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bullish hate.
    “He started off by asking how Bart was. You said Bart was fine. He said Bart was a damned good man, but wouldn’t it be nice if he could pick his feet up a little on that Waterford deal. You said, it sure would. He said, By the way, how’s that going. You said, Well it really isn’t my department and he said, Don’t tell me, Vincent, you know what’s going on. And you said, All I know is that Bart hasn’t closed the deal yet. I heard that the Thom McAn people are interested in the site but maybe that’s just a rumor. Then he said, Well I’m sure Bart knows what he’s doing and you said, Yeah, sure and then you had another coffee brandy and he asked you if you thought the Mustangs would make the play-offs and then you and Sharon were going home and you know when you’ll be out there again, Vinnie?”
    Vinnie didn’t say anything.
    “You’ll be out there when Steve Ordner needs another snitch. That’s when.”
    “I’m sorry,” Vinnie said sulkily. He started to get up.
    “I’m not through.”
    Vinnie sat down again and looked into the corner of the room with smoldering eyes.
    “I was doing your job twelve years ago, do you know that? Twelve years, that probably seems like a long time to you. To me, I hardly know where the fuck the time went. But I remember the job well enough to know you like it. And that you do a good job. That reorganization in dry-cleaning, with the new numbering system ... that was a masterpiece.”
    Vinnie was staring at him, bewildered.
    “I started in the laundry twenty years ago,” he said. “In 1953, I was twenty years old. My wife and I were just married. I’d finished two years of business administration and Mary and I were going to wait, but we were using the interruption method, you see. We were going to town and somebody slammed the door downstairs and startled me right into an orgasm. She got pregnant out of it. So whenever I get feeling smart these days I just remind myself that one slammed door is responsible for me being where I am today. It’s humbling. In those days there was no slick abortion law. When you got a girl pregnant, you married her or you ran out on her. End of options. I married her and took the first job I could get, which was here. Washroom helper, exactly the same job that Pollack kid is doing downstairs right this minute. Everything was manual in those days, and everything had to be pulled wet out of the washers and extracted in a big Stonington wringer that held five hundred pounds of wet flatwork. If you loaded it wrong, it would take your fucking foot off. Mary lost the baby in her seventh month and the doctor said she’d never have another one. I did the helper’s job for three years, and my average take-home for fifty-five hours was fifty-five dollars. Then Ralph Albertson, who was the boss of the washroom in those days, got in a little fender-bender accident and died of a heart attack in the street while he and the other guy were exchanging insurance companies. He was a fine man. The whole laundry shut down the day of his funeral. After he was decently buried, I went to Ray Tarkington and asked for his job. I was pretty sure I’d get it. I knew everything about how to wash, because Ralph had shown me.
    “This was a family business in those days, Vinnie. Ray and his dad, Don Tarkington, ran it. Don got it from his father, who started the Blue Ribbon in 1926. It was a non-union shop and I suppose the labor people would say all three of the Tarkingtons were paternalistic exploiters of the uneducated working man and woman. And they were. But when Betty Keeson slipped on the wet floor and broke her arm, the Tarkingtons paid the hospital bill and there was ten bucks a week for food until she could come back. And every Christmas they put on a big dinner out in the marking-in room—the best chicken pies you ever ate, and cranberry jelly and rolls and your choice of chocolate or mince pudding for dessert. Don and Ray gave every