5. My Red Rose Has Turned White （Ryan）
Chapter five
My Red Rose Has Turned White (Ryan)
W hen Hoffa had walked into my office for the first time, he hadn’t come empty-handed. It had been a bottle of Patrón, nothing so high-end that I’d feel indebted to him, and nothing so casual that we’d end up drinking the bottle right there and then.
“You do not open this bottle. Get me? You do not drink from it. Right now, you’re not worth shit.
There will be some nights where it will feel tempting to try and find answers at the bottom of this bottle.
You won’t do that. I did not get into business with a weak man.
Let this bottle therefore stand for all the values I see in you — the values that you will embody in our business together. ”
“That’s fine and well, Hoff, but when do we drink it?” I had naively asked, the ink barely dry on my diploma and a certain wetness behind my ears that was the affliction of all inexperienced men.
“ We never drink it. You’ll drink it when I’m gone.
That won’t be anytime soon, though, bud.
So, you may never get a chance to drink it, but let’s say you do.
I want you to spill some on my grave after everyone’s gone and then go back home and drink in my memory,” Hoffa had said, handing me the bottle and then going on his merry way.
That was Hoffa. He’d give a directive, hand you an envelope, pass you a bottle, say his piece, and then leave lickety-split.
“Christ, Hoff, that’s dark. Are you planning on dying anytime soon?
” I’d asked, chuckling nervously. There had been such a huge responsibility on my shoulders back then.
I could remember the weight even today. I had taken Hoffa’s money and had vowed to turn that investment into a wildly profitable business. I had no idea where to start.
“I’m not planning anything, kid. But that’s life. One minute you’re swimming with the fishes, and the next minute you’re sleeping with ‘em.”
That version of Hoffa, the man with the black hair and very few wrinkles, a perpetual wise-guy grin on his face, was still alive in my mind, going about his way, being so busy that he never had the time of day to sit down and drink his coffee.
We’d never meet for more than ten minutes at a time, but those ten minutes were filled with wisdom and sass.
One time, five years ago, Hoffa and I were walking down 5 th Avenue and he caught me smiling at some random passerby.
He grabbed me by the elbow, shoved me to one side of the street, and then wagged his finger in my face, saying, “In the jungle, if a monkey shows his teeth to another monkey, he’s admitting defeat and giving up his territory.
You ain’t never wanna be no subservient monkey, Ryan.
I catch you passing a smile at some random floozy walking down the street, I’ll beat the bejesus out of ya, kid. The stinkin' bejesus!”
“Okay, okay, fine, Hoffa, jeez, would you let me go?”
“Men like us don’t have the luxury of smiling at passersby. We’re busy men of business, not a bunch of tourists from Reno!”
If I sat down and thought about him, I could think of a hundred such quips that he’d imparted unto me from time to time. To think that he’d never do that again…
Fuck.
It had been rather quick, as these things often are, and I didn’t know what had happened.
We were sitting there on the golf course, him reading his paper casually as if he hadn’t just mere minutes ago dropped the news of his impending death, with me trying to wrap my head around the whole Melissa conundrum.
I’d felt hot and sweaty, and suddenly desired a cool splash of water on my face.
I had only come back from the washroom, my face and hands still wet, when I saw the golf club’s emergency medical team gathered around the table where Hoffa and I had been sitting.
I only ever got a glimpse of his limp arm from behind all the paramedics gathered around.
The rest I gathered from the harrowed look on everyone’s faces.
These were the people whom Hoffa had known for more than a decade.
It wasn’t every day that you saw one of your oldest golfing buddies die in front of you.
It was a good thing that my face was already wet; it hid the stream of tears that flowed down my cheeks. I knew that all that talk about him dying was meant to be taken seriously, but I had no idea that it would be this imminent.
Christ.
I stayed there as they put his body on a stretcher and wheeled him to the entrance, where an ambulance was waiting. I sat down next to the chair where he had died; for some reason, it felt like Hoffa’s spirit was still lingering, hoping for me to pick up on some final clue that he had left.
It was just today’s crossword that he had been doing when the angel of death came calling. Thirteen across. My red rose has turned white. Eight letters. Hoffa had put in “scorcher.” That man could solve a crossword like no one’s business.
I looked around to see if anyone was looking, but everyone was too busy looking at the ambulance reverse its way out of the driveway. I quietly tucked away the newspaper in my coat.
If Hoffa had been here for his funeral, he’d have said that it was everything he had ever wanted: Irish bagpipes, dark gray clouds gathering over the horizon, and a crisp fall breeze blowing all the dead leaves every which way.
Hoffa didn’t look particularly peaceful in his coffin.
He was frowning. It seemed as if he was trying to broker some deal in the afterlife or wrap up some unfinished astral business.
“As thou art in life, thus thou art in death…”
I didn’t know what the priest was saying.
I had no mind to just walk past everyone gathered there to hear him better.
I had seen Melissa enter the graveyard with her friends, all of them dressed in black.
Given that my last encounter with her was such a brutal one, I doubted that she’d be thrilled to see me at her father’s funeral.
No. My place was right here under the elm, along with the rest of the twice removed, second, and third cousins on whoever-gave-a-fuck’s side of the family.
The bottle of Patrón was safely tucked in my coat, my grip around it firm.
Other than the newspaper that I’d picked from the table after his death, this bottle was the only other material thing that Hoffa had given me.
Couldn’t count that fine coffee table that one of my friends had broken.
What was broken was broken and there was no way to fix it.
All I could do as I stood there in the shade of a tree was watch as they lowered Hoffa’s coffin into the ground.
I thought to myself how in the hell had all his old relatives and Mafia members been able to come to the funeral.
Hadn’t Hoffa cut ties with them all? The only thing that I could think of, the only image I could conjure was of vultures.
Freaking vultures.
It wasn’t long before everyone started walking in droves to the parking lot, leaving only me standing under the tree and Melissa, sobbing by her father’s grave.
This was beyond tricky. On the one hand, I had promised Hoffa that I’d spill some Patrón on his grave; on the other hand, I knew that I was the last person Melissa wanted to see at this time.
To make matters worse, rain clouds that had been looming on the horizon suddenly opened their vault, grumbling with thunder, shimmering with lightning, and pouring down on Calvary Cemetery.
Wet as I was, Melissa was wetter, as she was not standing under a tree.
I hurried to her, taking my coat off to cover her.
Before I could make it to her, she looked up, glaring eyes with mascara running down them boring into my soul with seething malice.
“I…”
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing here?” she snapped, sobbing.
“I…” Too shaken up by the death of my mentor, I found myself at a loss for what to say to his daughter while figuring out how to slide an apology somewhere in there, so she’d get over the fact that I had been the biggest douche the last time I had seen her two weeks ago.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here, but you need to fucking leave!” Melissa shrieked.
“I am so sorry for your loss,” I said. Before I could add, “It’s my loss too,” she cut me off.
“Is this some sick twisted game for you? What you did was bad enough, now you had to come to my dad’s funeral too? Is there no end to your psychopathy?”
“It’s not like that,” I said.
“I don’t care what it’s like,” she replied curtly. Her voice was barely audible over the sounds of the thunder and the rustling of the leaves in the wind.
She left me standing there by myself, not even taking my coat to cover herself in the rain. I watched her stolidly as she stormed off to the entrance of the graveyard. Where she went after that, I could not see. It was too misty to make out one silhouette from another.
“Well, Hoff, you certainly never made it easy on me. And you don’t intend to make it any easier now, do you, old boy?” I said as I uncorked the Patrón and poured a little of it over the wet dirt of his fresh grave.
“Here’s to you knocking on heaven’s door,” I said bitterly, then took a bitterer swig of the Patrón, my body drenched and cold. My heart was a desolate void, that great weight back on my shoulders, making me feel like it was pushing me into an early grave of my own.
Once I put the cork back in the bottle, I trudged back to the parking lot. It was just like Hoffa’s funeral to be as quick and to the point as he had been in life. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Except, maybe, without the bit where his daughter and his protégé were at odds.
I was more than just his protégé, though, just as he had been more than an investor to me.
In a city as cold and concrete as the heart of some evil witch queen, ruthless as a nightmare, Hoffa had been a warm presence and a guiding hand that took me from the shadowy depths and put me in the topmost echelons, turning me into a force to be reckoned with. A kingmaker, if there ever was one.
My red rose has turned white.