by Matt Burgess
“Yo, Alfredo. Where’s this dog of yours at?”
“Yo, Alfredo. Where’s your brother at?”
“Yo, Alfredo. What the fuck is up with them corny-ass shoes?”
Alex and Bam-Bam Hughes haven’t punched Alfredo in the face yet, which he thinks is a pretty good indication that they either don’t hold him responsible for Curtis’s death or that Baka didn’t tell them about the Vladimir mugging. Because when it comes to punching people in the face, Alex and Bam-Bam are not the type to bide their time. They huddle in the center of the basement, near the makeshift ring, arguing over which one of them should drag Diana upstairs. They worry that once the Dutches get sparked, the pooch might get blazed. It’s not like anyone would slip a stogie between her drool-slicked jaws, but she could catch a contact high, could start giggling and craving Cheetos, rendered useless for her upcoming dogfight. A German shepherd with steeple-shaped ears, she needs to get taken out of stupefaction’s way, and yet neither brother wants to miss his chance to get stupefied. They got brain cells to kill, shit to forget.
How do brothers fairly decide who has to go and who gets to stay? They start with the primary stratagem of intrafraternal diplomacy: rock-paper-scissors. When that doesn’t work—each brother keeps throwing down rock—they turn to the primary creed of potheads around the world: Ah, fuck it. They’ll both stay down here and get blazed. It’ll be fine. They figure if there’s one dog alive who’s built up an immunity to THC, it’s gotta be Diana.
Neck extended, snout in the air, she paces inside her ring like an uppity movie star, reluctant to sign autographs. The men down here watch her indifferently. Almost everyone plans to bet on Alfredo’s dog because pit bulls carry more gangster cachet than German shepherds, because Diana seems too snooty for dogfighting, because, primarily, Alfredo’s dog hasn’t shown up yet and imaginations grow fat on the unseen. The guys down here have endowed the pit bull with four rows of fangs, a set of titanium nuts, a two-pack-a-day smoking habit, a rap sheet going back to juvie, a tail shaped like a swastika. Diana’s tail? You kidding? It’s fuzzy and droops off her ass. The bottom of it drags across the floor as she sniffs the cardboard boxes demarcating the ring’s boundaries. Stacked waist high, the boxes are full of Max Marshmallow’s heavier inventory—bottles of laundry detergent, cans of Goya beans—and Diana presses her nose to the cardboard, as if she can smell the frijoles negros inside.
Dry at last, the Dutch Masters get sparked. Paulie Guns pulls out a Zippo, for which he gets roundly mocked. You out of your mind, Paulie? The butane contaminates the flavor. Even the apprentices know that much. Three Dutches make their way through three separate ciphers. They pull beautifully. With a Dutch pinched between his fingers, Rick Sprinkle talks and talks and talks about some calling card scam until his boy Rhino yells at him to stop sleeping on that shit and pass it along. Chastened, Sprinkle takes two extra hits and the tip of his Dutch glows red like a pimple. He passes it on to Soft-Core Jonas, who intentionally coughs out the smoke, hoping to dilate his lungs.
“Don’t be blowing that shit at the dog,” Bam-Bam warns.
“Where else is it supposed to go?” Jonas says, and it is a fair enough point. Diana’s ring is in the middle of a basement without windows or ventilation, and the haze—with no place to go but everywhere—spreads its fuzzy tentacles outward, drops down into all corners, wraps itself around the leg of a rickety card table, fills lungs, fills nostrils, climbs the stairs into the candy store, and creeps up the rungs of a wooden ladder that leads to a pair of metal grate doors. These doors, the basement’s only exit besides the stairs into the store, open up onto the sidewalk for deliveries; scattered around the borough, they are the kind of doors Isabel always makes Alfredo step around when they’re walking together down the street.
A Dutch comes his way, but he passes it on, unsampled. Alfredo doesn’t need weed softening his synapses, not with all the shit he has to juggle: the mounting impatience in this basement, Max Marshmallow’s regret, the Impala full of cops parked across the street and waiting for Alfredo’s go-ahead. But he can’t give that go-ahead till the guest of honor arrives. And if Tariq doesn’t come? If he never shows up? Then Alfredo will have gone to all this trouble, ass-fucked all his friends, for nothing. More important, if Tariq doesn’t show up—these questions come straight from the Department of Worry in bold, fourteen-point font—then where the hell is he? And what’s he doing? And where’s Isabel in all this? It has been over an hour since Alfredo last heard from his brother. Alfredo called and called, and the phone rang and rang, until something happened, and all Alfredo could hear was the dead dial tone of his parents’ line, a nasal sound, an auditory cousin to the G-flat hum of the Emergency Broadcast System, a sound of panic, of disaster, of terrorist attacks and nightmares come true.
The Dutch returns to Alfredo, smaller than before, and this time he does not pass it along. Not because he wants a toke—it’s the last thing he needs—but because he’s distracted. His eyes are closed, his ears cocked. He looks at the ceiling, and slowly, one by one, so does everyone else. Footsteps creak on the floorboards above their heads.
“About fucking time,” Jossie says. “I’m not trying to wait around here all night.”
The footsteps keep creaking. The men follow the sound blindly, their faces upturned toward the ceiling and its pink clouds of foam insulation. Stoned, their mouths hang open, as if they were watching an airplane descend toward LaGuardia.
Alfredo fights his way to the front of the crowd, but just as he feared, just as the pessimists expected, this isn’t Tariq plodding down the stairs, but a poorly goateed white kid named AIDS.
When the groan goes up, AIDS puts his hands in the air and says, “What’d I do?” He wasn’t even going to come tonight, thinking his friends don’t really like him (his nickname is AIDS, for chrissakes), but his mother doesn’t want him spending his Saturday nights alone, playing Xbox, eating junk food, and so she hectored him out of the house. Where are your friends, honey? What are they up to tonight? When he got to the bodega, the lights were off and the sign in the window turned to CLOSED. He felt relieved to be able to go home, back to his room, back to his Halo, but just as he was about to turn around, an old man thrust his puffy-cheeked face out the door and asked what’s what. AIDS froze. He assumed there was a secret password that (of course) no one had told him about. When he stammered something about a dogfight, the old man told him to go around to the back of the store. Which was just so cool! AIDS felt like a Prohibition gangster as he hopped over the fence into a dead-grass backyard. The old man swung open the back door and led him through a little railroad apartment and into the bodega and now here he is. Walking into a basement full of disappointment. “What’d I do?” he says. He doesn’t know. He never does.
“Yo, Alfredo,” says a voice from the haze. “When the fuck’s this dog of yours gonna get here?”
Alfredo goes upstairs and buys beer at two times the regular cost. Olde E, Bud Light, Natty Ice, Modelo Especial.
“Thanks,” says a different voice from the haze. “But when the fuck’s this dog of yours gonna get here?”
He goes back upstairs and buys snacks for the stoned. Drake’s cakes, Airheads, plantain chips, quarter waters.
“Thanks, but …”
He goes back upstairs—his calves starting to burn—and buys another Dutch, which he brings straight over to Rhino. He asks Rhino if he has any of that rumored opium on him, and if so, would he mind rolling a Dutch and sprinkling some of it over the herb. Opium is a rarity around here and Alfredo hopes the mere sight of it, the mere smell of it—in this windowless basement full of young men, cheap beer, and its flatulent aftereffects—will compel people to stick around, as the promise of crème brûlée might keep bored dinner guests in their chairs. Until, of course, the spoon scrapes the bottom of the dish. Until, of course, the O-laced Dutch gets smoked down to the quick.
“Sorry,” Rhino says. If he has any opium, it’s gonna stay in his pocket, wrapped u
p in butcher’s paper. “But yo, listen—why don’t you just call your brother?”
“The phone’s been disconnected.”
“Then go fucking get him,” Alex says.
Only three blocks separate the Batistas’ apartment from Max’s candy store, but Alfredo feels reluctant to traverse those streets at night. Look at the grief-puffed eyes of Alex and Bam-Bam Hughes. Check out how high their shoulders are hunched. It’s a scary world out there.
“This is a dogfight,” Alfredo whines. “Shit isn’t supposed to start on time, know what I mean?”
No one knows what he means. None of the guys down here even pretend to have been to a dogfight, except for Jeff Hernandez, who pretends to have been to all sorts of things (he also claims to have invented the “Jingle Bells/Batman Smells” song). Before anyone arrived, Alfredo put a strip of duct tape in the center of the ring, dividing it in two. He isn’t sure if that’s protocol, but a basketball court has a center line, so maybe a dogfighting pit does too. Who knows? Should the ring be built over a tarp, to keep blood off the floor? What about referees, judges, a bell clapper? Is betting handicapped? Should there be an undercard, a pair of roosters pecking each other to death, a bikini-clad kitten parading a poster board with the number of the round? Nobody knows. But they do know there should be two dogs: it’s the without-which-there-ain’t-shit of dogfighting. The guys down here don’t need rap videos or DMX lyrics to tell them that.
“This is fucking bullshit,” says a voice from the haze. It becomes a refrain, a refrain that circles the room twice as fast as any herb-stuffed Dutch. It’s fucking bullshit that Alfredo’s dog ain’t here yet, that they’ve all been standing for hours, that they work shitty jobs at RadioShack and Foot Locker, that the weekend’s already half over, that no one brought cards for Spades, that no one brought dice for Cee-lo, that they still live with their mothers, that going to high school sucked, but not being in high school sucks worse, that the Mets missed Clemens, that the weatherman predicts rain, that there ain’t any bitches down here except Diana pacing inside her ring, and, speaking of which, it’s fucking bullshit that she’s in there at all, getting mad comfortable, chilling in that cardboard arena before the fight starts, which probably gives her like a totally unfair advantage.
“Bullshit,” Bam-Bam says.
Winston steps on Rhino’s relatively new sneakers. Rhino bought them at a discount from David, who stole them from the Foot Locker he works at in Forest Hills, and now—would you look at this?—they’ve got a big black scuff on them. When Rhino starts bitching, Winston asks him what does he expect, walking around in white fucking shoes for crying out loud. After he says this, Winston’s eyes bug out of his skull a little bit farther than usual, as if his mouthing off has surprised even himself. Maybe, Alfredo thinks, Winston is at long last growing some balls. Maybe with Mike Shifrin somewhere outside this basement Winston has got enough to worry about and doesn’t need Rhino and his bitching on top of it—but that’s impossible, Alfredo reminds himself, because he never told Winston about Baka’s intelligence report. Alfredo didn’t want to overburden his friend, didn’t want more hair falling out of his head. Whatever the impetus behind Winston’s newfound moxie, it doesn’t seem to matter to Rhino. He knocks the beer out of Winston’s hand, the can sprays what looks like bile all over Billy Fitz’s jeans, and so Billy shoves Marc Franschetta, not because Marc did anything, but because Billy’s Irish and Marc’s Italian (third generation, but still: one keeps a shamrock in his wallet, the other drives a souped-up Camaro), and the both of them are convinced they’re supposed to hate each other and administer headlocks whenever the opportunity presents itself, and because the opportunity has officially presented itself, there is more shoving, more screaming, more beers knocked out of more hands, which strikes Alfredo as a very good thing, since a fight—even one between people, not dogs—will at least keep his friends entertained. No such luck, Dito. Max Marshmallow appears on the stairs, wrinkling his nose. He wears his new gray sneakers, a pair of khaki pants clasped, in the manner of all old men, well above his waist, and a linen button-down shirt—Max all pimped out for his return to the world of shady goings-on, a return that has so far been less triumphant than dispiriting.
“I want everybody out of here,” he tells Alfredo.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” Alfredo says. Guilt prevents him from looking Max in the face. Alfredo doesn’t know what’s going to happen tonight, doesn’t know if Baka or Shifrin or Tariq are ever going to show up, but he does know that there are three DTs parked in an Impala across the street and they’re busting in here, no matter what. And once they do, it’ll be trouble for Max. Can’t be running dogfights in your basement, the law books say. Or something like that. He’ll probably lose the store and the apartment behind it. The couch, the TV, the toilet with the handle that still sticks, the crystal dish overflowing with butterscotch candies—Alfredo worries that it’ll all be corded off with yellow tape and then taken away. Auctioned off to law-abiding citizens, to fill the city’s pockets. “You gotta trust me,” he tells Max’s chest. “I’ve got this all under control.”
“Exactly what have you got under control?” Max says.
“Maybe I oughta buy some more Dutches off you. Get these guys to mellow out a bit.”
“How much money you think I lost from closing the store tonight?” His Adam’s apple protrudes violently. “All the shit I coulda sold, but didn’t. How much money you think that is?”
“Let’s go upstairs,” Alfredo says. “You got any of those little apple pies? I’ll buy them off you for three dollars apiece.”
“I wanted a poker game,” Max groans. What he has instead is a mob of thugs who expect violent entertainment and who have so far been denied. Like a leaky gas stove, these young men will be easily ignited. He sees his store, his home, his shingles-scarred body erupting in a giant, orange, billowing ball of fire. If only he would’ve gotten his poker game! There would’ve been cigar smoke instead of reefer smoke. He would’ve been able to kibitz in the purest sense of the word: sit just beyond the green-felt table and, with much tongue clucking and head wagging, offer his expertise on how best to bluff and false bluff, how to tease the pot, look at your cards, stack your chips, and time your bathroom breaks. “This,” Max says as a do-ragged kid hocks up a loogie and spits it onto his floor, “is not what I had in mind.”
“My brother could be upstairs right now,” Alfredo says. He imagines Tariq in the fence-enclosed yard behind the store, banging on the screen door as if it were keeping secrets from him. If he gives up, if he goes to the front of the store with the dog on a leash, then he’ll be seen by the police, who won’t hesitate to nab him right then and there. Which isn’t exactly ideal. Alfredo wants his brother cuffed up and sent back to Fishkill, sure, but he wants that shit to go down when he says it can go down. “While you’re here messing with me,” Alfredo says, “my brother could be upstairs trying to get in.”
“I want them going out that way,” Max says. He points to the wooden ladder that leads up to the metal cellar doors. “Right now. Send them out that way. To the street. I don’t want these animals tramping through my store. Send them out onto the fucking street.”
“Ten minutes,” Alfredo says. “Please. Just give me ten minutes. As a favor to our friendship.” Max checks his watch, which Alfredo interprets as a positive sign. He knows he needs to talk whiter, show Max that the two of them are on the same side. “I’m asking for ten minutes, that’s all, and if my brother isn’t here by then, if we’re not making money by then, I’ll personally kick each of these assholes to the curb.”
Across the street, Officer Lopez returns with bounty. Three sodas and three shish kebabs, purchased from the halal vendor around the corner. Whoever goes out and buys the food gets to sit shotgun. These are the rules. But when Lopez pulls on the door handle, it pulls back, locked from the inside. He shifts the food and drinks to one hand. He pulls on the handle again, and again it pulls back. Behind the car�
��s tinted black windows, Sergeant Wright and Officer Hutchison are snickering. They’re bullies, these two, and Lopez knows all about bullies. A couple of years earlier, when asked in his academy interview why he wanted to become a police officer, Lopez—who, to his detriment, has always been overly honest (cf. the Unnecessary Marital Confession of 1998)—said he’d been picked on as a kid. Only when the cap came off the interviewer’s red pen did Lopez realize how badly he’d answered. Might as well have said, I have some scores to settle. Can I get a gun now please? But he managed to recover, talked some bullshit about how he knew what it was like to feel voiceless, what it was like to feel powerless, and what it was like to feel, uh, disenfranchised, a word he remembered from a John Jay criminal justice course. The interviewer recapped his pen. Ruben Lopez became Officer Lopez. And here he is, still surrounded by snickering bullies. But he doesn’t need a gun, or even a nightstick, to handle these two, not when he has access to what his communication books call reward power, the ability to confer valued material goods.