WALLFLOWER

Lumbago was a wallflower.


Ever since that first junior high school dance where he stared, in love, at Nancy Clark from across the room but refused to budge.  She stared back at him, did Nancy, wishing, he thought, that he would just cross the room already.  He knew she wanted him to--he was pretty sure.  But what would he have done when he got there?  The mystery, the indecision was all too much.


Even now he leaned against the wall while his partner Frank extracted teeth from Mr. Klinger the butcher with his fists.  Klinger's eyes pleaded up at Lumbago from across the back room, reminding Lumbago imploringly of how many times his mother and grandmother had come into the store with Lumbago in tow, of the free slices of genoa Klinger would reach over the counter to the little version of him with his hairy, bloody hand.  Lumbago leaned, not taking any sides.  But he leaned not so much with a casual indifference as a nervous feeling of disorientation.


He always thought there was something he should be doing that no one had ever told him about.  He blamed his mother.  That response / feeling felt a little typical but really no less true for being trite so he let the case rest right there.  "I blame my mother," and so, thus, she is to blame.


These kinds of things typically were two-man jobs, one way or another, and Frank always was a man of action, he liked to hit things and especially liked inflicting pain.  Lumbago's wallflower 'act,' as it was thought of, also was not a-typical in their line and could therefore plausibly be thought of as indeed part of his 'act,' and not the pathological inability to commit that essentially it was, by their colleagues who knew how they worked or by the occasional impartial observers of these transactions, like Klinger's off-the-books Columbian stock boy who knew now, and would indeed know later, to keep his mouth shut.  Frank and Lumbago are real good at the good cop / bad cop thing, they might say.  Frank was the muscle and Lumbago the mysterious wall-leaning alternative to the lip-splitting punch in the face--the threat of something possibly worse.


Lumbago was pretty sure, that given chance or necessity, he wouldn't be able to just casually wail away on Klinger's face the way Frank did, slice of salami or no, but fortunately it had never been an issue yet.  The one time he was called upon to do anything violent it had all happened so quickly and almost off-handedly, that he barely had time to think, change his mind or let his nature enter fully into it.  They were in a bar, Frank and he, not even on any kind of business, just sitting in a 'family'-friendly dive in the Bronx at a table in the back, and Frank handed him a new Glock-17 he has just lifted from the pick-up of a Mexican contractor who was doing some weekend work building a new patio behind Frank's goumada's house in Merrick, when Sal the Chink ran into the back room right into Frank knocking him down, splitting his forehead on the black and white tile floor.  The table was jostled and the safety was off, fucking typical of Frank, and the gun just went off hitting the Chink in the neck just like the police captain in the Godfather One.  The Chink goes down on his knees right next to Frank and is gagging and pulling at his neck just like in the movie and Lumbago just involuntarily starts giggling amid the chorus of "Whatthefucks" and "Cocksuckers" kerthwanging around the room just simply not being able to get over how much the Chink now reminds him of Sterling Hayden.  Thereafter he's just generally regarded widely, is Lumbago,  as  a stone cold killer.  Of course it's all helped by the fact that the Chink, while not actually Chinese but Indian-Irish, was nevertheless almond-eyed and dark-skinned and therefore not "one of us", and was also a single man with no kids or family, and had actually been robbing the place and trying to run out the back where he was inadvertently shot in the neck.  And Frank took it as Lumbago having his back and became from there his friend for life and more than happy thereafter to look the other way at whatever idiosyncrasies Lumbago might have exhibited if he ever had been called upon to do anything other than stand by the wall.


Klinger owed on a week of bets during a now-colossal NY Mets losing streak and had essentially doubled-down tragically betting against his beloved team just has David Wright suddenly got hot enough, with three homers that afternoon, to break a Met record for RBI in a seven-inning game (rain) in July, and carry the team to their first victory in the last 14 games.  Frank wasn't from the neighborhood so he didn't know Klinger personally, had never gotten a free slice of anything hairy-handed across the counter and wouldn't have given a shit anyway.  Lumbago though began to feel a little uneasy about it all.  Memories of his mother and grandmother, the refrigerated meat smell of the shop, the sawdust reminding him of kindergarten vomit, and he began to vertigo around the room, Frank and Klinger telescoping away down a violent rabbit hole and only the Columbian staying in focus standing on the lip of funnel along with Lumbago and now what was he doing, pointing a gun?  Maybe he had fired it already, it was hard to tell, but maybe that was why Lumbago's legs had gone soft beneath him, why he now saw the sawdust floor at close range, i.e. down there at the end of his nose.  Why couldn't he move anymore?  Now that he finally wanted to do more than just lay there...