Reckless Eyeballing Read Online Free PDF Page A

them.
    Sure, they wasted a lot of the “underclass,” but in the old days the mayor and the head of the Police Benevolent Association would take your side. And if you, well, had to remove some poor slob from his misery, there was always the friendly M.E. who’d fix it up. Nowadays, the head of the Police Benevolent Association was a woman. Sanchez…Chavez…something like that. Lawrence O’Reedy dropped to one knee, pulled his gun, and mockingly pointed it at an imaginary fleeing suspect. “Freeze, you son of a bitch. Give me something to write home to Mother about.” He chuckled to himself. He got up and tugged on his pants at the waist. Brown was standing in the doorway, a puzzled expression. “You all right sir?” he asked.

6
    Ball entered the plush building in which Jake Brashford’s in-town studio was located. He had a home on Long Island where it was claimed that he stashed away his wife and child. None of the fellas had seen them. The doorman looked him up and down before phoning up to Jake and having Jake verify his appointment. The doorman kept reading his newspaper as he nodded in the direction of the elevator. The New York Pillar said: “Flower Phantom Strikes Again.” Ian had read the paper that morning. The Flower Phantom had tied up the editor of a feminist magazine and shaved her head.
    When he got off the elevator a well-tailored white woman was heading in the direction of the elevator. When she saw Ball she turned around and half trotted in the opposite direction. Ball was a large man with broad shoulders. He had large hands and ripe facial features. To some he might have resembled a large ape.
    Brashford opened the door. He was slight with a thin mustache. His face was a reddish-brown color, and he had freckles: from his Irish ancestors, he claimed. He was always carrying on about the Cherokee and Irish in his background, and to skeptics would point out the famous black people with names like McCovy, MacElroy, Kennedy, McClure, McRae, and Shaw. He was frowning as usual, his hands in the pockets of his smoking jacket. The apartment was large and contained expensive furniture but very little of it. There were paintings on the wall that had been given or lent to him by friends from his generation. There were a number of books by Russian authors on his shelves. Dostoyevsky. Turgenev, whom Dostoyevsky accused of lacking ethnicity, and the old man Gogol, who ridiculed the modernist dogma that characters be “well rounded.” There was so much O’Neill memorabilia that the apartment seemed to be a shrine to the dark Irishman. In one room hung a huge portrait of Paul Robeson in Napoleonic military jacket and tights. An album cover on the top of the sleek blond (thirty thousand dollar) stereo system showed Louis Armstrong squint-eyed and grinning in an ambassador’s formal clothes. There were a number of books by American transcendentalists lining the bookshelves, plus oversized technical books on lighting, equipment, and stage design.
    Brashford snickered. “Man. Why don’t you get you some vines. You look like one of those punk people with them jeans and that leather jacket. I’m glad you stopped wearing that cowboy hat. Boy, they’re right. You can take the nigger out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the nigger.” Brashford wouldn’t end a conversation with anybody without mentioning this adage at least twice. And he was so out of touch that he thought people still said “vines.” Brashford always recommended that Ian consult his personal tailor. “I’ll pay for it,” he had promised.
    â€œI started not to let you up here. I’ve been working on my second play,” Brashford said.
    That’s a laugh, Ian thought. He’d been telling people for years that he was at work on a second play, but even his strongest supporters realized that he would never finish the play,