Over the detestable remains of that ruined, ruinous dinner, I whispered, “Shep, I want to pick.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Eddie,” Shep said, “what with all you bring in just doing your escape act, not to mention what the other rats take after the marks go their separate ways.”
“Come on, boss, I’m getting too big for the crib. Think about what I could do with sleight of hand applied to pockets.” Shep paused and for a moment considered me, the idea, and the overall aura. With his all-seeing fingers he reached up and rubbed his temples. I had raised the specter of a great take. Now, to finish the job, I spooked him with regurgitation of his own pet disclaimer: “What have you got to lose?”
I lined up with the rest of the pack for the nightly trim. Long hair can conceal the magician’s concern, half-occlude a beguiling expression, or provide figurative mist for a smoke-andmirrors moment, but the pickpocket must keep close-cropped to guard against a grab. Shep’s post-supper grooming clinic was harrowing for the prospect of losing a lobe, but compulsory if you planned to pick the next day. Although we rats trembled, Shep never so much as nicked. Scissoring sibilant air, he said of his talent, “Shear feeling.”
Next, I gave myself a manicure. For good reason has the magician’s trademark toilet long mandated a set of elegant, toothy nails: They provide ten teeny, discrete cubbies for secluding minuscule tools at one’s literal fingertips. An average prestidigitator’s arsenal might include monkey grease, conjurer’s wax, coiled hairpins, skeleton keys, balled elastics, dash of saltpeter, topical anaesthetic, chloroform resin, collapsible hypodermic, sneezing powder, sandpaper, smoke dust, morphine, mandrake, and half a dozen other accessories and essences to produce an entire battery of theatrical effects. Pronounced talons are essential to the art of legerdemain, supplying endless potential for deception of a gullible volunteer and credulous audience. Properly polished, nails provide arms-length reflectors for discerning the suit of a pigeon’s playing card or giving off the eerie impression of having eyes in the back of one’s head. Sufficiently sharpened, gelatin ends can cut through the toughest twine. For illusionists as well as certain larcenists (in a pinch, a seasoned second-story man might employ points like lock picks), long claws are de rigeur.
On the other hand, you have the picker of pockets. A tip that is hooked, split, or even just microscopically sharded can perilously hang him up. He can be the slickest slipper in the universe, with the fuzz shaved off the back of his knuckles and joints buffed to a bowling-ball shine, but one stray thread getting caught on an imperfect nail will send pickpocket howling ouch! and his mark hollering for help. Who has not heard of the attempt in which a messy-mitted misfit gets snagged on a fretfully frayed hem, tying up himself and his victim in a degrading tango on a busy corner until the law finally arrives to rescue them, applying cuffs before clippers to the self-captured man’s hands? With this legendary loser in mind, I pruned my performer’s pincers.
On the eve of my audition, dourly sporting a buzz and brandishing a fair pair of filed fingers, I, newly and ruefully dubbed Eddie Feet, went out to get myself some running shoes. I already knew the ones I wanted. The pair I had set my sights on were not in a store window, and they certainly were not for sale. They had gone up a few weeks earlier in the Beacon Hill slums. There had been an old pair there as long as I could remember, but these huge shoes, in keen lime green, were brand new. Visibly, the sneaks were no smaller than my size—they certainly don’t come any bigger—and best of all they were free for the taking … if you didn’t mind climbing a utility pole.
I sat watching the tenement from a stoop across Beacon Street. All the rats had heard of Mano, a seasoned hacker who controlled most of the Beast’s cybertropic trade. He programmed and peddled some of the more sought-after prescriptions, a digital pharmacopoeia administered transdermally for an electro-synaptic high. This stuff was so hot it had to be kept off the Net. Users picked up a RAM chip from the dealer in person, concealed it in a nether crevice of clothing, and scurried away to jack in on a private term. Fixes you could shut off or on with a keystroke, cybertropics weren’t physically addictive, but the powers that be, pissed they couldn’t get their hands on a cut of the profits, outlawed them as subversive, potentially revolutionary.
Mano’s customers came and went through the unnumbered entrance of the inconspicuous walk-up. The sign dangling high above the curb said all they needed to know—if they were in the know. Fat laces slung over electrical wires, the shoes were a flag for cybertropic services supplied covertly inside a dilapidated brownstone. It was uncertain what else Mano took care of in his HQ. The breadth of his clandestine projects was beyond the scope of rats going about our day-to-day business. Worse than a mere outlaw, Mano was a wild card, someone who, for all his involvement in activities both licit and il-, you could be sure was not on anybody’s side but his own. Besides, Shep prohibited cybertropics, and getting caught consorting with Mano meant immediate ejection from the Nec.
A low-rider rolled up, dropped hydraulics, and parked. The driver got out and entered the apartment. Having determined after careful observation that each deal lasted a minimum of eight minutes, I took my chance in the lull. Scaling the base of the pole, I climbed cautiously over metal cleats, keeping clear of wood well-splintered by repairmen’s boots. My supple old Chuck Taylors hung tough, giving their all in their last starring role. For maximum extension I had to go all the way to the top and poke my head between the lines in the direction of the shoes’ lofty perch. “Air,” read the polymer uppers, emblazoned with vinyl swooshes like the wings of a god. The namesake of the style, Michael, must have been the equivalent of Mercury in his day, for these high-tops could not have been designed for a mere mortal. They were gumsoled gun ships, canvas Cadillacs.
Aloft, sighting down the wires, I felt a little breeze at my back that I momentarily, queasily took for a good sign. I leaned my Adam’s apple against the leeward line and reached rigidly with my right hand. Fully stretched, I still could not grasp the coveted sneaks. Maybe a millimeter remained to obtain the tantalizing prize, lightly rocking in the wind. I did not try my left arm, which after years of street theater I already knew to be a smidgen shorter. Had I been carrying some implement—a pen, a key, or even a paper clip—I would have been able to make contact. But I had nothing. How had I let myself come so grossly unprepared? There wasn’t anything down on the deserted street that could aid me and besides, according to my biological hourglass, at least three hundred seconds had gone by during the current transaction. Even if I scrambled down and broke off a car antenna, I wouldn’t make it back up in time, and with lockout at the Nec less than thirty minutes away it would be impossible for me to return before my momentous morning foray. Wryly, I considered that the inch I had clipped from my nails no more than an hour earlier would have generously compensated for the infinitesimal distance separating me from success. In an avalanche of bleak, unspecific musings, my entire short life seemed to be an adumbration of such inauspicious inversions and confounded effects.
Stuck atop a stick above Beacon Street, I hit upon an alternative. Since the day I had first detected the suspended treasure, the lower shoe had plunged precipitously, practically upsetting the pendular equilibrium of the pair. I could reach up and shake the wire in question, possibly jostling the sneakers free. I knew, by a convoluted strain of superstition that had come to dominate my impulse in the clutch over the years, that it was do or die, and so I resolved to give it a try. First, against all hope, in an absent old compulsive gesture, I double-checked my pockets. Well, whataya know?—lucky One Cent. At least, at one time I had dubbed it lucky. Now I had the option of putting the trinket to the test with a superstitious little flip, giving the chip of worthless ore the opportunity to serve as my deliverance. I had perhaps seconds left. “What’ll it be, Abe? Make a monkey of myself with the coconut-tree routine or take a desperation shot at the buzzer?” “I’d say go with plan B, E,” came a sober voice, internally—so I
muttered ignorantly an idiot incantation, E Pluribus Unum, which on my lips in that essential instant felt altogether holy, and gave the coin a toss to find out whether One Cent held any fortune after all— “considering you’ve already almost toasted yourself.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” Like a lightening bolt it hit me. A wary, whiplash-victim’s glance at the junction box over my shoulder confirmed my suspicion: Holy shit! I just about created a circuit! The sparking imprecations of Shep’s attention-jerking science lectures came back to me with a jolt. Upon ascending to the topmost rung, I had narrowly inserted my head and left my neck bristling between two lines which, if touched together, would, in an instant, have my goose cooked. Without thinking to lift my chin from the first, I had just about reached up to grasp the extension of wire-the-second.
One Cent sunk—swish!—right into the nigh insole. With its gram of ballast, it sent the low shoe swinging. The sneaker swayed for a moment, then all of a sudden slid the scales of justice just a whisper in my favor. Laces slithered, shoes spun, and the whole shebang twirled off the wires and toppled end over end through the air to street—clop! clop!
I could not move. For close to ten minutes I had been, as I remained at that very mortal moment, an excellent candidate for conduit of awesome amperes. Now how the hell would I get out, considering the copious—and especially conductive— saline pouring down my brow? Already having served an oblivious sentence in this high-voltage stockade, I dared not peek down at the death-dealing cables. Just the crackling of the air told me one wire practically tickled my chin while the other almost touched my scruff. If I touched both at once, I would end up one roasted bird. I could almost hear Shep committing my ashes to the bay: “Hadn’t that shmuck learned anything in Introductory Street Physics?”
The instant before my glasses fogged up, I, practically paralyzed, caught a glimpse of them coming out of the undercover drugstore: first the driver, then, behind him, hulking in the doorway like a demented reject from the Patriots’ defensive line, Mano, nonchalantly palming a basketball. His hands were huge. He probably could have crushed someone’s skull singlehandedly, literally. I heard Mano dribble the ball on the way to the car. The two got in, slammed doors. Engine roared, hydraulics hissed, and subwoofers kicked in, supplying a throbbing drum for the hunt. When they started to drive away, I thought I might have escaped the predators’ detection, if not the lattice of electrocution. Squealing brakes—headlights had caught the upset shoes, planted in a pothole. There was a sickening measure of eight booming bass beats as from the front seat eyes plotted the function from street to sky: hightops … utility pole … power line … dodo in his nest. The beat got loud when the window rolled down. The mad scientist who synthesized the most sought-after cybertropics in all the Northeast couldn’t be bothered to get out of the car, much less climb the pole to collar a petty thief, but he did crane his head out to shout, “What the fuck are you doing?”
In vertical traction, all I could do was stall, and my only medium was my mouth. “Shopping for sneaks,” I said.
“Those Jordans might just fit.” Mano held the palmed ball out the window. “My homey and I were going to play some one-on-one, but why don’t we make it a game of ghost? Catch!” He hurled.
It was a good thing I couldn’t see through misted glasses: I might have flinched. The ball ricocheted off the coupling under my nose, causing the brittle solder to snap. In reckless reflex, I reached, caught the rubber casing of the power line, and, Tarzan-style, took a swing on a thousand-watt vine. I understood why the king of the jungle made that exotic call: He wasn’t showing off, he was shitting his pants. Trailing the charged fray like an electric eel, I sailed by the car window and set fire to the tuft of hair beside Mano’s right ear. He ducked inside and boxed the flames while I spun 180 and landed on my feet on the low-rider hood, leaving two dinosaur prints in the steel. Looking through the windshield at each other, we shared a collective shudder: Mano in the passenger seat with one singed sideburn, his hoops partner holding the wheel, and I on top of the engine. Still holding the insulated cable, I sprung down to pavement and jammed the end of the wire into the hood ornament. Mano reached for the door handle and it sparked in his hand. “Motherfucker!”
I have always hated it when people say that. As obscenity, it seems senseless, and yet the intent is always so brutal. The car abruptly jerked backwards, crumpling the back bumper against the base of the pole, but the juice stayed stuck in the jack. Mano dove across the driver’s lap and punched the emergency brake. “Dumbass! you’re going to get us short-circuited!” He growled out the window, “Come on, kid, unplug that shit!”
I wiped the condensation from my lenses. I was so overcome from being alive and in possession that, shuddering on rubber legs before the hard-won award, I flouted the urgency to leave the scene, kicked off the old Chuck Taylors, and tried on my prize right there. Nerves fritzed, my body spasmed as if I had just gone through shock treatment. Nevertheless, a magician’s nimble fingers took only a second to unknot the bind tying high-tops together. The shoes had barely been out of the box, but after getting left out in the rain a few times were not so stiff, as if by nature broken in, and they fit my feet like second skin. Pressing into the insole, I could feel at my right heel where that auspicious little coin had come to rest. Not only had One Cent sunk the sought-after shoes, but, at the essential juncture, its charmed discovery had saved my tail. Had it not been for little Lincoln, I would certainly have acted, in my defeatist distraction, on the unfortunate impulse to grab the reaper’s bait. That talisman was much luckier than I had surmised.
I cast a cursory glance at my old Chuck Taylors bereft in the gutter, offering a curt and final salute. Galvanized inside the car, Mano tried to cajole me into revoking the voltage. “Come on, bro,” the big bruiser cooed. “I won’t hurt you. Help us out and I’ll tell you a secret.” I pushed the glasses up the bridge of my nose, turned, and strolled off in my new shoes, bouncing Mano’s ball across the Common, taking time to smell the mandrakes.
Shep and I stalked through the streets outside South Station. After a wired, sleepless night, I had risen with a sense of fatalistic dread. I did not feel hungry, but my stomach turned and churned with a raucous racket that I was sure would give me away. Shep, smiling his insufferable grin, said, “Damn! boy! Didn’t you get enough for breakfast?” knowing full well I had skipped the morning meal as well as the demoralizing dinner the night before. My palms profusely perspired, which Shep somehow sensed. “Axle grease,” he called it. “Good for manual transmission. Go on, sweat it up, Eddie. Enough of that lube and not even the lint will stick. Just don’t drop the chop.” My heart? A frenetic lab rat raced Sisyphian laps on a treadmill smack in the middle of my ribcage. The scientist-sadists had him on more speed than anybody, man or mouse, had ever been given, so the entire mechanism—hub, spokes, and squeaky, lopsided wheel—was shimmying on skids through the cavity in my chest, lurching ever so slightly, unbearably left. Long had I lingered as the pretty boy of the pack, performing decoy deceits while the real artistry took place here at people’s waists. Today, my vocation was slated to change. I was crossing over, and in a few felonious moments I would find out whether I had what it took to be a real road rat.
“Sounds like you got new shoes,” Shep said in an effort to lighten the mood. This was about as tender as he could get. “Let me know when you think we’ve found the right corner,” he told me, compounding my sense of inadequacy and dread. How was I supposed to know? Why couldn’t he just take me to the place where all rats got started? Wasn’t there a training ground for this kind of thing? Of course, the reason he left it up to me was because Shep, a good coach, was interested not only in finding out if my fingers were supple enough, but also whether or not fortune would smile on me. It’s a process of autonomous triage that sets the pickers apart from the picked. Like dropping a line and waiting to see what bites, the object was to have me give it a try and, if unlucky my first time, admit that I was too small a fish to
fry and let me get thrown back—in this case, to the tank. A few years in juvenile would season me for a more criminally-minded try next time. Except for one of his dozens of lucrative hustles, what did Shep have to lose but another greedy mouth to feed?
I was bent over like a sick man, bug eyes beholding portentous patterns in the poured concrete (bars, ball, chain, pair of powerful handcuffs, bed of bare springs). Grotesquely out of place on my unworthy feet: the sensational shoes. “How about we work here?” I blurted, without even taking a decent look around. We had stopped at a nondescript corner near South Station: corporate buildings, broad sidewalks, and busy intersections.
“Nah.” Shep said. “This corner’s already being worked.”
His characteristic clairvoyance served to resuscitate my inquisitiveness. Briefly distracted from my malaise, I said, “How can you tell?”
“How can I tell?” Shep said, tapping the toe of my sneaker with his red-tipped cane. “How can’t you? There are a million indicators: a certain shift in atmospheric pressure, for one, the humidity level letting you know there’s a rat in the area. Not to mention the speed of cheese shuffling over sidewalk and the wind of the picker whiffing…”
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