Cold Type by Harvey Araton

Author:Harvey Araton
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press
Published: 2014-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Day Four: Thursday, November 10, 1994

Chapter Twenty-one

Another long fitful night came to a merciful end. Dawn arrived with Jamie still able to muster just a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep.

His back was sore. His neck felt encased in cement. He lay motionless on his back, staring at the ceiling, asking himself, What now?

His crossing of the picket line had been executed with the simultaneously comic and tragic touch of slipping on a banana peel and falling in front of a speeding bus. He had alienated everyone important in his life, with the possible exceptions of Cal Willis and Patrick Blaine.

Steven wouldn’t be making any more recruitment calls. Morris was possibly sitting shivah, mourning the loss of a striker more than a son. Even Molly might be furious with him at this point.

If the Lonely Planet travel guide Karyn had left for his viewing displeasure was the precursor to accepting the job at the invisible bookstore, what would Jamie have left with Aaron in effect out of his life?

My life sucks, kept running through his mind like a self-pitying mantra.

He had nowhere to go, nothing to do. What else to do besides isolate himself in his apartment, eat junk food and watch television until his vision faded to black?

One day down. And counting.

On the previous afternoon, Jamie had gratefully taken Willis’ advice and slipped inconspicuously through the side door of the building. Back in Brooklyn, he moved his car from the spot he’d left it in the previous night and found another one three spaces from his front door. It was a Monday no-parking zone, good for the next three days. Covered on that front, Jamie proceeded to shop as if the city was on Category Five hurricane alert. He purchased a pound and a half of sliced turkey and Swiss cheese, three large bags of chips, three six-packs of diet Coke. He stopped by the meat counter and bought a few hamburger patties, a dozen chicken wings and a large container of potato salad. He dropped two boxes of his favorite breakfast cereal, Special K, into the cart.

Two doors down, he propped his grocery bags against the front counter of the video store. He prowled the aisles and stacked videos against his body like a clerk taking inventory. Needy for companionship, he rounded up bad-ass hombres for a guys’ night in. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause; Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon; Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver; and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. He passed on Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo in a voluntary show of good taste.

Severed from the world outside his apartment, he settled in at home with the mad, misguided and misanthropic—the only real friends he believed he had left.

He avoided television for fear of strike news. He unplugged the telephone in the event his mother was moved to make another futile attempt to broker peace. He was hanging with Travis Bickle, with Ratso Rizzo. But even they were merely a temporary distraction from his misery. Not long after a dinner of the chicken and chips, Jamie shut off the television and lights.

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