Tracking Shot by Colin Campbell (i can read book club .txt) 📗

to look at this,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “You’re missing the opportunity in it all. The chance to—”

I shrugged his hand off my shoulder and stood up. “You’re an asshole. You dragged me all the way out here under this bullshit notion of my New York theater debut but all you really need is a stooge.”

“This isn’t just about you, Dominick. This is about me. We’re both on our last outs here and I don’t have anybody else I can bring in from the bench.”

“I’m sure you think you’re tapping into an emotional vein with that baseball talk,” I said. “What with you and me being old college buddies and such, right?”

“It’s the truth, man.”

“The truth,” I said, squatting down to his eye level and leaning in as close as I could to his face without touching it, “is that the last guy I buddied up with was a serial killer who murdered at least three people before my ex-wife blew him away in an alley. So excuse me if I don’t tear up at your fucking nostalgia trip and jump headfirst into this stupid scheme that is likely to get both of us killed.”

“I—”

“I needed an escape,” I said. “And you fucked that up.”

I left the bar with the cockiest and toughest swagger I could muster and made it two blocks toward my hotel before I collapsed into a heap on the sidewalk and started crying. Nobody paid me any attention and I was able to work out my shit in relative peace before trying to figure out what my next move would be.

The first step was to get back to my hotel room where I had a lock, a television, a hot shower, and a bed. I stripped to my underwear and got under the covers and passed out. When I woke up, Judge Judy was yelling at someone about being responsible for what her son did in their neighbor’s yard. I didn’t feel great, but I felt rested, something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.

Between the nightmares and flashbacks of the violence I’d seen the last couple of years—and the brand new fear of my in-laws coming to whack me—sleep had been rare and fitful at best. But in a new city, a city of millions of people that made it easy to hide, I slept like a drugged lab monkey. A long hot shower finished off the revitalization, and by the time I flopped onto the bed again, this time as Dr. Oz was leading a group of overweight housewives through a comically large digestive system set, I felt a flicker of optimism. A flicker bright enough to grab the tourism guide off the desk next to the bed and flip through it looking for something to do. Something in the city.

The real New York City.

I skipped down the steps, out of the hotel, and up the two blocks and over the one block to the Queensboro Plaza subway station. It felt weird calling it the subway because I had to climb two flights of stairs and cross the street to get to the platform, but once I was near the tracks, everything looked like it did in the movies. It was loud and weirdly cold and smelled like oil and garbage. The mix of people standing around waiting for the next train was staggering in its diversity. I made my way over to the big map of the subway lines and after a few disorienting moments, I figured out where I was going. When the 7 train pulled into the station, I jumped on with everyone else and waited for my adventure to begin.

There was far more wobbling and screeching than I would have expected and soon we were plunged underground into darkness with the train speeding up and slowing down at random intervals. I listened, fascinated, as the automated voice over the loudspeaker announced stop after stop. Subtle is not my natural state of being but I tried very hard not to stare as I ran my eyes up and down the seats evaluating my fellow riders. There were more families than I expected and more normal-looking people. I had assumed everyone would be fabulous and vaguely famous, but there were enough frumpy and goofy-looking people that made me feel at home. They all looked so natural on the train though, and I tried to be natural but was too aware of myself. So I embraced my tourist self, hoping my luck wasn’t rotten enough to get mugged twice in one day. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway though, because when I finally emerged from the subway up through the Times Square/42nd Street station into the magical bubble of lights and sound and electricity that made up the crossroads of the world, any hope I had of looking natural blew away.

And I could not have cared less. It was amazing. I slowly spun around with my head tilted as far back as it would go, trying to absorb as much of it as possible as quickly as possible. I could feel the renewal like my spirit had been waiting for this moment my entire life. I briefly felt validated in all my efforts, good, bad, or inexplicable, to get to that city and wondered if maybe there was a chance my life could turn out right. In fact, I felt so good that I expected a thunderstorm to pop up or someone to stick a gun in my ribs. But the worst that happened was I was jostled around by a pack of tourists just like me whose necks didn’t go as far back as mine did.

And then I saw Elmo doing the electric slide with Iron Man and I felt even better. I finally stopped spinning and made my way to the bright red set of bleachers smack dab in the middle of the street to see what that was all about. I climbed to the top of