They were all pretty much pricks. All the different incarnations, all the missions: full of pricks. Even the jobs I didn't go on, they would bring me back a T-shirt, or some other kind of touristy bullshit souvenir.
"Put the hat on. Let's see if it fits. Hope it does, it was the only one even close to your size."
That's right, look at the gym rat in a T-shirt that he couldn't possibly have worn even as an infant.
They would do that kind of thing all the time.
Rollin brought me a silk suit one time from a job he did in Hong Kong. I remember the quality was excellent. A beautiful blue color. Really first-rate goods.
So he had me try it on. No problem. Fit really well, actually.
That was until I tried to walk in the thing.
I don't know how they did it, but it was tailored in such a way that with one step, I managed to split the trousers from belt loop to fly and then, when I turned around to try and see what happened, the jacket split right up the back. Real funny, Rollin.
He was "rollin" on the floor laughing for about 5 whole minutes.
My mom always told me that they wouldn't put the time into pranking me like that if they didn't like me. Maybe she's right, but there were many times I left Phelps' time capsule of an apartment wishing I had thrown everyone of them over the balcony.
It was several years after I had been sheet-caked out that Rollin reached out to me.
It was all done through channels, of course. There were cut-outs and blinds, but eventually we ended up meeting in, of all places, Windsor, Ontario. Don't know if it was convenient for him, but I can assure you it was not convenient for me.
It was a rainy October afternoon. I remember that because it felt like we were in the north of England. A cold, piercing rain that cut right through you. We had lunch in the back room of a greasy Greek restaurant just off Victoria St in the downtown.
Turns out, Rollin got his cake shortly after I did. He knew it was coming. He would get more and more of the skin jobs that called for an old man and he was using less and less make-up. His mirror told him long before his controller. The "Man of a Thousand Faces" had been reduced to one, a mask that he couldn't pull off at the end of the job.
He could no longer hide who he was and once that was gone, once he had to really look at himself, he recognized the price his country had collected for his service.
Much as I had hated the guy, I have to say that when he told that to me, my heart kind of went out to the sonofabitch. Poor dumb bastard, we'd all told him about it but when he was at the top of his game he didn't need to listen. He was playing in cabaret and in our high-stakes world and winning universal acclaim. There was no reason to believe that that wouldn't always be the case.
His first wife left him when he was in the Eastern Bloc doing a job on a banker who was trying to jump-start the Fourth Reich. I don't think we ever met her, but I could be wrong.
He couldn't understand why she had left him. It couldn't have been because he was never home. Probably had nothing to do with the fact that when he was home, she was always finding bits and pieces of latex all over their place. (Turns out, she was allergic.) Couldn't possibly be because he was always taking her make-up. (At least, that's what she told me.)
The next two wives are a blur because they came and went much faster and each in their own way made sure that he would have to be working until long after the audiences lost their interest.
Divorce laws kept changing--especially during those years--and Rollin never did. Each new wife added about 5 years to his working life. He called it "bitch feed" that he would have to scratch up like some sort of sad rubber-covered chicken.
It surprised me that he felt a need to unload like that. His whole life story from our last job together up until earlier that morning. He also felt obliged to apologize for that silk suit gag. Forty years or more later, he was still carrying that around.
And as he would talk--still using those flamboyant gestures that were so common with smokers where they would use the vapor trail from their cigarettes to accent a story point, or punctuate a joke--I could still see the Rollin I has known all those years before.
I could also see the tattoos on his neck.
I finally asked him how bad it was and he told me.
Not all the bitches were going to get fed.
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised: it seemed like some kind of poetic justice, but there, in that restaurant on that day, it was sad. Very sad.
We talked a lot about sleep and how that had become harder and harder to come by. For a man who adopted and discarded faces as he did, to be visited by..., haunted by, those faces.... Maybe others enjoyed the sleep of the just, but not him and, truth to tell, not me either.
We talked about our lives since we left the job: the wins and, more frequently, the losses. We had a good laugh about Briggs as a TV talking head.
It got so we were the only ones in the place and then it got so that the restaurant had to close. They only did lunch on Saturday--not enough traffic to stay open all day. It got so I had begun to think about the long drive I had ahead of me and the relentless thunkety-thunk-thunkety-thunk of the Michigan roads. It got to the last moment that we both knew would be the last moment.
He wanted to show me one of his god damned magic tricks. Pick a card? Really? I told him that I didn't want to see a trick. Every time he brought out the cards, it ended up costing me money.
I got up to leave and he touched my arm.
"Just one more thing," he said.
And then, he made that move where he raised his hand across his throat and grabbed at the edge of his make-up.... He always did exquisite work, I do have to give him that. If I hadn't seen him do it, I would not have been able to tell the before and after difference.
I shook his hand for a long minute and I wished him good luck.
And then I had my hand on the door and he called to me in a stage whisper.
"I left you a souvenir in your car."
Of course he did, that prick.
Of course, he did. It was hanging from the hook behind the driver's seat. It was the same shade of blue exactly.
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