Lefty's Grey Canoe

Dashing out of the rain, from the café in your white Mary-Tyler-Moore outfit was the slow, fading crescendo I’d hoped for one day when I was younger, but when heartbreak came, it came with a rushing feeling that hurtling towards me was this feeling of dread, happy emptiness. I felt the camera pan back, like in a movie.

I stared at my bacon and eggs and tapped my folded up newspaper on the chair.

It was two o’ clock already, and she’d left me in the afternoon, with cold eggs, bacon and the sense that I had nowhere to go. As to her destination, well, I think I had a pretty good idea.

Shed been screwing Lefty now for well over a year, and you could see the look all over the guys puss.

Like powdered sugar on a French toast face this guy. Evident in the way death is subtle.
Strutting all over town, in the middle of the day just like that.

How bout it?

Flaunts it in my face at work all the time. He’s top man on the take. He's bought a brand new grey canoe, by Old Town, the same ones the yuppies from Maine trot in when they come a little too far south in the summer time.

Hes the only agent on the take period, so its real out in the open when he's paddling with my girl on those moonlit evenings. I stayed at home, pounding out my fears on a Smith Corona, wondering whether or not this "Soft Touch" I seem to have is gonna screw me out of the take, and mabye even my girl. This is before.

“Bit of the top of the pile this week, Jimmy. I’ll give something to the cops personal like.”

I’m standing there, pretending like I could give a rat’s ass. He’s making the whole transaction completely obvious, and when Carl finds out about this, he’ll be on the first boat to Tuna Town, underneath by the docks, the shark’sll make chum out of him., the rat.


I’d been separated from Sophie for a good six years when I met dollface out in the square one day while I was making the collections.

Im out at the pier, and she's dropping a care package to her old lady. She's a widow, and she paints these adorable little watercolors.

Im there again a few months later when I see her eyes meet Lefty in his big grey canoe. I know hes on the take, and the civies'd be real miffed if they knew one of theres was on a take so I dont say nothing, but I feel the jealous pangs like Im Cyrano de Bergerac or something.

He's got the stand up job and I'm looking back and wondering if it didn't all start years ago.

And on the night before Sophie left I bought an empty journal, a way to make notes on my manuscript.

I hadn’t thought of becoming a writer, really. It all just sort of happened, the way that you fall a certain way when you get hit in the chest with a pillowcase full of bricks. If and when the cards came down, there was little chance of me leaving anything else behind when I finally left the whole mortal coil years from now. I figured I’d give it a shot.

And ever since Sophie, I’d be up in the ‘crows nest’ – a little half-attic that my brother in law built back before, when I was married. Carmen’s brother Carmine built it.

He was going to leave the city, Carmine and he built half-attics all throughout the north eastern coast of New Jersey.

We were in the country version of the mafia, Carmine and me. We was wanna-bes, you know, prep-school gangsters who got away with more stuff because we were out here in the middle of nowhere, holding up bait and tackle shops, truckers with crates of beer, stuff like that.

See you had to be a real pro to lift the stuff coming into Newark, but up here in Paulston, on the New Jersey Shore it was a gold mine back then.

I could step into any grain silo east of West Orange and come out of there making some hillbilly piss his pants with a fist full of Farm subsidies. When Reagan cut subsidies even further, we felt a little guilty, but there was always something literary in our crime, that’s probably why I found myself writing.

I wrote all night after some of our big scores, up all night on coke. My writing was frenzied, morally ambivalent and impenetrable, I detected a certain immortal spirit, a foolish child who thought he was impervious to any physical violence.

Were in the middle of shit fields, and cattle ranchers, do you really think anyone’s going to go after a violent offender in the country. All of the cops were family from way back.

The corruption tied the mob together with us in the late 1980s, and I got out of the Coke and stolen bicycles angle and got into writing. Well that and cooked Real-Estate- Speculation, but my money’s now wrapped in a cocoon of paperwork and bureaucracy anyway what does it matter.

Those Enron guys had it right though.

My thoughts come back to her though, walking out in the rain in the middle of lunch, breakfast, whatever. Right there on Park Avenue.

When she walked out, it was the last dance.

No one comes around anymore to visit me. I’m living in a Retirement community years later, writing too many TV situations for Colombo. I’m drinking Yuban coffee in a large tubs that I can turn into ashtrays. My criminal status is defunct.

It comes and goes, and we never know how long it lasts, but we keep trying, even though we don’t know why.