They’d found him again.
Shane needs nothing other than Nina, Brit, a blunt, pills, and his iPhone.
And his pistol.
And cash.
And who takes cash anymore?
Thugs like me cause otherwise they track you, G, no joke.
He watches the street from the fire escape.
Brings the gun up and takes a bead on a black guy walking his dog.
Now a white mother with her two babies coming out of the gas station.
Someone stopped at the corner in their car, talking on a cellphone.
He’s sure he sees that sucker look up at him.
Ever since he was a little kid he’s had to deal with this shit.
One town to the next.
A bus, a train, but never by plane.
Too many cameras and way too traceable.
You go within ten miles of an airport and they’ve got you in a database somewhere down south with a team of analysts and a tracking device up your ass.
Shane goes out to where the car is parked behind the apartment building and kicks the fender. Thing hasn’t moved in months.
No insurance, and he let his license expire last year.
The car was Leo’s up until he went away.
Fucking straight up pimp-mobile gone to shit.
Those rims alone cost a fortune.
Tinted windows, leather seats: Leo’s old-school five-point-oh Mustang bought in honour, he used to say, of Vanilla Ice.
Leo’s old, know what I’m saying? Like for real old. Like ancient. Like practically pre-computer old. Like seriously retro. His first tattoo wasn’t Thug Life, it was The Lost Poets if that tells you anything about what shit he listens to.
He’s like all political and shit. He’s Black Power but he’s a white guy who grew up on a farm in the sticks, and was born in, like, 1968.
Leo on the coming revolution: Listen my brother, he’d say, except it was more like, Lissann mah Bruth-ah, shit is gonna git REAL.
When Tariq(e) made their appearance that first time during the riots, Leo got their motto tattooed on his forearm.
ONE WORLD.
Like some ancient-history hippy shit, but it worked, and it’s no joke—everyone, even half Lebanese Muslim trannies—united under a motherfucking dollar sign—and guess what?—it’s dope, yo, like TRUTH.
Nothing pays like looking like an outsider.
But, unlike Leo, Shane is a non-believer. Ain’t no change coming. People are dumb as shit, and there’s about a million Agents controlling the world—just look at the CEO, yo—you think that motherfucker will loosen his grip? Naw, homey, not likely.
And right here in the parking lot, an old, peeling poster of Tariq(e) in a white gown, a sawed-off shotgun in one hand, cash in the other.
Politics, G—ideas and words—shit’s like a virus.
All in one year: LAX, the Strip, the Quake, and the Wildfires.
Shane remembers—HAZMAT teams all over the news.
Jesus freaks saying it was punishment for Tariq(e).
And since then, like, perpetual crisis: retinal scans, drones, shootings, mass incarcerations, bombs going off—you name it—and the top-end surveillance and craziness beats all those things, like legit—the top-end shit is invisible and everywhere, like radio waves, oxygen, fucking microbes that get into your shit and the CEO and Tariq(e) and the Resistance already know all, and prolly, like, holding hands around a circle of virgin blood most nights.
Shane’s got one word for you: Hashtag fucking PIZZA-GATE, G—for real.
Shane calls his father and leaves a message on his voice-mail—old fuckers appreciate that shit. Wonders if the same network operates in the 7-0-9, and thinks to himself, Of course it does. Shit’s all connected.
Snowden was a PIMP.
The call means they’ll know he’s broke. They’ll know he’s onto them, but whatever. The apartment is bugged anyway. Has been for weeks.
He tried to redeem his mutual funds but the bank got a clamp on his money like tight.
Shane pulls up his hood. Shane is 8 Mile. He’s Milk.
Now he carries his gat everywhere.
How to get money?
MDMA is such bullshit. Your drugs are called, like, Parachute or something. These are called Bombs, you know what I mean? Like Dirty Bombs, bitch.
How to get them stacks?
He picks the girls up from the park where they’re all like totally blitzed on pills. Can’t even stay hard, later at the apartment, when the girls take turns playing intern.
Nina and Brit have the same thought: Something is wrong with Skeet Love.
Dear Craig,
I’m writing to tell you something you don’t wanna hear and that is you’ve written something beautiful.
You’re like I am—you kinda hate yourself and maybe you have good reason. You’ve done a lot of shitty things in your time. Sometimes you’re a horrible, selfish person who thinks you’ve never been as loved as well as you deserve.
It might be true, I can’t really say, but if nothing else, at least you’ve done this—you brought joy to my life. You really did.
Right now we’re only at the very beginning of our relationship. Things will go on from here if it’s okay with you. Right now, we’ve got more time to talk about things and about how we’re both doing and what will happen to us.
But I wanted to write you. I needed to tell you that your words touched me. You’ve done something wonderful for us, and you’ll prolly still feel, no matter what, that no one gets you. I don’t get you. Not yet, and maybe never. But I feel you, CFP. I feel you, and whatever happens now, whatever you decide happens, it’ll be cool, man. You remind me of my dad, like maybe when he wasn’t so old and broken from work. But I’d prolly still fuck you. I mean, I for sure would, but that’s not something we ever really have to worry about because you’re way over there in that world, and I’m right here with Shane and Nina, so whatevs.
Anyway, thanks, and congrats on everything you have. Like the books and your fam or whatever. They love you, and so do I, Craig. I love you and want to see you do well. I’ll write again soon.
Yours,
Brit
Nina’s like, Fuck, it feels so MINT.
Bitch is a feen for it:
Brit’s mouth on her bud while Shane raw-dogs her.
If you’ve never had it done to you, Nina thinks, you should.
Oh God, it’s so good, like legit, like money, yo.
Nina’s a good mom. A boy who lives with Grandma; another somewhere else.
One from Leo, and the other from her first boyfriend, Nick, who’s now, like, the manager of a Best Buy or something in some shit town up north.
She’s never laid a hand on those boys. She was good with them.
It kills her that it’s been so long since she’s seen them, but it got too hard. Like brutal. Like murder, man.
She’s a good mom.
Her oldest, Carter, starts school in September—or the Training Program.
Last picture she saw, he already had the brush-cut.
But, yeah, it’s straight-up mint, she’d like you to know.
Can’t keep your eyes off that shit.
But now Shane’s gone weird on them.
His weapon don’t work.
Only sometimes it don’t.
And anyway, Grandma got cash. Pop died from a workplace accident. Head clean off from the blade of a forklift.
She got a nice house and it’s better for everyone.
And this is the best summer of her life.
Even better than the one she met Leo and dropped school like something hot.
You can’t judge, you don’t know.
There’s something beautiful about life. Even here, now, in this apartment. The afternoon sun beaming in. Even right there, cars like shiny jewels in the parking lot of the TexaBucks. Man, it’s the best. This here’s the shit. The gold, the blood, the real dangerous stuff. The paper, the pills, the pistol, her pus
sy.
It’s the shit, I’m telling you.
This life’s the most beautiful shit in the world.
Look—all three of us got shiners.
On the train or in the street, people see us, and stare like seriously.
The three of us, G—we’re like everything.
We’re a trinity.
We are the world.
We are the children.
Mine’s old and like yellow and there’s a gash under my eye from Nina’s ring.
The girls are purple for Brit and like a kinda fucking sea green and blue for Nina.
This our shit, okay? It’s what we do, and some nights at the apartment the three of us join hands in a circle, and like, we close our eyes, and all we do is like breathe together, know what I mean?
It’s like a ritual but it totally ain’t satanic or whatever—The Painting Game—it’s a holy thing on the side of all that’s good and light.
It’s love, haters.
We don’t eat feces on toothpicks or some shit like that.
Or like fuck goats or whatever.
It’s like legit, human activity.
We hurt each other, we hit each other, and it’s love, okay?
And we wear it right here on our faces, right?
It’s our bodies, that’s what it is.
And Nina made it and she’s like so generous she shared it with me and Brit and now we’re together in a way that no one else could ever be.
And sorry-not-sorry, motherfucker should never talk this way—like what—this bitch ain’t queer—but my shit is deep, know what I mean?
Bitch has got eight eyes, eight legs.
Sees everything. Knows all.
When he saw that graffiti outside their building, Shane was like, Oh shit.
Then, two days later, there was that black sedan, totally Agent, like for real CIA or FBI or ATF—fucking HOMELAND, parked on the corner. Dude inside trying to be all like nonchalant.
David Koresh: Now there was a gangsta.
And now the CEO’s legions in the government are onto Shane.
Why?
Don’t know.
The CEO like seriously—a face made out of boiled meat—pushing buttons and making calls from the Mansion with a team of fucking Pinkertons running the show.
You feel those eyes on you every time you go out that door.
It’s fucking trippy, G.
That same homeless dude—like, what is this, a fucking drop-in?—shuffles around, picking butts off the sidewalk.
He’s got something to do with it.
Some nasty United Nations bitch-ass punk, except they got rid of the UN like last year, remember? And the Occupy bitches were like, Make the building into low-income housing!
Shane goes over to him.
Yo like what the fuck do you want?
Shane puts his hand on the butt of his gun, but thinks better of drawing it. It’s like just what they want. Next thing you know, they got your prints on record, Mom and Dad kidnapped, the girls sold into slavery.
Dude’s like, What?
Find somewhere else to hang, Shane says.
Then he sees that black sedan again right there in the parking lot of the apartment building.
Puts his head down and speed-walks around the corner like turbo-styles, he’s gone.
He first saw that image, the stencilled spider, while reading about the Illuminati. Shit’s fucked, dawg. A thousand silvery threads connected to a thousand marionettes. Think the CEO is a thing? Think Tariq(e)’s for real? They ain’t, they ain’t, (and BTW, thinks Shane, fuck your gender-neutral personal pronoun or whatever) but this is real: Shane pulls the hammer of his pistol back.
The House of the New Swamp. That’s what they’re called.
Here’s Shane on their website. Trying to figure out what in fuck they’re all about. It’s just about the most incoherent thing he’s read since high school, when the teacher assigned an excerpt of James Joyce.
Yeah, yeah, whatever, the Twin Towers coming down—inside job, no shit—but it’s the first he’s heard of the New Swamp, and the first he’s seen of their emblem: the very same stencil on the wall in the doorway.
Straight up Doomsday shit.
How a cataclysm will bring about the rebirth of some kind of alien behemoth they believe hibernates under Atlantis.
Like Ktulu or some shit.
Bitches be trippin.
And here’s some sad artist rendition of that sucker: some kinda hairy squid monster with fangs and eight eyes.
Like seriously?
But poor Shane, he’s really kind of an innocent, you know—his heart is caught in a web looking at that shit.
The Euro Zone might be safe.
Bitches got enough wind and solar to keep going for years.
When everything ends, and these fucking alien-collaborating-New Swamp-Jesus Freak-Illuminati-homeless-secret network motherfuckers pull off their coup.
Meanwhile, Shane’s bank account says, You ain’t goin’ nowhere, bitch.
Meanwhile, Dad and Nina and Brit with ball-gags in some cult sex dungeon for a gang of rapist Baltic millionaires.
Meanwhile, an intergalactic UFO raises Jesus and Elvis and Tupac straight up out of the ground, and some Somalian Muslim Vegan terrorists nuke Washington.
Meanwhile, Leo getting out of prison, and that bitch is pissed.
And Shane’s like, Dad, can you like put money in my account pretty please?
Be cool, Shakey, he thinks.
He orders a double Big Mac with fries and a Coke.
Fuck celiac.
Bitch is like starved.
Bitch needs a plan.
It was last year that Brit noticed the problem.
She was absolutely paralysed with fear.
Ever see one of those girls, who like starts going bald?
Not like cancer or anything, but like their hair starts falling out? At twenty?
Can you imagine?
It’s like genetic? I think it is?
Well—this was last summer—she got out of the shower. She’d been looking down at her vajayjay? Thinking about a baby? How she wanted one someday? And then, she’d looked down further at the drain.
Like a motherfucking wolf spider with its babies on its back, except not—because it was really a really giant tangle of hair—Eww—and so that’s when she went online? And found that olive-oil treatment?
And it saved her life, for reals, she says.
Who’d wanna fuck some cue ball?
Maybe if she were punk, but they’re stank.
But really her deepest worry isn’t going bald.
She pictures the drain in the bathtub of her papa’s four and a half.
She knows someday, someone will prolly murder her.
But that’s not her worry either.
Oh what’s the word? What’s the word she’s looking for?
You know what? There are two choices for a girl but it ain’t really a choice at all.
You can be fuckable or invisible, and that’s it, yo.
Just that drain going down underground.
That’s what she sees when she feels that way.
And it’s the scariest shit.
Scarier even than being some bat-shit crazy balding crackhead lookalike.
Nina wants you to know something, and it’s this: $$$$$$$$$.
Dollah billz.
Shane’s been gone for hours when she steps out into the hallway.
She’s going to buy beer, but also is kinda looking for him.
Wild Cat, man. Shit makes you crazy but it’s cheap as shit.
Shane’s not answering her texts.
They need cash.
Bitch’s got twenty bucks and five forty in TexaBucks.
She’s hoping she’ll leave the apartment and when she comes back, Shane’s home.
She buys eight cans of beer and has enough left over for a small bag of Doritos.
A man in a black suit is there watching her as she
waits for her change.
For sure, her A$$ is slammin.
She’s getting skinny.
She’s like a buck fifteen now.
She’s wearing pajama bottoms and flats but her ass is the event horizon.
It’s magic, man, that A$$.
The perfect jiggle.
Back at their building, she has a good look at it in the mirrored doors of the elevator.
Going up.
Before it happens, there’s this kind of rush of blood through her heart.
She believes in ESP.
It’s like totally true.
She’s got a gift.
Years from now, when the happy ending comes, and her and Shane and Brit are remembering this shit together, it’ll be this moment in her memory that marks the beginning of their fucked-up adventure together.
It’ll be right now, in this hallway outside their apartment, where she’ll begin to find her happiness, she knows it, like for reals for sure.
She’s walking down the hall from the elevator when she hears the click and then feels, like, a big hard dick in her back, but it’s like not a dick, because it’s a fucking gun, and holding the gun is Leo.
Sup, he says. I’ll have one of those beers.
Dear CFP,
I’d say you’re insane but that may be too complimentary. I think you prolly like too much people saying that sort of thing about you. Especially someone like me. I’m only eighteen years old. But I’m smarter than most. Maybe I’m smarter than you. And anyway, despite my admiration, I’d put you in a pretty moderate range, intelligence wise. That’s not really your deal. Your deal is heart. Me too. That’s why I think about you this way and why I like you.
There’s nothing ever that’s been invented in the history of the world that’s gonna kill people like us. Nothing ever, I promise you.
And I know how badly you’d just like to say Good Bye or whatever—that’s something you think about a lot, but that’s just not very good for any of us—and you have so much work to do, you know?
My family needs you, and yours does too, okay?
Love
Brit
BK blows.
McD’s got flow.
Skeet Love on the mic—
Yo yo.
Shane’s stomach like a cannonball of napalm.
Skeet Love Page 2