“Truly, All The Way Down” by Clancy Martin
--page 4

        “I understand, Mr. Popper. I mean, I believe I understand. If I have any questions I’ll ask Jim. I sure hope I can do as well as you have done, sir. Half as well, I mean.” The scotch had settled into my stomach and I felt comfortable and happy. I finished the last swallow.
        “You said it. That’s an excellent idea. If you have any questions, you just ask your big brother. He understands this business better than almost anybody I’ve got working for me. He is a genuine natural. Reminds me of myself. Hell, you both do, I don’t mind telling you.” He patted me on the shoulder again. “I wouldn’t worry too much, son. You and your big brother are going to be just fine.”
        Later, when I had my own business and my own employees, I often thought back on this scene with astonishment. He took such care with a sixteen-year-old kid. But that was a difference between Ronnie Popper and me. That human love and interest was his brilliance. He was a real mentor, a real leader. A real salesman.

~

        At lunch Lisa and I often snuck down into the old box room, behind the rows of jewelers’ benches with their dirty, silent men in safety goggles and grimy aprons bent over their clamps and tweezers, with blue torches lined up one after another in their wire torch-rests, hissing, barely audible, back to the very end of the basement where there were rows and rows of cardboard boxes holding thousands of silk pouches, seed pearl necklaces and earrings and rings—things Mr. Popper bought from China for a hundred dollars a box—and the counterfeit Rolex papers, and the counterfeit ‘Rottexx’ watches we sold for fifty bucks a pop, and knock-off Mexican Swatches that looked exactly like the real thing, and the hundreds and hundreds of empty jewelry boxes, in our signature forest green with red interiors, Christmas colors we kept all year around, waiting to be filled and sold, waiting to be unwrapped, opened and discarded.
        “I love to do it down here,” Lisa said, and the way she said it made me think she had done it with more than only me down here, so I changed the subject. We were smoking crystal meth off a square of tinfoil. When we first came down and had sex, with her sitting on a piece of dusty metal shelving and her legs around my waist—“Isn’t that hurting your bottom?” I said and she said, “It’s my ass, Billy. Shut up and fuck me. I like it on my ass. It hurts. It feels good. Come on. Make me remember it. Really fuck me!”—afterwards I didn’t want to go back upstairs and face those swarming, oily customers but then, smoking the crank, I felt like cleaning something. I wanted to get on the floor and empty some ashtrays and fix a drink for a big fish in the diamond room. Plus I was getting paranoid. Jim was surely looking for us.
        “Let’s finish this last and go back upstairs,” I said. I knew if I told her I was worried about Jim she would make fun of me and become stubborn.
        “I want to have sex again,” she said. “That was really nice. You will be ready now. Let’s have sex one more time. Then we can go back up.”

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