got no grudge,’ I said. ‘But you shouldn’t take out your problems on other people. Even a child knows that.’
He was shaking his head, still looking down. ‘No. No, I’ll never do that again. I swear to God. Never, ever.’
When he told me that, it was approximately two months after throwing me from the window. And when he spoke, his words were accompanied by an outpouring of pale blue ovals. Since the fall I had been seeing a lot of pale blue ovals when people spoke and I was just beginning to understand that they meant sincerity.
So I believed him. I also know that insane people can be very believable and there was some doubt as to Vic Malic’s sanity. Two psychiatrists gave depositions, one for and one against him, but the actual condition of Vic’s mental health remained vague and disputed.
The next day, by coincidence, I had to be in court on another case. I’d bought a roach-coach burrito and was looking for a place to eat it in private and walked by Courtroom Eight to find Vic chained to the table again, fiddling with another tiny sandwich. So we had lunch together. He was an oddly gentle conversationalist, very curious and nonjudgmental. We talked mostly about the pro-wrestling circuit and his hope of getting that certification someday. Vic had begun a fitness program in his cell and he was already up to a thousand sit-ups and five hundred push-ups a day. He looked strong.
During the hearing, old Judge Milt Gardner listened with his usual wrinkled calm. Vic’s public defender noted that there was no loss of life, only two minor injuries besides my own – which was, thank God, far less damaging than it first appeared – and the aging, long-out-of-code Las Palmas was actually being wooed by Execu-Suites at the time of the fire. Vic’s apology to me and the court was lengthy and very moving. He said so many nice things about me I sort of wished he would stop. Gardner questioned Vic in depth, and I never sensed dishonesty in him. I never saw any shapes and colors that didn’t match his words.
Vic was given seven years in the state prison up in Corcoran. A few months in, he helped expose a ring of correctional officers who were staging fights between the inmates and betting on them. As an almost-professional wrestler Vic was heavily pressured to fight, but he turned state’s witness instead. It was an ugly story, went on for weeks, made the papers and TV.
He was released two and a half months ago, the day before Christmas, for good behavior and for helping to crack the fight ring.
I met Vic at the Higher Grounds coffee shop around the corner from his place. He lives on the fourth floor of his building, and though he’s invited me, I’ve never had the courage to go up and see how he lives. I like him, but I still can’t imagine being in the same room with him again, four stories up from the pavement. I’ve met him once a week for coffee, always on Fridays like today, for a couple of months now. It was Vic’s idea but I agreed to it. He needs me more than I need him and that’s okay, though we quickly run out of things to say.
‘Hello, Vic.’
‘Hi, Robbie, how’s it hangin’?’
‘The usual, you know.’
‘And how’s Gina?’
‘Great as ever.’
‘Tell her I said hi.’
Vic and Gina have never met but Vic always asks about her. I keep waiting for the red squares of deception or the black rhombuses of anger to spill out, but they never have.
I thought of Gina’s letter and the unhappiness and pain it contained.
‘How’s the book?’ I asked.
‘Sold eighteen this week.’
While in prison Vic wrote Fall to Your Life! It’s about his difficult life and how he turned it around after setting fire to the hotel and throwing me out the sixth-floor window. It’s all about having a can-do attitude. He self-published the book as soon as he was released and he sells it at the tourist places around town. He arrives in a sputtering ancient pickup truck with a small card table, a folding chair, a change box, and a box of books. The cover of the book is a picture of me falling from the hotel, used with the photographer’s permission. I appear oddly calm – faceup, legs and feet out, and though you can’t see my exact expression, I seem to be looking up at something small and puzzling.
I get uncomfortable looking at that picture. I’ve tried to imagine what I was thinking about when it was taken. But again, it all went by so quickly there’s no way to tell. I could have been thinking about anything from the way the back of my mother’s blouse used to crease in alternating directions as she walked away from the Normal Heights bus stop each morning, to the flag atop the bank building above me that was rapidly getting smaller as I fell, to my first Little League home run. Gina made me a copy of the video that was shown widely on local and national news, but I still hadn’t gotten up the courage to watch it. She has suggested more than once that viewing it might make me ‘whole’ again, but I honestly don’t want to see it. I’m not a hundred percent proud of some of the things I thought of on my way down and would prefer to keep those difficult memories to myself.
‘Here,’ he said.
‘No, I wasn’t—’
‘Come on, Robbie, I know you don’t need it, but take it.’
We agreed a month ago, when Vic started selling the books, that we’d share the proceeds. I told him I didn’t want money from his work, but he insisted and I could see that it was morally imperative for him to pay me. He suggested a seventy-five/twenty-five split, with the larger portion going to him. I figured that was fine since I didn’t want his money in the first place.
Fall to Your Life! sells for ten dollars even, so Vic handed me forty-five. Our best week, which coincided with a street fair in Little Italy, was one hundred and ten dollars. Seemed like everybody in San Diego bought his book that weekend.
He smiled.
‘Thanks, Vic.’
‘Well, you know. I still got NBC, the Union-Trib, and the Reader interested in doing a story on us. Esquire is a maybe.’
‘I’ve got nothing to tell them, Vic.’
‘I know. I respect that.’
‘Any word from the federation?’
‘I sent them the newspaper articles about me, so we’ll see. I think my publicity would be good for wrestling. You know, a guy getting his act together. They’re always looking for another angle.’
We took our coffees outside and stood by the brick wall. The cold front was still hovering over the city and the fog moved down Fourth Avenue like something dreamed. I looked north in the direction of the Salon Sultra then checked my watch. Gina would be coming in to work in just a few minutes.
‘Robbie, did you hear about the Ethics guy who got shot?’
‘It’s my case, Vic.’
‘Oh, man. A former cop. A city employee. Anything to do with a government agency is scary if you ask me.’
‘What have you heard?’
I asked because Vic lives downtown and he talks to a lot of people on the street,
