Everything on the Line Read Online Free PDF Page B

One might say a cross between Johnny Depp and Elvis.
    His fingernails, bitten to the bone, are nothing but nubs.
    Ira Spade, by contrast, is the poster boy for what happens when a modestly handsome child grows up and starts to get old and loses the looks of his youth. At first glance, his face invites a double take on the part of the viewer, who might assume that he is wearing one of those Groucho-Nose-and-Specs masks, the ones with the fake fur eyebrows and the black plastic glasses and the fuzzy black mustache and the bulbous nose.
    Seated next to Jack, he is the After, his son the Before.
    Beneath the table, the family dog, Akuma, a black Doberman/pit bull mix, sits and bides his time, a vulture hoping for some unconsumed crustacean carrion.
    Ira cracks open his red beaut with gusto, eviscerates the shell, stuffs a hunk of white flesh into his mouth. While he chews, he strokes his thick black mustache with his stubby fingers as his left eye twitches frantically, a tic he has had since birth and that kicks into high gear whenever he gets the slightest bit aroused.
    Jack is struggling with a claw, and Avis asks if she can help him crack it open.
    “He’s a big boy, Avis, goddammit, he can do it himself !” Ira spews from across the table at his spouse.
    The words catapult Ira Spade back to the evening of December 31, 2010. He is ten years old, and his Dad, Victor, is returning home from a pre-New Year’s bender that began at the office in the early afternoon and ended at the bar of the Grand Hyatt on East 42 nd Street in Manhattan.
    Ira and his mother, Victoria, are finishing their New Year’s Eve dinner she had cooked for just the two of them.
    Victoria is doing the dishes, and Ira is sitting at the dinner table of their uptown Manhattan flat minding his p’s and q’s, when the front door crashes open and in wobbles Victor Spade, loaded for bear and with a belly full of Old Grand Dad.
    Victor’s breath, reeking of cheap bourbon, fills the entire Spade apartment quicker than you can say felony charges for being an abusive husband and father.
    The soused abuser peers at his son, ten years of resentment and frustration fueling his inner fires. He teeters up to the dinner table until he is within eighteen inches of his only child, and Victor is glaring out of those unforgettably wild eyes, eyes right out of the movies and the world of art, a satanic combination of Regan MacNeil’s in The Exorcist and Mr. Gower’s in that heartrending “poison capsules” scene with young George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life and those of the pitiful firing squad victim raising his arms aloft in Goya’s Executions of the Third of May, 1808.
    Victor Spade looks deeply into Ira’s eyes, the eyes of this son he never really knew or loved, and bellows, with a passion fueled by cheap bourbon and anger, “You’ll never be anybody !”
    The four words sear into Ira Spade’s ten-year-old brain as if they were imprinted there by a branding iron.
    Ira’s cell TelevideoPhone rings, rousing him out of his reverie. As he opens the phone, he wipes the lobster juice from his mustache and silently swears for the trillionth time that he will make damn sure that his only child will turn out to be somebody, and how .
    “No, Odi. No, this is really a bad time. Just sat down to dinner,” Ira says to the screen, where Odi Mondheim’s ugly puss looks out at him. “Then Jack and I are gonna hit for a coupla hours at the club. Gimme a call back around ten. Righto. Yeah, I heard a few things about him. Oh, just that he’s Jack’s age and he’s a hot shit over there in Italy. Gotta go now. Speak later.”
    “That Odi?” Avis asks.
    “Yeah, that sonuvabitch,” Ira says, his left eye twitching like hell. “Wants to talk. Told him a million times not to call me during dinner. What a loser !”
    “Yeah, what a loser !” Jack parrots, stroking his make-believe mustache.
    Jack at last solves the mystery of cracking open his lobster claw and he