SCADS
david mckenna
Some days it doesn’t pay to put your pants on, you just can’t escape the noise. First it was a three-hour shift at Eyewear&Ice Cream, then an earful of Sandy bitching about her brother’s corpse having its brain pickled for medical students to practice on.
“They opened his skull and stole it,” she raved as we sat side by side on our front stoop. “The same way you would open a freezer at Carfagno’s to lift a piece of veal.”
What’d they use to lift his gray matter, a pair of tweezers? That’s what I almost said, my mood was that foul. The air conditioner at work had blown out and the heat was so bad it melted the Buddy Bars and steamed up the lenses on the $500 Armani sunglasses. A legally blind lady tried to punch me, but I closed up anyway.
“I love Philly except for the heat,” I said, trying to change the subject, squirting myself in the face with my Luger-like water pistol that almost got me gunned down when some stupid bike cop saw me aiming at Oxygen Man #1, who was fixing to keel over after his half-block walk to Daoud’s Dollar Store for cigarettes.
“The heat don’t bother me,” Sandy said, eager to argue. “It’s the people I can’t stand.”
“Don’t forget the cars,” I said, busting her chops like I always do when she gets sassy. “It’s not bad enough, a million people breezing around for no good reason. But they’re all in cars, polluting me worse than those Camels you smoke.”
“Quit complaining,” she said, blowing smoke in my face. “It’s your fault we’re still in this crummy city.”
Cigarette Sandy is her full name, on account of her two-pack-a-day habit. Joe Scads is what she calls me — the name’s really Joe Mingledough — because of the time I read Blackjack for Winners by F. Frank (P.G.W., 1993) and promised to win scads of money in Atlantic City. I lost our ten-grand down payment on a house in Jersey, in what looked like a toy town you would put up around a set of electric trains. She’ll never forgive me.
“This time I’ll make sure you don’t get a chance to blow the dough,” she said mysteriously.
Turns out Workhorse Harry, Sally’s brother, was one of twenty stiffs who had their brains scooped out and sent to anatomy classes at Franklin University Medical School, as part of a shady deal between the chief sawbones there and some enterprising ghoul at the city Medical Examiner’s Office. Sandy heard on the news that a relative of one of the cadavers was settling with the city for about $90,000, so now she wanted to sue on behalf of Harry, who probably didn’t make that much money his whole life.
“You said they fired the guy who cut the deal,” I said, disgusted. “They even apologized for snatching the brains. Why make a federal case? The city’s almost broke as it is.”
“Here’s why, you moron,” she said, flicking her non-filter into the gutter. “Cadaver abuse. You got your child abuse, spouse abuse, old people abuse. This is worse. Cardinal Bevilacqua says even the unborn have rights. Why shouldn’t dead people?”
“Because they’re dead. You can’t abuse ‘em, or be nice to ‘em either, unless it’s to buy a red marble gravestone.”
It was getting sort of loud. I could tell by the way the neighbors were hanging over their railings, watching like we were in the Mummers Parade.
Oxygen Man #1 — Carmen to his kin — came over to play peacemaker, pushing his oxygen tank in a snazzy little cart with chrome wheels. A tube thinner than an earphone wire snaked under his shirt from the tank and wound behind his ear to a little clamp on his nose.
“It ain’t worth it, whatever you young people are steamed about,” he said, making this weird downward motion with his hands that was supposed to hush us. “Life is too short.”
Not short enough for you, I thought, trying some hand signals of my own as he stuck a cigarette in his mouth and pulled a lighter out of his baggy old pants.
“That’s right, Carmen,” Sandy said. “Too short to let opportunity slip by, unless you’re my deadbeat husband.”
If you saw Sandy, you’d know why I put up with her guff. Two yards tall, with lips like cherries, skin like peaches and cream, tits like honeydew melons. Yum. Name another body part, I’ll match a fruit I like.
Carmen lit his cigarette and didn’t blow us up, but I told him what a bad idea it was, smoking and wearing an oxygen tube.
“Mind your own business,” Sandy said to me. “Worry about something real, like how we’re gonna scrape together enough money to move, what with all the fancy food you buy.”
“The fancier the food, the more you eat,” I reminded her.
She proceeded to tell the cadaver story to Carmen, who just happened to know the perfect lawyer for the case, if we didn’t mind cutting the lawyer in for a third of the settlement. At this point Carmen slipped into a coughing fit that brought him so low he nearly kissed the curb. He hacked and spit but somehow remained attached to his tank. I didn’t want to think about how far up his nose that tube was stuck.
Carmen managed to name the lawyer just as his brother Carlo — Oxygen Man #2 — wheeled his own tank around the corner from Ninth Street. He’s short and fat as Carmen but two years older and not as loud, with less hair on his skull and more in his ears.
Carlo pointed his cigarette at Carmen and said to Sandy and me, “Don’t believe anything he says,” though he couldn’t possibly have heard what we were talking about. “He’d walk over his own mother if he smelled money behind her.”
I figured Carlo would know, since both men live with their 90-year-old mom in the house two doors down. Sandy and me ducked inside and then out the back door to tool around in my Jeep-like vehicle, where we could yell at each other in peace. But that’s not how it turned out.
We drove south and watched the sun sink into the lakes like a big red beach ball. We raced home and threw off our clothes. I cooked up some melon and cream cheese waffles with a splash of Midori and some blackberries, which are the same color as Sandy’s eyes. Sinatra was on the boom box. I sang myself into a frenzy and invited Sandy to hum along. She whipped up my elixir of love — fruits and ice cream, cracked ice and wheat germ, and some pharmaceutical she adds that I don’t even want to know about. We drank deep and jumped each other and I, for one, forgot all about cadavers.
But not for long. Next day, Sandy’s on the phone with the lawyer Carmen recommended, laying down her sorry-ass rap. What an outrage, her poor brother, empty-headed at his own funeral. As if the big dope had any use for a brain at that point, or ever had. Twenty years Harry pushed produce around at the Food Center, very slowly, until one day he fell asleep in the wrong dark corner and got mashed by a pallet of Idaho potatoes. No insurance, of course.
Two years after the fact, Sandy’s sees dollar signs, and so does her lawyer, Dan Cheatham. Pronounced cheat ‘em, I kid you not. A fast talker with a salon tan and a shag rug on his head. “You may think you’re not hurt, but let me be the judge of that,” he says in his cable TV ad, which ends with his phone numbers flashing on the screen and an announcer shouting, “Can’t beat ‘em? Cheatham!”
Sandy was talking to this sheister like he was Moses come down from the mountain with the secret word. Yes, Mr. Cheatham, I saw the story about my brother on TV, and it was like my worst nightmare. Yes, Mr. Cheatham, I’ll send you his case number. Action News got it from the newspaper.
Cheatham got right down to business, filing suit against the city for negligence and cadaver abuse, a new one on me. I mean, it’s alright to dress stiffs in bad wigs and goofy makeup and suck God knows what out of ‘em so they don’t smell bad at funerals. Why fuss over a few frontal lobes?
I guess most folks would disagree. After the Action News bit, 15 more relatives of the cadavers filed separate suits. The city withdrew its settlement offer on the first suit, figuring it made more sense to duke it out in court than fork over scads of dough — close to $1.5M — for brain snatching.
A month later and Sandy was in full swing with the legal thing, all hyped up and closing in on three packs a day. Swapping faxes with Cheatham from the doctor’s office where she works as a receptionist. Mumbling words like “disposition” and “decedent” in her sleep, which wasn’t so restful.
“You’d sleep better if you fired that sheister and let the dead rest in peace,” I said.
“My brother won’t rest till he gets justice,” she said, lighting up after the eggs Benedict and filet mignon I made for breakfast. “And that sheister, as you call him, is gonna make us enough money to move somewhere decent.”
I finished my mocha cappuccino and looked her in the eye. “The only thing worse than an ambulance chaser is a hearse chaser.”
If you knew me, you’d know why she puts up with my guff. My dad, Clyde Mingledough, was a chef at the Bellevue-Stratford who married an Italian fan dancer, settled in South Philly, and taught me everything he knew. But I became an eye doctor, just to be different. Sandy thought she’d snagged a guy who’d make great meals and great money. She was right about the meals.
“Besides, I like it fine where we’re at,” I confessed.
I cook broccoli rabe like your mother wishes she could, and I know karate. Yeah, I’m six inches shorter than Sandy and skinny, but it’s Bruce Lee skinny. When we make love I’m all over her like a mountain climber and, man, do I know her peaks and valleys.
“Well, I think this place is the pits,” she said, blowing a cloud across the table like you wouldn’t believe, like she was a fire in a tobacco factory, and cocking her head the way they do in those glossy magazines that smell like the perfume counter at Woolworth’s. She was dressed South Philly casual — sweatsuit, gold chains, heavy makeup.
Did I mention Sandy’s cheekbones? Put a turban on her and she’d look like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, but lots younger. I’m ready for my closeup now, Mr. DeMille. Not that she’d know who Norma Desmond was, or Cecil B. DeMille.
Truth be told, I wasn’t catching many Z’s myself. My Eyewear&Ice Cream clients were getting feistier every day, maybe on account of the heat wave. One lady had the gall to complain that her $300 glasses weren’t ready yet, on the very day I took her prescription.
“These are my summer sunglasses I’m waiting for,” she shouted to the other customers, unwrapping a Klondike Bar. “By the time they come in, I’ll need my winter glasses.”
Did I tell you all my clients are on welfare and don’t pay a dime for glasses, or even ice cream? What is it with people and money? Buy ‘em a room full of toys and they bitch about the one toy you forgot. Even worse than welfare cases are rich fucks who whine about capital gains taxes and such.
You could say I’m on welfare. The feds pay me to fill eyeglass prescriptions, and they pay well. But the money’s not good enough for Sandy, not by a long shot, which is why she kept the court battle going even after it started looking like Cheatham couldn’t beat ‘em on the cadaver scam. Not for anywhere near 90 grand.
First the city’s lawyers argued that coroners didn’t seek permission from relatives because permission isn’t required after autopsies are legally authorized, as they were for all the decedents. In other words, coroners can remove brains, bronchial tubes, big toes, any body part they take a fancy to, once an autopsy is OK’d.
Then the city came up with a med school paper stating that Workhorse Harry’s brain was received July 1, 1993, even though city records say he died July 21, which even Sandy had to admit was his death day. This meant either Harry was walking around without a brain for three weeks prior to his death — I contend he got through his entire adult life without one — or there was a mix-up at the med school and they worked on a brain they thought was Harry’s but wasn’t, or the city and med school were conspiring to confuse the issue, or some other trick was in the works.
Whatever. The city refused to discuss the discrepancies but was offering Sandy $15,000, no strings. Cheatham was still telling her to go to court.
It was time for Sandy and me to have a civilized chat. I put some Mozart on the box, grabbed a big crystal bowl and mixed us a tortellini salad with balsamic vinegar, which we picked at with forks on the front stoop.
“Take the 15 grand,” I advised. “They’re willing to concede they screwed up and couldn’t keep track of the corpses. But this crap about cadaver abuse won’t float in court. No one knows for sure now when, or if, Harry’s brain was mailed to the med school.”
She lit up and took a big drag — by the time she stopped, half the cigarette was ash — and held in the smoke while her face turned Jersey tomato red, a beautiful shade.
“Small-timer,” she said, blasting me with a full-force gale of tar and nicotine. “I should have listened to my father. He had you figured.”
Sandy’s father — Nicky Carnations, he was called — ran a flower shop and took numbers till he got whacked for skimming too much off the money that went downtown to the bosses.
“A real big shot, that Nicky,” I said. “Didn’t even leave enough dough for his own funeral, though I gotta admit the flowers were impressive.”
I was so pissed I bit my tongue chewing a black olive. I used to bite the side of my mouth, but for weeks now I’ve been biting my tongue bad enough to bleed.
“At least he didn’t blow his dough on some stupid blackjack scam,” she scowled. “He did it his way, even when the end was near.”
Sandy listens to too much Sinatra, which is why I was playing Mozart. But it was the wrong Mozart. Piano Concerto #20 is real operatic, with an undertow that inspires a lot of gut-wrenching and hair-tearing.
“His funeral procession took a half-hour to cross Broad Street,” she said, exaggerating.
I spit blood on the sidewalk as Sandy emoted. I think my canine teeth are getting longer. I’m turning into an animal, like everybody else around here. I should have found me an uptown girl who wears jogging shoes to work and eats alfalfa sprouts.
“You’re a champ at making glasses,” Sandy said, “but you got no vision, Scads.”
The phone rang just as I was getting ready to smash a flower pot with a wheel kick. When Sandy came back from answering it, she was wearing this funny expression, smug and shaky at the same time, like she’d just won the Most Beautiful Imbecile Award. Did I tell you she has curly hair the color of ripe eggplant? A dye job, but so what.
Anyway, she said the city upped its offer to $30,000 and Cheatham told her to accept. But there was bad news too. Cheatham, unbeknownst to Sandy, had pre-arranged to split the settlement money three ways, with 20 percent going to the guy who referred the case to him — Oxygen Man #1. Which would leave her with about 14 grand.
“What can I do?” she said. “I don’t have a contract. Just a verbal agreement to split the money, if there is any.”
She sounded as close to sheepish as a South Philly gal can until Oxygen Man #1 came creeping around the corner with his tank in tow. She was in his face before I could put down my fork.
“Twenty years I know you, Carmen, but I never knew you were such a snake.”
“Don’t get steamed,” he said, making that goofy motion with his hands again. “Everybody’s making money.”
She’s got about six inches on Carmen, too. “If my father was here, he’d rip that tube outta your nose and strangle you with it,” she yelled, jabbing down at him with her non-filter.
By that time the neighbors were out, including Oxygen Man #2, who got the gist of what Sandy was screaming about as he approached the scene.
“I warned you not to trust him,” Carlo said to Sandy. “If there’s money around, he zooms in faster than flies on shit.”
The oxygen men’s mom appeared, smoking a Camel and repeating “Madonna mia! Stop it, boys.” Her raspy little voice got lost in the commotion.
When Carlo caught up with Carmen, their air tanks collided. “Go back inside, you momma’s boy,” Carmen said. “It’s almost time for your melba toast.”
By now Sandy and the oxygen men were all waving lit cigarettes, but I didn’t get really concerned until Carmen took a poke at Carlo, which started a wrestling match that knocked over the air tanks and tangled the brothers in their tubes. Even Sandy freaked at that point.
I jumped in, figuring the whole neighborhood was ready to blow. The dueling oxygen men kept jabbing at each other after I intervened, so I got out my Luger-like water pistol and doused ‘em till they cooled off. I straightened out Carlo’s tank and Sandy helped Carmen get the tube back up his nose, God bless her.
Things got back to normal after that episode, at least for a while. Sandy got her 14 grand and we celebrated — fettuccini with black truffles, calamari with porcini stuffing. Dad would have been proud. But then she started yapping about this beautiful development in Shitwater, NJ, or somewhere. Next thing I know she’s nagging me to sell our rowhouse and move us across the bridge.
That was when I bought Blackjack Secrets by Stanford Wong (Pi Yee Press, 1993) and got to thinking about what a killing I’d make if I stuck to Wong’s common-sense tips, like not bothering to count cards if the discard tray is holding more than half a deck already.
Sandy found Blackjack Secrets hidden under my copy of Cow Country Cookbook, put two and two together, and moved her settlement money into a separate account that I couldn’t touch without her signature. She kissed and made up with Oxygen Man #1, who became her unofficial financial advisor.
“You’d rather piss the money away than move us to a nice town where the sidewalks ain’t lined with garbage,” she said, shaking Blackjack Secrets at me.
“The towns you like don’t have sidewalks,” I said.
Last week Sandy and Oxygen Man #1 moved to Shitwater where they can smoke together happily ever after, or at least until Carmen passes on to that great tobacco patch in the sky and leaves her the scads he made finding clients for Dan Cheatham. Or until she gets tired of changing air tanks for the old fart and comes running to me for some homemade lasagna and some home-grown salami, if you know what I mean.
Well, Mingledough, I said to myself when I found her note, life goes on.
It’s October now, and we’re all much cooler. Eyewear&Ice Cream has never been busier, though I sorely miss watching Sandy’s face light up when she tastes the tortellini. Did I tell you her teeth are whiter than chunks of fresh coconut, even after all those weeds? I expect her back any day now.
Oxygen Man #2 stops by to gum a meal when he has enough wind to walk the 30 feet from his house to mine. Sometimes I take the geezer for a drive in my Jeep-like vehicle. I tell him about Sandy, and he tells me how swell the neighborhood used to be. Which is fine by me, as long as he abides by my one rule: no smoking.
