galoshes blog

A Short Story

By Gavin Murphy

Sometime in the late 1990s

It’s early January and freezing cold when my kid brother tells me he’s thinking about robbing a bank. We’re at my house – the wife is at work – so we’re having a couple of afternoon beers and smoking a little, listening to music on the radio.  

Yeah right, I say.

No, I think I could be serious.

I take a swig and say: I think that maybe, finally, you have gone completely insane.

Jimmy swigs and says: I’ll get the money, split this dreary hamlet and chill in Florida – or Costa Rica – maybe for the rest of the winter – maybe forever.

So you’re Willie Sutton now?

Who?

Never mind.

I’ll walk in, pull up a mask, and – I won’t even have to say ‘stick ‘em up.’

Yeah, I say. Stick ‘em up is no good for you. Since you’ve never even touched a gun in your life. 

Who said anything about a gun? I could do the finger in the pocket thing.

In your case, I recommend the note approach. 

So what should the note say?

I shrug my shoulders in an aggravated how the hell should I know manner. Why are we talking about this? Have another beer.

How about: ‘I have a weapon. Give me the money.’ But there’s no actual weapon. Violence wouldn’t be good, at least on my part. I mean, somebody may shoot me but at least I won’t hurt anybody.

I refuse to acknowledge him. I listen to the radio. It’s an FM jazz station with a weak signal. A sax player is bending the chords, grinding through the notes, resulting in a torrent of magical sound. Not Coltrane. Not Dexter. Maybe Fathead or Cannonball.

Jimmy cracks open another beer. He looks dejected. This prompts me to reengage in hopes of perking him up a little.

What if you go to all that trouble and only get a couple thousand?

Jimmy takes a contemplative sip from his can of PBR and thinks for a moment. 

I could make the demand more specific. 

How much do you want?

$20,000.

Why twenty? Why not thirty?

Fine, thirty. Do I bring a bag or something?

I guess you bring a bag. But watch out for the exploding dye.

The what?

Sometimes they give you a bundle of cash that’s booby trapped with a device in it that when you leave the bank or touch the money, it detonates and ink is splattered all over the cash and you.

Indelible ink?

I think so.

If the ink gets in your eyes could you sue?

A couple of days later we’re in my garage, trying to figure out how to get a snowblower to work. The sky outside is like slate. There isn’t a leaf on any of the trees and there is a kind of desolate silence hanging over the neighborhood, a kind of uneasy quiet that exists only in the suburbs. The driveway and sidewalk need to be cleared of the latest pile of white stuff.

Jimmy has a beer in one hand and the other hand in his pocket to keep it warm. He says: So what should I wear?

Just wear ordinary clothes. Maybe sunglasses. 

What about the security camera? Sunglasses may not be enough.

OK, wear a wig. A hairpiece, not a fright wig.  And no hoodie.

He is silent now in a way that makes me nervous. Not that I actually think he’s gonna do this crazy thing. It’s a game we’re playing. We’re bored. But if he does do it I’m an accessory. I try to change the subject. If you need cash so bad, why don’t you get a job? 

He stares at me, then says ‘yeah.’

I say: Get something in sales, where you can make some money. Sell cars, stocks and bonds, or some other legal white-collar scam. 

I can’t do any of those things. 

It’s true. He can’t.

Jimmy is a very unlikely criminal. He’s three years younger than I am, in his late thirties. His hair is sandy brown and still thick. Mine is darker and thinner, with some gray. He has deep brown eyes that glaze over easily in the company of most people. We’re from a middle-class family, both of us college educated. Jimmy went to college on an art scholarship. He’s an artist, a painter and sculptor. I’m a writer – more like a journalist. So we’re impoverished, not by birth, but by choice of profession – the fine arts. No steady paychecks and no 401K plans.

It’s my mother’s fault. When we were kids, whenever one of us said something intelligent about our future, like – I want to be a lawyer when I grow up – she would shrug and sigh and say: Well, that’s nice.

But what mom?

Oh well, you shouldn’t worry about money so much. You should do something that makes you happy. 

Implicit in this statement was the notion that money wouldn’t make you happy. This was a concept I eventually learned was as bourgeois as they come. While it’s true that money can’t make you happy, only middle-class folks like my mother seem to be under delusions about the imagined unimportance of money, coveting it and disdaining it at the same time. We were raised to think having a job was necessary, and indeed, important. But true fulfillment was beyond the grasp of professionally credentialed strivers. 

I asked my mother: What about dad? He pursued the career he wanted but he didn’t seem too happy about it most of the time? 

Well, your father really wanted to be a writer. 

My dad worked as a copyeditor for a major metropolitan newspaper. Mom sometimes called him the ‘grammarian.’ Now he’s gone, and mom lives in a complex for seniors, mostly other widows, and collects Social Security. Dad was ambivalent about my own desire to be a writer and Jimmy’s aspirations to paint. In my late teens, when my prospects seemed dimmed by pot smoking and rock concert going, Dad suggested I apply for a job with the phone company. Decent pay. Good benefits. Spend time outdoors climbing poles. He thought that would be a good job for me. He knew I liked the outdoors.

So mom, why didn’t dad just be a writer?

I knew you couldn’t just choose to be a writer and become one. It didn’t work that way, but I was in regression mode and wanted to hear what mom would say.

With a tight-lipped grin that patronized the old man she said: ‘Well, maybe he could have, but he was in the war and then went to college on the GI bill and he got married and had a family and had to work and … 

The grin disappeared, replaced by an expression of sad resignation.

Jimmy’s teachers in high school and college told him he was a goddamn artistic genius. For several years he lived in New York City, working and occasionally selling one of his paintings. But then he gets sick with a bad appendicitis, and with no health insurance, he loses his apartment. Now he’s divorced and back on Long Island, living in an illegal apartment in the basement of a big old house owned by the widow of a city fireman. Jimmy is doing faux finish paint jobs on furniture and walls for the new money on the North Shore. I’m working as a freelance writer. My financial situation is better than Jim’s only because I’m married and my wife Beverly works and has health insurance for us both. She shares custody of a daughter – Charlotte, called Charlie by her Uncle Jimmy – with an ex and doesn’t want any more kids. Her parents gave us a deal on their house when they retired to North Carolina.

Suburban ennui can lead to very bizarre behavior. So I go with Jimmy to case a bank. It will pass the time and maybe make him realize what a stupid idea robbing a bank is. I know if I leave Jim on his own on this bank job thing, he’s sure to screw it up. I figure it’s best to hit a branch office close to an entrance to the Long Island Expressway, or one of the parkways. A setup where the getaway car could be parked out of sight.

What getaway car? Jimmy asks.

What are you going to do? Escape on foot down Jericho Turnpike carrying a bag full of cash? You see many pedestrians around here? You’ll stand out like… like some idiot who’s just robbed a bank and thinks he’s going to get away with it.

So I’m supposed to park the car, go inside, rob them, run out, get in my car and pull away without anyone seeing me?

I drop you off and I drive the getaway car.

No, he says. Definitely not. You aren’t involved in this. The last thing I need is your wife pissed off at me.

I’m already an accomplice.

Let me think about it. 

I ask Jimmy: You remember Robbie Paletino? I visited him when he was up in Dannemora. It’s a pretty bad place. We don’t want to go there.

They won’t send us up there for a first offense.

Maybe not, but it still would suck if we were caught. Mom’s already disappointed in us. She raised us to be artistic, not criminal.

Yeah, Jimmy says. Robbing a bank is crazy.

I think this is the end of it.

A week later the temperature is in the teens and the stock market falls several hundred points in a day. It’s been shaky since something went haywire in Thailand with the baht. Jimmy calls and says he’s lost all his painting jobs because his clients are scared about the stock market. He doesn’t know how he’s going to pay his rent and he’s down to seeds and stems. The transmission on his car needs to be replaced. I tell him to come over to my place for a beer. He says maybe and hangs up. A few minutes later the phone rings again.

I’m gonna do it, he says. 

What?

You know.

You’re crazy.

I gotta get out of here.

So just go to Florida for a couple weeks.

My car will never make it that far.

So hitchhike.

I should go to Cost Rica. They take dollars there and probably don’t care exactly where they came from.

Lack of dollars is your fundamental problem, and you haven’t got a passport.

I do have a passport. Remember? We honeymooned in Rome. It’s still valid. I checked.

Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be by in a little while.

Jimmy’s patched together a robbery note, like one of those ransom note deals. In fact, he’s done a whole series of them. Collages of clipped letters from newspapers and magazines, in different colors and fonts, each with a different phrasing. He’s selected one that says: ‘Give me $20,000 in cash.’

It seems short and to the point and doesn’t use the words gun or knife. It also sounds desperate enough.

I thought you wanted $30,000?

I’ll take twenty.

You’ll be lucky to get a few hundred. Think about it.

I check to make sure he hasn’t used anything, like an overdue electric bill with his name on it, as raw material for the note. I’ve read about stupid guys doing just that kind of thing. 

I say: You remember K.B.? He used to sell people nickel bags in his old pay envelopes with his name on them.

Jimmy doesn’t say anything. 

We’re not going to do this, I say.

I am.

We each have a couple beers. Then we get into my car and drive to the Long Island Rail Road station parking lot. Jimmy’s plan is to steal some license plates there to put on my car, an otherwise non-descript Honda Accord, in case it’s spotted. He has some specific license plates in mind. We cruise the lot for several minutes before he spots the powder blue Porsche that belongs to his former brother in law who works as an attorney in the city.

He says: Drop me off and cruise around the lot until you see me walking toward the road.

He gets out of the car and looks about, appearing very suspicious in the process. He steps toward the Porsche.  I figure we can plead alcohol-induced insanity and maybe we’ll get rehab rather than county jail. But then I recall Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. How he gets drunk and cuts the tops off some parking meters. They send him to a chain gang.

I drive around the lot. It’s full so I figure it doesn’t look too suspicious as I cruise in circles. It’s early afternoon and all the owners of these cars are at their desks in the city and it will be well after dark before most of them make it back here after spending better than an hour schlepping on the train.

I swing back to where the Porsche is parked and see that Jimmy already has removed the plate that is visible from the lane. I think he should have done it the other way around. I put the car in park, get out and walk up to the front of the Porsche. Jimmy is bent toward the plate working at a bolt with his screwdriver. My approach startles him and the screwdriver pops out of the screw.

You scared the shit out of me! 

What’s taking so damn long?

Hold the bolt behind the plate for me.

I bend down and stick my hand up behind the bumper and feel around until I find the bolt for the license plate and I hold it with my fingers while Jimmy works the screwdriver. I have to grip it tightly to offset the force applied by the screwdriver and I realize I should be wearing gloves like Jimmy is. Just when I think the flesh from my fingertips will rip off the screw turns and the bolt pops off in my hand. We skulk back to my car then pull out of the lot slowly.

I say: If we stop now it’s only what, petty theft?

Jimmy: Stealing this asshole’s plates is the most fun I have had in a long time. 

Now we drive to the parking lot in front of the Department of Motor Vehicles where a couple of guys swapping out license plates won’t attract any attention. Sure enough in a couple of minutes the Porsche plates are on my Honda and we are on our way now to the bank selected for the job.

I go over the checklist.

Bag?

Jim has a large pencil holder type bag that looks like one of those locked bags that storekeepers use to make bank deposits. He figures it can hold plenty.

Note? 

Check, he says. It’s in the bag.

He ducks down in the car and pulls on his wig. It takes a little while to get the thing in place. It looks like a shorn horse’s mane fastened atop his head.

Where the fuck did you get that?

The rummage store in Huntington Station.

I grip the wheel tighter. I have to piss.

Jimmy checks his look in the rear-view mirror.

The bank is on a corner of a commercial boulevard. It’s set apart from the other businesses nearby, which include a moribund video rental store and a donut shop. The bank is sited behind a landscaped berm with a couple of stunted trees, a hedgerow and a sign that indicates there is an automated teller machine.  

I park around the corner, on a deserted tree-lined street in a residential area. I can still see the rear entrance to the bank, but I figure no one inside can see us. I turn to Jimmy.

This is insane.

Jimmy throws his head back and laughs. His head, with that mane of hair, seems immense, like a lion’s. 

I say: Let’s go to a bar. Have a couple more beers. I pronounce beers with my most extreme imitation of a Long Island accent, flattening the r-sound. 

Jimmy grimaces. He shakes his head. Then he puts the sunglasses on and gets out of the car.

I wait. I really need to take a piss now. I get out, stand beside the car, behind the open door, and let loose a gusher. Finally, I see Jimmy come out of the bank, the bag clutched under his arm. But instead of coming back to the car, he turns and heads in the opposite direction.

I jump in behind the wheel and steer around the block. A police car races by me going in the direction of the bank. Finally I spot Jimmy, loping down a side street a couple blocks from the bank. He’s already ditched the wig and sunglasses. He’s walking casually down the road. The sun has come out from behind the clouds. I pull up beside him, but he keeps walking, ignoring me. I roll down the window and wheez: What the fuck are you doing?

Get outta here!

Get in the car! 

There’s no need for both of us to go down.

Both of us are going down if you don’t get in the car!

He finally gets in.

How did it go? I stammer. I already need to piss again.

There were about five people ahead of me in line but before I knew it, I was in front of the teller. I handed her the note. She turned white and started to shake. I felt bad. I said to her: I’m not going to hurt you. Then I smiled. She seemed a lot calmer then and just started putting money in the bag. When she handed me the bag, I said: If there’s more, can you give it to me? You see my brother has a brain tumor…

What!

She reached down somewhere and pulled out some more cash and put it in the bag. I said thanks.

At what point did you get the bright idea not to come back to the car?

I don’t know. It’s not like I was trying to keep all the money.

I know.

Within minutes we are back at Jimmy’s place. The widow is out and we pull my car into the ramshackle old garage behind the house. Jimmy sometimes uses it as a sculpture studio. There is welding equipment and scraps of metal piled in a corner. We close the garage door. I pull down my zipper and whiz in the corner of the garage.

Jimmy pops the loot bag under his shirt, trying to be very delicate in case it is rigged with a dye pack.

Inside the house we gently place the bag on Jimmy’s small kitchen table. He unzips and carefully inserts a pair of tongs – the same kind of tongs my mother used for years to pull chickens and such from the oven – to get at the cash. Then there’s a loud snapping sound and a spray of dark liquid erupts from the top of the bag followed by a puff of red smoke.

Oh Shit.

When the smoke clears I peek into the bag. The inside is smeared with dark ink.

Jimmy, still holding the dye smeared tongs, hangs his head.

I turn to leave, but stop.

What do you want me to do with the Porsche plates?

Just leave them in the garage, Jimmy says. I’ll deal with them.

I shrug.

Inside the garage I remove the detested brother in law’s license plates and toss them into the corner with the other metal scraps. I reattach my own plates and back out of the garage. I head directly to the bar.

At the bar I see K.B. and Robbie Paletino. We drink beer and talk and then we go out to the parking lot and smoke a joint in K.B.’s car. Then we go back in and drink more beer. The reefer makes me even more paranoid than I already am. I keep looking to the entrance, expecting any minute to see a brigade of cops charging in with their guns trained on me. We stumble back out to the parking lot, laughing loudly as K.B. recalls an amorous adventure with one of the girls we knew in high school. Finally I go home. My wife is pissed off. Where the hell have a I been? Well, obviously a bar. She has no idea what a rough day I’ve had.

The next morning Bev has left for work without bothering to say goodbye. I watch a report about the bank robbery on the TV news. They show a grainy film from a video camera. The robber looks uncannily like Jimmy’s ex-brother in law. They report that the robber fled on foot. There’s no mention of a getaway car.

I feel hung over but am not up for my usual post binge breakfast of a cheese omelette with veggie sausages. The phone rings. It’s Jimmy. 

I need a ride to the airport.

Why? You goin’ somewhere.

I think I should take a vacation.

Don’t get crazy. I saw the news. They’re probably looking for your ex-brother in law. 

Just get over here.

There’s a large canvas on an easel in the middle of Jimmy’s living room. It’s one of his self portraits, a glum depiction of a face with caved cheeks. I’ve seen it before, but now it’s plastered over in spots with ink-splattered twenty dollar bills, placed at angles across the face and spewing out of shirt pockets. Next to it is a freshly made sculpture that appears to be made of shredded New York license plates welded together to form what looks like a demented beanstalk.

Jimmy is dressed and clean-shaven, sipping coffee.

Is that what you wanted to show me?

He doesn’t say anything but points to a cardboard shoe box on his kitchen table. 

Open it.

I lift the lid. The box is filled with cash.

What’s this?

What’s it look like?

What about the ink?

The teller tucked most of the cash in a pocket in the bag. It wasn’t stained at all.

How much is there?

$23,124. 

Oh shit Jimmy.

Take half.

No, I say. You keep it.

He reaches into the box, grabs about a third of the cash and stuffs the bills into a plastic shopping bag. Then he stuffs the bag into my jacket pocket.

On the way to JFK, Jimmy says: Tell mom I had to go Miami to talk to a big gallery there about my work. Tell her they bought me a plane ticket and I had to go right away. 

That sounds good, I say, even though I really don’t like the idea of lying about this to my mother.

Don’t tell her I’m going to Costa Rica okay?

I look at him. I want to ask when he plans on coming home. Charlie will be asking about her Uncle Jimmy. But he looks like he’s about to cry. I feel my own throat tighten.

Okay, I mutter.