by Matt Burgess
“This kid. He’s going to have much drugs on him?”
“You know what today is? Today is the last day of school for all the private-school kids. Get out a week early so they can beat the traffic out to the Poconos. Remember when we was in high school? Last day before summer vacation? Kids lining up for drugs. Dealers coming correct.”
“And Vl—”
“And our man Vladimir is gonna have his pockets full of pills. Make his money for the long summer ahead. Know what I mean?”
Alfredo stands up and feels dizzy. “Okay,” he says. He punches his timecard, clocks in for the day. “Let’s go rob him.”
Back in the day, when Alfredo and Winston were little shits and new friends, they chanced upon the Alleyway. Too narrow for a car, but wide enough to accommodate a couple of teenaged boys, the Alleyway succeeded an earlier discovery—marijuana—and provided an ideal venue for the smoking of those first, poorly rolled blunts. No police, no old ladies, no moochers asking for a real quick hit. Nobody but the two of them. The Alleyway is T-shaped, and Alfredo and Winston got blazed at the bottom of that T, behind a gate door closed to the street. On either side of them they had stores—a Laundromat and a nail salon—both of which produce their own olfactory, marijuana-masking chemicals. At the top of the T are two- and three-family homes, far enough away that crinkle-nosed neighbors rarely called the cops; close enough that when they did, Winston and Alfredo ran right at the houses, choosing among multiple escapes, this one’s driveway or that one’s backyard, and slipping safely to the street with the ease of THC coursing through capillaries. This went on for years. Winston and Alfredo would duck into the Alleyway and come out fifteen minutes later, giggling and red-eyed, a cloud of smoke blooming behind them.
When Tariq went to prison, all that stopped. Because when Tariq went to prison, Winston and Alfredo went to work, using the Alleyway now as their base of operations. What made it so well suited to recreational purposes—low exposure, multiple exits—made it equally well suited for professional ones. But no more smoking, Alfredo said. Can’t shit where we eat. Can’t toke where we sling. It was one of many rules, and today he’s allowing it to be broken.
“Fifteen years old?” Winston says. Pinched between his fingers he holds what was supposed to be a courage-fortifying blunt. “I mean that’s just a little kid. You know?”
Alfredo sits on the ground, his back against the wall, his hand on his chest. He counts his heartbeats. The big dark pillow hasn’t materialized yet to smother his face, but he knows that it’s coming.
“And it’s the middle of the day,” Winston says. “And it’s like a really nice day, too. Hey, Jesus. Do you need like a paper bag to breathe into?”
Alfredo shakes his head.
“Well, let me know,” Winston says. A glass bottle lies on the ground, and Winston kicks it, sends it clattering, helicoptering down toward the other end of the Alleyway. “The kid’s gonna be outside a school,” he says. “That’s what worries me. They’ve got cops in schools nowadays. Right? Aren’t there like cops in the hallways?”
“I don’t know about cops,” Alfredo says. “There might be some nuns.” Winston extends the blunt toward Alfredo, and Alfredo waves it away. He’s already taken two, three hits, hoping to dilute the panic filling his chest. It hasn’t worked. He leans forward, away from the wall, and puts his head between his knees.
“Why don’t we just go over to Gianni’s,” Winston says. “Cop a few slices. Chill out a bit.” As he inhales another lungful of weed, the cherry at the tip of his blunt glows red. He passes it back toward Alfredo, but again Alfredo waves it away. “You serious?” Winston says. Confused, he looks down at his hand, as if to make sure this is still a blunt he’s offering, that it hasn’t turned into something else entirely, a cup of tea maybe, or a big brass tuba. “You don’t want any more of this?”
“It’s all yours,” Alfredo says. Keeping Winston smoking keeps Winston quiet. As long as he’s got that blunt bopping between his lips, he can’t prattle on about everything he’s worried about, and he can’t, in turn, sharpen Alfredo’s own secret fears. God knows Alfredo’s not above breaking the law, but he hates to steal. He wishes he were more like the recently deceased John Gotti, a gangster who saw the pleasures in thieving, who’d hijack a truck full of fur coats just for the thrill of getting away with it. But that’s not Alfredo. To talk about it, sure. To sit on a park bench and scheme. But to be in an alleyway about to go do the thing—that, for Alfredo, is a chest-seizing nightmare. He closes his eyes and carefully, carefully breathes in through his mouth. It was more than two years ago, while sitting next to his older brother in the backseat of a Camaro at three thirty in the morning, that the hairs on Alfredo’s arms stood up, and he discovered he was a hyperventilator.
Earlier that night, Virgil’s Catering Hall in East Elmhurst had hosted the sweet sixteen birthday party of a Miss Rashida Katabi. There had been a DJ spinning records, shawarma in warm buffet trays, an elaborate cake-cutting ceremony. The privilege of using Virgil’s for this special occasion had cost Rashida’s father, a walleyed Lebanese man, $2,800, which sum he paid in cash. How did Alfredo know all this? Because his brother told him. And his brother knew because the guys in the front seat of the Camaro—Gio and Conrad—told him, and they knew because they worked at Virgil’s and had closed down the catering hall only a couple hours previous. They were driving back now, still wearing their polyester uniforms, with friends in the backseat, with intentions: they were going to break in and rob the place. The plan had been formulated weeks in advance over late-night bottles of Corona. Keys had been copied, combinations scribbled down. They’d just been waiting for someone like Mr. Katabi to walk into Virgil’s with an envelope stuffed full of cash.
Alfredo had begged his way into the car and now he was asking to get out. Bent over on the sidewalk, his skinny legs quivering like a dog’s, Alfredo could take deep breaths but he couldn’t breathe any of it out. December’s cold air poured down his lungs. His fingertips felt numb. A hive’s worth of bees seemed to buzz in his ears. In his haste to get out of the car he left the back door open, and the Camaro’s internal system beeped and dinged. The ceiling light glowed above his conspirators’ heads. Alfredo watched them watch him. Outside, exposed in the street, choking on air, certain he was going to die, Alfredo felt that it was the tears falling out of his eyes, more than anything else, that disqualified him as a criminal badass. With shouted apologies from the front seat, the car drove away, left him behind. They drove toward Virgil’s Catering Hall, and—although they didn’t know this at the time—they also drove toward their eventual arrests, toward court dates and public defenders and years-long imprisonments.
That first panic attack, and the ones he’s had since, the palpitations he feels now, might have something to do with the sacred prohibition against stealing. Alfredo wonders if he’s crazy to credit his breathing difficulties to a fear of supernatural retribution. And yet it is a commandment, number seven, Thou shalt not steal, right after don’t kill nobody or commit adultery. And while he doesn’t go to Mass anymore on Sunday mornings, or melt the paper-tasting wafer onto his tongue—it has been five years since his last confession—he still walks the streets afraid. He peeks up at the clouds, fearful of somehow giving offense. He has rules: he won’t take the Lord’s name in vain, he says a quick grace before dinner, he can’t pass a church without making the sign of the cross. Sometimes before he falls asleep, he’ll send God a silent prayer in which he offers a general thanks for the life he’s been allowed to create for himself and asks only that God do nothing to snatch the pleasures of that life away (Isabel mainly, and now Christian Louis too). Alfredo respectfully prays for noninterference. No lightning bolts, okay? Please don’t burn down New York. You leave me alone, I’ll leave You alone.
Alfredo stands up off the ground, but that only seems to make it worse. His arms are goose-pimpled, his tongue coated with anxiety. All this trouble, and he won’t even get to keep the pills f
or himself. He intends to give them to Tariq, who returns home tomorrow after an absence of two and a half years. A drug package being the standard reentry-day gift. Alfredo hoping to impress upon his brother that he is a weight-slinging gangster with resources to spare. Well, that changes everything, his lungs say. If you’re not going to keep the pills for yourself … Yeah, right. Stealing is stealing. He can ask for Vladimir’s E, he can put in a request—what is religious scholarship if not the prying open of loopholes?—but if Vladimir says no, nah, nyet, go fuck yourself, then Alfredo, the weight-slinging gangster, knows he won’t be able to just reach out and take it, hit this stranger, this ninth grader, right in the mouth.
Winston, who’s never thrown a punch outside the world of two-dimensional video games, blows a gray stream of sticky-smelling smoke into the sky. The smoke rises, drifts toward the two- and three-family homes, toward a clothesline with pinned-up jeans and T-shirts and orphan socks. It curlicues into an open pant leg. Alfredo expects the smoke, now hidden, to ascend even farther up the jeans and come out the waist, maybe in the shape of a man’s chest, and this thought is quickly replaced by another: two, three hits of that blunt and I’m already blazed, waiting on some gray-skinned savior to come out of the sky.
“What’s the matter?” Winston says. “What you looking at?”
“Maybe for this Vladimir thing,” Alfredo says, and, as always, talking relaxes him: better to be pushing words out of his mouth than drawing air in. “I’m saying if it’ll make you feel better. Stop your crying. Maybe we can call the Alphabet Brothers.”
“Why? So they can rob Vladimir while we stand in the background and cheer them on?”
“So you can stand in the back. So I can stop hearing you bitch.”
“Sure,” Winston says. Having smoked the blunt down to roach size, he stubs it out on the brick wall of the Alleyway. There was still some pot left, the best part actually, but Winston doesn’t do roaches. He doesn’t like burning his valuable fingers. “Whatever. Do your thing. Call up the Alphabet Brothers.”
The Alphabet Brothers—Alex, Bam-Bam, and Curtis Hughes—are a trio of tough black guys from Corona, Queens: Jackson Heights’ neighboring neighborhood. The brothers don’t look too tough, though. Each of them is over six feet tall, but not one of them weighs more than 145 pounds. (Their mother, Mrs. Hughes, calls them a bunch of skinny belinks.) They’ve got the long lean bodies of blacktop basketball players, and if you saw them out on the court you’d think they were pure shooters, the guys who spot up behind the arc and put up J’s, who are squeamish about running through screens, who don’t like to bang in the post for rebounds. The Alphabet Brothers, however, don’t do any of that. Sports aren’t really their thing. Their thing is punching people in the face.
It starts in the hands. Due to some genetic quirk, the Alphabet Brothers have arthritic-looking fists, with bony knuckles as big and as round as walnut shells. If Vladimir refuses to hand over his goods, the brothers will act. Each one punches from the shoulder and hits like a mule.
But, unfortunately for Alfredo, the Alphabet Brothers don’t work for free. The negative aspect to their involvement is the negative of any merger, corporate or piratical: splitting the spoils. But like the Comcast/AT&T merger recently announced in the papers—Alfredo’s a proud reader of the New York Post—without the collaboration, there ain’t no profits. The two parties need each other. Alfredo provides the information; the lump-fisted brothers, the violence. The brothers, God bless ’em, do the actual stealing. They also cover Alfredo’s ass retribution-wise. If the young and inexperienced Vladimir cops a postrobbery, pride-stung hard-on, if he gets all horny for revenge, then he’ll have to come after two separate crews, and—seeing as how the poor kid’s unaffiliated—he’ll have to come after crew one (Alfredo and Winston) and crew two (Alex, Bam-Bam, and Curtis) all on his own. “And to make moves like that,” Winston suggested, “guy would have to be drunk on some mad vodka.”
But as is Alfredo’s wont, he worries still. The concern isn’t that the Alphabet Brothers will, after robbing Vladimir, turn around and rob Winston and Alfredo, too. They’ve got too much history together, too much mutual business: they’ve got a dogfight going off tomorrow night in Max Marshmallow’s basement. But what if the Alphabet Brothers try to press their man advantage? Intimidation artists, they might lean over Alfredo with their cumulative height advantage of twenty-one inches (Alfredo’s five foot six and a half) and loudly insist the spoils be split according to man, and not crew, thereby giving the brothers the majority of Vladimir’s E and cash. What if they gang up and … oh, never mind. Alex and Bam-Bam’s cell phones go directly to voice mail. Only Curtis answers Alfredo’s call.
A good thing, too. Pulling the string on one Alphabet Brother is easier than marionetting all three, even if that one is Curtis Hughes, seventeen years old, the youngest of the trio and the most belligerent, which is a little like ranking last in a leper colony beauty contest.
“You’re not serious,” Curtis says when he arrives. “That is your drug dealer? The little white boy across the street? With his hands in his fucking pockets?” Curtis hocks up a loogie and spits it onto the sidewalk, just far enough away from Alfredo’s Timberland boot. “Tell me that the real boss hog is round the corner. Slinging X by the fistful. Tell me, Alfredo, that you’re fucking with me.”
Alfredo and Winston had Curtis meet them here, on the sidewalk across from the Catholic school, and he’s shown up scowling. He climbs off his bike, a twenty-four-inch Schwinn built for children. Face doused, shirt stuck to his chest, Curtis, despite the cool weather, is sweating like Patrick Ewing at the foul line. Little bikes are his preferred mode of transportation—they advertise to the world that he’s an original gangster, not above taking a bicycle away from a child—but it isn’t easy for a grown man to ride a boy’s bike, it’s especially hard on the knees, and Curtis agreed to pedal the twenty blocks over here because he thought he was robbing a drug dealer. Not some wannabe, his thumb up his ass.
“Because I don’t need to come all the way out here to rob white people. I can do that at home.”
“Don’t worry,” Winston says. He pops a piece of General Tso’s chicken into his mouth. On the way over here, Winston, his eyes red and his stomach grumbling, stopped in the Wok ’n’ Roll on Seventy-third for some Chinese takeout. He eats the chicken straight from the container, pork fried rice sticking to his chin. “Trust me,” he says.
Curtis stares, his face contorted as if somebody just smeared a dollop of fecal matter under his nose. “Now I know I’m a fucking idiot,” he says. “I know there’s nothing I can do about being so obviously stupid. But over in Corona, the drug dealers? They look like me. And the kids that look like that? Over there, across the street? Those are the wiggers playing dress-up for Halloween. Punk bitches just trying to look hard. And nobody gets fooled, starts thinking these kids are for real, worth anybody’s time, except, you know, the jerk-offs. But hey. That’s Corona.”
“We wanna know if he’s a drug dealer,” Alfredo says. “Let’s go ask him.”
They make their way across the street. Monsignor McClancy High School is a graffitiless, freshly painted three-story building, with large windows and grass lawns and big, shadow-casting trees. This could’ve been Alfredo’s school. Without his father’s accident, without the subsequent loss of Jose Sr.’s store and the soaring costs of his medical bills, Alfredo might have ended up here, carrying books and notebooks through McClancy’s heavy doors. He went to grammar school at the nearby Our Lady of Fatima and the all-boys McClancy would have been the next logical parochial step. Oh well. Alfredo went from Fatima to I.S. 145 to Newtown High, where he lasted a little under two years before dropping out. Had things broke differently—had lightning bolts not been tossed—Alfredo might’ve found himself in McClancy’s smaller classrooms, learning from ear-yanking nuns who don’t take any shit. Who knows? He might have gotten that cap and gown after all. Might’ve been in seminary school by now, on his way
to wafer-dropping, thurible-swinging priesthood.
As a preemptive measure, Alfredo takes off his glasses and stashes them in his pocket, next to his baggie of Internet-purchased prescription pills. The edges of trees, windows, people—it all goes fuzzy. He squints. What else can he do? These glasses are his only pair and he doesn’t need Vladimir landing a lucky punch and cracking a lens. Although a battle royal seems increasingly unlikely. Alfredo wants to believe Winston’s story, but Curtis’s doubts match his own. There’s no question the kid they’re walking toward is Vladimir—his is the only Slavic face in a sea of Hispanics—but is this Vladimir a drug dealer holding down weight? He’s certainly trying to look like a drug dealer. Over his McClancy-mandated shirt and tie, he wears a purple and gold retro Lakers jersey. On his head he’s got on a straight-billed black baseball cap, turned around backward. His pants are baggy and slung low. But the problem is that the kid’s trying too hard. It’s as if Moscow’s version of MTV just recently started playing Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre videos, and Vladimir—anticipating his own American debut—took notes. He’s even got an old-school pager clipped to the waist of his wool pants. And it’s all wrong anyway. Not only does the hip-hop outfit clash with Vladimir’s pale skin and above-the-lip peach fuzz, but it’s a pusherman ensemble from a different time and place: the early nineties, the West Coast. There is, however, one cause for hope. A group of kids float around Vladimir. A promising sign—split the nucleus of a teenaged atom and you’ll often find drugs—but in the five minutes Alfredo and Winston were across the street, waiting for Curtis, they didn’t see one hand-to-hand. Not a single money-for-pills exchange. Either the kids have already copped, or they’re waiting to cop, or—Alfredo hates to even think it—this little Russian’s got nothing to sell.
“Hey, Vladimir,” Alfredo shouts as he gets closer. “What’s good with X? Let’s talk about some E.”