Gagliano,Anthony - Straits of Fortune.wps by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

that year near the beach up in Surfside, not far from the old movie theater that some friends of mine had leased and converted into a gym. I trained a few of my clients there. I had moved up there after the northerly migration created by the hurricane back in '98 had driven up the rent prices down on South Beach to the point where I had to either buy a condo or spend the rest of my days resigned to the task of helping send my landlord's kids to Harvard. In the end I moved north. The boom hadn't reached as far as Surfside, and the rents there were still reasonable. The place I lived in was a twin- level apartment building on Byron Avenue, called the Lan- caster Arms. The neon sign out front didn't work, and the blue-and-white building looked faded against the relentless- ness of the sun. An octogenarian named Sternfeld owned and managed the place, and he was nearly as surly as Cal. 42
    He liked to stand on the stoop of his building behind his walker like an old admiral at the prow of his ship, and he had the crazy, wispy, white hair of a conductor in search of a symphony. The day I came by to see the apartment, Sternfeld looked me over with the expression of a man attempting to calculate just how much trouble you were going to be to him. He was delighted when I told him I had a job, as though I'd accom- plished something remarkable. He was even happier when I told him I was single, without even so much as a goldfish for company. In the end he promised to chop a hundred dol- lars off the rent if I would walk with him three evenings a week. So for four hundred a month, I got a one-bedroom apart- ment with two entrances, and if you left both doors open on a hot day, a nice breeze would blow through. You had to be careful when you did that, however. The neighborhood was not all that safe and secure. One day I came out of the shower and caught a sun-fried crackhead with a glass eye trying to download my laptop out the back door. The lesson there was that while the rents were reasonable, the people around you might not be, and after that I was more vigilant. A quiet man who minds his own business and who doesn't own a stereo with too large a set of speakers will, in general, get along with his neighbors, and so I did. On my left was a family from Ecuador. They had a twenty-year-old son whom the police came for one night because he had decided that parking people's cars wasn't quite as profitable as selling them. His parents knew I had been a cop, and so they asked me to counsel him. I did what I could. After that he decided to raise pit bulls for the dogfights over in Hialeah, but the police hadn't liked that idea very much either, and so now he was back in community college, trying to find another way into the economy. 43
    Billy Shuster lived in the studio on my right. He was a transvestite who worked as a postman by day. It sounds cli- ch� but he really did like show tunes, particularly Ethel Merman's rendition of "There's No Business Like Show Business," which for some reason he never played all the way through to the end. It was very anticlimactic in an an- noying way. It got so that I could even predict to the second when he would lift the stylus only to set it down at the begin- ning again. Sometimes, when Billy left his door open, I'd see him standing at the ironing board in his bra and panties, ironing the clothes he was going to wear that night, his sand-colored Twiggy wig perched on the end of the board like a depressed cat. Billy told me once that he liked me because I brought stability to the building. In his own way, so did he. He had been a tenant there for fifteen years. Sometimes, on cooler evenings, he and Sternfeld played chess on a little tiled table they'd set up in the shade on the small patio behind the hedges. It didn't seem to matter much to Sternfeld whether Billy was dressed like a man or a woman, though he didn't curse nearly as much when Billy was in drag. He just didn't like the fact that his partner