by Matt Burgess
An hour later, Max walked out onto the sidewalk, the candy store’s awning glowing yellow and red behind him, his seventy-two-year-old face pink and exhilarated. Alfredo, who handled the money transactions, stood on one side of the street, and Winston, who handled the drugs, stood on the other. When he looked up from his magazine, Winston smiled and waved, and Max, with equal vigor, waved back. It was three o’clock in the morning.
“My man, Fredo!” Max said. Arms swinging, pelvis out, he strutted over to where Alfredo was standing. If not for the marshmallows, he might’ve whistled. “What’s poppin, homeboy? What’s crack-a-lackin?”
“If you’re here to buy prostate shrinkers,” Alfredo said, “I don’t have any.”
They stood shoulder to shoulder, both men staring into the street as if waiting for a bus. “You know why you didn’t like the poker idea?” Max said.
“Why didn’t I like the poker idea?”
“Because it was boring,” Max said. He grabbed hold of his crotch and gave it a squeeze. “It didn’t have any balls.”
“I’m thinking—I can’t be sure about this—but I’m thinking you got a new plan, yeah?”
“I know you’re real busy,” Max whispered, looking both ways down the deserted sidewalk. “But I’d like to show you something.”
He turned on his heel and strolled away toward the candy store, walking with the air of a man who fully expected to be followed. Winston, apparently, expected the same. He stuck a finger in his magazine, marking his place, and hollered out a request for a diet soda. Anyone else? Any other requests for the errand boy? Sure! Perched under an AC, a pigeon lifted its groggy wing and asked for a five a.m. wake-up call. The streetlamps wanted new bulbs. The tires of parked cars, more air. And if Alfredo wasn’t too busy, would he mind emptying out the wastebaskets on the corner? It never ends. When he closed his eyes, he saw spots, little novas of light. In the last hour and a half, he had made exactly one drug sale, a dime bag sold to a teenager named AIDS. Alfredo wanted to go home, pour himself into bed with Isabel, wrestle with the twin icebergs she called her feet. But instead, like a good boy, he followed Max Marshmallow into the candy store.
On the counter a newspaper sat primed for Alfredo’s inspection.
“Check this out,” Max said. He pointed to an AP-credited photo of a sweaty-faced black guy, his hands wrapped tight around a microphone. “You know who this is?” Max asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. “DMX. That’s what it says right here. Dark Man X. You listen to his music?”
“Not really,” Alfredo said. “He’s from Yonkers. I don’t listen to rappers from Yonkers.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Max said. “But it says right here”—he looked down at his finger, as if to make sure it was still under the photo and hadn’t wandered over to the lingerie ad on the other side of the page—“it says right here that there’s some controversy over his lyrics. I don’t give a shit about any of that, but it gave me an idea. Every great idea—I ever tell you this?—every great idea you’re ever going to get is going to hit you while you’re reading the paper. I read four papers a day. The Post, Newsday, the Daily News, and the New York Times. The Times is the best. If I spoke Spanish, I’d read your El Diario.”
“Max,” Alfredo said.
“So I’m looking at this DMX guy, and I get to thinking, right? I have all that space under the store. I want to get some gambling going, there’s big money in gambling, but you tell me we need something your friends can’t find on the Internet. So Alfredo, let me ask you—what do you know about dogfighting?”
“Dogfighting?”
“Dogfighting,” Max said.
“I don’t know anything about dogfighting,” Alfredo said. “I don’t know anyone who’s ever even been to a dogfight.”
“Yeah, but think about it for a second. Imagine the effect it would have on Jose.”
“Tariq,” Alfredo corrected.
“Okay, imagine the effect it would have on Tariq.”
Alfredo imagined it. He imagined Tariq walking down into the basement on Saturday night, the night he comes home, the dogs nipping at air, Alfredo standing between them, arms raised, a wad of cash in his fist. Huh. A thing like that might actually impress Tariq, a man who respects only power and violence. He’d see that Alfredo ain’t the greasy-faced seventeen-year-old he left behind. Little brother was all grown up. A neighborhood player. A dogfighting entrepreneur who will not be easily intimidated.
“I don’t know,” Alfredo said. “I think maybe it’s not a bad idea.”
A small current of panic jolted Max’s face. “Really?”
“You’re serious about this, right?” Alfredo said. “I don’t want to make moves on this unless you’re for real.”
Max bit into a marshmallow, and for a brief moment Alfredo felt sorry for this old man, who spent his days and nights dreaming up credit card schemes and calling card schemes and bail bond schemes and sweetheart schemes and underground gambling schemes without ever intending to follow through on any of them. Just another shit-talker. A cash-register jockey trying to protect himself from the sharp teeth of boredom.
“Are you serious?” Max asked.
“I’m not sure,” Alfredo said. “I think so.”
“Then I think so too,” Max said. “Why not, right?” He rolled back his shoulders. “Let’s do it.”
Things moved quickly after that.
Alfredo went out onto the sidewalk and phoned the Alphabet Brothers, the only guys he knew who owned a pit bull. He asked them if they might be interested in some dogfighting, preferably on this upcoming Saturday night. Violence and mayhem? Of course they were interested. One slight hang-up: they didn’t own a pit bull, they owned a German shepherd. Was that gonna be a problem? Not at all! It was even better, matter of fact. A pit bull brawling a German shepherd would be a more unexpected matchup and therefore, to Alfredo’s thinking, a more authentic dogfighting experience.
“What’s the dog’s name?” he asked, wanting to know for publicity purposes. When they told him, he said, “You’re kidding.”
The next day he went to the shit-talkers. It was like the Mets reaching out to the Yankees, like Piazza canoodling with Clemens. Alfredo visited the neighborhood gossips outside their bodegas and barbershops, their pizzerias and pool halls, and he whispered in their ears, asking that they please not tell anyone, thereby ensuring they would. Within hours, the word was on the wire.
The Alphabet Brothers’ Diana vs. The Batista Brothers’ TBD
First Dogfight of the Year
June 15, 2002
Now all Alfredo needed to do was find himself a dog. On Tuesday, he took the R train to the Animal Care and Control center in Rego Park, only to find out that they’re not open on Tuesdays—not that it mattered since according to the sign in the window they don’t even offer any animals up for adoption. They just take them in. Well great. On to Plan B. If he couldn’t adopt a pit bull, he’d steal one. On Wednesday, Alfredo (taking shallow breaths) and Winston (smoking blunts) walked through what seemed like every last alleyway in the neighborhood, including the Alleyway, looking in people’s backyards for a chained-up, left-alone pit bull. They found a thousand dandelions, nine deflated soccer balls, dozens of white plastic patio chairs with pockets of week-old rainwater in the seats, a little Filipino girl fiddling with matches (they told her to stop), a tireless car propped up on cement blocks, abandoned baby diapers, busted TVs, cigarette butts, countless planes above their heads roaring into LaGuardia Airport, a pair of sneakers tied together and hung from a telephone pole (the sight of which made Alfredo’s blister-clad feet squirm in their Timberlands), nice old ladies, mean old ladies, basketball hoops, barbecue grills, and hundreds of American flags, draped over balconies and stuck in the ground, big flags and little flags, all of which had been purchased in the last nine months. What Alfredo and Winston did not find, however, was a pit bull. On Thursday, exhausted, they loitered outside 7-Eleven and waited for a Slurpee-craving dog
walker to leave his pit tied to a parking meter. It didn’t happen. By late evening, with only forty-eight hours to go, Winston and Alfredo started thinking beyond pit bulls: they would have settled for another German shepherd, a rottweiler, an obese rat, a rabid squirrel, a piranha in a fish-bowl. Any animal, really, with a cantankerous disposition. On Friday, after coming back from Elmhurst Hospital with Isabel, Alfredo called Winston and told him all the prenatal tests came back strong. Healthy baby, healthy mama. Disaster averted for one more day. Alfredo had a good feeling. This is the night, he told Winston. This is the night, this is the night. We gonna get ourselves a dog.
4
The Heist, Part One
When Alfredo walks into Gianni’s Pizzeria, he finds Winston exactly where he expects to find Winston: by the front door, hunched over the Street Fighter II machine. Surrounded by Asian onlookers, he hammers the keypad and throttles the joystick. When his on-screen avatar leaps, Winston goes up on his tiptoes. When the character moves left, Winston leans with her; when she moves right, Winston bangs into his opponent, a Chinese teenager with liberally gelled hair. Like most experienced gamers, the Chinese kid plays with his back straight and his fingers loose, an even-tempered maestro conducting an orchestra. Alfredo can see, however, that the kid’s shoulders have started to slump.
In a video game there are a certain number of frames per second, layered sequentially so as to give the impression of continuous movement. Just like a movie. What Winston can do is see between those frames.
Whatever the hell that means. When he tries to explain it, Alfredo usually zones out and starts thinking about something else: the Mets, Isabel, a folder in the cabinet. As far as Alfredo can tell, Winston plays defensively. He waits for his opponent to make an aggressive move, reacts before the next frame pops up, and then beats the virtual shit out of him. For instance:
In one fluid motion, the Chinese kid taps his buttons and crooks his joystick, and his on-screen character, the ninja Ryu, shoots a pixilated fireball from his pixilated fingertips. But Winston sees between the frames. His character, the ninety-eight-pound Chun-Li, has already leapt over Ryu. She crouches behind him, her chest heaving. While the fireball moves into empty space, Chun-Li takes out Ryu’s legs with a low roundhouse kick. As he falls, she catches him with an uppercut; while he’s in the air, she finishes him off with a series of punches and kicks: low, medium, and high. An eight-hit combo. The fireball spirals off the screen, exits stage left and into the wings. Game over.
The boys in the crowd turn to look at one another. Almost all of them, Alfredo imagines, made the trip out here from Flushing, riding the 7 train from Main Street to Eighty-second for the opportunity to challenge Winston in a game that’s almost as old as they are. Those who have never seen Winston play before allow their eyes to widen.
It is a cutthroat world, the world of high-level competitive gaming. The participants are almost universally the socially abused—the stutterers, the BO challenged, the acne pocked, the alopecia afflicted, the kids who collected Magic cards and lurked in the back of the gym during dodgeball. Whupping somebody’s ass in Street Fighter II is their chance to stand tall, to get in an opponent’s face and talk some shit. But that’s not Winston’s style. He gives the Chinese kid a slight bow, then turns to the crowd and quietly asks, “Who’s next?”
No one jumps forward. Reluctant to embarrass themselves, the onlookers drift toward Gianni’s counter for some slices and garlic knots; others, the ones with particularly delicate egos, leave the pizzeria entirely and head for Flushing, running away from Winston as if he were a fire-breathing Godzilla. That’s my best friend, Alfredo wants to tell them. How do you like that?
Outside the pizzeria, Alfredo launches into his usual post-Gianni’s spiel: how Winston’s getting exploited like a circus bear, how he’s bringing in like 90 percent of Gianni’s business, how that fat dago probably wakes up on Saturday mornings to push a wheelbarrow full of quarters to the bank, how Alfredo knows Winston gets his free slices and his unlimited Mountain Dews but maybe he should be getting paid like the business partner he is—which is to say, maybe Winston should be getting paid cash money.
“Get your hands in the wheelbarrow, if you know what I mean.”
Winston looks straight ahead, stares out of an empty face. His eyes are dilated, his pupils eclipsed. “What’s good with that X?” he says. Behind him, two white kids circle each other, slap boxing. Winston pays them no mind. “You wanna go halfsies on a pill?” he asks.
“That shit’s for my brother,” Alfredo says.
“No, definitely. I’m really just talking about half a pill though.”
The older of the two white kids—he must be around twelve—catches the younger upside the head with an open-hand stinger. Alfredo wants to tell them to stop, but he hasn’t had much luck talking to kids today, and besides, he ain’t in the business of parenting other people’s children.
Winston says, “You think one pill’s gonna make a difference to your brother?”
Because in addition to being a video game prodigy, Winston is also a skilled and insistent needler, and because Alfredo owes him money, and because Winston might still be shaken up over the Vladimir incident, and because it’s supposedly his last night of doing drugs (and even if Alfredo wants to roll his eyes every time he hears that bullshit, friendship requires that he act like he believes him), and because, really, what’s one more pill, because fifty is a nice round number, because Tariq will never know, because a crashing Winston is a foot-dragging Winston, because even if it goes against everything Alfredo believes in, sometimes it’s just easier to give in—Alfredo decides to hand over a pill. He brings Winston around the corner where no one can see them. And where it smells like some seriously stank-ass shit. Damn! The fruit and vegetable grocers must have illegally dumped their overripe produce down the gutter, and now the smell of rot wafts up from beneath the sidewalk. Alfredo would pinch his nostrils together but he needs both hands to pull the top off the E-beeper. Like any magic trick performed twice, it’s lost much of its pizzazz. He grabs a pill out of the beeper, but before he drops it into Winston’s cupped palms, he first takes a peek. He brings the X close to his face for inspection, and his forehead runs cold. He feels an urge—it both frightens and exhilarates—to bash in Winston’s skull.
What Alfredo sees in the middle of the pill, etched into its chalky surface, is this:
A logo. A brand. A tattoo shared by all the other pills in the beeper. Meaning Winston’s intelligence report was faulty. The pills do hit the streets with logos, and, even worse, it’s a logo Alfredo recognizes, an infinity sign, which emblazons not only all of Vladimir’s E, but Baka’s as well. Meaning either Boris gets in his lab coat, brews up some pills, and stamps them with a copyright-infringing logo, or there is no Boris the Chemist. If one thing is inaccurate in Winston’s report, why can’t all of it be inaccurate? Maybe Vladimir buys his pills from Baka, or from the pusherman above Baka. And maybe—the thought tightens like a knot—that superthug won’t be too happy about his boy getting kicked in the throat.
Of the five boroughs, Queens has the most efficiently run drug industry. From Jamaica to Astoria, the crack, coke, and H game goes through a small number of corporations, each one tightly structured. Records are kept. Codes are scribbled into ledgers. There is a hierarchy with easily replaceable five-oh lookouts kicking it up to corner boys kicking it up to enforcers and treasurers and runners, who are all kicking it up to local gang leaders who themselves are kicking it up to a dozen boss hogs. With their drug money, these top-of-the-triangle gangsters open up travel agencies and antique shops and any other business with easily fudged books, and they smoke Cubans and dream of hip-hop stardom, and then, after three, four, or maybe even five years, the federal indictments come hammering down and these gangsters go straight to jail. The twenty-five-year-olds on the rung below move up and become the new boss hogs. And then in three, four, or maybe even five years …
Alfredo ain’t inte
rested. He sticks to weed, buying a little at a time off Baka and marketing it creatively. Selling it, for instance, not in miniature Ziploc baggies but in clear plastic vials, the kind hospitals use. The rubber stopper at the top of the plastic tube gives the impression the weed was stuffed in an airtight container; the curved shape magnifies the amount of product inside, allowing Alfredo to skim a bit off the top; and the vials’ glassy smoothness suggests to consumers that these tubes have recently been plucked from the unfortunate anuses of Colombian drug mules. Freshness, therefore, is guaranteed. If he were keeping this Ecstasy, as opposed to giving it to his brother tomorrow, Alfredo would market it in a couples package, selling two pills at a time—one for your pleasure, one for hers—with a discounted Viagra thrown in to counteract E’s dick-softening effects.
Not that Alfredo’s all about the marketing. He also looks for income outside the corporate pyramid. Buying scrips off the Internet. Running dogfights in Max’s basement. It was always Alfredo’s brother who wanted to climb up the triangle, to push the real shit—yak, crack, and China—at the real weight, but Alfredo is happy to stay a free agent. Less money equals less jail time and fewer bullets in the ass. But Alfredo’s survival as a free agent requires that he stay quiet, that he not shatter the wrong guy’s jaw.
Disgusted, Alfredo throws the infinity-branded pill to the ground. While he rattles the E-beeper and explains the situation, Winston gets down on his hands and knees. He slips his fingers into the cracks between sidewalk panels. He takes out his cell, hoping to make use of its green glow, but the phone is off or the battery’s dead—Winston having probably neglected to charge it. Alfredo’s harangue is smoke, and Winston crawls underneath it. He brings his face close to the sidewalk, close to the subterranean smells of rotten fruits and rotten vegetables, until he finally finds his pill. Only a couple of inches away this whole time. And within striking distance of Alfredo’s boot.