THUGLIT Issue Nine

by Jen Conley

  Nothing is sacred.

  The cold wind bites at my neck. I bunch up my shoulders and shiver, head back to my apartment. Climb the stairs, drop my keys on the kitchen table, and strip off my work shirt. I pull a bottle of vodka from the top of the refrigerator. The light on the answering machine is blinking red. I press it and sit.

  "Mister Joselewicz. This is Mister Chapin. We spoke last week. I tried to call you at the store today but nobody answered and I couldn't leave a message and…well, I was hoping to stop by tomorrow so we can talk about the future of the building. I'll come by around opening." A pause. "Be well, and I look forward to meeting with you."

  I sit at the kitchen table and stare at the machine. My hands ache. I dig the fingertips of my left hand into the soft web of skin between the fingers on my right hand. I consider the vodka but don't open it. There's no real solution inside the bottle.

  My head dips forward, yanked by the gravity of sleep. My thoughts drift to Paulie, what he said about busting heads. Like it could be that easy.

  That was a different time. Different time, different values.

  When Paulie returned he didn't return alone. The bell above the door dinged and I looked up from the remains of the display case. Only the metal trim was left—I had cleared out all the glass but hadn't gotten around to replacing it.

  I didn't need to be introduced to know it was Joe the Bear. Big guy with a face like sandstone, shoulders like watermelons. His arms were tangled with thick black hair, the same that curled around his ears. He did look a little like a bear.

  He stood at the counter for a moment, sizing me up, before saying, "I heard you make a good bagel. I would like to try one, please."

  I nodded, pulled out a plain one, asked, "Schmear?"

  The Bear nodded. "Of course."

  I placed my palm on the top, cutting through the bagel sideways, crumbs flying across the cutting board. The Bear said, "I knew your father. Do you know that?"

  "He never mentioned you."

  "We weren't close. Your father never played ball. I gave him a pass because of that damn union. Those Yids were some tough bastards. But they don't count for much no more, and I'm tired of looking at this store, thinking about all the wasted income."

  I put the bagel on the counter, cream cheese curling out of the sides. The Bear picked it up, regarded it like a piece of art, and took a bite. He nodded, chewed, swallowed. "You make them like your dad made them. That's good. If you want to keep making them, it's going to be a hundred a week. That's less than anyone else in this neighborhood, and only because you make good bagels. I think that's more than generous, don't you?"

  The way he said it, like it was an act of charity. Rage blossomed in my chest like a red-petaled flower. I told him, "A hundred a week is the difference between me eating and not eating. No deal. I'll give you a dozen free bagels a week. Best I can do."

  The Bear took another bite, chewed it carefully, like there might be something sharp hidden inside. When he finished, he turned his head without taking his eyes off me. "Paulie, Rick. Go in the back, look for the most expensive thing you can find. Smash it up."

  The two men smiled at each other, clenched their fists, made their way around to the side of the counter. Invading the space that only me, my mother, my father, and the health inspector had been allowed into.

  No one else, ever.

  I took a step back. The Bear said, "Normally I'd have them break one of your hands, but then you can't make the bagels. I'm not a bad guy, is what I want you to know."

  Rick was first, not concerned with me, looking toward the back, his eyes searching for something to destroy. Sitting on the counter was a bagel board. Without thinking, I picked it up and swung it with both hands, caught him across the jaw, sent him sprawling to the floor, taking down the coffee maker with him. It shattered across the white tile floor.

  Paulie stopped. He and the Bear looked at Rick, groaning, holding his jaw. I held the board up, pointed in Paulie's face, but I was looking at the Bear. "My father escaped the Geheime Staatspolizei to come to this country. He fought to make a better life for us. I will not let you take what he built."

  The Bear's lip curled into the facsimile of a smile. He said, "Okay kid, if that's how it's going to be." He could have been furious or he could have been amused and I wouldn't have known the difference. He didn't take his eyes off me but he turned slightly, to speak to his men. "Paulie. Rick. Out."

  Rick used the counter to pull himself to his feet. There was blood smeared across his chin and his jaw looked distended. Paulie got underneath him and led him through the door. The Bear nodded. "If that's the way it's going to be."

  Then he left too, a dark cloud in his wake.

  For the next five days, every time I left the shop, I expected to catch something heavy across the back of my skull. Every time the bell over the door dinged my heart paused and waited. There wasn't much to do. The cops were in the Bear's pocket. I could have gotten a gun, but that was a temporary solution.

  When Rick and Paulie came back on the fifth day, I was sure that was it. Rick's jaw was still red and swollen, and there was a thin piece of shiny metal wrapped around the back of his head to hold it in place.

  Rick looked at Paulie, who lingered by the beverage cooler.

  Paulie said, "The Bear told you to do it, so do it."

  Rick walked to the counter with a look in his eyes could have melted glass. My hand went to the bagel board sitting next to the register. It wasn't a fair fight but that didn't mean I would go down easy. He mumbled something through his wired jaw.

  I asked, "What?"

  He sighed. Spoke louder, each word carefully enunciated through clamped teeth. "The bagels, please."

  The first batch should have been in the oven already, but I got in late after stopping at the grocery store to pick up plastic containers of poppy seeds, sesame seeds, roasted minced garlic.

  I pour equal parts from the three containers in a sheet pan, follow it with some sea salt. I pluck the bagels from their ice bath, let them drip dry, and place them facedown in the mix, then facedown on the bagel boards. I ignore the pain reverberating through my hands.

  As I place them in the oven I feel like I'm doing something wrong, looking over my shoulder, expecting my father to scold me. The kitchen fills with the thick smell of toasted seeds.

  The bell dings as I put the first batch onto the cooling rack. I head to the front, hoping to see Paulie. Instead I find Chapin, the kid from the bank, his hair slicked and parted, his fingernails buffed and shined. Wearing a suit with razor-sharp creases. He smiles a plastic doll smile but doesn't offer me his hand. This sets a bad tone.

  "Mister Joselewicz," he says.

  I watch his hands clasped in front of him, tell him, "You know, no one ever gets that right. My last name. You must have been practicing."

  The smile on Chapin's face dims a little. "So, have you thought about what we discussed?"

  I place my hands on the counter and my finger brushes against the bagel board. The one I stopped using to make bagels after it got blood on it. I keep it next to the register, as a reminder or a memento or because I can't bear to part with something my father made, I don't know.

  The door chimes again. Paulie lumbers in, says, "Mikey Bagels, what have you got for me today?"

  "Check the back."

  Paulie looks Chapin up and down, then heads into the kitchen. Chapin opens his mouth to speak but is drowned out as Paulie hoots and hollers. He comes out of the kitchen holding up one of the bagels. "You made me my everything!"

  I shrug. "You're a good friend, Paulie. I just wanted to say thanks before this son of a bitch shuts me down."

  Paulie says, "This the prick from the bank?"

  Chapin says, "Sir, I…"

  Paulie puts a stubby finger in his face. "No, shut up. You're a prick. This guy has been in business since before you were a cell in your dad's balls. And you think you can come in here and take him out. Bullshit. This guy, his f
amily, they've dealt with tougher than little shits like you."

  "But…"

  "But nothing. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Destroying neighborhoods. Destroying history. I got nothing but respect for this man." Paulie puts his arm around me, pulls me close. As his fingers clasp my shoulder I feel a rush of warmth. The pain in my hands disappears. Paulie's voice rises, face reddens. "You know how me and this man met?"

  Exasperated, like he's talking to a child, Chapin asks, "How?"

  "Like this." Paulie takes the bagel board and swings it, smacking Chapin across the jaw.

  Chapin collapses into a pile on the ground, trying to yell, the sound coming out garbled and thick. He grips his face and blood seeps out between his fingers. He stumbles toward the door and bangs into it before sliding out.

  I know I shouldn't, but I laugh. Then Paulie laughs. And then the two of us are bent over, holding each other up, laughing into each others' shoulders.

  When we're calm enough that we can breathe, I tell him, "You know this can't end well for us, right?"

  "Ah, I still know a few of the bulls in this neighborhood. Anyway, we're old men now. What can they do that someone else hasn't already tried?" Paulie takes a bite of his bagel. Through a wad of chewed dough he says, "This is a damn good bagel. Look at you, mister traditional, changing things up."

  "Maybe I'll get a new sign, too. What about that?"

  Paulie swallows. "That ain't such a bad idea. The thing needs a little touching up."

  "What do you think about Michał's Bagels?"

  "You know it should be Mikey's Bagels, right?" He laughs. "It's fine, it's your business. But I thought you were ready to close up yesterday?"

  I pat Paulie on his shoulder, step into the kitchen, pull one of the everything bagels off the rack. I join Paulie back out front, take a bite, and the bagel isn't bad.

  Maybe even a little nice to try something new.

  Feeling Good

  by Max Sheridan

  I feel good. I feel better than you. Statistically. It's a fact and yet it's irrelevant, meaningless. But it's true. You, you're probably not feeling so hot. You're lying in bed maybe, you're wondering why you just don't get it. I'm not making you feel any better and this doesn't make me feel any worse. Remember that.

  South America is dying slowly of carcinomas. In India they squat effortlessly, but they're poor, they can't read, they shit in the street like you or I drop a used Kleenex in the municipal garbage. Then you've got your Africans. I'll speak my mind. I'm thinking that every single one of those shouting, arm-pumping, poverty-stricken, robbed, eviscerated, bombed, cheated, narcotized Mozambicans, Nigerians, Sierra Leonese I see in Newsweek every Thursday would jump on the first boat that floated by. And then Africa would be empty, really, and the Africans could start over again.

  Truth is, they'd be floating for a while.

  They'd float until they sank.

  None of this is my market or my concern, which is why I'm statistically happier than you, why I'm feeling better day by day and you more often than not feel like subcontinental road shit. I'll tell you why specifically. I graduated from a notable southern institution of higher learning without the foggiest idea of how a toaster works. That makes me feel good. I get pussy. It never works out in the end, but I get it and my team leader Green—my co-pledge at Delta Kappa Epsilon—doesn't.

  Here is a story that I think just about sums up my existence and Green is in it. Green and I were both pledging DKE. Green had made it all the way to hell week, but he is a Jew and a Yankee. I didn't care one way or the other if Green made it in. Green could hurl a football and he was smarter than most of us pledges, but you never can tell with a southern gentleman, can you? I'd probably have celebrated if Green had made it in. I'd probably have dropped a ten-dollar bill on the floor at the celebration party and watched a stripper lick it up with her twat.

  We had to dig a pit, all of us. We were to put a goat in that pit and then service that goat. The digging took a weekend. The pit was six feet deep and six across when we were finished. One evening when Green was drunk and I wasn't, I pushed him in from behind and he shattered his collarbone—turned it like a steam propeller on rock. So even now, in addition to his intolerance to binge drinking and the feeble way he curls his fists when deep in so-called thought, Green walks like a rabbi contemplating something of interest hovering above and just beyond his left shoulder.

  I feel good on Friday nights and I feel fine on Saturday mornings when the blond in my bed typically doesn't. When she opens her eyes and begins in existential terror to calculate the logistics of her departure. When it's like a bladder full of piss, that compulsion to leave, but you'd sooner have your hamstrings ripped out of your legs than give up the warmth of your bed. That's how they all feel and I don't and I don't mind. I've actually grown to sympathize.

  I worked with Green for five years before I made my move. Understand that I'm not stupid. I'm actually what you'd called gifted. I intuitively recognized that the basest desires, the most inane motives of my colleagues, were no baser or inane than my own. I hated New York City from the first time I set eyes on her, face-to-face from the Secaucus ferry, but I pretended to like her enough that I can't even tell the difference these days. I eat Jew food and look forward to drinking Belgian beers and well-mixed martinis and to half a dozen other things anathema to a man of my moral and emotional constitution. For five years I was convinced Johnnie Walker Blue meant something because that's what they all told me.

  Fleshing out my motives took a while. I realized that I wanted money, that I'd have to keep a closet of suits that could be visually price-tagged, that I'd sooner have a thumbprint of my face on the five o'clock news as another Catholic pedophile with a lollipop fetish than show up at the office with the wrong cologne or display anything but the very best in toiletries on my toiletry shelf. I'd need the right prints on the wall, I knew it better than they did, some kind of a view and a doorman I'd pretend was just as good as me.

  But what I really wanted was to shape consciousness. I wanted that power, which is what Jenny Naaktloper Literary Agency represents, to make people read what they thought they wanted to read. They took me on as an intern a month out of college and gave me an expense account. I crossed the Mason Dixon Line at 35,000 feet. I immediately gravitated towards what was hot at the time. I started out in children's multicultural vampire fiction.

  It took me all of a day to see what worked there. Every team of vampire hunters had to have a Puerto Rican, a Chinese and a Pole. For some reason that was a winning cultural amalgam. All the African-Americans had white-white teeth and never complained about anything. The Italians couldn't use the words tomato paste. Maybe only I noticed that. I moved a series called Angel Soto's Door-to-Door Vampire Hunters, which had a spic vampire hunter, Angel Soto. The bloodsuckers were a mixed bag. That series was written by a Dane, the CEO of a rubber company.

  I got sick of multicultural vampires, so I moved into gay and lesbian juvie fiction. I dated the best authoress in my stable who'd made a living writing anti-NATO rants for Rush Limbaugh before she joined the rainbow parade in spirit if not in act. I churned out a few gay-lez juvie series that were typically mentioned on the backs of books if only to put you in the mood to read other better-written series. Again, I was the only one that seemed to notice this. Jenny Naaktloper sure as hell didn't. She put me in an office of my own with a Kaiser Idell desk lamp.

  To celebrate, I reamed Jenny on her own doormat at 4 a.m. one morning with her long legs vertical and her chin in her chest. She told me later that she'd had a camera put in her penthouse apartment the week before, right above the elevator door, and that she watched the episode on video every night for a month. I didn't have to look over my shoulder after that.

  Green didn't get pussy. But he cared about his job in a very precise way. He cared what got written and why. He believed things were happening for a reason and he wanted to be part of that process. So he was honest in that respect. Gree
n didn't pay for it either.

  He said he didn't pay for it but I'd been inside Green's apartment on the Upper East Side, near the water, perhaps a hundred times, and I didn't believe that Green wasn't spending most of what he didn't devote to the general upkeep of that apartment and his toiletries on Asian pussy. Green had a thing for Asian ass I've never been able to fathom. I'd rather fuck a painting of a dead rabbit hanging by its leg. I see them all the time at the Met where I shop for ass on Museum Thursdays and I'm tempted every time to do those paintings an injustice.

  Green never made it into DKE and that killed him at the time but he recovered. He always did, which is why I think I pushed him. We didn't see much of one another sophomore year but I knew where to find him; in the law library where it was quieter and open latest, reading the Nibelungenlied or Don Quixote or the Aeneid. He would read with a sharpened pencil. He would scribble in the margins in an elegant hand and reread his own notes. I imagine he thought he was alone. I drank and blacked out once a week because that's what I needed to do, but I never got paunchy or red-eyed like a fighting dog. My hair never lost its luster or its density.

  I ended up working at the big university library for beer money. I rolled a bullet-grey dolly through Government Documents, shelving. You could lose yourself in there. Physically.

  I used to think one day I might run into some man back there in the stacks who'd been trying to find his way out for years. Maybe he'd gone in with a backpack and a Snickers bar trying to prove something in comparative religion or Middle East policy, and he'd done it, but then he couldn't find his way back out. So I would find him and he'd just collapse on my dolly like it was a gurney and I'd roll him out and they'd all stare at his limp, waxy wrists and his castaway's beard without pity. How the hell did he get back there? they'd be thinking. Did he steal something? Did he light a bonfire with some of our books?