In Nine Kinds of Pain

by Leonard Fritz

  In the winter, you just have to worry about two things: 1.) Making sure your shovel isn’t stolen, and 2.) Allowing the dopers and crackheads to shovel your sidewalk. Sometimes the two go hand-in-hand. Sometimes the dopers will steal your shovel and then a few days later come by your house to ask if you need your sidewalks cleared. They do this because they know you don’t have a shovel anymore. And you know that whatever you pay them will go directly to their habit, but you pay them anyway. You pay them because 1.) They have your shovel, and 2.) If you give them money, they won’t retaliate by throwing a giant icicle through your front window during the night.

  You have to give the crackheads credit, though—they do a wonderful job shoveling. That’s because they want you as a repeat customer, what one in the business world would call an “anchor client.” They want to know they can count on you to give them money to buy their crack, because they need it every day, and they need it every day, and they need it every day, so they need you every day.

  Just look at them crackheads go! They sure can bust some snow!

  The Canadian Mafia

  The dark edges of the Detroit River along the city’s side are fenced-in lot after fenced-in lot of emptiness, underdeveloped for no reason. The fenced-in lots (usually with barbed wire at the top of the mesh walls) are overgrown with vegetation, and the abandoned warehouses that still litter the shore are a standing testament to the way businesses fled the city over the last few decades. Those warehouses aren’t completely vacant, though—they serve as nests for the streetwalking rabble, the dopers, the crackheads, the disenfranchised, the lonely, the lepers, and the freaks.

  Ronald Frady normally does his business on the river’s shoreline, from a red-with-beige-plywood-over-the-windows three-story construct underneath the Ambassador Bridge, but tonight he has to return to his old stomping grounds, the empty building that was once a Ford assembly plant (now closed and rotted).

  He stands in the off-street doorway of the plant. There’s been an accident on the street. Frady watched it as it occurred. He saw the black SUV boldly challenge the yellow-to-red light and the mini-van that plowed into its side. Both vehicles spun onto the sidewalk. There were a few injuries—an old woman and a kid in the demolished mini-van. Frady was close enough to hear the SUV’s driver, a short Mexican woman painted to the nines (on a Wednesday night?), lie to the cop who took her story. She stopped, she claimed, she never saw him, she claimed, he must have been driving without his lights, she claimed. Frady smirks. Lying bitch, he thinks. He’s glad he doesn’t have to deal with the rabble anymore. The liars. The cheats. Her arrogance sent two people to the hospital. But she has to get out of paying a ticket somehow, right?

  The accident causes a few stumbling blocks for Frady: 1.)People who gather. They crawl out like cockroaches at night, from everywhere, when there’s an accident. They stand. They smother. They call their friends who hope they can make it down there in time to see the accident. People began to gather on the corner, and Frady was nervous that his friends from Canada would see the commotion and turn around, escape the stir of the street. 2.) The helicopters. The police helicopters that usually patrol at night, flying so low that the windows in your house shake, their searchlights so drowning they light up half a city block. Those same helicopters are over the crash site, rumbling, flooding, being obtrusive to Frady or anyone else that wants to remain in the shadows. Frady needs the helicopters to go away. 3.) All the response units. Patrol cars flashing blue and red; ambulance blue, red, and yellow; tow truck yellow and white. With the helicopter lights, the bright prisms of justice were working overtime tonight.

  Frady is thankful, though, that the accident is taken care of, all the players put to rest, before the Canadians arrive. At least he thinks the Canadians haven’t arrived yet. He hopes they didn’t get scared away.

  Frady sees their shadows approaching the plant. They don’t appear to be armed, but that would be underestimating them. There are two, that he can see, and neither is carrying anything. Frady wishes he met these men at the warehouse by the river, because it’s more compact, with only one way in, and he would be able to keep an eye out for any strange movement outside their business meeting. The plant is too big to control for one gunman. But at least he knows it inside and out. And he knows that the Canadians don’t.

  “Mr. Skills?” Man Number One says. He has a high-pitched voice.

  “Right here,” Frady says, in his low-pitched voice. He slowly moves from behind the rusted blue gate near the walkway.

  The two men, both in long black overcoats, dressed a little too conspicuously, a little too much like the mob figures you’d see on The Sopranos, stop walking and wait for Frady to approach them. It’s night, but they’re both wearing dark sunglasses. And they’re both much shorter than Frady, which, of course, just makes Frady a bigger target to shoot at.

  “What happened, Mr. Skills?” Man Number Two says. Frady has met Man Number Two before. The man has a temper, which is a detriment in this line of business.

  “One of my guys fucked up, that’s all,” Frady says. “The man hung himself. My guy didn’t kill him.”

  Man Number One looks Frady up and down and says, “That’s bullshit, Frady. Why would our guy kill himself? And, more importantly, where’s the stuff? And the money?”

  “I don’t have it with me right now,” Frady replies.

  “We can see that. Any problems we should know about?”

  “No problems,” Frady says. “I just didn’t bring it with me. I’ll have it by next week.”

  “No,” Man Number Two says, “you’ll have it by Friday. That’s when we’ll be back in town.” Man Number One nudges Man Number Two and, with the synchronicity that all great swimmers and hitmen should have, they walk away in-step.

  Duct Tape

  Baby wants to ask for a new knife, but she can’t. She knows that the waitresses here don’t like it when the whores from the street use the gracious 24-hour warmth of the diner as a place to plant (and possibly play), and she doesn’t want to upset the natural flow of the service she’s received. There’s an order to things, Baby knows, and using what is given (even if this knife can’t penetrate the iron walls of a stick of butter) is the way the Lord has intended. Baby thinks these things as she grows hungrier and hungrier, then decides it’s best to leave and get something to eat from the store on the corner (or maybe some wing-dings at the Shugar Shack) than to cause a police-invested scene.

  She walks out and sees Dallas roll up to her in his Impala. She waits while his window goes down.

  “Want to go for a ride?” he asks her.

  “This is entrapment, you know,” she says.

  “No,” he replies, “not that kind of a ride. I need someone to talk to, about Liz. Mind if I chew your ear for a little bit?”

  She shrugs and slides into the passenger seat, drawing herself away from the glut of greasy Mott’s bags jammed in the hole between the seats. “You need someone to pimp this ride,” she says.

  He smiles to her, then turns away and frowns.

  Baby doesn’t know that Dallas has been sitting in his Impala, across from the convent, since early in the morning. He had been saddened after his date with Liz, a date that didn’t go as well as he had hoped, a date in which he had pulled out his penis. He’d been further saddened when he’d returned home and had discovered that Smiley, the one true bright spot in his life, the smile in most smile-less days, was gone. At first, he’d thought that maybe the dog had escaped again, and he hoped that, if it did escape, it would be hiding in his house and he would begin to take care of it from now on, fuck what the fucking Mexicans think. But when he’d turned toward his front porch, he’d seen what appeared to be a large rug sticking out of the Mexicans’ black dumpster. Upon further inspection, Dallas had discovered that it was, as he was afraid it might have been, Smiley. The dog was dead. The dog had left him. The dog would no longer smile at him. All the smiles he would ever care about seeing were gone.

&nb
sp; Baby doesn’t know that Dallas’ chest had exploded from the combined grief of Liz and Smiley. The explosion should have killed him. And, since he believed it did, he didn’t spill the contents of his head onto the dining room buffet, as he should have. He didn’t do it because he is a coward.

  He then pounded Percodan, Percocet, and Ol’ Grandad and drifted away. And woke up still feeling like his heart had exploded from his chest.

  He needed Liz back. He wanted Liz back. He decided to go back to the rectory. He only wished he had enough nerve to go in and talk to her, explain things to her, like why he acted the way he acted at dinner the night before. He felt a little ashamed (even though the bitch should have understood what he was trying to say and trying to show her) and wanted to explain. He thought he would sit and wait, wait until she came out, try to talk to her on his turf, not on her terms. The longer he waited, the more he knew that he probably didn’t need her after all.

  That’s why he followed Baby as she left the convent. That’s why he waited until Baby left the diner. He needed Baby now, to help him forget.

  They pull up in front of the chartreuse and orange house, which glows from the faded burn of the streetlight. She looks at Dallas, who smiles at her, and she gets out of his car. She clutches her bag, the bag, and waits for him to go up the porch steps.

  “This your palace?” she asks.

  “Yep,” he replies. “Come on in and make yourself comfortable.”

  The front room smells sour. It could be from anything, but she’s not sure what. Maybe old food, she thinks. Or feet. The house looks as though it hasn’t been cleaned in a while. Newspapers have been thrown about, some look read while others don’t. Dress shirts and pants are hanging from a variety of exercise equipment. There are fist-sized holes in the dining room wall. The shades are drawn, and the curtains are gone (or maybe they were never there in the first place—she doesn’t know what type of person, sloppy or clean, Liz was). There is a pair of binoculars on the window sill, and a hand gun on the dining room table.

  “That’s a nice bag you’re carrying around,” he says. He hands her a jelly jar of something alcohol. “Were you leaving the convent or something?”

  “No,” she replies. She sits on the dark-flowered couch.

  “Go ahead, have a sip.”

  “Yeah, thanks for the drink,” she says, not taking a sip.

  “Well, Emily will be mad if I’m not a gracious host,” he says.

  “Emily?”

  “Yeah, you know . . . Emily Post?”

  She nods and tries not to think that that was the most bizarre thing she’s heard someone say in a long time.

  “You know, the only reason I asked you about your bag is because it looks like you have all your stuff with you. Is that what you have, all your stuff in there?”

  “Well, sort of,” she says. She takes a sip, winces, then says, “I have some important stuff in here. I don’t want to leave it at the convent. It’s kind of, you know, valuable to me. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.”

  “Understood,” he says.

  She sees some typed pages on the coffee table and brings them closer. “You write poetry?” she asks.

  “No, a friend of mine wrote that,” he replies. “He’s a cop, too, like me. And he ain’t happy with his woman neither.”

  A

  Terza Rima

  by

  James Bible

  If It’s True That After 7 Years Every Cell in Your Body Has Regenerated Itself, Then I Look Forward to (A) 7 Years From Now and (B) A Totally Different You

  You Xerox your ass for the men only, your

  pretty pink taco looks/smells black and gray and

  white, so wear panties next time, you fucking whore.

  Your neo-punk-electric-suicide band;

  I’ve got some advice: frozen orange juice, kitty

  litter, mixed with gasoline makes napalm. And

  sawdust, a little citric acidity

  (found in Diet Sprite), and mixed with glycerin

  makes dynamite. Blow up your band/the city.

  “Beer: Helping White Guys Dance Since 1909”

  too many Xanex when you got your tattoo

  lead to bumper sticker humor, which is fine

  on a green Volkswagen, but not fine on you.

  Maybe you should have OD’ed on Seconal

  and gone with “Keep On Truckin’.” Or maybe do

  some E or suck a crack pipe (a hazed freefall)

  and come up with a new thought, ’cause unlike

  tattoos, at least condoms are disposable.

  At first it was cool you were a Lipstick Dyke

  but you Jekyll/Hyde into a man-hater

  and piss in my Earl Grey, and you (hate) act like

  you’d throw my lonely dick in a food grater,

  then take up with your hydro-powered dildo

  (110 psi), Robo-masterbater.

  Cunnilingus, Sodomy, Fellatio,

  blow job’s no crime against womanity.

  I don’t castrate you, so how far can you go?

  You shave down your cookie, think it looks pretty,

  but I don’t need any razor burn, or to feel like I’m

  Humbert taking Lolita’s virginity.

  I’m overdrawn at the bank by nineteen bucks,

  feeling like shit, a revolver in my mouth,

  and you ain’t helping none.

  “You know Jimmy Bible?” Dallas asks.

  “No,” Baby answers.

  “Ain’t that the greatest poem you ever read?”

  She shrugs. “He sounds like he don’t like women much.”

  “No, that’s not it,” he says. “He just don’t like one particular woman much. She caused him all kinds of grief, just like Lizzie done to me.”

  “So, you said you wanted to talk a little bit about Liz?”

  Dallas turns his eyes from her. She feels a sudden shift in the weather patterns.

  “Fuck my wife,” he says.

  Baby smiles. “Dallas, did you lie to me to get me here?”

  “Yeah,” he replies.

  “You lied to me?”

  “Yeah, I lied,” he says. “I didn’t bring you here to talk about my wife. You want some more to drink?”

  “No thanks,” she says. “Not really.”

  “Good,” he says, and he picks up her jelly jar and hands it to her. She holds it while he pours Ol’ Grandad in it, over top of the clear liquid that was already in there. “Did anyone ever tell you you look just like Halle Berry?”

  “Yeah,” she replies. “I get that a lot. You kinda look like Drew Carey to me. You know who Drew Carey is?”

  “Drew Carey?” he says. “I look like him?”

  “Well, that’s not so bad. I don’t think it’s bad. I kinda like the way Drew Carey looks. You know, it’s very clean. You know?”

  “Well, I guess. But you, you look just like Halle Berry. You ever see that movie Monster’s Ball?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “She was good in that.”

  “Yeah,” he says. He sits down in the chair facing the couch. “You remember that one scene? The one where that dude fucks her in the living room?”

  Baby nods.

  “Well, Baby, that’s why I brung you here. I wanna fuck you like that.”

  “I don’t think so,” she says. “I’m not even thinkin’ that way right now. I got more on my mind than trickin’. I need some space from that right now.”

  “Well, I think you’re going to anyway,” he says, standing now.