The Unexpected Salami: A Novel by Laurie Gwen Shapiro Read Free Book Online Page B

“Let’s sayI needed to be dead fast. And I reckon Colin and Phillip needed the fame. Simple as that. You got a place for me to stay? I just got here from Buffalo. Fucking oath, I came to this coffee shop because I’d heard you telling Phillip and Colin about it.”
    “The guys
needed
to be famous? What does that have to do with this?” My voice had gone from loud to shrill.
    “You know, my family is gone, except for me mother’s cousin in Buffalo, New York. I’m the end of the Gibbs line.” I barely listened. I wanted to rip his slimy guts out. “I reckon you want me to lay it all out like on Batman.”
    I knew right then. Stuart had run afoul of his shady circle and wanted out. Phillip—thirty-four, an aging hunky rocker with a we’ll-give-you-one-last-shot recording contract. He’d do anything to prove the naysayers wrong about his being too old to put money into the band. Phillip made films for the Victorian Ambulance Corps. He could have faked a death on film with his medical cronies or his old film-school buddy Doug Lang. And his roommate who got married and was always dropping by the house, the video documentarian, worked for the Melbourne police;
he
could have helped carry it off. My mind was racing. Who did they know at the morgue? I couldn’t figure out how Phillip could have gotten Stuart a passport, but I was sure I’d find out soon enough. I had been an utter idiot. And whatever the cockamamie plan had been, it had worked.
    “Did Phillip mastermind this or did you?”
    “It was Colin’s idea, Chickie.” At first I thought Stuart was laughing at me, but then I realized he was embarrassed for me.
    Colin? My Colin? I was shattered.
    I opened the floodgates: Stuart slept in my parents’ bed that night. That lying parasite had forty-five cents in his pocket and planned on sleeping in Central Park. He’d get killed for real, or get arrested for vagrancy. Then perhaps Colin and Phillip would get arrested, when I could have prevented that. Stuart Gibbs, the unexpected salami to end all salamis. I’d sort out my emotions in the morning.
    Around one in the morning, I woke up and peeked in the extra bedroom to check on things. Stuart had wrapped a tie around his arm. Dad’s dinosaur tie, a forgotten Father’s Day gift from the American Museum of Natural History.
    “Not in my house,” I said, defeated. “This is my house.” Stuart was naked except for his socks. I tried not to look at his penis, flaccid and uncircumcised; it was about the least erotic thing I’d ever seen. He shivered. I was far too late.
    “You’ve got to get off the goddamn treadmill,” I said softly. I had never seen the “strap” before. Even though I knew Stuart was at it all along in St. Kilda, I never chose to explore what went on behind his door. Like the majority of Manhattan residents who live below Fourteenth Street, at least those that read the downtown press, I was obliged to be a fan of Lou Reed, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker; I’d read plenty about heroin abuse. But there was the fabled strap, in a dinosaur-tie incarnation, bulging the vein of a foreigner lying on my mother’s Bloomies’ white sale Ivan Stanbury flannel sheets in my family apartment, the last bastion of nothing-ever-happens. I sat there in stunned silence for several minutes. Stuart’s eyes were closed.
    “If you had relatives in Buffalo,” I then asked out loud, “why did you come to New York?” I didn’t think he heard me.
    “You told me anyone could get lost here,” he said.
    Frieda rang my buzzer. “Hi,” I said through the intercom, “I don’t think it’s a good time.”
    “Sorry to butt in on you, but do you mind if I crash in your extra bedroom? I left my keys at the office, and the front door there is locked.”
    “Frieda, I have a guy here.”
    “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Who is it?”
    “Look, I have to go. Call Janet—she left a message that she was staying home to read. Call me if she’s not there.”
    “Okay.