Manhattan Voyagers. Thomas Boone's Quealy
Читать онлайн книгу.
He ran a hand through his hair. “I dropped all the confetti-colored pills; they gave me diarrhea and a ringing in my ears. Now I’m just on Jack Daniels & Coke.”
“Johnnie Walker was my medicine of choice.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I really loved doing a long line of shots, Eddie, getting totally wasted in the shortest time possible. Then I felt happy and carefree again.”
“Yeah, Jack and Johnnie are tried-and-true pick-me-ups, Letitia, the only problem is the crushing hangover that hits you the next morning.”
She gave him a hard look. “You ain’t gonna find salvation in a bottle.”
“Who’s looking for salvation?”
“It’s time to be getting off the sauce, Eddie, you’re drinking yourself to death.”
“I’m considering dialing down a notch to vodka & Red Bull. RB is an energy drink and has B6 and B12 vitamins in it.”
She drank the last of the soda, crushed the aluminum can with her strong fingers, and lobbed it into a trash basket. “Why don’t you just drink Drano and get it over with?”
He grimaced. “Oy vey!”
“You’re fooling nobody but yourself, Eddie, you got to get your skinny ass into a 12-step program, A-sap.”
“It’s the best I can do right now, Letitia.”
“I hear you, sugar, I’ve been there myself.”
“The Red Bull also has caffeine in it that doctors say is beneficial for the heart.”
She seemed puzzled. “When I was a kid the doctors said caffeine was bad for you.”
“Yeah, I was told the same thing, however, the doctors changed their minds; now they say it’s good for you.”
“Those same doctors told me margarine was good for me and I needed to stop using butter on my pancakes.”
“Now they say margarine’s bad for you because it’s only one molecule away chemically from plastic, Letitia, so you need to start using butter again.”
“It’s all so confusing, Eddie, I wish those doctors would make up their damn minds.”
“I agree.”
“It seems like we’ve got to unlearn a lot of the stuff we learned growing up.”
“Yeah, Letitia, nothing is true for very long these days.”
She turned her back on the water and faced the Downtown skyline. “So where are you sleeping at night?”
“Here and there.”
“Does here and there have an address?”
“I’m catching my forty winks at the skyscraper they put up on Ann Street a few months ago.”
“The 70-story monstrosity that twists like a pretzel?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“How are you getting past Security?”
“I waltz in with the cleaning crew at 11:00 P.M. wearing a uniform I ‘borrowed’ from one of the company’s trucks.”
“It’s that easy?”
He nodded. “The guards are paid minimum wage; they’re not the sharpest tools in the shed. I never get asked for my I.D.”
Her face soured. “Here we are living in New York, the number-one target of terrorist groups, and Eddie Felton can walk willy-nilly into a major building near Ground Zero, without even being challenged. What does that tell you?”
“That we’re not as secure as Hizzoner the Mayor says we are.”
“Bingo!”
He shrugged. “Politicians tell lies; so what else is new?”
“You’re a naughty boy, Eddie, but you’ve got chutzpah.”
“If you act as though you belong in a place, Letitia, you’ll be accepted. It’s all in the way you carry yourself.”
“What happens once you’re past Security and in the building?”
“I locate an executive office with a comfy couch and a private bathroom. Then I sleep until 6:00 A.M., tidy up carefully after myself so nobody’s the wiser, and leave with the cleaning crew at the end of their shift.”
“The guards don’t check you on the way out either?”
He shook his head. “Security systems are designed to keep intruders out, Letitia, not in.”
“How many years you been an office squatter, Eddie?”
“Almost six.”
Her eyes glowed with visions of dollar signs. “I could buy me a new Caddy with all the rent I’d have saved if I squatted like you did.”
“It’s not an easy existence, Letitia.”
“Did you ever get caught?”
“I’ve had a few close calls but I’ve never been arrested.”
”The newspapers would love to know about you. I bet they’d run your story on their front pages. You’d be invited onto the TV talk-shows.”
“Yeah, maybe, but after my fifteen minutes of fame was over I wouldn’t have nowhere to sleep at night.”
“Do you got any family left?”
His jaw tightened. “Nah, I’m the last of the noble line of Feltons.”
“Noble?”
“We were Connecticut Yankees, Letitia, big fish in a small New England pond.”
“Hmm.”
“All the Felton men went to Yale dating back to my great-great-great grandfather.”
“That makes you an Ivy League squatter, Eddie, probably the only one in the entire country.”
“You could be right.”
“Yale, my word; ain’t you the smarty-pants?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“My cousin, Dzhane, is a smarty-pants too.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, sir, he was the son of a sharecropper in Alabama and got accepted to Auburn University. His SAT scores totaled 1315 even though he only got as far as ninth grade in school when he quit to work full-time on the farm.”
“Very impressive, Letitia.”
“But he never went to Auburn. He didn’t have any money, and he wasn’t a football or basketball player, so they wouldn’t give him a scholarship.”
“That’s a shame.”
“But Dzhane kept the acceptance letter the university sent him. Seven years later he showed it to his boss at the toy factory he got hired to work on the assembly line at. Like you, Eddie, the guy was impressed too.”
“I don’t wonder.”
“A few months later, a slot opened up and my cousin got promoted to foreman. Today Dzhane is the plant supervisor.”
“I’m glad.”
“Now me, Letitia Jones, I wasn’t no smarty-pants so I went to the school of hard-knocks out in Brownsville. I barely graduated.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down erratically. “I was almost expelled from Yale in my senior year.”
“Why?”
“I had a few too many