Last Stop This Town

by David Steinberg

  They talked about the Army and what Dylan would have to do to make Rangers. They talked about memories, like Noah’s tenth birthday party where Jack Unger laughed so hard a pepperoni came flying out of his nose. And they talked about Sarah, about how maybe all the fighting was really just them being scared for the future.

  During a lull in the conversation, Dylan asked, “You know what a wingman is?”

  “Yeah. I’m supposed to keep the ugly friend occupied while you bang the hottie.”

  “No, seriously. In air tactics.”

  Noah shrugged.

  Dylan explained. “People think it’s all about following the leader and doing what he says, but the wingman’s real job is to protect the leader.”

  Noah looked at Dylan, his face illuminated by a sliver of light coming through the busted tail light. “What are you saying?”

  Dylan met his eyes. “The wingman doesn’t need the leader. The leader needs the wingman.”

  A tear welled in Noah’s eye. It was the most emotional, heart-felt thing he’d ever heard Dylan say. And he was just about to return the sentiment when suddenly, they heard a noise.

  Noah peeked out through the tail light. “It’s them. Three Brothers Towing.”

  They heard some more noises like a chain, some metal scraping, and a hydraulic, then the car jerked up and Noah fell into Dylan. Dylan screamed as Noah’s knee lodged into Dylan thigh, but Noah shushed him.

  Some more noises, then the car started moving. As the car was towed away, the guys bumped their heads and got tossed around the trunk.

  Dylan looked at Noah. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Me, too,” he replied.

  A thought popped into Noah’s head sometime during the bumpy ten-minute ride to the impound lot. What if they were taking them to one of those car crushers? It made no sense—he knew they didn’t crush cars for parking illegally—but what if there were a mix-up? Or the Three Brothers just did it anyway, as a goof? Would they ever even find their lifeless bodies, compacted into a tiny cube like Wiley E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon? And if they did, what would they say? All he needed was the headline “Gay Lovers Suicide Pact” haunting his parents for the rest of their lives.

  He was just about to tell this to Dylan when suddenly the car stopped. It was lowered to the ground, they heard some more noises, then it was quiet.

  The guys waited another minute to be sure, then Noah slowly pulled the emergency release and the trunk opened.

  He peeked out. Sure enough, they were inside the towing lot.

  Noah saw that the coast was clear and slowly climbed out. He silently helped Dylan out of the trunk, then motioned to him and pointed toward the back of the lot.

  It was the Cube.

  The two slinked across the lot until they arrived at the Cube. Dylan took his keys and manually unlocked the passenger door to avoid any noise. He did the same to the driver’s door and got in. They closed their doors without a sound.

  Once again, their hearts were pounding. Sure, it was Dylan’s own car they were stealing, but it sure felt like grand theft auto to them.

  Dylan put the key in the ignition and whispered, “You ready?”

  “Let’s do this.”

  Dylan turned the key.

  Suddenly, Wreckx-N-Effect blasted from the radio, blaring “ALL I WANNA DO IS ZOOMA-ZOOM-ZOOM-ZOOM IN A BOOM-BOOM!”

  Dylan darted for the volume control and turned off the “Rump Shaker.”

  Noah’s heart started beating again as they waited a moment to see if anyone heard them.

  Sure enough, Anthony came out of his little booth to see where the noise had come from. And he was soon joined by his other two brothers, Sal and Vinnie, who came out of the main building.

  “Shit,” Dylan sighed.

  But there was no turning back now.

  “Punch it!” Noah ordered.

  Dylan floored the accelerator and the Cube raced out of the lot. Unfortunately, the gate was locked.

  As they zoomed forward, Dylan screamed, “What about the fence?!”

  “Ram it!”

  “That’s your plan?!”

  “I didn’t think this far ahead!”

  But the discussion was moot.

  BOOM!

  They rammed the fence.

  One side of the gate exploded off its hinges and shot up into the air while the other side swung open. The Cube accelerated onto the main street and the gate landed behind the car.

  Dylan looked back in the rear view mirror. Both of them were pumped up on adrenaline and couldn’t believe it.

  “Holy shit!” Noah exclaimed.

  Back in the lot, the original asshole, Anthony, yelled, “They’re stealing that car!”

  Vinnie shouted, “Mother fuckers!”

  “Get them!” Sal ordered.

  The three brothers jumped into their cheesy muscle car and sped after them.

  It was roughly two a.m., the Cube was racing along Flatbush Avenue at sixty miles per hour, and three insane Italians were chasing them in a Camaro.

  Noah saw the Camaro gaining on them and yelled, “Head towards the bridge!”

  “Which way?!”

  “There!”

  The Cube turned onto the Manhattan Bridge.

  In the Camaro, Vinnie, the youngest of the three brothers, and sporting a thick bushy moustache not unlike Super Mario, yelled from the passenger seat, “They’re taking the bridge!”

  Sal, the eldest, with no official beard, just a thick layer of five o’clock shadow, floored it.

  Still, the guys had a good thirty-second lead. The bridge dumped the Cube out onto Canal Street and as they sped along, they saw a guy walking.

  “Pike?” Dylan wondered aloud, not sure if he was right.

  Noah yelled, “Stop! Stop the car!”

  Dylan slammed on the brakes and the Cube skidded toward the curb, leaving a trail of burnt rubber. The noise got Pike’s attention and he looked up just as the Cube screeched to a halt right in front of him.

  He leaned in through Noah’s open window. “Hey, guys.”

  Noah screamed, “Get in!!!”

  Pike saw that some shit was going down and quickly jumped into the back seat.

  Dylan peeled out.

  Stopping for Pike had given the Camaro time to catch up, and now the Italians were only a few yards behind them.

  “Left! Head south!” Noah ordered.

  Dylan swerved onto Lafayette Street.

  Pike was fairly calm, given the circumstances, and asked simply, “Hey, what’s going on?”

  “It’s a long story,” Dylan replied as he ran a red light.

  Noah looked out the back window and reported, “They’re still after us!”

  Dylan swerved again, this time making a left U-turn onto Dover Street.

  The Cube passed the Camaro going the other way and Dylan quickly turned, hoping to lose them.

  Pike looked around. “Hey! Where’s my weed?”

  Noah looked back at him. “Yeah, about that…”

  Dylan quickly pulled up under the Brooklyn Bridge, stopped, and turned off the lights. He left the car idling, just in case, but for all intents and purposes, they were in silent running mode.

  They waited.

  You could almost hear their hearts pounding.

  Then, Dylan saw the Camaro driving down the perpendicular Lafayette Street and whispered, “There!”

  But the Camaro kept going.

  They’d lost them.

  All three of them breathed a sigh of relief.

  They waited another moment in silence to be sure, then Dylan turned off the ignition. He turned back to Pike. “So, we’ve been hiding in trunks and stealing cars from the Insane Clown Posse. What have you been up to?”

  “Nothing,” Pike replied sadly. “Abso-fucking-lutely nothing.”

  Noah looked around. “Where are we?”

  Then Dylan spotted something.

  “Look.”

  The street s
ign. It read “Front Street.”

  The guys looked at each other, amazed. They were looking at the alley behind Front Street, the mysterious unnamed road that didn’t appear on any Google map.

  They broke out into big smiles, then Dylan grabbed the wristbands from the change holder and they got out of the car.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE GUYS WALKED up the small street lined with boarded-up buildings, empty lots, and rubble. But as they got closer to the alley, they saw more and more people, and everyone was headed in the same direction.

  Toward the party.

  The three of them started to feel the excitement and energy from the crowd of young people waiting in line to get in. People were chatting in this festive atmosphere, and strangers became friends as the line moved along. When the guys finally reached the front of the line, they showed the bouncer their wristbands and entered the party.

  As they stepped in and the deep bass of the thumping David Guetta tune “Sexy Bitch” vibrated their teeth, they were immediately in awe of the size and scope of this party. The sheer number of people and the size of the warehouse were unlike anything they’d ever seen before. After all, this was a party that companies sponsored. It had a budget. People planned and organized it and it took a crew to set up.

  They just stood there, stunned.

  Noah was the first to snap out of it. “I’m going to go try to find Sarah.”

  “Good luck, man,” Dylan said, and he meant it.

  Noah knew Dylan was rooting for him. He always was.

  “Thanks.”

  And Noah headed out into the crowd.

  Pike turned to Dylan. “Sarah’s here?”

  Dylan smiled. “It’s a long story.”

  Pike and Dylan went over to the bar and in no time they were both enjoying a couple of cold Smirnoff Ices, proud sponsor of Stark Raving Mad 2012.

  “So where’s Walker?” Pike asked.

  Dylan raised an eyebrow. “Wasn’t he with you?”

  “Nope, we split up at this freaky barber shop in Soho,” Pike inaccurately summarized. “Last I saw him he was chatting up some girl.” Then he added confidentially, “P.S., he didn’t do it with that hot Latina chick.”

  Dylan sighed, “Poor Walker.”

  Walker and Genevieve got dressed. The sex had been nice. Walker didn’t have comically premature ejaculation like in every teen comedy he’d ever seen. Maybe because he wasn’t nervous like he thought he’d be. Or maybe, the thought crossed his mind, because he actually was good at it. Whatever the reason, it lasted long enough for him and maybe even long enough for Genevieve.

  It was weird. He’d only spent a few hours with her but there was just something about Genevieve that made Walker calm. He wasn’t anxious around her, and things he said just came out right. He felt like he hadn’t just met a new girl tonight, he’d met a new him. He liked who he was when he was with her.

  Walker pulled his shirt back on and turned to her with a big dumb smile on his face. “That was…”

  Genevieve smiled. She was pretty content herself and didn’t want Walker to ruin the moment. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Come on.”

  She took him by the hand to head back down to the party but he stopped her.

  “Wait. Can’t we just stay up here for a while?”

  She looked at him gazing off into the distance. The city lights were pretty amazing.

  She smiled again and wrapped her arms around him.

  The Camaro slowly cruised down the nearly-abandoned John Street.

  Suddenly, Sal saw something. “What’s going on over there?”

  It was some young people walking where only homeless people or serial killers dared to tread. The Camaro closely followed the trail of kids. They were all walking toward a small intersecting street.

  “Hey, wait a second,” Anthony said, trying to jog his memory. “The one kid said something about a party…”

  Sal stopped the car. Anthony looked up and barely made out the sign on the unlit street.

  “… on Front Street!”

  The brothers looked at each other and broke out in big smiles.

  Noah walked around, looking for Sarah. But there were over a thousand people in the crowd.

  Noah was desperate. He called out, “Sarah! Sarah!” but his voice could barely be heard a few feet away, let alone by the other eleven hundred party-goers.

  Noah looked around. It was hopeless.

  In actuality, Sarah was only sixty or sixty-five feet away, dancing with Kim Striker, but a sea of people separated her from Noah. And from the way she was dancing, it looked like she was pretty into her date for the evening.

  Pike wanted to check out the party and agreed to meet Dylan back at the bar in twenty minutes. He wandered around until he came to an area where people were covering themselves in paint and rubbing themselves on a huge canvas on the ground, like finger painting but with their whole bodies. After the party, the canvas was to be auctioned off for charity, but the goopy, sticky kids on the canvas couldn’t have cared less. It was just incredibly fun. Pike was immediately in love with the idea, and even let out a spontaneous, “Wicked.”

  He grabbed a can of yellow paint and poured it over his head. One girl on the canvas saw this and laughed, but Pike didn’t care. He plopped down onto a blank part of the canvas and started making “snow angels.”

  “I’m a bird! A pretty yellow bird!” Pike shouted out with glee.

  Pike stood up to check out his work. Not bad. But it needed some red.

  Pike went over, grabbed a can of red paint, and poured it on his crotch. He plopped down, facing the canvas this time, and started to hump the pretty yellow bird. A dude nearby saw this and cheered him on, “That’s right, fuck the shit out of it, man!”

  Pike laughed then stopped suddenly. Something was happening. He looked down.

  His dick was getting hard. Realizing the irony, Pike screamed out, “Fuck!”

  Depressed once again, he got up and went under the port-o-shower that was set up to wash off the paint (which thankfully was washable). He dried off his hair with a towel from a nearby stand and started back to find Dylan at the bar. But the party was much more crowded the closer he got to the bar and Pike soon found himself shoulder to shoulder with a ton of people. He bumped into one Asian dude on his cell phone.

  “Sorry, man.”

  He looked up, making eye contact for a second.

  It was the busboy.

  “My cell phone!” Pike gasped.

  The busboy ran.

  Pike chased after him. They ran through the crowd, pushing people over, knocking others out of the way, and generally making a scene until the busboy broke free of the bottleneck and made a dash for the back loading dock. Pike booked after him, and after only a couple of seconds, he caught up to the busboy, grabbing the kid by his collar and throwing him up against the wall.

  “Give it up,” Pike demanded.

  The busboy held out Pike’s phone with his finger on a button.

  “Stop or I’ll hit send,” he threatened.

  Pike raised an eyebrow. “Wait, you speak English?”

  “Of course I speak English, asshole.”

  Pike shook his head, annoyed. He repeated, “Give me my phone.”

  The busboy threatened once more, “I am sending a jpeg of a bag of weed to your mom as we speak.”

  Pike was confused. He’d deduced how the guy had found the picture of the pot on his phone, but asked, “How do you know my mom’s number?!”

  “Speed dial one, ‘Mom,’” he explained, then added, “Aw, that’s so nice you put your mom on speed dial one.”

  Pike loosened his grip on the kid’s collar a bit. Amazingly, after all these years, Pike’s parents still had no idea Pike was a stoner, and they were actually pretty strict. “Okay, okay, hold up. What do you want?”

  “Give me the weed.”

  “Sorry, it already got stolen.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s
true,” Pike said with the utmost sincerity.

  The busboy looked disappointed. “Fine, then I guess I’m keeping the phone.”

  Pike had had enough of all the bullshit and suddenly found himself without the will to keep arguing with this guy. “Fine. Keep it,” he said as he let him go.

  The busboy brushed himself off and pocketed the phone.

  Pike turned to leave, then stopped. Something dawned on him. He turned back to the busboy.

  “Wait a second. My phone doesn’t have a speed dial.” It was a brand new BlackBerry, not a piece of shit Nokia from 2007.

  Their eyes met. Busted.

  The busboy ran and quickly disappeared in the crowd. He was gone.

  Pike screamed out once again, “Fuck.”

  Tonight was not his night, he thought. It occurred to him in that moment that everything that had gone wrong had been a direct result of Pike being stoned. Maybe Dylan had a point about easing up on the pot.

  Pike hung his head low and was just about to start back to the bar when he heard…

  “Pike?”

  He turned. It was Walker, with Genevieve.

  “Hey, you made it!” Walker boomed excitedly. He looked around. “What happened to Haley?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Pike noticed Walker was holding Genevieve’s hand. Then he looked at Walker’s face and stared into his eyes. Something was different. A disturbance in the Force.

  Walker had gotten laid.

  Pike knew, and without a word passing between them, Walker knew he knew. Walker blushed a little.

  But there was nothing to be embarrassed about. Pike smiled and patted Walker on the back, genuinely happy for him.

  A thought sprang up in Pike’s addled brain. Even after all the shit he’d been through tonight, seeing Walker with that glow, that confidence and knowing maturity washed over his face… somehow that made it all worth it. He knew that one thing had nothing to do with the other. Or did it? Whatever the answer, in that moment Pike felt that all was right in the world.

  “Come on,” Pike said as all the negativity left his body. “Let’s go find the guys.”

  Dylan stood at the bar alone, watching the talent walk by, but he wasn’t in the mood for any more female companionship tonight. He ordered another beer from the bartender.