“It wouldn’t kill you to expand your wardrobe a little,” I tell him. “You’ve been wearing that stuff for two years straight.”
He shrugs. “So I’m not a slave to fashion.”
“I’m going to leave this here,” I say, taking off my leather. “It's a beauty, but it makes you sweat like a hog. You got any wooden hangers?”
“What is this, the presidential suite? I’ve got plastic. Live with it.”
We take off. Vinny lives in G building. I’m over in C. That's how they name the buildings in what's known in the neighborhood as the Jungle.
Don’t get the wrong idea. It's not like the projects you see on TV, with drive-by shootings, Chihuahua-sized rats, and kids falling down elevator shafts. The Jungle is just a worn-down kind of place where the kids run wild and herds of cats live out back by the garages. It's right on the edge of an industrial wasteland—factories, a steel mill and a strip mall a couple blocks down. Some kids at school call the place Welfare Towers, which is a lie. People here work. Most of them. They’re just not rich.
“So what did you do today?” I ask Vinny.
He shrugs, squinting in the white sunlight. “I don’t know. I woke up. End of story.”
Here's the deal with Vinny.
First time I saw him was playing soccer in gym class, grade eight. He was the new guy in school. It was shirts versus skins, and Vinny was chosen by the skins.
“No way. I’m not taking it off,” he told the teacher.
Vinny wasn’t just wearing a shirt, though, he had on his jacket too. Like he was too cool for soccer. And he kept his left hand stuffed in the pocket.
“Why not?” Mr. Pitt asked. Then after a second staring Vin down, he just said: “Oh.”
I guess Pitt figured out why not by himself, even though it was a mystery to the rest of us. “Okay, you’re with the shirts then,” he said.
Wayne nudged me with his elbow. “You think he's got a gun in that pocket?” he said.
I had to laugh. Wayne thinks life is a movie.
“Yeah, Wayne. He's been sent from the future to kill you.”
It was a cool September afternoon and the leaves were already falling, so me and Wayne weren’t real happy to be skins either.
“Hey, I want to be a shirt too,” Wayne called out.
“Forget about it,” Pitt told him. “You’re a skin.”
He blew his whistle and we took our end of the field.
“What's with the new meat?” Wayne asked me. “He gets to wear a parka, and I have to freeze my butt off?”
So you see, we had something against Vinny from the start. New guy getting special treatment and all. So maybe we gave him a little extra attention—attention of the tripping and shoving kind. Nothing major, no concussions, just our way of getting his precious jacket dirty.
I was going for the ball when me and Vinny got tangled up, and both of us went crashing to the ground. My head hit the turf and I lay there for a second, trying to figure out which way was up. I watched Vinny push himself to his knees. His left hand was out of his pocket now as he reached to the grass to balance himself. There was something funny about that hand. It took me a second to focus; then I realized what it was. On the end of a skeleton-thin forearm, his left hand only had three fingers. Not even that really— there was a middle, an index and half a thumb. It looked sort of like a claw.
“What's wrong with your hand?” I asked.
He looked me in the eye like I’d just insulted him.
“Nothing,” he said, shoving it back in his pocket. “What's wrong with your face?”
Good comeback, I thought.
Later, I told Wayne about the claw hand and the skeleton arm. In school, you can’t keep something like that hidden for long. Try going around using only one hand for a day and you'll see what I mean. So everybody was asking what happened to it.
Right off the bat, I'll tell you I’m a nosy guy. I’ve got these big satellite-dish ears that can pick up a cricket farting at twenty feet. So I heard kids asking him, What's with the hand?
First he said: “It was an accident. I was helping my father—he's a fireworks expert—mix chemical powders for a New Year's Eve show. A lightbulb blew and threw sparks down into the powder. Boom.’ And they never even found the missing fingers.”
Second: “I got caught in a drive-by shooting outside an arcade, downtown. I was the only one hit. They said the fingers were too mashed to reattach.”
Third—and this was my favorite: “When I was four, I was kidnapped and held for ransom. My family's rich. But when the money didn’t come fast enough, the kidnappers cut off one of my fingers for every day the ransom was late. Then they mailed them to my parents.”
He’d obviously been explaining his hand for years and had figured out some juicy lies. The thing is, people believed him. I mean, how could they not? The evidence was right there in front of them.
The truth was boring. Months after we crashed on the soccer field, after I found out he’d moved into the Jungle and we started hanging out, he finally spilled it.
A birth defect had left him with a skinny twisted arm and half a hand. No story. No action.
“I think I like the lies better,” I told him.
“Me too,” Vinny said. Then a smile spread across his face. “Did I ever tell you how, when I was a baby, a pit bull dragged me from my stroller and chowed down on my fingers? Swallowed them whole.”
FIVE
At the Dairy Barn I order a banana split.
“And hold the roaches,” I say.
Wayne stares back at me from the other side of the counter. He's wearing the Barn's polyester uniform, stained with a shotgun blast of ketchup on the shoulder and lower-caliber blotches of hot fudge and mustard on the sleeves.
“We don’t do special orders,” he says.
“Okay, then leave them in.”
I pay and go grab a seat with Vinny. As we head into week seven of this heat wave, the sun feels like it's about to go supernova and burn us all to ash. But there Vin sits in his oversized jacket. I get why he wears it, but I still think he's deranged. Vinny yawns, leaning back against the wall and stretching his legs out on his half of the booth.
“What do you have to yawn about?” I ask him. “You’ve been sleeping in since school let out.”
“Hey, I still wake up at the crack of noon every day. Anyway, you know how I look up to you guys, slaving away for the Man. Did I ever tell you you’re my hero?”
“Yeah, the last time you tried to bum some money off me.”
Wayne appears with our splits. That's our employee discount—whatever we order one of, he brings two. We got connections. “Hey, ladies. What's up?”
“I love a man in uniform,” says Vinny.
Wayne coughs a laugh. “That's so funny I just forgot which one of these I spit in.”
Wayne tosses his Barn cap on the table, grabbing a seat and scratching the new dark fuzz on his usually shaved head. His cap has a grease stain on the front that looks like the state of Florida. Employees are expected to launder their own uniforms, but Wayne wears his stains as a political statement, an act of slobby civil disobedience.
“You’re not eating?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “I can’t eat that stuff anymore. Just the smell of it makes me want to chuck.”
“You’re never going to make employee of the month talking like that,” I tell him.
Strange to see how Wayne's gone straight. Back in kindergarten he was voted most likely to do hard time. They use his old finger paintings as psych tests for the criminally insane.
Ever since we were little he's taken me under his evil wing, teaching me the ways of the Dark Side of the Force— Vader to my Luke. He stuffed my first-ever lifted CD in my jacket, and told me when to run. He took me on wrecking sprees, trashing construction sites. But he's always been strictly small-time, doing victimless crimes. His biggest heist was boosting half a dozen Discmans from the loading dock at the Wal-Mart.
I can remember when we had promising careers as juvenile delinquents ahead of us. Until we got caught doing something seriously stupid.
This was how Wayne talked me into it.
“Easy money. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody even owns the stuff really. How could it be stealing if nobody even owns it?”
That was a deep question. His logic wouldn’t stand up if you leaned on it, but I was bored and there was nothing else to do.
This was the middle of October, four years ago. It was at the tail end of a teachers’ strike, so you couldn’t really blame us—we were without guidance.
The development off Black Creek Drive had about a dozen new houses being finished. Not luxury places, but still castles compared to our apartments back in the Jungle. And in these castles they had cutting-edge, top-of-the-line toilets.
“Toilets?” I asked Wayne. “We’re going to go all the way down there to break in and take a leak?”
He shook his head at me like I was the idiot. “Do you know how much toilets go for?”
I let that question die in silence.
“So you want us to deal hot toilets?” I said, starting to laugh before I saw he was serious.
“Those things go for like six hundred bucks,” Wayne told me. “New places like that will have the absolute best. Brand-new designer stuff.”
“And what's your master plan for selling them—set up on a corner downtown, ‘Wanna buy a toilet? Wanna buy a toilet?’“
A slow smile played out across his face, the same smile I remember from when he figured out how to do fractions before me. His genius smile.
“I ever tell you about my uncle Ron? The one who runs a plumbing supply store?”
There were a lot of questions I should have asked at this point, and any one of them could have flushed this whole idea into oblivion. But I was bored, and not too bright.
Getting in was no problem. A plastic tarp was nailed up over the patio doors, where they hadn’t installed the glass yet. Not so much breaking and entering as slicing and entering. One quick slash with a box cutter and we were in.
But getting to Black Creek Drive was a different story. Here's where things got seriously stupid. Me and Wayne were thirteen years old. Couldn’t drive. So how do we transport the merchandise? You can’t strap a toilet to your bike, can’t fit it on the bus, can’t drag it over a mile down the sidewalk back to the Jungle. So what's the easiest, most inconspicuous way to get it from point A to point B?
A shopping cart. Now, you never know how loud a shopping cart can be until you push it over uneven pavement, or take it off-road to cut through a vacant lot. My forearms felt numb from the rattling vibration by the time we got to the place. At least the new development had been recently tarred, so our final approach didn’t break the sound barrier.
“Don’t worry,” Wayne told me. “People will just think we’re bums collecting pop cans or something.”
He had brought an old blanket to cover and cushion the porcelain for our getaway, and a plastic bag of tools for extracting the toilet.
They hadn’t hooked up any streetlights yet, so it was real dark, without even a flicker of light from the empty houses.
Choosing one of them at random, we sliced our way in. Setting the flashlight to wide beam, we found two bathrooms upstairs. Since we’d figured the cart had a two-toilet capacity, we couldn’t believe our luck. One-stop shopping! I held the light while Wayne went to work.
“Good,” he said. “The water isn’t hooked up yet. Don’t have to worry about a flood.”
“Just hurry it up, man.” I was getting a queasy feeling in my gut, the same one I remember from when I fell off the roof at my aunt's place one time. The feeling you get in that split second while you’re in the air, flying, anticipating the impact.
“Look at this thing,” Wayne said. “Extra wide, for the fat butts of the rich.”
“Don’t these have serial numbers or something?” I asked. “Like cars or guns?”
Wayne grunted as the last of the big nuts came loose.
“That's it,” he laughed, getting to his feet. “Easy money. Help me lift it.”
You never think how heavy a toilet is until you try and heave it down the hall. We ended up dragging it to the top of the stairs.
“Okay, let's take it slow,” Wayne huffed, trying to catch his breath. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”
We took the stairs one at a time, facing each other and stepping down sideways. By the fifth step my arms felt like they were going to rip off, and I could feel my own heart attack coming on. My hands were slick with sweat.
I don’t know which one of us slipped first, but right then me and Wayne stumbled and gravity worked its magic on the six-hundred-dollar, hundred-pound porcelain baby we were trying to deliver. With the flashlight shining on us from the top of the stairs, we watched the toilet crash down, splintering the hardwood and taking a gouge of plaster out of the wall. The noise boomed through the empty house like a chain reaction of car crashes before the toilet impacted with a final echoing thud on the new wood floor, breaking into three large pieces.
Before the sound died off, blinding light flooded the house. For a second I thought we’d woken someone up, but there was nobody to wake.
“Now, how the hell am I going to write this up?” a strange voice said from downstairs.
Squinting against the sudden brightness, I could make out a cop standing by the light switch, looking from us to the dead toilet, back to us again.
End of story, except for the arrest, the booking, the sentence to an eternity of community service, the humiliation, the restitution and the parental barring of any contact between me and Wayne for the rest of our natural lives (which lasted about eight months—the barring, not our lives).
So that's how my life of crime ended, not with a bang but a flush. Grand theft potty.
“So what's with the new hair?” I ask Wayne, who can’t stop rubbing the fresh fuzz on his head.
“Big Boss Man says families don’t like bald teens. They think they’re skinheads. Bad for business.”
“No way,” Vinny says, licking chocolate sauce off his spoon. “That's like a violation of your human rights.”
“Yeah, well, so is this uniform.”
Vinny makes a disgusted grunt. “I mean, what, just because you shave your head you’re some neo-Nazi? Is the Dalai Lama a skinhead?”
Wayne frowns. “Who?”
“Is Captain Picard a skinhead?”
“Who?”
I help him out. “The bald guy from Star Trek.”
“Is Vin Diesel, or what's-his-face from R.E.M., or Charlie Brown, are they skinheads?” Vinny's about to bust a vein in his brain. He's touchy about discrimination.
“Charlie Brown's not really bald. He's got that one hair on his forehead,” I say, trying to be helpful.
“Yeah, but that's not real. It's just drawn on,” Wayne says.
“Well, he's a cartoon,” I tell him. “So everything about him is drawn on.”
Vinny just shakes his head at Wayne in disgust. “Man, they’re walking all over you and you don’t even know it.”
“Easy for you,” I tell him. “You’re a bum. Try making a buck.”
He shrugs. “I don’t buy into this consumer society stuff.”
“So that makes you either a bum or a communist,” I say.
“Or a free spirit,” Vinny says.
“Or a freeloader,” I say.
Wayne throws up his hands. “Stop. You guys are making my head hurt. What are you talking about anyway, Duncan? You got that easy job, sitting around all day. No hauling garbage, no mopping up washrooms, no slobs demanding extra sprinkles.”
Vinny poin
ts at him with his spoon. “Hey, that reminds me, Wayne. Where are my Oreo crumbs?”
“I forgot to scrape them out of the Dumpster. Seriously, this is what I have to deal with all day long.”
I’m not really listening to what Wayne's saying. The last few days I’ve been zoning out right in the middle of things, feeling spacey. It comes from not getting more than a couple hours’ sleep every night. At work, Jacob will tell me something and I'll watch his lips move and hear the sound, but the actual words are missing in action. I went through this insomnia thing last year after what happened at the beach, but I thought I’d kicked it. Sometimes I’m so groggy even my teeth feel tired.
“Man, you look like crap,” Wayne tells me, shaking me into focus again.
“Thanks for sharing, Wayne.”
He scratches at the ketchup stain on his shoulder. “No, I mean it. You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”
“It's those all-night orgies,” I say.
Vinny snorts. “You know, it's not an orgy if you’re the only one in the room. There's another word for that.”
I shrug. “Some days I just wake up knowing, like deep in my bones, that the world's out to get me. God's got a contract on my head.”
They’re both staring at me now.
“Get this man a Happy Meal,” Vinny says.
“What's the matter with you?” Wayne asks. “The sun used to shine out of your butt.”
“Yeah, well, I saw a doctor about that.”
“You know what it is?” says Wayne. “It's working five days a week that's doing it—starting to get to me too. What it is—it's like dying one shift at a time.”
Vinny sighs. “I feel for you guys.”
Wayne tosses his hat at him. “Vinny's an idiot, but he's got the right idea. Be a leech, like him, and no worries. No eight-hour soul-killing shifts. No getting up in the morning. No taking orders.”
“No future,” I add.
Wayne shakes his head. “Having a future's way overrated.”
He goes on talking, but I’m zoning out again. What I need right now is twelve hours of deep, black, empty sleep.
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