“So what happened to the home for the blind and deaf?”
“Well, my brother had some licensing issues with the state of Oregon, we never quite got it open, and then my girlfriend kicked me out. Blah blah blah, long story short, I’m back here. But I still got the Lexus.”
“That’s good.”
“So how much for Frank’s pecker?”
“Nothing, Glen.”
“Nothing? For a relic that’s seen the insides of Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow both?”
Just then Matt Sweeney walked in. He used to be a doctor, so I waved him over for a quick look. “That a human penis, Matt?”
He stuck out his lower lip and took the box from Glen. “Hard to say. Could be. You’d have to show a pathologist.”
“How much, man?” Glen was whining now.
“Nothing. Even if that is a human penis, it’s not Sinatra’s.”
“Prove it!” Glen shouted.
“Calm down now, pal,” I said. “What makes you think it’s worth anything, anyway, even if it is Ol’ Blue Eyes’ John Thomas?”
I could see his fantasy beginning to implode inside his skull. “You could charge money to see it. They auctioned Napoleon’s off for big bucks.”
“There’s no proof. You’d have to show provenance. A chain of custody. Where’d you get it, anyway?”
chuck
When I ran into him at the Brass Candle, trying to get someone to buy him a drink without actually lowering himself to asking for one, Glen looked like a cat had done its business in his mouth. There was a slight pleasure in the recognition that I was now doing better than he, so I bought him a beer and a shot and he asked me how was Gretchen. It was the half-hidden leer I perceived that made my pity, such as it was, evaporate.
“Last I heard she was in jail for soliciting.”
Did I enjoy the look of shock on his sagging face? I did for a moment, until I realized that there was no guilt in it, that he bore no sense of his own responsibility in this tragic matter. Though I am long out of the narcotics trade, it was plain Glen wasn’t, and seeing my long-awaited shot at comeuppance, I asked him if he knew anyone who wanted in on a score.
His eyes narrowed as if he was already trying to figure out how to screw me out of the score I was generously letting him in on. “Might be I’d be interested,” he said.
“For five hundred I can get five cases of store-brand pseudoephedrine,” I said.
“I got something right here on my person worth a fuckload more than five hundred, and I’d trade you outright.” He reached into the inside pocket of his coat, and I put my hand on his arm, shaking my head no.
“Cash only,” I told him, which got him real quiet.
“You going to be out behind the Choose’n’Save dumpster tonight?” he asked.
“Fuck yeah, every night,” I said, reverting to an exaggerated version of my former manner of speaking. In catching up with him I had deliberately skipped the uplifting “can-do” parts of my redemption story: the associate’s degree in English, the pretty happy marriage to Bonnie—who is a nurse’s aide and disapproves of any and all illicit drug use—and especially the assistant manager job at the very same Choose’n’Save behind which I once dealt dope.
torie
As soon as we got the money we went over to Larry the dishwasher’s house and scored, then we headed out toward the supermarket where Glen’s friend would be waiting with the cold meds. In the heady rush of new love Glen and I both maybe overdid the snorting, but God, it felt good. I’d packed my bag with all the clothes and jewelry I thought I’d need in my future life as Mrs. Glen Frobe.
Did I feel bad about taking Jerry’s $2,565? Nope. The gun in his night table? A little, because what if someone broke in and there was Jerry scrambling for the weapon in the drawer and it’s not there and he gets killed and his last thoughts are, That conniving thieving bitch took my fucking piece and I loved her more than anything I ever loved, goddamnit, while the intruders, bikers as I’m imagining them, cut off his slim-as-a-pea-shoot pecker and do all manner of horrid things to him in an orgy of speed-fueled sadism that lasts until one of the bikers, I’m imagining his name is Seth or something else biblical—I know: Esau!—says something like, “Shit, man, this is one dead motherfucker,” and they go rooting around looking for whatever they can scavenge since Jerry never has much dope lying around the house and the money taped under the drawer is gone, another thing Jerry probably would be cursing me for, even as he reflects that he’s never loved anybody like he loved me, with my prominent overbite and my twenty minutes of Kegels every day.
jerry
Soon as I saw something going on between Torie and Glen I sensed a golden opportunity, because Glen is a guy who can’t say no to a piece of ass and Torie will do anything to get high, and when she made an excuse to leave five minutes after he headed out the door I had that magic feeling, like I might, just might, have a shot at getting rid of her for keeps. And for fucking his old friend’s girl it would serve Glen right to get stuck with the bitch for a few years.
chuck
So I went out to the store, and after pretending to make some revisions in that week’s work schedule (a job that strictly speaking should fall to Walt, my superior, who on the pretext of giving me valuable management experience via delegation has been weaning himself off just about all his own responsibilities over the last couple of years), I stepped onto the loading dock out back and removed from their hiding places five empty, flattened Choos-a-Fed cartons I’d been saving for a while. What kind of a man hides at his workplace empty cardboard cases of Choos-a-Fed, you may wonder? The answer lies in my abandonment some years ago of the drug life. I never, though I was so urged at the time, joined a twelve-step recovery program. Had I joined such a program I would not have encountered Glen in a bar, since participants are honor-bound, as I understand it, to shake off their other addictions as well. Had I joined such a program I would not have spent these last years stewing over Gretchen’s fate and plotting different kinds of revenge on Glen. I’ll bet I have twenty or thirty such scenarios, of varying degrees of complexity and practicality and lethality.
And now an opportunity had arisen, and I filled each case with what I figured the weight of the Choos-a-Fed would have been, and then I sealed it up carefully enough that it looked brand new and unopened, a level of craft that was probably unnecessary, because he was tweaking like the very dickens when I saw him at the Brass Candle. I loaded the empty cases into the bed of my truck and sat and waited out back by the dumpster.
torie
So I’m thinking maybe it’s time to get out of the hospitality business altogether, once we’ve made this score up in Topeka, and cut way back on my crank habit before it turns into an addiction. Also thinking what beautiful babies Glen and I could make, and what a contribution I could make to society after getting my hygienist’s license back.
glen
We’re driving north on the turnpike and I am feeling pretty damned fine. This Crumdog will certainly, upon hearing who our mutual friends are, take the Choos-a-Fed off our hands for three, maybe four times what we would have paid poor old Chuck for it. As far as Chuck goes, the cops aren’t going to spend much time on the shooting of a well-known low-level pot dealer tossed into a dumpster behind a supermarket. Not the cops I used to know.
As I listen to the female prattling on about our future of domestic bliss, I wonder about leaving her with the bikers. She needs more crank than I can afford to provide, and where I’m going I won’t want a woman attached to me at the hip. The turnpike snakes through the Flint Hills, and up around Matfield Green I swear I can feel Frank Sinatra’s penis start to vibrate in my pocket out of something not unlike joy.
SCOTT PHILLIPS is the author of six novels, including The Ice Harvest and, most recently, The Adjustment (Counterpoint) and Nocturne (les Éditions la Branche). He lives in St. Louis, MO.
osito
by kenji jasper
Man, you know shit is fucked up
when we comin’ way the fuck out here,” Gary said between puffs. He’d rolled the blunt with a Phillies, which meant it wouldn’t last long. I’d told him that there were better brands, but he insisted. “This what I started with. So I’ma stick with these shits till I ain’t have lungs no more.”
I was never a fan of working high. Hell, I didn’t even touch weed or anything else. For me it was all about control, all about making mind and body one whenever needed. But Gary was the one who’d got us the job. So Gary was calling the shots. That’s how it was and how it is still, at least in theory. Execution, however, was a completely different matter. At least he wasn’t smokin’ meth.
“This is where the money is,” I said.
Gary’s country-fried English made me self-conscious about the way I pronounced my syllables so clearly, a lesson from my father about living in the “other” world, the one where people wore shirts and ties and worried about their balance sheets and annual reviews. All I wanted was a cubicle with my name on it. All I wanted was a quiet place to do my job. Too bad I wasn’t any good at it.
“What the fuck does that shit even do?” Gary asked, the blunt already at half.
We’d boosted the car from the Dunn Loring station lot, a white Beamer wagon with factory rims. An ’01 or ’02 most likely. But I couldn’t be sure in the dark. We were headed to someplace called Osito, about an hour outside of Baltimore. Rico told us it would be like palming a Snickers from a checkout.
My name is Nsilo. Don’t ask me where it comes from. I got it from my pops. Any explanation is as gone as he is. He took a .38 slug to the chest on a dance floor six months home from the first Gulf War. All he was trying to do was break up a fight. But when the line on the screen went flat, it was my mama who ended up broken.
Rico had a cousin in Osito, the only child of the only black family in the whole town. This cousin had a father who was on the road most days driving eighteen-wheelers. The mother was the secretary at the all-white Pentecostal church. I could smell the sellout all over them.
“I mean, why in the fuck would you wanna be up and runnin’ around all the time?” The roach that remained of the blunt was practically burning his fingers. But he kept pulling from it, even though he was at the wheel a long way from home.
Gary had memorized the directions after a thirty-second read back at the house. A heavy-hitter with a photographic memory is a beautiful thing. As long as you can control him, that is. I’m middle management, which means that I’m the one who takes the dog for his nightly walks.
Much like rap, the crack business ain’t what it was twenty years ago. Back in the day, you couldn’t walk down a street in the neighborhood without somebody trying to hire you to work one of their corners. But Rockefeller and the Patriot Act and rap changed all of that. That’s why Rico got into meth. There’s still plenty of money to be made in that game.
So Rico’s family of sellouts sold him the location to the biggest meth lab in the county, five trailers in a park of twelve cooking crank like a twenty-four-hour convenience store. We were being sent to make a pickup, one we weren’t paying for. There was a bit of other business too. But I was supposed to handle that personally.
When the summer had started I was 100 percent certain that I was headed for the straight and narrow. Meechie had gotten shot outside The Crab House on Georgia Avenue over some broad with more stretch marks than a bag of rubber bands. Our fathers were brothers. My pops had at least made it back from the war. Meechie’s had stepped on a land mine. And that was that.
Meechie was the only dude in the world who always had my back. I mean, even when I used to hoop back in high school, he’d be in the bleachers right above the bench, ready to pounce on anybody stupid enough to start a fight with me in it. I was good. But he was better. The game wasn’t going to be the same without him.
I had done all right in school. And there was a lady at my church who worked on Capitol Hill. They were short on minorities in the Congressional Page Program. It didn’t pay much but she said it was a way into working for the government. I was so fucked up over Meechie being gone that I actually thought it might be for me.
I was used to taking orders and making deliveries. I’d done it all my life. So taking the blue line to Capitol South for the same seemed like a walk in the park. White people were easier to manage than crackheads. Give ’em a smile. Make a joke they understand and you turn into their main boy in a flash. It’s even easier when you know how to get ’em what they want. They assigned me to someone named Guy Medscar. He was an assistant to somebody’s assistant. But his cousin was a big deal over at the Capitol, a senator I think.
Medscar was one of those dudes who got married out of high school to a girl who didn’t fuck him anymore. He had the four kids, the twin Beamers, the vacation house, all of that. But I could tell that it was more like a life sentence than a week in the Bahamas. My first lesson on the job was that the life everybody wants in the ’hood is a pain in the ass to somebody in the ’burbs.
Then he asked me one day, in a whisper, “You know where I can get some”—his fingers coming to together like they were holding an imaginary pipe—“meth?”
While I had a PhD in crack cocaine, meth wasn’t big in my part of town. The way he asked was so funny to me that I thought he was making it up. Meth was for trailer park hillbillies and the fags in Dupont Circle. I might not have known much about it, but I knew where to get it. I knew where to get anything that wasn’t nuclear or came with propellers.
“How much you want?” I asked him. His eyes lit up like the Washington Monument after six.
“How much can I get?” he asked.
It seemed simple enough. I went to see the guy sitting on Rico’s stash out by Iverson Mall. I brought him a dub that Friday and he gave me a hundred dollars, five times what it was worth. That next Monday he asked me for an eighth. Every three days he’d page me after hours. The code after the number would say how much he wanted.
I hadn’t been there two months before I was buying ounces to cover Medscar’s orders. Then his boys got in on it. It got to the point where people in the building showed up at his office like it was mine. Since I didn’t use (I didn’t even drink), the money was all profit.
It really did seem like a foolproof situation. Then the fools got involved.
“So what we supposed to do once we get there?”
“We supposed to holler at this dude named Jeremiah,” I explained. “That’s all I know.”
“You think they gonna have any food up in this jawnt? I ain’t had shit since dem wings and fries I had for lunch.”
Jeremiah was a prophet. He believed in God so much that he went wherever the Lord told him to go. Sometimes it was places he didn’t want to be. Other times it was places he didn’t understand. I didn’t want to be in Osito on a Friday night.
I had a chocolate star named Deidre sending me pics with her legs open, panties off. She was free for the night. But business was business. This was a run we had to make.
Now, as you might have imagined, it didn’t take long for the other pages to see that I was getting special treatment from the boss. I took hour lunches that were supposed to be thirty minutes. I never buttoned the top button on my dress shirt, even though it was policy. And every once in a while, one of my girls would come through.
I made sure my broads knew the deal way before they came over to Capitol Hill. First and foremost, the invitations only went to the right ladies. I couldn’t have anybody up in the office who didn’t have the sense not to show up in sweatpants with her hair a mess.
Kina was probably my favorite girl. She didn’t have much of an ass on her but her hips were lovely, the perfect handles to hold onto while I hit it from the back. She grew up on the block but she had worked at a bank. So she knew how to dress. She came in there one day in a pin-striped skirt and blazer, heels, and a real nice blouse. The blazer was one layer too many in the summer heat, but when she came in the office she was lookin’ good, like she always
did. Medscar damn near started jerkin’ off the minute the girl sat her purse down. I gave him that special nod that explained what I was up to.
“I’m gonna need you to get these supplies for me,” he said, making sure to sound really official. Paper-clipped to the list was a key to the supply room. Every floor of the building had one. But only supervisors and the janitor had the key. It was almost as good as booking a room at a motel, without the room service.
He gave me a big wink as I motioned for Kina to follow me out the front and down the hall. I knew he’d studied every inch of the broad, imagining what he might do if her whole world was in his hands. I locked the door behind me once we were inside the room. She lifted her skirt up, flashing the fact that there was nothing between me and her wetness. And that’s where I stayed, while hell broke loose all around me.
I had a couple of the other pages making runs for me. I mean, I kept the operation small but I knew beforehand that Medscar wasn’t going to be able to keep his mouth shut for too long. White boys in places like that aren’t good at keeping secrets. The ones who can work over at Homeland Security, or at the CIA.
So one of these kids, Jacob, a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy from out in Reston, decided that he was gonna start selling to some of the pages in the other buildings. They had a roll call every morning that he thought was the perfect place to do business. He was in college, after all. Who doesn’t get high in college? Instead of selling his usual dimes and dubs, Jacob decided to get a bigger fish on the hook. Some page he’d never seen before pulls him to the side and tells him that he wants to buy a half. The kid, seeing dollars and stars (before the bars), says he can get it. He and Rory, my other guy, had about a half between them. They did the math, but not much else.
The only way to tell that Osito was even there was the lit-up sign at the city limits. The sign was made out of Christmas lights, even though it was just after Labor Day. Beyond it were just the silhouettes of buildings and small moving shadows, most likely raccoons and possums scampering around in the middle of the night. The Monrovia mobile community was about a mile in. The entrance was a concrete apron that led to a dirt road. Gary had to put the high beams on to cut through darkness. The thick dirt road had trailers on either side of it, sleeping souls who would barely remember the sound of our engine as soon as we’d rolled past them. Jeremiah’s place was past those, a supersized camper parked beyond the mobile park, right next to a forest.
The Speed Chronicles Page 6