With a Little Luck: A Novel Page 10

  At this point, Grandpa comes wheeling over in his chair and slides to a sideways stop right beside me, almost as if he’s on ice skates.

  “You got a problem?” he asks, chin jutted forward and up.

  “No, sir,” I say. “I was just trying to be helpful.”

  He gestures to his wife. “There some kinda age cutoff on this contest?”

  “Well, no … I don’t think so, no …” I say, stumbling for the right words, and my balance. Are they serious?

  “You don’t think Mama has nice boobs? I’ll bet she has better boobs than anyone else in this line.” He looks me up and down. “Definitely better than yours.”

  “Hey—I’m sure you’re right,” I say, backing away slowly. “I’m really sorry. I was just trying to be helpful.”

  “Ageist!” he says. And then says it again, louder, “Ageist! You hate the elderly!” He gets more and more agitated and starts to point at me. “She hates the elderly!”

  “Sir,” I say, now walking toward him, trying to calm him. Christ, I don’t want him to have a heart attack or something. “I don’t hate the elderly. I love the elderly. Love. I hope to be an elderly … person … someday.”

  “Mama,” he says, as he turns to his wife. “Show her what you got.”

  I raise my hands up before me. “That’s not necessary. Really.”

  But Mama doesn’t listen to me. She raises up her shirt, exposing her breasts, and I quickly look away.

  “Look at Mama,” he insists.

  “Sir, I don’t want to look at your wife’s breasts. Ma’am, please pull your shirt down, there’s no need for this—”

  Now I sound like Officer Ma’am. I’m ma’am-ing her. Which makes me feel even worse, because I know how crappy it feels to be ma’am-ed.

  “Look at ’em!” Wheelchair Willie says, more forcefully.

  How has this happened? How did a gesture to help a sweet old lady become an assault on my eyes? Is this not a sexual assault, if we’re really going to get technical about it? This woman is flashing me. Okay, so maybe it’s not assault. It’s certainly indecent. How do I make it stop? By looking?

  “Fine,” I say, putting my hands on my hips to brace myself.

  Her breasts hang well below her belly button. The skin is stretched and almost pulling, and the majority of them seem hollow, until you get to the bottom, where the rest of them are.

  “Wow,” I say. “I’ve never seen a pair like that before.”

  “Told you,” Grandpa says.

  She shakes them at me, and her husband lights up like a Christmas tree.

  “That’s it, Mama,” he says. “Shake it!”

  The other girls in line start egging her on and cheering. It’s becoming a bit of a situation, and I don’t want to be held responsible for any part of it.

  “Okay,” I say, in a higher pitch than usual, trying to signify that “show and tell” is over. “Thank you for sharing them with me. I have to go to work now, but I wish you the best of luck in the contest.”

  I take off so fast that if my life were a cartoon you’d see my legs in hyper-speed as I try to get the hell away from them and into the elevator.

  And as I watch the floors light up as I pass, I wonder, in the grand scheme of my life, why was it written somewhere that I would need to experience that?

  My office is full of years of promo kitsch that I’ve collected. Some is from my tenure, and some has been passed down from friends or co-workers. You get to know people at record labels when you work in radio, and they are forever sending you “stuff” to promote their artists. Less so in the past couple years, as it seems we are in the late Cretaceous period of the record label, but I definitely have an odd collection, including some things that could even be considered museum-worthy, or at the very least Hard Rock Cafe–worthy.

  Things as small as a signature Def Leppard guitar pick, to a train whistle from the House of Cash and signed by Johnny Cash himself, to a guitar played by Stone Gossard during Pearl Jam’s unplugged session, to the actual angel wings from R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” video.

  But my prize possession is a Coolio head. It belonged to Tommy Boy records—apparently, in Coolio’s heyday they had a life-size animatronic Coolio in their lobby. As Coolio’s career disintegrated, so did animatronic Coolio, until eventually all that was left was the head, sitting atop one of the exec’s desks, the mangled, broken-down body shoved in a closet. The head is complete with dreadlocks and eyes that moved back and forth—when animated. It was incredibly lifelike, and once I saw it I couldn’t let it go. I needed it to be part of my collection. I basically harassed the entire staff of Tommy Boy for months until I finally broke them. Now the head is mine. At certain times of the day Coolio looks almost as placid and wise as a Buddha. Most other times of the day he just frightens me.

  Safe and sound in the eclectic mess that is my office, I scan the gossip sites to see if there’s anything breaking that I’ll need to cover or make fun of. It’s sad that I even look at this stuff, but it’s what our zeitgeist is these days so it can’t be avoided. There’s nothing terribly exciting, so I decide to walk into our pathetic kitchen to see if anyone’s left something out for the scavengers to nibble on. Every now and then, there will be some event in-house or some label that sends over doughnuts and you can score something yummy. But usually you’re stuck with the downstairs vending machine.

  When I turn the corner into our kitchen, I see a rear end I’m not sure I recognize from our floor poking out of our refrigerator. I take a few quiet steps to the side and see that it’s Ryan, aka Dr. Love from KKRL. He does not work on this floor. KKRL is on the fifth floor. Is he actually sneaking onto our floor to see what kind of food we have? And I thought I was sick of the vending machines downstairs. Ballsy.

  I watch him cut a tiny sliver off someone’s cheesecake and take a bite. Then I clear my throat to get his attention. He turns around, caught red-handed.

  “Are you eating my cake?” I ask.

  At first he doesn’t speak. I raise my eyebrows at him to say, “Well?”

  “What cake?” he says, with a mouthful of food, accidentally spitting some out.

  “At least chew and swallow it before you go on with this ruse.”

  He swallows and giggles like a kid who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Another family’s cookie jar.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “We never have anything good on our floor.”

  “So you just thought you’d help yourself to my cake,” I say.

  “Well … I didn’t know it was yours.”

  “Would that have made a difference?”

  “Probably,” he says. “I’ve seen how many pretzels you eat at a time.”

  Really? He’s going there? The cake isn’t even mine, but now I’m gonna pour it on thick.

  “It’s good cake, right?” I ask.

  “Mmm-hmm,” he says, somewhat guiltily.

  “It’s from my favorite bakery. In San Francisco. Where it was flown in for me by my mom, who was just visiting and wanted to bring me a special treat: my favorite cheesecake.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Oh, no, it gets better,” I go on. “I’m on a diet. And that cake? Was my one treat for the entire week.”

  “Um …” he says. “Then I was doing you a favor?”

  “Are you calling me fat?”

  “As a gender, we have no response to that. Except ‘No. Oh, no, not at all. Not you. God, no. Of course not.’ ”

  “You’ve been trained well.”

  “Yes, well … that’s why they pay me the not-so-big bucks to pretend I’m a relationship expert.”

  “How did you get that title, might I ask?”

  “I have no idea,” he says, looking sideways to make sure nobody is listening. “I suggested ‘King of the Meerkats.’ Didn’t play with the bosses, though. So relationship expert it is. Though I’m unmeasurably unqualified. Please don’t tell anyone.”

  “Your secret is sa
fe with me,” I say.

  “And your diet is safe with me,” he says. “Because I will apparently eat all of your food. I’m really sorry about that. Seriously.”

  He seems genuine at this point, and I can’t take it any longer. Yes, I like to mess with people, but I can never keep it up. I always end up having to tell the truth.

  “It wasn’t my cake,” I say as I breeze past him and open the fridge, slicing off a piece for myself and shoving it into my mouth. “I was just messing with you.”

  And with that I walk out of the kitchen and back toward my office.

  The Red Line rings just as I settle into the studio and start one of my all-time favorite songs, “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith. If you could equate songs to comfort food, this is my mac ’n’ cheese. But the Red Line is ruining the moment. There’s always a feeling of panic when you see your red line light up. It could mean that there’s an emergency; it could mean that when you thought your mic was muted, it wasn’t and you said something on-air that wasn’t meant to be heard; or it could mean that you said something that was meant to be heard but your boss didn’t appreciate it at all and you may be fired momentarily.

  I watch it ring in a state of panic before I answer. Finally, I do.

  “This is Berry,” I say, tentatively.

  “It is so on,” says the voice on the other end of the call.

  “Huh?” I say, confused.

  “It’s Ryan,” he says, clarifying.

  “Oh!” I say, relieved that I didn’t inadvertently let a cussword fly.

  “You got me good in that kitchen,” he says. “I felt terrible.”

  “Good,” I say. “Because someone is going to be upset that their cheesecake was molested.”

  “You did it, too!” he says.

  “I’m not saying I didn’t.”

  “Well, you should know that you’ve started something here.”

  “Have I?”

  “And two can play at that game,” he warns.

  “Bring it,” I taunt.

  “Oh, you have no idea,” he says. “Listen to my show tomorrow.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “This is Ryan Riley … signing off. But remember … all you need is love.”

  Click.

  God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.

  —VICTOR HUGO

  Chapter Eight

  “Here’s the thing about Prince Charming: He doesn’t exist. The truth is, ‘Happily Ever After’ is ruined in the space between ‘Someday, my prince will come’ and ‘Damn it, my prince came too soon.’ You make your own happily ever after simply by choosing to be happy. Nobody’s gonna be perfect, folks. Pick someone who doesn’t drive you completely crazy and love them.”

  That would be Ryan on the radio. I’m listening to his show, as ordered. I’m a little pissed he can get away with a “came too soon” joke when I get warnings from the FCC simply for the occasional reference to Nickelback being the perfect arena rock band for the Shithead Generation. I’m still not sure what I’m listening for, but I have to admit he can be amusing.

  “That means they’re allowed to drive you crazy part of the time. Because you’ll drive them crazy, too—trust me. I try to go by the eighty-twenty rule. If your partner makes you want to scratch your own eyes out (or theirs) only twenty percent of the time? You’re golden.”

  Interesting. I guess those are pretty good odds. From my past dating experience—Dead and Married excepted—I think they’re actually pretty optimistic. The phonetic similarity between Dead and Buried and Dead and Married is actually quite interesting. Something to ponder if you have too much free time or are sitting in your car, listening to the radio, waiting for your parakeet’s next missive.

  “Okay, listeners. In the spirit of proving that ‘Yes, anyone can find love,’ I’m having a special contest tonight … and the winner gets a date with KKCR’s classic-rock DJ, Berry Lambert.”

  Oh.

  No.

  He.

  Didn’t.

  “Look her up if you don’t know what she looks like. She’s pretty cute.”

  And he called me “cute.”

  “Now, Berry loves cake. She’s very protective of her cake. She’ll bring cake in to work and leave it in the fridge and then guard it with her life, checking on it throughout the day to make sure nobody’s stolen it.”

  Am I really hearing this? Have I nodded off into a narcoleptic lapse of consciousness while traversing the hallways? I pray not, because Lord knows what Daryl and Jed would do if they happened upon me. I’m never surprised by how low those two will go. Did they even watch that video human resources told us was required viewing?

  “So I think a fair way to earn her love is to sing an emotional rendition of ‘MacArthur Park.’ ”

  Donna Summer’s version of the tune is suddenly booming through my speakers: “Someone left the cake out in the rain.…”

  “Callers, now’s your chance to sing for her love and win a date with Berry Lambert. Compliments of the station, you will get dinner for two and …”

  I don’t even stay to hear what the “and” is. I race to his floor and charge in and out of offices until I see his studio and bang on the glass window. He looks up and smiles, giving me a thumbs-up.

  I violently and repeatedly thrust my two thumbs down, which just makes him laugh. As soon as he takes a commercial break, he removes his headphones and steps out into the hall to join me.

  “Are you kidding me?” I shriek.

  “Well … kind of,” he says. “I’d call it more of a ‘getting you back’ than a ‘kidding’ since, well, I did promise a date.”

  “I didn’t agree to that. What makes you think I need a date? Or want a date? How do you know I’m not married?”

  “I asked.”

  “Asked who?”

  “You’re single,” he says.

  “I don’t even know you. You’re a cake-stealing, fake-contest-making menace. And I’m not going on your date.”

  “Yeah, you will,” he says, confidently.

  “Uh—no, I won’t.”

  “Sure you will,” he says. “Because you’re a good sport.”

  “This has nothing to do with being a good sport,” I practically shout.

  “I gotta go back in,” he says, grinning like a schoolboy fresh from a prank in progress. And as he walks away, my cellphone rings. It’s Bill. My boss.

  “Hello?”

  “Berry!” he screams, and I’m certain that not only has that idiot Ryan just procured me an unwanted date, he’s also gotten me fired. “I love it! I just heard. Why didn’t you tell me you were doing this, and why didn’t you do it on KKCR?”

  “Wait—what?” I ask. He’s happy about this?

  “We’re gonna promote the hell out of it.”

  “Okay, there’s nothing to promote. Ryan was kidding. And it was done without my knowledge or consent.”

  “Do you have any idea what the phone lines did when he announced that date with you?”

  “Uh …” I stumble. “No?”

  “They went nuts! Guys … girls … everybody wants a date with Berry Lambert!”

  “Berry Lambert never agreed to this, Bill,” I say sternly.

  “Berry Lambert wants to keep her job, right?”

  “Berry Lambert doesn’t think you can possibly be serious. And Berry Lambert is extremely upset that you have caused Berry Lambert to resort to referring to herself in the third person.”

  “Berry, it’s all in good fun. What’s one night of your life? I’m talking to Wendell, the station manager at KKRL, and we’re both going in on the money for the date. We’re thinking a helicopter ride around the city after dinner. He’s calling me back in five.”

  “I’m not getting into a helicopter, Bill!”

  “It’ll be great!” he says, ignoring me. “Call you later. I love this, Berry. Good stuff! Way to think outside the box!”

  He hangs up. “Good stuff,” I mimic, and then notic
e an intern standing about three feet to my left.

  “Yes, occasionally I talk to myself,” I say.

  “Hey,” she says. “We all need a pep talk every now and then.”

  I smile politely and walk to the elevator. I can’t believe Ryan is doing this.

  A helicopter? No. Bad enough that I’m now being forced on a date with some random stranger, but I will draw the line at the helicopter. How about my safety? Is that not something I have a right to? Fine, my time … can be sold. A dinner? To keep my job … whatever—I can deal. Helicopter? Hell, no. I call my dad to see if there’s anything legitimately unlucky about helicopters. If there are any related superstitions, he’ll know.

  “Luck be a lady, tonight,” my dad sings into the phone when he answers, channeling a not-too-bad Frank Sinatra. If he had a very bad cold. And was tone-deaf.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I say.

  “What’s wrong, pumpkin?” He can hear it in my voice.

  “Are helicopters safe?” I ask. “And do you have a cold?”

  “Sure they are,” he says. Adding, “Except when they’re not. They’re like anything. Cars. Airplanes. Roller coasters. Why do you ask? Are you planning to ride in one?”

  “Trying to avoid it, but, yes, there is a possibility that I will have to. I have a little situation brewing at work.”

  “As long as you don’t step onto the helicopter with your left foot when boarding, you’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well,” he says. “That, and if there isn’t some engine malfunction or something gets stuck in the propeller.”

  “You are not helping!” I shout.

  “Aaaa … choo!” He sneezes. “Berry, it’s fine. It sounds exciting! Can I come?”

  “Yes, Dad. That’s what the contest winner will want. A date with me and my dad.”

  “Sounds like a new reality show,” he says. “I like it!”

  “While I have no doubt that somewhere, someone would pitch and probably sell that … I’m still going with ‘no.’ ”

  My call-waiting clicks, and I look to see it’s Nat.