by Poppy Brite
He found himself watching an Italian splatter movie called The Gates of Hell. Good old Lucio Fulci; his plots were brain-numbing nonsense, every character dumber than a bag of rusty nails, but he gave great gore. And nothing normal ever happened in his movies.
A girl began to bleed from the eyeballs—Fulci loved eyeballs—then proceeded to vomit out her entire digestive tract over the course of maybe a minute. She’d been parking with her boyfriend; such were the wages of sin. Zach pressed the reverse button and watched the actress suck up her intestines like a plate of spaghetti in marinara sauce. Tasty.
A moment later he realized that the movie was making him hungry, which meant it was seriously time for some food. The remains of a muffuletta from the Central Grocery were wrapped up in his little dorm-style refrigerator. Zach kicked the sheet off, swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, rode the ensuing headrush for a minute, then stood and picked an expert path through the debris to the fridge.
The savory smells of ham and Italian spices, oiled bread and olive salad wafted up as he unwrapped the greasy pink butcher paper. The big round sandwiches were expensive but delectable, and they made two or three meals if you weren’t a big eater, which Zach was not.
It wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford a muffuletta anytime he wanted one. Money was free, or nearly so; all he could need was at his fingertips every time he sat down at his desk and switched his computer on. But he had never quite gotten used to having enough to eat. His parents’ kitchen cabinets never had much in them but booze.
The movie raged on. A priest had hung himself in the town of Dunwich—original name, that—which flung wide the gates of hell, or something. Zombies with bad skin conditions seemed to be able to beam themselves around like refugees from the Starship Enterprise. Zach thought of the only priest he had ever known, Father Russo, who said the masses his mother used to drag him to every few months when she was coming off a bad binge. Twelve-year-old Zach had gone to confession alone one day, ducked into the booth and leaned his aching head against the screen and whispered, Bless me, Father, for I have been sinned against. Hot tears squeezed out of his eyes as his lips formed the words.
That is not how the Confession begins, the priest replied, and some of Zach’s hope ebbed. But he persisted: My mother kicked me in the stomach and made me throw up. My father slammed my head against the wall. Can’t you help me?
Bad boy, telling lies about your parents. Don’t you know you must obey them? If they punish you, it is because you have sinned, The Lord says honor thy father and thy mother.
WHAT ABOUT THEM HONORING ME? he shrieked, slamming his hand against the flimsy wall of the confessional, a hot spike of pain shooting up his already-sprained arm. Raking the curtain back, bursting into the priest’s side of the booth, yanking his shirt up to display the technicolor bruises and belt stripes across his skinny ribs. WHAT ABOUT THIS, MOTHERFUCKER, WHAT DOES GOD SAY TO THIS? Staring into the priest’s startled face, seeing the tracework of broken veins deepen from red to purple, the weak watery eyes flare with pious anger, and knowing sickly that there was no help here, that the priest was not really seeing him, that the priest was as drunk as his parents had been last night.
He had been hauled from the church and told not to come back, as if he ever would; he collapsed on the stone steps and sobbed there for an hour. Then he got up, hawked an enormous goober on the steps, and left with a silent pain that went deeper than his bruises and abrasions, all the way down to the wounded soul that the Catholic church would never touch again.
It would be nice to see Father Russo hanging and burning and bleeding from the eyeballs. Maybe the priest was dead now; maybe he had the starring role in some hellish Lucio Fulci film. Zach hoped so.
He chewed the last bite of muffuletta, licked the grease off his lips, and went diving for clothes. He came up with a pair of army pants cut off at the knees and a T-shirt that pictured JFK grinning toothily as his brains exploded in vivid silkscreen color. Faded red Converse hightops without socks completed the ensemble.
It was time to go snag his two daily stashes. Then he could come back here and get some work done.
June, as far as Zach was concerned, was the last tolerable month in New Orleans until mid-autumn. The days were already hot, but not as mired in sodden swelter as they would be through July, August, and most of September. During these obscene months he slept all morning and afternoon, his dreams punctuated by the rattle and drip of his laboring air conditioner. He spent his nights cramming his head with information, words and images and the subtle semiotics they triggered in his brain, or hacking paths through the infinite mazes of forbidden computer systems, or simply skating around the boards where he was not just welcome but absurdly revered.
Only long after sundown would he venture into the French Quarter to prowl the gaslit side streets, to walk among euphorically drunken tourists and roustabouts on neon-smeared Bourbon Street, to meet his friends passing a bottle of wine in front of Jackson Square, or lingering in the dark bars and smoky clubs of Rue Decatur, or occasionally throwing a small party in Saint Louis #1, the old cemetery on the edge of the Quarter.
But today he descended the stairs to the sidewalk, pushed the iron gate open, and drew in a noseful of the humid air as if it were perfume. And it was, of a sort; it felt like wet cotton in his lungs, but it carried the fragrance of the Quarter, a heady mélange of thousands of odors: seafood and spices, beer and horseshit, oil paints and incense and flowers and garbage and river mud, and underlying it all the clean crumbling smell of age, old iron, softly sifting brick, stone trodden by a million feet, recording the infinitesimal imprint of each.
Zach’s third-floor apartment overlooked tiny Rue Madison, one of the two shortest streets in the Quarter, along with its twin Wilkinson on the other side of Jackson Square. His row of buildings was decorated with intricate black ironwork. Only a block long, quiet little Madison ran straight into the technicolor melee of the French Market.
Zach passed the vintage clothing store on the corner, knocked on the open door and waved to the hippie proprietor (who had recently given him a neighborly deal on a black frock coat lined with royal purple silk, though it would be too hot to wear the thing until Christmas), then cut through an area housing an informal bazaar where you could find useless crap or the very treasures of Lafitte, depending upon the day and your luck. Then he was in the French Market, surrounded on all sides by delicious smells and harmonious colors and all the symmetry and bounty of the edible vegetable kingdom, heaped together in great glowing piles under one old stone roof.
There were pyramids of tomatoes so achingly scarlet that they hurt the eyes, bushel baskets of eggplants like burnished purple patent leather, the verdant green of bell peppers and the delicate, creamy green of the tender little squash called mirliton. There were onions as large as babies’ heads, red and gold and pearly white. There were nuts and ripe bananas and cool frosted grapes, fresh herbs by the bunch, great thick braids of garlic and dried red tabasco peppers hanging from the rafters. There were stalks of fresh sugar cane, sold by the foot so you could gnaw and suck out the sweet juice as you walked through the market smelling and marveling. There was homegrown rice, and barrels full of shining red beans to cook it with, and long links of smoky Cajun sausage to throw in for flavor. There was a fish market to the side where you could buy fresh crabs and crawdads and catfish, bright blue Gulf shrimp as long as your hand, even alligator if you liked.
And in front of every stand were the vendors hawking their wares, old men who had come in laden pickup trucks before dawn, their faces seamed leather, black or tan, Cajuns, Cubans, occasional Asians. The Market, Zach thought, was probably one of the most culturally and racially diverse spots in the city. Good karma for a place where, not two hundred years ago, slaves had done the morning shopping.
Every vendor had the finest, the freshest, the cheapest goods in all the Market; they all proclaimed so, each more loudly than the next, until the clamorous praise for fr
uits and vegetables rose to the roof and spiraled out between the stone columns. They would sell it to you by the piece, or the pound, or the whole damn lot if you fancied.
But Zach fancied other things. He walked through, looking but not stopping, until he reached the fringes of the flea market that took up the rear part of the building. Here the wares tended more toward the tacky or the weird, tables full of shell magnets and ceramic crawfish salt shakers alternating with stands that sold leather jewelry, boot knives, essential oils and bundles of incense and suspicious-looking cassette knockoffs of whatever CDs the vendor had recently bought.
Several of the people running the weirder stands nodded to him. There was Garrett, a nervous kid with bleached-blond hair and great tragic angel-eyes, who painted pictures way too scary for the Jackson Square portrait crowd; he had a table full of crucifix pendants and rhinestone cat’s-eye sunglasses, and was doing a brisk business. There was Serena, purple-haired patchouli-daubed priestess as calm as her name, nodding happily before her altar of bootleg Cure and Nirvana; serene until some unsuspecting light-fingered customer happened along and mistook her for an easy mark. Then she whipped into ultraviolent motion, straight-arming the hapless thief with one hand, retrieving her merchandise with the other. There was spooky Larese with her black Cleopatra eyeliner and tattered velvet dress, who did Tarot readings on the square when she wasn’t selling her homemade voodoo dolls in the Market. Her readings were not lucrative; she told her customers so many accurate bad things about themselves that they almost always demanded their money back, and she always gave it back—but with a date scrawled across it in indelible Magic Marker, a day and year sometimes far in the future, sometimes ominously near.
Zach scanned the stands and tables. The sign changed locations every day, but someone always had it. Finally he spotted it taped to a table of hats manned by a lean young man with skin the color of café noir and a mass of dreadlocks that seemed to burst like snakes out of the top of his skull, twisting halfway down his back, some of the strands interwoven with threads of purple, red, yellow, and green—the colors of Rasta and Mardi Gras. This gentleman went by the mellifluous name of Dougal St. Clair. The sign taped to the edge of his table, neatly printed and discreet, read HELP US IN THE FIGHT AGAINST DRUGS! ANY DONATION APPRECIATED.
“Zachary! I t’ink you need a hat, mon!” Dougal’s face split into a grin sunny and stoned as his native Jamaica as he waved Zach over. His voice was deep and jovial, with an accent like dark, sweet syrup. He plucked a broad-brimmed black hat from the jumble on the table. An Amish hat, circled with a handsome band of black leather and silver cockleshells. To his credit, Dougal did not plop it rudely onto Zach’s head, just held it out until Zach had to take it. Zach held the hat in his hands but did not try it on. Some of these guys could sell you anything.
“Actually,” he said, “I wanted to make a small donation to the cause.”
“Ya mon. No problem.” Dougal didn’t exactly stick out his hand, just eased it to the edge of the table where it would be available in case anyone wanted to slip anything into it. Zach scissored two twenties out of his pocket and palmed them over. Dougal’s dark eyes flickered, clocking the amount even as he made the money disappear. He reached under his table and came out with a thick pamphlet, which he handed over to Zach: The Dangers of Marijuana, ever so imaginative a title, the propaganda zombies were really knocking themselves out with creativity these days. Zach tucked the pamphlet into his pocket.
Dougal unscrewed the top of a thermos and sloshed a generous amount of steaming black coffee into the plastic cup. The odor touched Zach’s nostrils, rich with chicory. Dougal saw him squirming and offered the cup. “Finish it off, mon. Fresh this morning from Café du Monde.”
Zach’s hands itched to grasp the cup. He knew how warm and comforting it would feel between his palms, knew how the smooth slow-roasted flavor would roll over his tongue. Unfortunately, he also knew how the subsequent effects would feel, his heart slamming like a caged thing against the inner meatwall of his chest, his brain drying out like a sponge, his eyeballs seeming to jitter and buzz in their sockets. “I can’t drink coffee anymore,” he admitted. “I used to love it, but now it just gives me the shakes.”
Dougal’s heavy eyebrows drew together in genuine consternation. “But we got de second-best joe in de world right here! Jus’ have a slug, it’ll do you right.”
“I can’t even drink decaf,” Zach said sadly. “My imagination’s too good.”
“You’re twenty?”
“Nineteen.”
“An’ you quit drinkin’ coffee—”
“When I was sixteen.”
Dougal shook his head. The frayed and festooned ends of dreads swayed gently around his face. “I t’ink you need to relax. If I couldn’t drink New Orleans coffee, I guess I’d be makin’ even more donations to de cause than you do.”
“So what’s the best joe?”
“Jamaican Blue Mountain, mon. Fry up some salt fish’n’ackee every morning, have two-three cups of Blue Mountain, you lose dem dark circles unda your eyes.”
Yeah, thought Zach, and die of a heart attack before I hit twenty-five.
They shot the shit for a few more minutes. (“Party tonight,” Dougal informed him, “buncha folks gonna dial de trip phone at Louie’s,” which translated to “Anywhere from three to twenty people are going to drop acid in St. Louis Cemetery tonight.”) As he made his farewells and turned to go, Dougal stopped him. “You want de hat? Half price—no problem.”
Zach had forgotten he was still holding the black Amish hat. He started to toss it back on the table, then stopped. He didn’t have a hat, and this one would keep the sun off nicely. He put it on, a perfect fit. Dougal nodded. “Very fine. Make you look like a preacher man gone bad.” That sunny grin again, and Zach laughed too. These guys could sell you anything.
On his way back, Zach stopped at a produce stand and bought a few handfuls of thin, twisted, lethally hot red and green peppers. Once in a while the Market would get some of the orange and yellow scotch bonnets, or habaneros, that grew on bushes in Dougal’s home country. They were said to be the hottest pepper in the world—fifty times the heat of the jalapeño—and they had a sweet, fruity flavor Zach loved. But the Louisiana peppers would do for now. He would snack on them later, while swigging milk and speeding down the highways of hackdom.
He supposed his strange body chemistry had its rewards. He missed coffee like a dear lost lover, but he knew no one else who could hack on acid, thrive for days on pot and Bloody Marys made of equal parts vodka, tomato juice, and Tabasco, or munch ounces of near-pure capsicum without even a scorched tongue or a burning belly to show for it.
He walked back down Madison, checked his mail—two catalogs, one from Loompanics Unlimited, which sold books about how to obtain fake IDs and disable tanks and other useful things, and one from Mo Hotta Mo Betta, which carried every fiery sauce, spread, spice, and seasoning known to humankind. These he filed on the bed for leisurely perusal later, along with his sharp new hat. His fingers were itchy, ready to pound some keys.
First he took out the antidrug pamphlet and removed the bag of pot taped between its pages. Tight green bud, packed nearly flat, laced with delicate little red hairs that spelled P-O-T-E-N-C-Y. Zach stuck his nose in the bag and breathed deep. The smell alone was intoxicating, herbal and piney. Anything that smelled that good just had to be illegal.
He crumbled some onto a stray sheet of paper, removed a couple of seeds and set them aside to throw in a field later, packed the weed into his black onyx pipe and lit up. The sweet smoke curled down into his lungs, sent green tendrils into his bloodstream, uncoiled the knots in his brain.
Aaaahhh.
Time to work.
He flipped the box on, stuck the phone in the modem’s cradle, and dialed an obscure local pirate bulletin board system known as Mutanet. The BBS was an information exchange for all sorts of hackers, phone phreaks, and assorted computer weirdos. Zach had discove
red its existence by writing a program that dialed every phone number in the area code and kept a list of the ones answered by modems. A little time spent discovering which ones led to bulletin boards—and what other ones might be useful—had led him to Mutanet, and a combination of brashness, twisted humor, and demonstration of his abilities had gotten him on.
He had all kinds of work waiting and projects going: credit card accounts to shave pennies from like wafer-thin slices of salami, bank balances to augment, lists of phone codes to obtain for sale later. He had recently written a program that cracked the encrypted password system of the state police headquarters, and he was toying with the idea of wiping clean the records of every drug offender he could find.
But right now he felt like fooling around on Mutanet for a while. He wasn’t sure what made him do it—it wasn’t how he usually began a work session—and he was never sure what gods to thank, afterward. For the pirate board might have been the only thing that saved him.
The system’s logo appeared, along with a screenful of warnings, exhortations, and dire pronouncements, then a prompt. Zach tapped in his Mutanet handle (LUCIO) and his current password (NH3GH3), and he was in.
A computer BBS worked much like a real bulletin board: you could put up items for anyone to read and respond to, or you could put messages in envelopes, so to speak, for the eyes of one person only. It was better than a real bulletin board, though, because no one could deface your messages or peek into your envelopes except the systems operator, who wasn’t usually inclined to bother.
He had mail waiting, a message from a talented phreak named Zombi who had given him some good uncanceled credit card numbers of the recently deceased. Grieving relatives didn’t usually think to notify the card companies right away, and in the meantime the numbers were ripe for misuse or dissemination. Maybe this would be something equally nifty.