The wonderful thing about art, I suppose, is that it doesn’t really have to do anything. Like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Mona Lisa or Rodin’s The Kiss—all that is asked of it is that it be beautiful.
It doesn’t work that way with people.
I owed Victor Gaimari a favor. Favor being a broad, all-purpose word subject to many interpretations, you might think I’d be picking up his dry cleaning or driving him to the airport or taking his homely visiting cousin to dinner and a show. But it wasn’t that kind of a favor.
You could have knocked me over with a feather. Joe Bradac was the last guy I’d expect to see standing on the threshold of my apartment at nine o’clock on a Monday morning. A cop at the door wouldn’t have surprised me. It could have been my landlord—I try to pay my rent by the fifth of the month, but occasionally I forget. Maybe a Jehovah’s Witness. Once in a while even a dissatisfied client shows up at the door—things happen, after all. But not Joe Bradac …
Like me, Matt Baznik is Slovenian, a big solid guy with a receding hairline, a roll of fat around his middle. He was huddled in frigid misery in his car coat, draining his sixth beer, which undoubtedly added to his chill, cheering listlessly every time the Steelers fumbled or had a kick blocked, which seemed to be every few minutes or so. He didn’t appear to be having a very good time. “You want another beer, Milan?” he said. “Or maybe a sausage sangwidge?”
In blue-collar towns such as Cleveland you don’t often run into guys with names like Richardson Hippsley-Tate. It isn’t the norm. There are plenty of people named Annunzio Napolitano or Bernie Feinberg or Leroy Washington Jr. Or even names like mine, Milan Jacovich. That’s Yugoslavian—Slovenian, to be more precise—and in my old neighborhood on the East Side, or in Bernie’s or Leroy’s or Nunzio’s neighborhoods, a guy with a hyphen in his name had better be either pretty good with his fists or damn fast on his feet.
A couple came into the bar and sat down next to me. They both had that kind of unremarkable, unmemorable face that you couldn’t identify ten minutes later, and the only reason I noticed them at all was that his head got in the way between me and the TV set at the far end of the bar. That bugged me because this was an important moment in my life and I wanted to see every bit of it. Twenty-seven million dollars was nothing to shrug off, and it was going to be mine …
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