Excerpt: A Bra Full of Bullets

Chapter One

The mugger didn’t expect me to fight back. What he didn’t know was that a little switchblade was hardly a threat. In the Army I’d been trained in hand-to-hand combat and even had some opportunities to use the skill in Korea. I was also drunk enough and feeling cocky enough to take him on and defend the lousy $35 I had in my wallet.

I was just leaving Brenda’s apartment and it was two hours before midnight.
Brenda wanted me to stay until the clock struck twelve and ushered in 1960—a new decade of hope—but I would have gotten more hell from my wife than I was going to get from my mistress.

Had to get home.

Brenda’s apartment building in the Village was a block from the subway station. The mugger—a shabby fellow with an old green sweater and sporting a goatee—popped out of the shadows of the alley and waved a little silver blade at me.
His eyes were ugly wide and hopped up serious.
“The wallet, Daddy-O,” he said.
He was about twenty, twenty-two I figured. Just a kid.
“Are you joking?” I said. “You’re mugging me?”
Light snow was coming down from the night sky. I briefly looked up; there were no stars. There are never stars at this time of the year in New York.
It was cold out and our breaths made small clouds between us.
“The wallet,” he said, “or I cut you open, Daddy-O!”
I said, “’Daddy-O’?”
I wasn’t that much older than him, ten or twelve years. I was thirty-five, six-foot-two, 190 pounds, making me taller and heavier and older than the kid.
He made several sloppy slashing motions. I remembered that one zipperhead who charged me with a bayonet and how I later opened him up and pulled out his intestines and made a decoration of the Gook’s goop. You do strange this in war, stuff your average suburban dweller would never understand.
The mugger took another swipe and me and I grabbed his arm at the sweater and swung him into the wall of the apartment building, hearing his nose crack against the brownstone, American made. The blade fell to the ground, as did my hat. I picked the blade up and looked at it.
“Trash,” I said
The mugger groaned. I grabbed him by his bushy hair and smashed his face into the wall again, this time taking out a few of his teeth.
I position myself behind him and said into his ear: “Mug me? Cut me? You have any idea who I am? I make more money in a month than you’ll probably see in your entire lousy worthless Beatnik life.”
“Lemme go, square,” he said, his body limp.
“Slice me? You ever been cut by a knife? Eh? Answer me? You ever bleed from a blade, Daddy-O?”
He was scared now, and he had a reason: I meant business.
He said, “N-no.”
I said, “Well, here’s something for your personal experience.”
Stabbed him in the ass.
He cried out and fell to the ground.
“Damn you,” he moaned. “Goddamn you to hell, Daddy-O.”
“You’ll live.”
“I just wanted money! I’m hungry!”
“Ever think of asking?” I said. “I know what it’s like to be hard-up, I’ve been there. How about asking instead of stealing?”
Slammed my shoe on his hand.
He groaned, in more pain.
Noticed his ass was bleeding on the sidewalk.
Took out my wallet.
A twenty, a ten, and a five.
Tossed the ten dollar bill his way.
Said, “Happy New Year.”
Adjusted my tie, turned around, and walked away.
“Cripes,” I muttered.
I buttoned my overcoat. I still had the switchblade. Interesting little thing. I decided I’d keep it for a soueviner.
Forgot my hat. Thought it was still in my head but the adrenaline was running too fast in my blood and it wasn’t until I was on the subway that I realized my hat was gone.
What a night. What a day!
Leaving my hat behind it’s what got the trouble ball rolling, some of it anyway, a major part of it…
Guess I should back up a little…

***
Name’s Robert Weaver, bra peddler.
Some fellows are nylon men, some are panties men; I happen to be a bra man. They call us the bra pimps of Madison Avenue. That is the main account I handle at Shaw, Marshall and Holliday—Beauchamp Brassieres, what every woman on the East Coast—and across America—wants under her sweater or blouse, holding their creamy round meaty globes up high for the admiration of all men ages fifteen to seventy.
No woman sags in my ad campaigns.
At the time I was at the penultimate, delicate and tender age of thirty-three, married seven years, two kids, three bedroom apartment in Upper East Side, one mistress in Greenwich Village, a drinking problem with a failing liver to go with it, and a stressful job with the ulcer that came with the package. Thirty-three: no longer the promising young copywriter, not yet the middle-aged ad man.
Thirty-three is an age when anything could happen and almost everything did for me.
My story begins, appropriately, New Year’s Eve—December 31, 1959, just as the U.S. was sliding into 1960 like Errol Flynn making a teen girl. Deep inside I knew that 1960 was going to be a year of change for me; something grand was coming, something ominous. Whatever it was, I welcomed it. Needed it. Was bored with the way my life was: wife, house, kids, lover, flings, job; the same thing day in and day out.
I needed a change, was looking for a change.
The old proverb says, Be careful what you wish for…
Yearned for the adrenaline rushes I felt in the war, or when I landed my first big account.
Felt that when I stabbed the mugger beatnik.
It felt—good.
I felt—alive.
How long had it been since I realized that I was dead, a ghost, an empty husk moving through the world, feeling nothing, living of nothing but the next paycheck, the next account, the next model to have sex with outside my marriage; indeed, how long?

***
It was the day before 1960 at the office, or the last day of 1959 if you want to think of it that way. There was work to do, but not so important that people didn’t start pouring the drinks at 10 a.m. I didn’t have one until noon, until I got some tedious small items off my desk, made a few calls, and gazed over the copy I had been working on yesterday.
The general atmosphere at the agency was festive. This wasn’t just a new year, but a new decade. There was talk of all the hope, all the new things to experience, the promotions to be had, new accounts, how TV was changing the business, how Kennedy was going to make America a better place and beat Krushnev’s ass something silly.
Copywriters, artists, secretaries, stenographers, management, switch board operators and receptionists alike mingled, drank together, laughed, and—a few drinks down the line—started to get too friendly.
Mr. Shaw, who was in his early 60s, was getting a little fresh with a twenty-three-year-old receptionist who had only been with us for two weeks now. The girl, who wore a tight sweater that enhanced her attributes, giggled at everything he said to her, and she went, ”Oh, Mr. Shaw, you’re too much!” every thirty seconds. She knew how to play the game. I suspected a promotion for her within the first month of 1960; that’s how it usually worked with Andy Shaw.
“Always make the boss happy,” a familiar female voice said behind me.
“Indeed,” I replied, “the games of dirty old men moving employees around like chess pieces on the board of commerce.”
“How poetic,” she said. She was Fran, my secretary. She was twenty-five, petite, short dark hair, and had been working for me since I started here. She was a damn good secretary and I wouldn’t have any other.
She was also quite tipsy, holding a flute of champagne in her hand.
I was drinking rye, straight.
“How is it?” I asked.
She held up the flute. “This?”
“Looks tasty.”
“It is tasty.”
She offered me the flute.
“Taste?”
“No thanks.”
“I don’t have atomic germs,” she said with a giggle that was similar to the giggles coming from that receptionist.
“Champagne and rye are a bad mix,” I told her.
“There’s no cognac,” Fran said, “that’s what I’d like, cognac.”
“That can be cured.”
“You have some?”
“You know I do, Fran.”
“Wasn’t sure if you polished off that bottle yet.”
“There are no dead soldiers beyond those walls of my inner sanctum.”
I’d had a bottle of fine cognac, straight from France, since I‘d started here, since she’d been here, used only on special occasions—celebrations when signing a new account or when an ad campaign paid off well.
Yes, she knew I had that bottle…
I was feeling—good.
I was feeling—drunk.
I looked at her blue dress, how it clung to her hips and breasts.
Damn me.
“Shall we?” I said.
“Indeed,” she said.
We made our way into my office. I didn’t realize how loud the good times were getting out there until I closed the door.
The sounds were muffled.
“Nice and quiet,” Fran said, leaning against the door, her eyes glassy.
“Maybe you’ve had enough to drink,” I suggested.
“The hell with that,” she said. “It’s the last day of 1959. Do you know what that means?”
“No, what does it mean, Fran?”
“It means it times for some magnificent cognac.”
“I concur.”
“Of course you concur.”
“Of course?”
“We think alike,” she said, her words slurred. “Or I think like you. I know what you’re thinking, Robert.”
I brought out the cognac, nestled in the bottom drawer of my desk, and two paper cups.
“What am I thinking?” I asked.
I poured the sweet elixir into the cups.
She stumbled forward.
“We’re thinking the same thing,” she said, “about 1959.”
I handed her a cup.
“To 1959,” I said.
“Goodbye, time!”
We held up our cups and drank.
Her eyes bulged. “My, that stuff’s the best.”
“Another?”
“I’m not saying no.”
We had another.
We had a third.
And then she fell forward, I caught her in my arms, and then we were kissing. It was inevitable. I knew this would happen; she knew this would happen. Yes, we were thinking the same think. Yes, she knew I had this bottle, she knew we’d have to go into my office to get it, I played right into her plan. Or was it my plan?
She broke the kiss and said, “Is this a mistake?”
“Probably.”
“Should we stop?”
“Probably.”
“Don’t stop.”
We kissed some more. I ran my hand down her back and cupped her ample rear end that was soft and warm.
“We agreed,” I started to say.
“What?”
“We agreed to not do this again.”
“He broke it off, Robert.”
“Who? Stan?”
“Who else?” She waved her hand in front of my face. “Do you see the ring still there? It’s gone. So long, dreams of martial bliss.
“What happened?”
“Does it matter?”
“It might.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I want you to kiss me.”
I kissed her.
“There’s still my wife,” I said.
“Rot,” she whispered. “I know about Brenda, remember?”
I unzipped the back of her dress.
“This is a bad idea,” I said, but I kept doing it.
“The last act of the decade, Robert,” she said, “who cares?”
I agreed. A new dawn lay ahead for all of us, so why not.
***

A guy sleeping with his secretary is one of the oldest stories in the modern book. It began with Fran five weeks after she started to work for me, six weeks after I joined the agency. It seemed harmless enough at first, the sort of thing a senior copywriter often does with the available girl Friday: the quickie in the office, a hand job, stolen kisses and pinches of flesh. All light and fluffy to release the tension of a business where tension becomes your shadow and side-kick.
The mistake, now that I look back on it all, was going to her little apartment in Brooklyn, spending too many idle hours where we would talk, spending the night every once and a while and telling my wife, Elaine, that I had had one too many with the boys and spent the night on couch, didn’t catch that last train out of Penn Station—this was when we lived in New Jersey, before we moved to the Upper West Side. Elaine never suspected a thing.
It was becoming too much of a habit, Fran and I; not just in my office but drinks after work, back to her place, and then one time at a fine hotel on 57th Street; the room was gratis because we were handling the hotel’s ads and we needed a few rooms to use, “to get the fee of the place.”
“So how many girls have you taken up here?” Fran had asked.
“Clever,” I’d replied.
“Really, you can tell me, I know I’m not the only one.”
“You are the only one,” and that was the truth, then.
“Well, you’re not.”
“Oh?”
“There are other men, Robert.”
“Oh really,” I’d said. “Anyone at the office?”
“No—yes—no, not anymore.”
“Who was it?”
“He’s gone.”
I think I knew. I didn’t care.
“There’s a boy in Brooklyn,” she’d said.
“Lots of them, and girls too.”
“He’s serious. Sadly serious. Silly serious.”
“A sap?”
“He’s nineteen.”
“There you go.”
“I’m his first.”
“Oh boy.”
“He thinks we should get married because of that.”
“To be nineteen again,” I’d said. “Jesus, I was in the army.”
“An d there’s an old boss of mine, a man I used to work for.”
“How old is he?”
“I don’t mean he’s old, I mean I worked for him before—well, he is old, I suppose, he’s forty-three.”
“He could be your father.”
“I could be his daughter.”
“I hope I’m so lucky at forty-three, to be able to bed a young lady like yourself,” I’d said, drawing her close to me, ready for sex.
“I can’t believe I’m sleeping with three men at the same time,” Fran had said. “Sometimes the same day. There have been days when I have been with you and then I have a date that night and I…”
She looked at the floor.
“Why are you telling me this?” I’d asked.
“Do you think I’m a tramp?”
“Not at all.”
“A whore?”
“No.”
“A trollop?”
“Maybe a strumpet.”
“I like strumpet. Wait, do I? What exactly is a strumpet?”
“A minx,” I’d told her.
“I was thinking ‘trumpet.’”
“I can blow you like a trumpet.”
“I know I should probably fee dirty,” she’d said, “but I don’t. I just like sex. I love sex. Is that so bad?”
“Sex is never bad, you little trumpet.”
“Ouch!”
“Sorry.”
“Why the heck am I telling you these things about me?” she’d said.
“Don’t have a clue.”
“I guess…I mean, do you care that I see other men?”
“Why should I?”
I didn’t; in fact, it aroused me thinking about her spreading her legs for another man, or taking him in her mouth, after being with me. Don’t tell me why. Hell, it still does.
“Because I care,” she’d said as we kissed and got undressed.
We had sex twice over the course of three hours, ordered some scotch and hamburgers from room service.
“Are we going to stay here tonight?” she’d asked.
“You can. I need to get home. The new baby, you know.”
“Someday I want a baby. To have something grow inside me—what a scary thought! But it’s what women do.”
“You’re young, you have time.”
I had started to get up from the bed and that’s when Fran had grabbed my arm and pulled me back, my face falling into her bosoms, and she’d cried out with strange desperation in her voice, “Don’t leave me here alone, Robert! Don’t leave me in this beautiful place all by myself!”
Always thinking like a Mad Ave Fellow, I envisioned a bra ad. We didn’t have a brassiere account at the time but I could see the picture: the woman is faceless, all we see are her size 38 globes in a tight form-fitting bra, and just below them is a man’s head; his eyes are closed like a sleeping baby and he has just the slightest of a Mona Lisa-like grin. The words below are: “He will never leave you.”
Probably too racy for a billboard.
As for Fran, I had never seen her lose her composure like this. She’d never acted needy for affection or emotion., just for sex. We hade a three word code: “I need you.” If I had said it, there were a number of ways she could come into my office and satisfy my need; if she said it, there was always the couch and once, the floor, and another time, the women’s restroom (that was after hours and the office was empty).
And then she’d started to cry.
I felt awkward. Such emotions were not a part of our arrangement. We never spoke of it, but there was a silent agreement between us that the rendezvous of our loins was strictly animal kingdom, no human vulnerabilities allowed.
“What’s wrong, Fran?”
Snot dripped out of her nose.
“What did I do?” I’d asked.
“It’s not you, Robert. It’s what I did.”
“What’s that?”
“I let this get complicated.”
“How?”
“I think I love you, Robert.”
I did not like the sound of that.
I’d told her “No, you don’t love me.”
“I think I do.”
“Un-think it.”
“I can’t.”
“This won’t work, not that way,” I’d told her, “not that way, girl. We work together. I’m your boss, et cetera. I’m married.”
“And you’d never leave your wife.”
“And kids. No. I have a family.”
“Someday I want a family.”
“And someday I will.”
She’d still clung to me. I felt her tears and snot on my upper arm. “What have I done, Robert?”
“What about the others? The kid…”
“I don’t love him.”
“Your former boss?”
“I could never love him.”
“Fran…”
“I’m sorry, let’s just pretend I never said that. Erase it from your mind. It never happened. Get into a time machine, go back five minutes: you were getting dressed to go home.”
I had looked around the room. It was too nice and spacious to be left alone. This was a room for lovers, for spouses, for newlyweds, for cheating husbands and wives.
“I can stay a while, then maybe you should go home and I’ll go home and we’ll never...well,” hell, I didn’t know what to say.
Back down to bed. I’d held her. We had started to kiss, but we didn’t have sex. We had both fallen asleep.
I’d woke up and it was after midnight. There was still time to make the 1:10 a.m. train to Hoboken. Quietly, I’d dressed and left the room. She’d be okay; she’d wake up in the morning and rush to Brooklyn for fresh clothes and maybe she’d be late for work, which was fine by me.
I just could not stay the night with her. I never liked staying the night with her anyway, expect when I was drunk and it was three in the morning and there was no choice. I didn’t want to wake up to her face, and remember her confession. Maybe I was afraid of what else she’d say.
She’d looked so small and fragile in that big hotel bed, lying naked on the sheets, her breathing heavy.
Sure, I’d felt like a heel because I was one.
When I’d arrived home at two in the morning, Elaine was up, breast-feeding our second child, born just three months ago.
I’d thought look how beautiful my wife and child are, how perfect and natural. Why was I doing something that could destroy this bliss?
“Another long night at the office,” Elaine had said softly as she switched breasts with the little boy.
“Tell me about it.”
“I didn’t even know you hadn’t come home until the baby cried.”
I had looked down at them. I bent, and kissed her on the forehead, and then kissed my son on his wispy-hair skull.
“I’m beat.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
It was nice to be in my own bed, not that hotel bed, not Elaine’s small bed in Brooklyn, not the couch in my office.
Twenty minutes later, Elaine had joined me. We cuddled. She fell asleep fast but my sleep was erratic.
I had kept thinking about Fran, alone in that room. What would her reaction be if she woke up in the middle of the night and I was gone? Would she be sore at me? Would she feel abandoned?
For some reason, I’d had visions of her lying in a tub full of water—that big clawfoot tub the hotel provided, the tub in the ads we made at the office—and slicing her wrists open in lonely despair.
I’d dreamt of it too.
I was up at five, just a couple hours of restless sleep. I didn’t bother with a shower. I’d get a shower at the room.
Elaine opened one eye.
“You’re too ambitious,” she’d said.
“Dog eat dog.”
“How I know.”
She did. Her father had been an ad man. That’s how we’d met.
The baby woke up and cried as I left.
I knew how my son felt.