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Rob Roberge is a novelist, screenwriter, and director, and plays in a rock 'n' roll band. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including the Literary Review. He lives in California.

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Nick Ray lives in a world where everything is for sale. University Ph.D.s, pig fetuses, bomb shelters, and vending-machine-dispensed live bait, to name just a few. But for the first time in a long time, Nick Ray finally has something to sell.

Determined to be covert about an affair he's having with a woman already spoken for (by another woman), Nick buys the cheapest computer he can find at a local pawn shop, only to discover that the hard drive contains the names and addresses of dozens of members of the Witness Protection Program.

Partnering with a hulking Russian gangster with the world's worst fashion sense and a disbarred lawyer who drinks rocket fuel, Nick decides to take advantage of his unique discovery. Yet despite the impressive credentials of this entrepreneurial dream team, Nick soon learns that having something to sell can end up simply making you a valuable commodity to someone else wanting to make a big score ...

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More Than They Could Chew

Dark Alley

Chapter One

Exile on Main Street

"That's one of the tragedies of this life -- that the men who
are most in the need of a beating up are always enormous."

-- Preston Sturges, The Palm Beach Story

Nick Ray will let you down, is the way my ex-wife Cheryl putsit. Nick Ray is not without his charms, she'd tell you, but he'sa sucker bet. In a fixed race, he'd find a way to finish second.Ask me, she'd say, and I'll tell you about a loser.

I am Nick Ray and I was once, and not so long ago, viewedby myself and others around me, as a young man with potential.No one would have picked this. No one, I'm betting,would've picked me as the desk clerk at a rat hole like the LincolnHotel, a place full of people with too much past and toolittle future.

Even Cheryl, who, for a number of years, made it her life'sbusiness to be disappointed by me, wouldn't have guessed Iwould end up at the Lincoln, but that's where I am.

The Lincoln Hotel sits on the corner of Long Beach Boulevardand Broadway. There is, as the sign announces, a bath inevery room. The sign was painted the last time the hotel wastotally renovated, I'm guessing sometime during the Eisenhoweradministration, since the lettering on the sign is in thesame style as the lettering and graphics from the first wave oftelevision commercials.

The plop-plop-fizz-fizz guy. Steve Allen holding a box ofPost Toasties, telling you he'll be right back. Drive-ins. Thatlettering.

You're watching a rerun of Kraft Mystery Theater and FredMacMurray just paused in front of a hotel and lit a cigarette.He looks around to see if Richard Widmark put a tail on him.He exits the shot, the building all that's left of the scene. That'sthis building. It might as well be in black-and-white.

The building cannot be torn down, it received historicalstatus from the state of California a couple of years ago. It can,however, be wrestled, foot on throat, from Mrs. Carlisle, and itwill be in a few months. The state of California's like thosecops in Penn Station at three in the morning. They're rappingon the seats. They're exercising their authority.

Move along. Doesn't matter where you go but you can'tstay here.

This has added a jittery quality to normal day-to-day life atthe Lincoln. It's made Hank Crow, the other desk clerk, angryas hell. Hank's an old-time socialist who looks like Ossie Davisand there are stories he has to tell you. He's locked arms withPaul Robeson and Woody Guthrie, he's had Emma Goldman'stongue deep down his throat, and she only took it out longenough to harmonize about the circle being unbroken. HankCrow did his part -- he walked the picket line while the Weaverstapped their feet, plucked their revolutionary banjos and sangand this was all back when the country was young enough forsomething like hope. Just ask him, and Hank will tell youthese things.

Listen to Hank Crow and learn this and learn it well: if hehad a hammer, he'd hammer in the morning and if he had amonkey wrench, he'd show those bastards downtown, and if he had a pipe bomb and a thirty-ought six, he'd say good-byeto this world in style and take a few of the screwheads with him.

Hank's still angry enough to care and I end up feelingvaguely guilty that I've never had that passion about much ofanything in my life. I have lived thirty-three years and I haveonly learned what I don't want to do with the rest of my days.I've never had much of a plan -- I came out west because theweather was nice, I came to Long Beach because it was thecheapest beach city in Southern California, and I took the jobat the Lincoln because I got free rent and I didn't have to domuch of anything at all.

Me and Hank work the desk on the first floor and we sitbehind bulletproof yellowing Plexiglas and we have one ofthose push-pull drawers you used to see at drive-thru banks tohandle monetary transactions. Our desk is huge and pink andit has three buttons near your left leg. The one on the leftbuzzes people in. The one on the right is wired to the cops.The one in the middle doesn't do anything. I press it sometimeswhen I'm bored.

On the first floor is the lobby, which was probably niceonce, with the metal ceiling that once had impressively hammereddesigns that now looks like a world of broken knucklesbehind forty years of quick slap paint jobs.

The Lincoln was built in 1921, when Long Beach was thepride of the golden coast. Three years earlier, on what hadbeen the land where Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton shottwo-reelers, they'd struck oil and Long Beach had its greatestreal estate boom. The town flourished, the old Pike AmusementCenter ran for miles on the beach. The Old Pike was thepride of the West with the centerpiece being the CycloneRacer, the biggest and fastest wooden roller coaster on the coast, a coaster that danced and hairpinned its biggest curve ahundred feet out into the water.

In 1933, an earthquake rocked downtown hard and uglyand there wasn't much left standing. The city rebuilt thetourist center of the Pike, which had started its steady declineinto navy-port sleaziness. The city council put up breakwatersthat stopped the waves so the navy could have a safe harborfor the marine yards flourishing in the war-machine money.The city found out waves were important -- the lack of motionkilled sea life and coughed and hacked the garbage onto theshoreline ...

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