The Money Game

by Michael A. Smith

  “That’s good,” Ace said, squinting out the corner of one eye at the tape job. “It’s better than a sling or one of those padded figure-eight supports. I’ve broken both my collarbones before. Second time for this side.”

  “How’d you do that, Ace?” Country asked.

  “Once in a street fight in my old neighborhood in Chicago. When I was in the Navy, I got drunk and fell outta a top bunk.” He laughed easily.

  “You’re gonna be so sore,” Kandie said, grimacing sympathetically.

  “I’ll survive. What about you and asshole Hank?”

  “I’m sorry about all this, Ace. I’m trying to get him to let me alone. He just won’t.”

  “Did you fuck him?”

  She looked confused and speechless.

  “Before you met me, of course.”

  “Yeah, it was before I met you. It was only two or three times. I didn’t like him. He’s dirty, and he stuck his dick up my ass even when I told him not to. He slapped me around, too.”

  “Yeah, I get it. I don’t think he’ll be back for more, unless he’s really stupid.” Ace drew her close to him with his good arm, bent and kissed her. He was immediately aroused and pressed himself against her.

  “Oh, my God,” Kandie said, stepping back and looking down.

  Ace steered her hand so she could feel the oncoming tumescence. “It’s the adrenaline. Let’s get in the back seat of the Sentra. Country will drive us to your place. You can give me head on the way, okay, Kandie?”

  “Oh, sure, Ace, if you want! I owe you for getting rid of Hank. I ain’t going to work this evening. I’ll call in sick, so I can take good care of you, Ace.”

  “I know you will, Kandie. You’re the best. You know, I got a plan to get some big money. When that happens, I’m gonna take care of you, Kandie, and your kids.”

  “I’d do anything to make that come true, Ace.”

  “I know you will, Kandie.”

  In the car, while Kandie labored at her task and Country drove, Ace did relax. He was even happy. All three of the characters he’d been cultivating had performed according to the script: they stuck up for him, defended him and did as they were told. A bit more grooming and they’d be ready for the main event.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  They parked in front of Kandie’s apartment building. Ace and Country waited beside the car while she hustled across the street to another building, where another mom had babysat Kandie's kids for the afternoon. The complex included a dozen or so two-story brick buildings, each containing eight apartments. A sign near the management office advertised one-to-three bedroom units, an exercise room, Jacuzzi, steam room, playground, two swimming pools, tennis courts and a sand volleyball court. During the summer months, the maintenance crew kept the grass green and trimmed as close as a Marine boot’s hair.

  Kandie told Ace that her three-bedroom apartment rented for over $900 a month. She chafed at having to take a handout from her aunt and uncle to afford this lifestyle, but she wanted her kids to be safe. All this information greatly pleased Ace, because he knew that it made Kandie hungry for money and financial freedom.

  “Richey’s girlfriend Carmen lives in this complex, right?” Ace asked, when Kandie returned.

  “Yeah, it’s the far building, but she works days and Marisa is in the sixth grade. Her grandmother usually picks her up at school.”

  Inside the apartment, Kandie put one-year-old Melody in a playpen while Country carried in six large sacks of groceries they had stopped and purchased after Kandie finished her blow job. Ace hadn’t made the request for sexual reasons, but rather to make certain Kandie would do whatever he asked, even when the request seemed odd and untimely.

  The groceries included steaks, baking potatoes and a twelve-pack of Budweiser. Kandie shooed the men out of the small kitchen as she and the oldest girl, six-year-old Cindy, began dinner preparations.

  In the living room, Ace sat on a sofa and laid a pack of Camels on the coffee table. Country turned on the television and was immensely pleased to find a channel showing re-runs of Gunsmoke.

  As if alerted by her radar, Kandie rushed into the living room with an ashtray and two coasters. “Anything else?” she asked. “Give me about ten minutes and I’ll make a vegetable tray with a dip. I’ve got some canned oysters. You like oysters, Ace?”

  “Yeah, they keep me virile.”

  Kandie laughed too loudly and returned to the kitchen.

  Four-year-old Lloyd stood silently in front of the coffee table. Ace returned the stare for several seconds before he reached out with his left hand and lightly slapped the little boy on the cheek.

  Lloyd’s eyes opened wide with excitement as he put his hand to his cheek. “You hit me!” he said gleefully, and charged Ace with his tiny arms whirling like a windmill. Ace put his hand on Lloyd’s forehead and pushed, causing the youngster to tumble backward onto the floor.

  Kandie came around the corner with the promised tray of snack food. “Lloyd, goddammit, leave Ace alone! Smack him if he bothers you, Ace.”

  Ace laughed. “He’s fine. Just fix dinner. I’ll watch him.” He could see Kandie heave a great sigh of relief.

  “You knocked me on my butt!” Lloyd said, emphasizing the word “butt,” which someone had obviously admonished him not to use.

  Country interrupted, “Not so loud, guys! I cain’t hear the television!”

  “C’mere,” Ace said to Lloyd. “Let me show you how to fight. You right-handed or left-handed?”

  “What?” Lloyd asked.

  Ace took a coin from his pocket and flipped it onto the floor. Lloyd picked it up with his left hand and stepped back, signaling he wasn’t about to relinquish the dime.

  “A southpaw, like me,” Ace said. “That’s good. C’mere.” He reached out and pulled Lloyd toward him while using his boot to shove the coffee table forward and create some space in front of the sofa. “Hold your arms like this. Hit with the right hand. No, like this. Hit once, hit twice. Stick, stick with the right, then uppercut with the left. Now kick. No, not that leg, this leg. Do it again. One, two, three, kick. That’s a boy! Now back up again.” Ace tapped Lloyd’s right fist. “Hit twice with this fist, then the other one. Then kick with this leg. No, wait, wait! There’s more. Hit one, two with this fist, once with the other; then kick with this leg, then swing with this fist. Now do it.”

  Lloyd tried to master the routine without success as Ace fended off his blows and voiced words of encouragement. Soon, Lloyd tired of the game and sat beside Ace on the sofa. Ace put his arm around the boy. “You learn that routine and you won’t have to take shit off anybody.”

  Lloyd’s eyes sparkled. “Momma, he said shit! Shit!”

  Kandie stepped into the living room, again taking in the scene. “Ace, what are you tellin’ him?”

  She was happy, not angry, he knew. Happy because a man, a real man, sat on the sofa treating her son like his son.

  “You sure he ain’t gettin’ on your nerves?” she asked again, anxiously.

  “No way,” Ace said, looking at Cindy peeking around her mother and then Melody cooing to herself in the playpen. He stood and walked into the kitchen and leaned against a counter while Kandie turned the steaks in two different skillets.

  “I understand. I was one of three small kids left alone in a ratty apartment with my mother when my father went on permanent vacation. We lived in Pittsburgh then, although I don’t remember it much. After my dad split, my mom moved to Chicago — Hyde Park — with this jerk who was going to law school. She was a beauty.” Like Kandie, but a lot smarter, for all the good it did her.

  It hit him and he pulled out his billfold, ignoring Lloyd’s ongoing prattle. Ace took out a tattered photo of himself, the twins, and his mother when she was young –– in her late twenties. She and Kandie looked enough alike to be sisters. Both were buxom women with long legs that seemed joined right to the waist. They had the same luxurious hair and slightly upturned nose. Only their facial features were noti
ceably different. His mother had had a higher forehead, bigger eyes and better teeth.

  “Is your mother still alive?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, Ace. What about your brothers and sisters?”

  “Twin sisters, remember. Lori and Loni. Lori’s a pediatrician, Loni’s a lawyer. They still live in the Chicago area.”

  “Oh, my God! They must be really smart, Ace. Do you keep in contact?”

  “Now and then,” he replied, lying. Actually, they wanted nothing to do with the black sheep of the family.

  “That’s good,” Kandie said, as the microwave dinged. “The potatoes are done. C’mon, everybody. Grab a seat. Cindy, help me get everything on the table. Lloyd, get Country!”

  After dinner, Lloyd easily persuaded Country to watch cartoons on television. Kandie put Melanie to bed. Cindy sat at a small desk in the corner of the living room, coloring in a book. Kandie refreshed Ace’s cup of coffee and sat opposite him at the kitchen table. She glowed with happiness.

  “It’s so nice for all of us to be here,” she said, with great emotion.

  “Even our big retarded kid,” Ace said, glancing at Country.

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s the shoulder?”

  “Hurts a little, but I’ll be fine. Get me a couple of aspirins.”

  Kandie jumped up. “I got cake and ice cream. Okay?”

  Country and Lloyd answered simultaneously in the affirmative.

  Ace took the aspirins but skipped dessert. While Kandie did the dishes, Ace went into the living room, sat on the sofa, leaned back and fell into a troubled half-sleep. The photograph he’d shown Kandie generated a mind movie of his nightmarish youth in Chicago, and some of the events that shaped his life and personality.

  His mother, June, initially seemed a good catch to the would-be lawyer attending the prestigious University of Chicago. June was beautiful, loyal and supportive. After she worked as a secretary to put him through two years of law school, the wannabe lawyer found someone else to use. A woman who already was a practicing attorney.

  June and her three kids were left alone in a Hyde Park brownstone broken up into four apartments. They were one of only a few white families in a low-income, African-American neighborhood.

  “Why don’t we move somewhere else?” he’d asked his mother at the time.

  “This is a wonderful old neighborhood with so much history and a lovely mix of people of all races,” she’d replied. “It can be revived and restored and we can be part of that process, Leslie. You can be happy here.”

  A true liberal, June believed this philosophy and at first invited everyone and anyone to their apartment. When he was six or seven, Ace remembered bouncing on a neighbor’s knee. As soon as his mother left to go to the grocery store, the nigger forced Ace to suck his dick, threatening to rape and kill his sisters if he told anyone. Word got around and it wasn’t the last time the neighborhood men took sexual advantage of him. After that, Ace lived in fear and terror, whether asleep or awake. He wondered why him and not his sisters, but decided that they had decided no one would believe him. Additionally, they got to exact revenge on a white male, a representative of their main historic oppressors.

  His mother had been terribly naïve in thinking that a white Jew kid named Leslie Semanski would be received with open arms on the streets of south Chicago.

  It got worse when June took a black man, Harold Smith, into her bed. Harold claimed to be a community activist and pretended to be a poet, although Ace could never understand his rhymes, which was why he later came to hate rap music. It wasn’t English, Ace told everyone, but just nigger-talk, pure and simple. They trashed the neighborhood where they lived, and they trashed the language, too.

  Ace became a child of the street and soon concluded that Harold Smith had simply sniffed out white pussy. It gave him status in the community to be sleeping with a white woman and he bragged about it to every black male above the age of ten.

  The black kids soon threw Harold’s descriptions in Ace’s face. “Ha’old say yo’ momma jest lay dere lak a big ol’ white fish when he be fuckin’ her wid his big nigger dick. Dat de trufe, Leslie?” They said his name like it was a girl’s name. “Ha’old say yo’ momma don’t swaller no cum, Leslie. Spits it in de sheets. Ha’old say he don’t know why, ’cause his cum be white. Leslie, how come yo’ white momma don’t swaller de white cum of a black man?”

  The taunts stung his soul. Initially, Ace panicked and didn’t know what to say or do. He ran, he hid, he cried. Finally mustering some courage, he began talking back. The mother of one of the black kids who regularly tortured him was a prostitute. Everybody knew that. So Ace said, spitefully, “Jesse, yo’ momma’s a ’ho. Ever’body fuck her.” Ace spoke like everyone else on the street at the time, trying to fit in.

  The screaming, irate black boys swarmed over him and pushed him into an alley, yelling all the time that a white boy couldn’t talk that way about a black boy’s momma. Of course, Ace had heard talk about someone getting the “shit beat out of him,” but he never knew what it truly meant until that day in the alley. They beat him until he lost control of his bowels, and then they made fun of him because he’d shit his pants.

  It was the first of many beatings. Some included sexual assaults of various types. Ace couldn’t go outside without hearing how Ha’old was fuckin’ his momma and how he was a scared little white boy who shit his pants, sucked dick and took it up the ass. Harold knew what was happening but all he did was grin and say, “Leslie, be a man. Don’t get your momma involved in this.”

  In middle school, some white kids took Ace aside and told him he didn’t have to take shit from niggers. They said niggers were the worst racists in the world wherever they were in a majority. There’s protection in numbers, they told him. If he’d join their gang, the Hyde Park Polar Bears, they’d protect him. And they did, so long as he stayed in the group. They taught him how to steal and how to defend himself. Ace developed an aptitude for the martial arts, especially as he grew older, taller and stronger.

  At age thirteen, Ace began riding a crosstown bus to Oak Lawn, where he enrolled in a martial arts class taught by Snake Simmons, a rabid racist. “Remember that the black man is a natural slave,” Snake had said. “He’s strong but he’s dumb. In slave days, a half dozen white masters would rule hundreds of black slaves. Slaves seldom tried to run away. The dog has fangs and claws and is faster than a man, yet we keep them as pets. Remember that control happens first in the mind. You have to get it across to niggers and dogs.” Ace was receptive to this message, given his unfathomable hatred of “them.”

  Ace became a dedicated student and soon rose to the top of his class, aided by a rapid spurt of growth. He also developed a skill in using knives, including throwing knives. He practiced incessantly in the alley behind the dojo. Well-balanced throwing knives had the same killing capacity as guns, but cost far less and generally weren’t illegal to carry. They made no noise.

  That was the point at which Ace actually earned his nickname from Snake Simmons, who got his moniker because he always struck first. The Ace of Spades was the highest card in the deck and trumped all others. It also was known as the death card.

  When he was fifteen, four black youths his age backed him into another alley, demanding money. They threatened to kick the shit out of him and make him suck their dicks.

  Drawing upon Snake’s philosophy and training, Ace had said, “Maybe you will, since there’s four of you, but that won’t be enough.” His confident, cool demeanor alone had caused them to hesitate, and he knew he was about to take control.

  One of the blacks had said, “Whatcha talkin’ ’bout, white boy?”

  “It won’t be enough for you to kick the shit outta me. ’Cause if that’s all you do, I’m gonna hunt and kill all of you, no matter how long it takes. Your families, too. I know where you live. I’ll wait until your mother or grandfather is alone on the streets. Then, I’ll gut them.” He pulled out a kn
ife. “So you’d better kill me now while you got the chance.”

  Escalation, that’s the key concept, Snake had told Ace. Escalate the consequences of the fight to an unacceptable level for your opponent, or opponents. With notable exceptions, most adversaries don’t want to escalate the conflict to a lethal level. The black boys backed down under his threat and his stare. They understood that Ace meant to carry out his threat, although they covered their retreat with braggadocio.

  Later, Ace isolated each one and beat him badly; badly enough to make each of them shit their pants. He didn’t stop there, though. He trained them to suck dick and take it up the ass. It earned Ace a reputation and he learned how much better it was to dish it out than give it up. He became addicted to the fear and terror he inspired.

  He even stalked his mother’s first boyfriend, Harold, after the ghetto poet became bored with using him and his mother. One night, Ace broke into Harold’s apartment, beat him silly, revived him, and then castrated him. He’d shoved Harold’s private parts down his throat until the black man choked to death on his own instruments of torture. Harold went into a garbage dumpster and disappeared from the earth. It had been incredibly satisfying to Ace, who also learned the virtue of patience in exacting revenge.

  Years later, in a psychobabble session with a prison counselor, Ace had tried to explain his tendency toward violence, as well as his racist attitudes. The psychologist seemed amazed and alarmed, which Ace found equally incomprehensible. How could he be anything else other than what he was, given his experiences from a young age? How could he deny the validity of the attitudes and actions that had allowed him to survive, and feel better about himself? No one had ever convinced Ace to think and act otherwise.

  Despite all her rhetoric about the beauty of integration, June Semanski eventually came to her senses and stayed hidden away in her apartment with her “things” and her unrealistic dreams. She drew welfare and Ace supplemented the family income by stealing and fencing the goods. His mother regularly castigated him for his criminal activity, although she always took the money, especially if he gave it to his sisters first.