Night Train

(8)

          We talked a lot about Tony, too, those nights around the campfire, Tony, that big tawny tiger, Tony, the Phantom of Lafayette Park. He’d slipped through our fingers, that was sure. The quality woman in Brentwood? It was possible. Maybe she didn’t dump him after all. Maybe the two of them were in Paris by now. Or maybe Tony was back in the Big Apple, the cellar bar on Houston, tickling the keys with those fast hands, with those big padded tiger paws of his. I kept wanting to ask Jack straight out, “Did Tony really fight Jake LaMotta in the Garden,” but I already knew the answer because I’d done the research at that wifi on Fairfax and I’d done the math, too. But I didn’t want to burst Jack’s bubble. Besides, I was feeling bad because I’d unloaded on him earlier about the revolution. Jack lived in a dream world, he was the Francois Villon of his own imagination. Pathological lying was a lot more than a hobby with Jack. It was more than a sport, more than recreational therapy, even. It was his vocation. Jack was like a spider spinning a delicate web of fantasy. That finespun dream world was Jack’s buffer zone, his cocoon. It was all he had between himself and the tarantula reality of the street.

          Jack and I got to wondering also why the cops didn’t roust Angela out every night along with the other squatters. We asked her about it one day on the way back from Von’s.

          “I suck their dicks,” she explained.

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