The Listener
Hugh Lessig

He has Lou Gehrig's disease, this guy I'm wheeling down the sidewalk. 

He sits sideways in his wheelchair and sweats a lot. But I guess that's not so odd -- the sweating, I mean -- considering the heat.

This East Coast heat amazes me. It shimmers off the sidewalk and wraps around you like wet burlap. It bakes the tender skin just under your eyes. I look down at the bald head of Mr. Pollini and I wonder if he feels the heat, whether he knows he is about to die. The smell of his ice-blue Aqua-Velva hangs just above the heat and the dead-fish smell of the Atlantic Ocean.

"There is a pizza place halfway down this block, on this side of the street," I say. "According to your directions, this should be your old business. Am I right?"

His eyes say yes. 

In the short time we have been friends, I have learned to read his eyes. This has surprised me, because I am an old man and my days of reading people's eyes were thought to be over. But a mobster's eyes always look the same. I saw my first set of
mobster's eyes in the 1930s and now it is the Twenty-aughts, and I can't see the difference. It is like the unchanging face of war.

"And somewhere in this pizza place, we'll find Jimmy The Rat. Should I just ask for the new owner?"

Yes again.

"This is the guy who hates your guts, right?"

Mr. Pollini turns away from me, focused on what lies ahead. Or at least I assume he is. That's the thing with these Lou Gehrig's 
patients. They're completely messed up on the outside, but inside they're perfectly normal. Same smarts. Same technicolor dreams. Same whoop-ass sense of humor. But the spark plugs don't fire, so the wheels can't turn. It's a helluva thing.

So now we're coming up to the pizza place. We approach the door, and for some dumb reason it occurs to me that I might not see tomorrow.

"He's going to kill you, isn't he, Mr. Pollini? You don't want to live any more, and I'll wheel you in there and he'll kill you the minute he sees you. Am I right?"

Mr. Pollini bangs his hand on the arm of the wheelchair. Let's go. Quit talking. All you've done is talk to me for three days. Stupid reporters.

"He'll kill me, too, I suppose. Am I right?"

*

You wonder how things get this way. How you can meet someone and have your life turned inside out. Because I'm not the kind of person who normally goes around pushing wheelchair-bound people with neurological orders to their deaths. It just happened to make sense, given how it all started.

I met Mr. Pollini three days ago. He was in the Bayside Nursing Home, which sits about one-quarter mile back from the boardwalk. I walked in there and went to the front desk, where a nice-looking woman greeted me.

"I'd like to volunteer," I told her.

The woman was maybe 35. She had too much suntan and a formless smile that belonged in a Sears catalog.

"We have all kinds of opportunities available for volunteers," she said, and started to describe 'life-enabling' experiences.

"I'm not much on the enabling end," I said "What I need, I need to talk to someone. Someone who is quiet and doesn't talk back a lot. I figure there's all kinds of people here who haven't heard from their sons or their daughters and they're just dying to have someone sit with them. Does that sound copacetic?"

She hemmed and hawed, but later that same day, Mr. Pollini and I met face-to-face. His full name was Franco Pollini, and I knew that name from somewhere. I thought I might have even written a few stories about him. When you've been in the newspaper business as long as I have, the stories run together. They shouldn't, but they do.

"I need to get one thing straight with you," I told Mr. Pollini. "I'm no do-gooder. I'm not some retired guy with too much time on his hands and a shitload of guilt that he needs to dump by doing a few good deeds before he dies."

His eyes annoyed me from the get-go. They were intelligent and hard, and they knew what was going on. I had planned on feeling superior in this exchange.

"I've got something I need to get off my chest. I can't go to my normal friends because it wouldn't work. Once I finish talking, I'm out of here."

Mr. Pollini looked at me with an expression I took for amusement. 

"Maybe I should introduce myself. My name is Picasso Smith. I'm an old newspaper columnist. I work for a paper called The Frisco Foil, which as you might have guessed is in San Francisco. Maybe you've been reading about me, because lately I've been in the news."

He smiled broadly and nodded.

"Six months ago, I was kidnapped from my office in the newsroom. A man came in with a gun and said he killed a man over something I wrote. It was a stupid column about an old labor dispute, and this crazy guy had an old grudge against a boss, and in the column I said where the boss lived. So the guy went and killed him. Well, there you go."

He looked at the wall. I had the feeling I was boring him.

"So this crazy guy, he wants me to write about how he just killed a man. I didn't want to do it, so he pulled a gun out of his coat and told me to march out of the building. My office is in a corner part of the second floor, so I left without attracting attention. We get in his car and he starts driving across the country. We end up going from San Francisco to Pennsylvania."

Pennsylvania. He seemed to know Pennsylvania, and for some reason that made sense. I knew I had heard the name of Franco Pollini, and it had to do with Pennsylvania.

"So we go across the country, like I have a choice, right? We end up in an old township cemetery in the heart of Pennsylvania slate country. His parents are buried there, and he starts talking tothem, or to their headstones. I'm no shrink, but I thinks he wants to 'confess' himself for killing this guy. And he's making a big dramatic scene, and he's looking over at me, like he's expecting me to take notes. Except by this time, every cop in the country knows I'm missing, and they're on the lookout. So right there at the graveside we're approached a local deputy who happened to be driving by the cemetery and sees me. Well, this crazy guy sees the deputy and shoots him dead."

I had to stop there for a minute and catch myself, because I could still see the deputy's face, or what had been left of it. The
bullet tore away his lower jaw, and he lay there on the beautiful green grass, his tongue wagging helplessly, looking at me with the kind of eyes you never want to see. His wedding ring looked brand-new, and he had the pink, pudgy hands of a child.

"After the shooting," I said, "we piled back into his car and took off. He kept wanting me to write his life's story. I kept seeing
that deputy's face in my head. And that's when it started to happen. Are you getting this so far?"

Mr. Pollini's eyes had gone soft.

"In my day, I was known as an annoying interviewer. I would badger guys until they told me what I wanted to know. I'll say: 'Just one more thing,.' or, 'Hey, I don't quite follow something.' It drives people crazy."

I took a deep breath.

"If someone already is crazy, it drives them over the edge."

Mr. Pollini laughed long and hard. He didn't make any sound, but his smile was wide enough to break the bank.

"We drove together on the Jersey Turnpike," I said. "I kept asking him: 'Why did you kill that deputy? He was only a boy. You killed a boy right in front of your mom and dad.' I kept it up for hours, and he says nothing, right? Finally, at a rest stop about 25 miles from here, he got out of the car, walked over to the dumpster, pulled out his gun and shot himself in the mouth. It was maybe 3 a.m. and no one saw it. I took his car and got out of there."

Mr. Pollini said one word. It hurt to listen to his tortured speech.

He was saying "cops."

"You're asking why didn't I call the cops? You raise a valid point in your minimalist way. I had been kidnapped, and I had been the subject of a manhunt. All I had to do was walk into the nearest police station and become a hero, am I right?"

He nodded as if to say, Obviously you didn't, stupid. I had wanted to give him a voice and now I did. I imagined him with a flat Pennsylvania twang, a punchy dialect slapped around with hard t's and d's The son of Italian immigrants who was determined not to work in the garment factories like his aunts and uncles.

"Here's the thing, Frank. Can I call you Frank? I couldn't come out of hiding, even though people were worried about me. I couldn't make sense of what happened. A guy kills someone over what I wrote. He kidnaps me. He kills a deputy. He blows his brains out near a dumpster. I pounded a beat for 40 years, and I've seen my share of meaningless, stupid death. But now it doesn't make sense -- maybe because it has to do with me, and it never did before."

Mr. Pollini looked at me with those soft eyes again. His hand reached out and touched mine. His palm was like snakeskin.I grabbed his hand and held it.

"Maybe we should talk some more," I said. "Is that copacetic?"

*

This goes on for two more days. I tell Mr. Pollini all my reporter war stories from the 1930s and 1940s. In between, I start to know a little about him. He tells me he was in the pizza business. That he had three sons. That his wife died 15 years ago. It is hard going. I have to ask him to repeat himself again and again.

"Are you from Pennsylvania?" I ask him.

He points at the floor. Here. I'm from here.

"For some reason," I say, "I associate your name with Pennsylvania. You're not someone famous, are you? Someone I should know?"

A nurse's aide comes in and helps me translate some more words. She shows me newspaper clippings from old Atlantic City newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, which I enjoy the shit out of. There are photos of Mr. Pollini as a robust, chain-smoking, suntanned man with a tuft of chest hair protruding from his shirt, and dockworker's forearms sticking out from rolled-up sleeves. The stories say he was known as a "friend to all" and his pizza parlor is one of the "classic family-run businesses" in the city.

The aide comes in several times, each time with a different clipping. Mr. Pollini must have a scrapbook somewhere.

"Mr. P. served up a lot of pizzas, didn't he?" she says.

Her name is Tiffany or Tawney or some such thing, and I think she's trying to keep an eye on me. I didn't give my real name to the other nurse, and I didn't provide any ID, so I figure I'm on a trial run as a volunteer.

"Are you and Mr. P. getting along?" She asks me.

I don't like this aide. She talks to Mr. Pollini like he's messed up, and I know better. But she smells nice and she chews a nice stick of gum, so it's OK if she sticks around some.

Mr. Pollini tries to say something. Then he frowns and stops.

"What's wrong with him?" I ask her.

"Oh nothing," says the aide. "Mr. P. wants to go for a ride, and I keep telling him that's against the rules. She says roo-ules
like it's two syllables. "He's not allowed off the grounds unless it's group supervision. . I think he's trying to recruit you to be his 
getaway man."

"Ah. I see."

The aide left us just then, and Mr. Pollini started to cry. I was reminded of something the aide told me: Lou Gehrig's patients are 
prone to wild mood swings, and I shouldn't let it get to me. But after about two minutes of that, I asked him what was wrong.
He mouthed one word over and over.

Leave. Leave. Leave.

"All right," I told him. "What the hell. You've listened to me."

He made me get a new wheelchair from the other side of the nursing home. I helped him into it, then wheeled him onto the back porch. I counted to 100, pushed him down the ramp and out to my car. Once in the car, he handed me a piece of paper with an address. The paper was old and creased, as if he had kept it in his pocket for 20 years and fingered it every day. It was the boardwalk address of his old pizza place. I drove to the boardwalk, got out of the car and fixed up Mr. Pollini in the new wheelchair. Then I pushed him along until I saw the big sign.
Jimmy Moselli Jr. House of Pizza.
Stromboli. Calzone. 
Brick ovens.

I knew the name of Moselli, too, and this time I didn't have to think about it. That's when I figured I we were going to die.

*

Now we are maybe 15 feet from the pizza joint, and I stop.

"See, I know Jimmy the Rat, and that's how I know who you are, Mr. Pollini. You were involved in the Pizza Train, am I right? Must I explain this? The Pizza Train was a group of pizza parlors central Pennsylvania that laundered drug money for the mob in the 1970s. You owned pizza joints all through the Pennsylvania coal regions. Pollini's Pizza Palaces. I had many a slice on you."

Mr. Pollini is slumped in his wheelchair. I wonder if the heat is getting to him.

"Jimmy Moselli - that's what made me remember. You rolled over for the feds and fingered James "The Mouse" Moselli and they sent him away. He had a son, Jimmy 'The Rat' Moselli. He was a junior. And he obviously runs this place, according to the sign."

Mr. Pollini turns around and squints at me. I can't tell if he's crying or laughing.

"And this is your old place of business. Are you telling me that Moselli bought out your old pizza place after you got sick and went in the nursing home?"

No shit, Sherlock. It's about time you figured it out. Big investigative reporter.

"And that's what been eating at you?"

Wouldn't it eat at you? Your old enemy moves into your house after you broke and get wheeled into a nursing home. He cooks in your oven, shits in your toilet. Damn it all. 

I opened the door and pushed Mr. Pollini into the dining room. It was a quarter 'til four and the place was empty except for a bartender behind a horseshoe-shaped bar. He wore a white shirt and a black bow tie, and he disappeared into a back room after giving us a look.

A few moments later, a man whom I took to be Jimmy The Rat came to greet us. He was a gorilla of a man with blue whiskers and hair on his knuckles. He carried himself like someone who had been in shape for most of his life. He had wrists like baseball bats.

His gaze passed over me and settled on Mr. Pollini.

"Franco, you look like hell. What brings you into my place? You want something to eat? Oh wait, you can't eat pizza because we don't serve it through a straw." He pointed at me without looking. "Who's this? Your bodyguard? He don't look much better than you. He must be a hundred years old."

"Eighty-seven," I say.

"The bodyguard talks," Jimmy says. "You better watch it, bodyguard. You got your work cut out for you in this place."
Jimmy bends over and puts his hands on his knees. He gets into Mr. Pollini's face and locks eyes with him. "It's so good to see you, Franco. You have no idea."

The roar of a shotgun came from in close, and the concussion kicked back the wheelchair. A wisp of smoke arose from Mr. Pollini's lap. Jimmy the Rat was on the floor, his eyes wide and full of fear. He looked at the viscera that had spilled into his hands. Then he relaxed very gently, almost gracefully, and looked at nothing in particular.

Well, idiot. You're the getaway man. Start getting us away.

I pivot the chair on a single wheel and roll toward the door. The homemade shotgun contraption fixed underneath the armrest clatters to the floor. Mr. Pollini is laughing. I walk briskly down the sidewalk toward my car, leaving the scene of a meaningful death, rushing headlong into another set of questions.

"At least tell me how you got the shotgun fixed under the armrest."

I still got friends, you know.

"Friends? Is that how you did it? You can tell me, Mr. Pollini. We got time."

Hugh Lessig <mailto:hugh@pinn.net>'s work can be found at The Pulp Foil <http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/8002/>, and also in the Plots With Guns archives.