16- William from Connecticut

One of the walls in Tim Tim’s living room had a huge poster for an old crime movie, To Live and Die in L.A..  I’d never seen it before.  The poster showed a man with a briefcase and a gun, standing with his back to a concrete, graphitized wall, bathed in so much shadow that I couldn’t even make out his face.  He was wearing sunglasses and he looked disheveled and dirty.  This guy was supposed to be a crook or a cop?

            “A federal agent is dead,” it said in bold, white print.  “A killer is on the loose.  And the City of Angels is about to explode.”

            I looked around the room and I saw a lot of stuff like this, movie posters, a big screen TV, dozens of DVD cases scattered about the floor around the TV.  The couch I was sitting on was covered in clothes and CD cases.  Albums by Journey and Air Supply, emotional 80s cheese rock.  Scattered about the floor were cans of butane, the kind you would use to refill a cigarette lighter.  Tim Tim liked to sniff them.

            I was sitting on this couch and listening to Tim Tim have sex in the other room with a forty year old man. I felt a lump under my ass and I reached into the cushion of the couch and pulled out a G.I Joe action figure, the small kind, not the old 12 inch kind you got in the 60’s. I stared at it for a moment. A child’s toy in my hand, a small plastic man, articulated, once lost in the crevasse of this couch. In the next room, a child toy in the grasp of some forty year old piece of shit’s grasp, also articulated, but still very lost in a different type of crevasse.

            There was another man- he said his name was Bob- sitting in the living room with me.  He was in his underwear- tight, white, and not big enough- sitting in a chair across from me.  I was still wearing my clothes, and Bob, who was plump and hairy everywhere except his head, which was sheathed in thinning brown hair that was combed over his pale scalp, and who was sitting only a few feet away from me.

            “Where are you from, William?” he asked me.  I never tell them my real name.  “Are you from the city?”

            “I grew up in Connecticut,” I told him, lying again.  “My father’s a professor at a small state school there.”  I’ve never even smelled Connecticut.

            “We have a summer house in Connecticut,” he said.  “Me and my family.  Do you still talk to your dad?”

            I took a pack of cigs out of my jacket and I put one in my mouth.  “Do you mind if I smoke?” I asked.

            “It’s fine,” he said.  “My son smokes.  I wish he wouldn’t.”
            “Surgeon General says they’re bad for pregnant women,” I said, lighting it up, “but I’m not a pregnant woman, so who gives a shit, right?”

            Bob laughed.  His nipples where hard.  I think he was just cold.  Inside, Tim Tim was moaning and screaming the name of the grease ball inside with him.  This was a routine.  For Timmy it was like Fred dancing with someone who couldn’t match the steps of Ginger.  There was a step-by-step procedure, Tim Tim told me, for giving a man a good time, and most of it included a lot of moaning and screaming and fake little orgasmic shutters.  I don’t know if a man actually can orgasm during that kind of sex.  I never do.  But then again, I might not remember.  I’m never sober for it.  I opened a beer.  It was my fifth.

            “What do you do, Bob?”

            “I don’t think I should tell you too much about me.”

            “You keep asking me questions,” I said.

            His face turned red.  “I’m sorry.  I don’t…I mean I don’t really know how to…”

            “You’re going to pay me,” I said.  “Right?”

            He nodded.

            “Then it’s not a question of you being charming,” I said.  “It’s a question of me having a few more beers.  I’m not drunk enough yet.”

            Tim Tim let out a long, shrieking moan from inside, and Bob looked over, his hands digging into his hairy thighs, incidentally licking his lips.

            “I have a son,” he said.

            I’m starting to sweat.

            “He’s about the same age as that little one in there.  They think he’s going to be All-City this year- only a freshman.  Point Guard.”  There was a moment of terrific pride there before his face became drawn and dark.  “He’s a handsome kid.  He looks a lot like his mom, to be honest.  I work late, so I don’t get to see too many of his games.”

            “Where does he go to school?”

            “Lincoln, same school where Marbury played ball.  Best basketball school in the city.  We moved near Coney Island just so the kid could play there.  We used to live in Howard Beach.  He was all set to go to Adams, but I didn’t figure he’d get much exposure there.  You a Knicks fan?”

            “Not really,” I said.

            I took a long, deep swig of beer.  The bottle was almost empty.

            “He’s such a handsome kid.  I just…”  I finished the beer and opened another one and took down the neck of it with a single, short swallow.  “....I think about things sometimes,” he said.  “Things I shouldn’t think about.”
            I thought about Pink and what she was doing at that moment.  I was a whore in (sort of) love with a whore.  I thought about who she was doing at that moment.

            “Do we have to talk about this?” I asked.

            “Are you gay?” he asked me.

            “If I’m drunk enough,” I said.

            “Do you have a girlfriend?”
            “Do you want to pass me a new beer?”  I drank down the rest of the one I had in three or four quick swallows.  I found myself praying to pass out.  I opened up the new beer.  It was warm, but I drank half of it without stopping to take a breath.

            “That’s why I came here tonight,” Bob said.  “I came here because of that little boy in there.  I mean,” he said, pausing as if he was hurting my feelings.  Yeah, this was a chubby middle-aged family man sitting across from me in his tighty whitey BVDs who now had his hand on my leg.  “You’re a handsome boy, but that one in there…he’s so young and pure.”

            “He’s not so pure,” I said and I drank some more.

            “He reminds me so much…” Bob said, and then opened up one of the beers and took a few sips.  “I mean I see people on TV and in the newspapers who do shit like that, to their own children.”  Bob was crying.  His non-beer hand was further up my leg.  “I don’t want to be one of those fucking people.  I do this because I love my son.  Because I’m a good father.”

            I finished my beer.

            “How old are you?” Bob asked.

            “Eighteen,” I said, lying again.  I’m thin and my hair’s a little bit too long.  I can pull off eighteen when I shave.

            Bob was finished with his beer, and his hand was touching the crotch of my jeans.            “Use protection, okay,” I said, his hand grabbing between my legs.

            I thought about Tim Tim, moaning, screaming, accepting.  I thought about To Live and Die in L.A., a movie I still haven’t seen.  I thought about the scruffy man with the suitcase and the gun and the Wayfarers sunglasses.  I thought about the Aurora Project, and the Government and Richard Milhouse Fucking Nixon and the assassination of Mahatma Ghandi.

            For the next hour I made four hundred dollars.  Enough to pay the rent.  Enough to buy a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of Jack.  I went home, only a few doors down, stumbling, drunk, through the door, and I stripped off my clothes.  The floor was moving like the Atlantic in a storm and my feet were made of jelly.  I fell down with my pants and shorts around my ankles.  A small, cheap coffee table toppled over, spilling cigarette ashes all over the floor.  I was lying on the floor, naked, with ashes on my face, and I never wanted to get up.  But, after a while, I got up and climbed into the shower.

            The water, too hot, welcoming.  It scalded my skin at contact, and it felt like I was going to die.  Still, I lay there for a while.  I wasn’t sure if I was bleeding.  I wasn’t sure if something was…torn…inside me.  I curled up on the floor and let the water strike me, passive, immobile.  I curled my knees up to my chest and tried to cry. 

            Nothing came.

            When I finally turned the water off, I could hear thunder somewhere outside, somewhere far off.  Coney Island, maybe.  A storm was coming.  I lay on the wet, tiled floor with my face pressed into the rubber mat, the water beading, and scalding my skin, and I prayed that the rain would wash away the whole fucking city.

15- In Love or Something in a Phone Booth in Queens

I went to a Mets game one night, watched Al Leiter toss a two hit shutout at the Dodgers.  I don’t even like the Mets.  It’s all about time-killing, killing time.  I invited Tim Tim but he said he had to work, and he didn’t like baseball.  By the time I got out of Shea, it was dark, maybe ten-thirty.  People were leaving the park, families, couples, drunken groups of local meat-heads.  Four fat guys with an M, an E, a T and an S painted on each one of their flabby chests.

            I found myself standing in a phone booth a few blocks away from the stadium, with the receiver in my hand, and my index finger poised above the keys.  The sky was lit just a little by the bald, pock-marked face of the moon.  I wanted to call her.  I needed to call her.  It’d been three days since I’d spoken to her, three days since I’d heard that voice that kept me awake when I closed my eyes in the dark, and it felt like three weeks.  Christ, it felt like three years.  Shit, maybe it was three years.

            I didn’t remember what year it was.

            Still, the receiver on my ear as I lightly fingered, but never quite pressed the four button (the first of her number), I couldn’t find it within me to dial.  I let out a long sigh, which seemed to take near forever, and I placed the receiver back into its cradle.

            “She doesn’t want you to call,” I said to myself as I pressed my forehead against the filthy glass.  It was one of those old-time booths, a tower of dirty Plexiglas with the flimsy, fold-up door.  There was a torn to fuck phone book hanging down from the box by a thick metal cable.  There weren’t fifteen pages left in the entire phone book.  All of New York narrowed down to Althea Aaron to Michael Addams.  Either random vandalism, or someone’s fantasy of population control.  I tore out a page, doing my part, and crumpled it into a tiny little ball and I dropped it on the ground.  I stood inside that booth for a good ten minutes just reading the walls.

            Some of it was advertisement.

            WILL SUCK U OFF 4 FOOD, one screamed in black ink, adding a phone number.

            “She doesn’t want to hear from you,” I said again, this time louder.

            Some of it was public service.

            KEEP YO DICK OUTTA JUANITA RUIZ, this one hollered in thick magic marker, SHIT’S GONNA START TO ROT OFF!!!!!!!!

            Some of it was poetry.

            Scrawled in barely legible, tiny letters of blue, Gat, gat goes the nine of Willie Pimp when a nigga tries to skimp a hoe.

            “She doesn’t want to fucking talk to you,” I said.

            Finally, and maybe even more relevantly, there was one message directly above the payphone itself in blatant red ink, in tight, flawless print: Keep calling, bro.  The bitch can’t answer ‘cause she’s got her mouth around my meat.

                I stood there and, in spite of my mood, I let out a bit of a laugh.  I could feel warmth on my cheeks in spite of how cold it was outside.  I was crying.  Not a lot, just a few drops slipping down to my cheeks while I tried to fight off the rest, but I was crying.  Still, laughing made me feel a little better, even if it made the tears come a little faster than they’d been coming.

            I dialed Pink’s number, my forehead pressed against the dirty glass.  The booth smelled like piss or body odor, or maybe both.  Outside was the city, or Queens, anyway.  There was dirty water running down the gutters from an afternoon rain and there was steam rising visibly from a manhole up the street.  There was a woman, probably a whore, slamming down hard on top of some paying customer in an old brown Ford parked between a Korean grocery and a locksmith’s shop.  I was still close enough to see the cheesy neon figures on the outside of Shea, and that they were going to be playing the Padres next.  The phone was ringing on the other side, one, two, five times.  No answer.  Pink didn’t have an answering machine.  She didn’t believe in them.  I kept on the line.

            Be in this booth at 2:45 a.m. on July 18th, 2002, somebody had written, very, very tiny on the plexi-wall, and I’ll suck you into a fucking coma.  For a moment, I could still smell the encounter.  It seemed to me like half of New York had either taken a piss or fucked on that corner, or in that booth in particular.  Across the street, in the alleyway, the hooker silhouette screamed like mad and it made me think about Tim Tim, about sweaty middle-aged men and blood and semen and my ass filled with coiled barbed wire.

            “Who the fuck is this?” Pink’s angry, out of breath voice growled in my ear.  I tried to say something, but nothing came to me.  I called her before the game and I didn’t get an answer.  I called her three hours before that and got no answer.  At least at that point I knew she wasn’t across the street in the Ford getting a very public cock skewering.  “Hello,” she said.  “I’m fucking busy, and if you’re calling for an appointment…”

            I hung up.

            I wound up walking to some tavern in Ozone Park, the kind of place where Bruce is on the juke box, and a group of beer-swilling regulars wear bad T-shirts with nicknames and numbers on them and play softball against similar regulars from similar bars all over Queens.  Bruce and the E-Street Band were playing “Glory Days” and I was drinking a beer that tasted old and stale.  I had a headache, and I’d already done a shot of tequila and chased it with another stale shitty beer, thinking that it’d help.  It hadn’t done much yet except irritate my stomach.

            I scratched at the fold of my arm, at old, scabbed-over battle scars.  I wanted small, cheap hit of black tar.  I wanted a fistful of my mother’s valium.  I remembered my mother for the first time in months and I took another drink of stale beer.

            “So, I did what you said,” one meathead said to another in one of the booths.  They were wearing Queens College sweatshirts but looked more like bricklayers than students.  They had broad shoulders and thick necks and had about fifteen empty bottles in front of them and two empty baskets of chicken fingers and fries.  Tow-headed and probably blue-eyed, they looked, between the two of them, like an Army recruiting poster.

            “I told her,” the first meathead said, “I told her how I felt about her.”

            “What did you say?” the second asked.

            “I told her that I loved her, man.  I just, you know, just let it all hang out.  I told her that when I graduate that I want her to come with me to San Diego, and just, you know, start a life together.”

            The second meathead was laughing.  “And she said ‘no’, right?”

            “Well…yeah.”

            “Big mistake, man.  You don’t ever tip your cards like that.”

            The first kid looked like he’d been punched in the stomach.  “You said ‘seize the moment’ and all of that ‘change my destiny’ shit.”

            “I didn’t tell you that,” his friend said, sipping his beer.

            “Remember,” he said, “all that ‘founding fathers’ stuff, and how they seized the moment and grabbed what was theirs?”

            “Dude,” the second kid said, “I flunked Colonial History.  If I told you that shit, I was drunk and you should have just ignored me.”

            I laughed softly to myself and I took another sip of beer.  As always, The Jeffersons were moving on up on a TV above the bar, and I was watching, vaguely, as the neighbors, the mixed couple, whatever the fuck their name was, dropped by to see George, while Wheezy was, apparently, visiting her mother.  I guess I wasn’t really watching, as you might say.  It was more like I was staring at the screen with my eyes half open, dreaming.  I was thinking about Vermin.  I was thinking about two twenties, which I had in my pocket, and about a tiny square of junk that I could spike up with.  I was thinking that I didn’t have the energy to go to the Bronx.  I was thinking about Pink.

            Right about then was when I noticed that there were two muscle-bound, probable physical education majors from Queens College standing on either side of me, looking down on what looked to them to be a stain on their fraternity letter sweatshirts.  “Hi fellas,” I said.  “I think Jesse James is probably greasing up a chopper, and/or some tatted up porn star on 37.  Did you want to change the channel?”

            One of them, the one who failed Colonial History, grabbed me by the collar of my dirty fatigue jacket and growled at me.  “What exactly were you laughing at, faggot?”

            I looked up at him, and I felt a soccer ball catch in my throat.  The other one had this giant smile on his face.  Like his boyfriend had just said or done something very clever.  “Sorry guys, just watching the Jeffersons, that’s all.”  I smiled.  “I’ll try to keep it…”

            Before I could blink, a fist the size of a ham crashed into my face.  Half of my body went limp and the other half went numb.  This guy was holding me up as my chin dropped to my collarbone.  I held my breath but felt it forced out of my chest as the other one slammed his meaty paw into my stomach.  I tried to reach for my beer bottle but my limp hand only swatted it down, spilling beer onto the counter.  The amateur historian picked up the bottle, by the neck, beer pouring all over the floor and all over his hand, and brought the bottle down square onto the top of my head, spilling a few ounces of beer on to my forehead and neck, and littering my hair and shoulders with shattered glass.  I could feel blood running down my forehead.

            The good Samaritans at the bar, most of whom probably played on whatever softball team toured Queens’ public ball fields under the banner of the bar, cleared a path for the two men to drag me to the door.  Bruce was singing “Born in the USA” as I went face first into the pavement, tasting my own blood and without the slightest bit of feeling in my lower torso or below.

            “Stay out of this place, you drugged-up faggot,” one of them said.  “Or I’ll shove a fucking pool cue up your ass.”  He laughed.  They laughed.  The Samaritans laughed.  The door to the bar closed and I was having another great night.  I thought about calling Pink.  I thought about the quarter and dime in my pocket and a dirty, smelly phone booth in Flushing.  I thought about Vermin and begging for something to ease my pain.

            I thought about The Aurora Project.

            I might have fallen asleep.  I didn’t know.  But for a moment, maybe two, I wasn’t laying there anymore.  I was somewhere.  Somewhere different.  There was glass and bubbling green fluid, everywhere, like being inside a bottle of 7-Up.  Beyond that there were men with baggy white lab coats and clip boards, staring into my eyes, watching my mouth move as I tried to ask them who they were and where I was.  “Help me,” I was trying to say.  “Help me.”

            My mouth was filled with bubbly, sweet-tasting liquid and it didn’t seem to bother me.  I couldn’t feel my body, and it didn’t really bother me.  The room was all blinking lights and computer displays and a pretty woman with tied up, red hair in John Lennon glasses with a clipboard and a pen, tapping on the glass and mouthing something about auditory response time, whatever the fuck that meant.

            Two guys, sitting at a pair of computers and wearing cheap linen suits looked at me and then continued their conversation about how the Cubs still haven’t won a World Series and that they never would.  They walked past me, a man in a glass bottle, and didn’t bat an eye.  Maybe I was inside a water cooler.  Maybe I had become a water cooler.  One of the lab coat guys leaned in, close to the glass and said to me, with a stern look on his face, “Don’t come back here, faggot!”

            I woke up, covered in puke, but with most of the glass off my face and out of my hair and onto the ground.  I was still in Ozone Park.  I was still lying in the street.  I had no idea what time it was.  Maybe it was a dream.  Maybe I was going nuts.

            I probably just needed some pain killers.  I got up and started walking.  A few blocks later I was inside a CVS, browsing.  I opened a box of Advil and I took four.  I opened a bottle of Bayer and took five.  I opened a tube of Dramamine and took four of those.  I took a few more things I don’t really remember taking, except I remember that one of them, my mistake, treated pre-menstrual cramps.

            A man, a customer, middle-forties, fat, with a shiny, balding head stood next to me, staring at me, at the bits of brown beer bottle glass in my hair, at the cuts and bruises on my face.  He’d watched me walking up and down the aisle, you know, browsing.  “What in the name of God happened to you, man?” he asked.

            I smiled at him, and clapped him firmly on the shoulder.   “Love is grand, ain’t it, Wally?”

14- Fortune Cookie

                                                         PART II: DEEPER AND DEEPER

There was this girl who was a cousin of a friend of a friend of mine when I was a kid.  I was about fourteen and just starting to figure out exactly how the whole game worked.  I was a virgin, but whatever.  This girl, this Korean girl, she had this beautiful raven hair, full tits, for a Korean anyway, a face that was smooth and unblemished like a doll’s.  She was eighteen or nineteen, and we called her Fortune Cookie- I don’t remember her real name.  She’s Korean, and not Chinese, so looking back on it, I guess the name is stupid.

            Fortune Cookie, she always knew that we watched her.  She had to.  We’d spot her walking by all the time where we hung out.  Summer afternoons we’d head on down to the playground in front of the Elementary school and play basketball, and she’d always walk by.  She lived a few blocks over from the school with her mom, dad, and about seven relatives in a small split level on 149^th Avenue, and she worked in some office downtown, filing papers, and shaking her ass for some lawyer or some accountant.  There wasn’t any particular reason I could figure that always put her walking past that long chain-link fence.  She must have known she gave us instant wood when ever we caught so much as a whiff of her sweet little ass coming up on us.  Like fucking wolves, we could smell her- we all knew the scent of her perfume even if still today I can’t tell you the name of it.  She knew it because she was a slut.  Everybody knew that.  Kevin had friends, older friends who had gone to school with her, who even knew her real name.  Some of them had even had her.  The stories blew my MTV-soaked mind.

            Threesomes, foursomes, whips, chains- this girl liked to fuck, and apparently, she’d do almost anything to get off.  At fourteen, we didn’t have much chance, but at least we could watch all we liked.  It was a ritual.  Fortune Cookie would pass us by because she knew what we wanted, and she gave us a look because she liked it.  Each time she’d prance by us with her firm fucking tits sticking out and that ass wagging back and forth- it was like a test of our on-coming manhood, a gateway drug.  She wanted to see who would step up to the plate and be the batter up to conversation.

            I didn’t have a tenth of the guts it would have taken.

            Kevin, he knew people who knew her.  He even knew her name.  Her real one.  It made sense that he was the first one to talk to her.

            “Hey,” he said, as she walked by, “you have a cigarette?”

           Fortune Cookie stopped.  She…actually…stopped.  She was wearing a cute little flower-print dress and no bra.  “You like menthols?” she asked.

            Kevin smiled.  “My favorite,” he said.

            She smiled back and she dug into her purse and pulled out a pack of smokes, putting one between her supple lips and passing one through the chain-link.  She looked around for a lighter, but didn’t seem to find it.  It was the first time I wondered what exactly was with all of the shit inside a woman’s purse.

            “I got you,” he said, and he took out a lighter, a shiny little Zippo that I recognized as my father’s.  Had he stolen it?  It didn’t matter, because of the cool way he lit it up and offered it.  He flipped it open and lit the flame and she leaned forward, the smoke through the fence and he lit it.  She took a long, cool drag, the cherry burning bright as he lit his own cigarette.  The rest of us were just watching.

            Her legs were long and white- I’d never seen anything that white before.  She smiled at him.  “You know Big Phil, don’t you?” she said.  “I’ve seen you around.”
            “I’ve seen you too,” he said.  We’d been playing ball for a half an hour, and Kevin wasn’t even sweating.  Completely calm, completely cool.  Always.  “Phil says you’re uh…really something.”
            Her eyebrows rose and her lips opened up to a big, laughing smile.  She was gorgeous.  Nice teeth.  “You’re a little young,” she said, “but you’re kind of cute.  You get high?”

            “Depends on the high,” he said.  He looked around.  It was a Sunday, and the street was pretty empty.  He smiled.  “I might know a guy I can score some good shit from.”

            “Really?” Fortune Cookie asked.  Her fingers grabbed hold of the fence and she pressed against it lightly.  Her nipples were hard, pressing against her dress like they were going to rip through it.  “You’re a pretty resourceful kid.”

            Kevin took a long drag from his smoke, trying not to cringe.  He hated menthols.  “But if I’m going to take you to him, my friends and I have a little something we’d like you to do for us.”

            The Fortune Cookie locked eyes with him and her smile disappeared.  She drifted back a bit from the fence.  “I’m not a whore.  Whatever it is you jerk-offs hear about me, I do whatever I do for fun.  I don’t fuck for drugs and I don’t suck for weed.”

            “Baby, baby,” he said, smiling a coy little smile.  “I don’t want you to do anything, or, well, any of us for that matter.  Me, maybe, but not today.  Not like this.  What I want…is for you to just take the edges of that cute little dress of yours…and pull it up so we can see what you have under the hood.”

            There were six of us, most of us fourteen, most of us sweating and nervous, and she looked over all of our faces, considering.  She looked especially long at me and then back to Kevin and then back to me.  “You two know each other?”

            “Something like that,” he said, laughing.

            “He’s cute too.”

            “Funny,” Kevin said.  He smiled at her.  “What’s it gonna be?”

            She took a long drag of Kool menthol and let out a long stream of smoke.  She flicked away the lit smoke and looked around, her eyes darting back and forth up and down the block.  Nobody was around.  We were the only ones in sight.  The Fortune Cookie grabbed the edges of her dress and she pulled just a little bit upwards, slowly, showing off those smooth, cream-colored thighs.  Her almond-shaped eyes watching all of our faces in turn, she lifted it up higher and revealed a smooth-shaven mound of wet female flesh, the thing we’d all dreamt about.  The thing I’d seen before only in magazines and in shitty, cheap, stolen porn tapes.

            It was pink and it was beautiful.  Probably because it was the first, I guess.  It’s just that way.  When I imagine what it must have felt like from the inside out, that tight-lipped, perfectly shaven gash was everything we’d expected it to be and then some.  It was living smut- the first and last thing we’d think about when we pumped our meats at night for the next few years of our lives.

            A few weeks later, Kevin fucked her.  I had her a few years later after I’d been with a couple of other girls.  She told me that Kevin had told her to let me.  She wasn’t what I’d expected.  She wasn’t as tight.  She wasn’t as good.  Fantasies are never lived up to.  That’s a fact of life.

            I heard a few years ago that she’d married into money- a nice American boy with a nice house with a nice job, living in some nice small town up near Poughkeepsie. 

That’s what I heard, anyway.

13- The Copernican Revolution

“The thing of it is,” said Nick Knack, a little emo punk kid with spiky blue hair and little blue knob jutting out from underneath his lip, as he leaned over the front rail, pool cue in hand, “the guy could be anywhere.”

            Knack took his shot, and he banked in the twelve ball off the rail.  “I mean, at this point, he could be in Mexico, Argentina, fucking Poland, dude.”

            Tim Tim, who was the other half of the eight ball game, was standing at the bar with a beer in one hand and a pool stick in the other.  “Why would he go to Poland?” he asked.  “Nobody goes to Poland.”

            “Fucking Nazis did,” Nick said.

            Laird was sitting at the bar, looking at the TV, trying not to look at the girl down at the end of the bar.  She had long, black hair and sat five stools down on his left, with one index finger curled around a cigarette, and the other twisting along the edge of her drink.  She was looking right at him.

            “Dude,” Tim Tim said.  “Are you comparing Kevin to the Nazis?”
            Knack was still shooting.  “Two ball into the eleven,” he said.  “Corner.”  He calmly stroked the cue into the two, which edged the eleven into the corner pocket, just as he’d said.  “I don’t know, Tim.  Figure the Nazis swept through Europe, taking whatever they wanted, pissing off just about the whole world in the process, and before you knew it, they were off to fucking Argentina or whatever.  Sounds at least a little like Kevin, if you ask me.”

            Knack sized up another shot and he leaned over the table.  Tim Tim was using a house stick, wooden, ever so slightly bowed.  Knack, on the other hand, was using this big maple and ivory baseball bat of a cue stick that nearly shook the table every time he struck a ball.  The place was Kay’s, a shit hole of a place in Jamaica with a juke box full of blues and country songs, and a single pool-table which was last re-felted sometime during the Reagan administration.  It was two o’clock and there was nobody there that wasn’t laying face down in front of a half-full beer and smelling of seven days without a shower and a month without a paycheck.  Aside from the seemingly indigenous peoples of Jamaica, black, white, drunk and watching re-runs of Judge Judy on a thirteen-incher with a fucked up vertical hold above the bar, there was the girl behind the bar- Debbie, a dyed blonde, black roots showing chick so skinny that her neck muscles stood out and the bones just above her tits jutted out like a little, jagged mountain range leading to her neck.  On the other hand, she had absolutely perfect teeth.

There was Debbie, and then there was this girl down the bar.

            Laird’s eyes met with her green eyes, and she smiled at him.  He sipped his beer and turned around to Tim Tim.  “What does it matter where he is anyway?”  The girl was still looking at him.  Debbie was cleaning glasses and tapping her feet to “What’d I Say” by Ray Charles.  “Gone is gone.”

            Knack had run the table down to nothing but low balls, which were hanging around the pockets as evidence of Tim Tim’s misses.  Knack and his maple and ivory baseball bat smoothly sunk the eight ball in the side pocket on a two rail bank.  He let out a big, whooping laugh, stomped the end of his tusk of a pool cue to the floor and said to Tim Tim, “Pay up, motherfucker.  Gimme my fucking money.”

            “Fuck,” said Tim Tim, tossing a ten on the table, which Nick Knack added to a messy fistful that he pulled from his breast pocket.  The lip-ringed, emo punk counted his money and formed it into a loose stack, hooting and howling.  “I’d say that’s…a healthy eighty bucks you just gave me, pip-squeak.”

            Tim Tim lit up a cigarette and wiped snot from his nose with the sleeve of a dirty T-shirt that said “You Aren’t Here.”  He let out a smoke-filled sigh and collapsed onto a stool in the corner with a cue in one hand and a smoke stuck between his lips.  He was fifteen years old, and he looked younger than that.  “I thought it was seventy.”

            “Whatever, kid,” said the Knack, “I flunked math.  Every fuckin’ time.”  He spat out a cackling laugh and danced to the bar between Laird and the pretty brunette, who was licking her lips after a sip of whatever whisky-looking beverage that was in front of her.

            Laird was staring at her hard enough to knock her over, and he took a sip of his beer and he licked his lips, and he wondered if she’d make him use a rubber.

He smiled at the girl and she smiled meekly back, and then Nick Knack started talking.  “Nicely done, Junior,” he said to Tim Tim, “Nicely fucking done.  You don’t fucking gamble unless you’re capable of winning, fuck-wad.”  He pulled a ten from his bundle of cash and set it hard on the table, and said to Debbie, “Two shots of Jameson, Love, and your fucking phone number.”

The Brunette took another sip of whisky, something dark, scotch maybe, and she smiled and she looked down at the bar.  There was a girl sitting next to her, blonde, a little bit chubby, with a bright red leather coat that looked like an ugly couch.  She was whispering in the brunette’s ear, and the two of them were laughing.  Laird felt his cock stir a bit and he took another sip of beer.  Maybe I can lay both of them, he thought.  Fat girls give great head.

Debbie the waitress poured two shots of Jameson in front of Knack and Laird.  “I don’t have a phone,” she said, giving Knack a look over.  There wasn’t much to look at, but she took in his 125-pound frame and shook her head.  “Are you even old enough to drink?”

Knack smiled at her…crooked teeth…and pushed forward the ten and without answering, he did his shot in a long swallow and then picked up the shot in front of Laird.  This, he took down in similar fashion, with a single swallow and then slammed the glass down on the bar for effect.  “Kneel before Zod!” he yelled and pumped his fists into the air, one after the other.

Knack unscrewed the two halves of his cue and he put them into a long, thin case, which he snapped shut, smiling.  “It’s a good day,” said the Knack.  “It’s a good day.”  He turned to Laird and gave him a long look over, and Laird apprehensively looked up at the mirror that served as the back of the bar and he saw that his face was white all over.  He hadn’t shaved in about five days.  He looked over at the girls and realized that he kind of looked like shit. Knack cracked an uneasy smile and said, “You alive, partner?  You don’t look so good.”

“Bad shit the other day,” he said.  “Wasn’t a big deal, but I’m still, you know, recovering.”

Knack took a sip of Laird’s beer without asking and he cringed a bit with the swallow.  “Nice medication,” he said.  “If I see your boy Kevin, I’ll give him a holler.”

“In Argentina?” Laird asked, smiling.

“Fucking Poland, baby.  I hate spics.”  He nodded to Debbie and said, “Keep the change on that ten, but only after you get this fucked-up junky another beer.  It’ll balance him out.”  He smiled and slapped Laird on the back a little too hard and he barked, “I’m gonna go find an ugly girl and get my dick sucked.  Nice working with you,” Knack said to Tim Tim, who flipped him off.

            Then, Knack was gone and Tim Tim went over to the juke box.  Laird was looking at his beer and he was thinking about Kevin and about Pink.  He was thinking about Vermin’s apartment, and the few wadded-up bills he had in his jeans and what they could buy him.

Suddenly had a headache and his stomach felt like it was tied into a large, single knot.  When he closed his eyes, he saw a bright blue canvas with stark, white lines that looked like…something.

            It looked like a secret.

            “You want to buy us a drink?” someone asked him, and when he looked up at the mirror, there were two girls standing on either side of him, the cute brunette with the pale skin on one side, and her chubby red couch of a friend on the other.

            Laird blinked his eyes, and he faked a smile and he said he would.  When Debbie came over, the couch, whose name was Emma, ordered a whisky sour, and the brunette, whose name was Mia, ordered a Sex on the Beach, and Laird made an obligatory Coney Island joke and they all pretended to think it was funny, and Laird felt the knot in his stomach being pulled tighter.

            “Do you come here a lot?” he asked and Mia said they didn’t.

            “We go to St. John’s,” she said and he acted impressed.  “Emma’s a Communications major and I’m undeclared, but I like Philosophy.”

            “Who doesn’t?” Laird asked, sipping his beer.

            “Ooooh,” she said, smiling wide, “Do you like Kant?”

            “Oh yeah,” he said, wishing he hadn’t even made eye contact.  “Who….doesn’t?”

            “I love the Copernican Revolution, you know?  The idea that the representation makes the object possible and not the other way around.  I mean, that’s just so…deep.  Isn’t it?”

            “Sure is,” Laird said, looking at the curving line of cleavage that dipped down from her breast.  “Deep.”

            “What do you do?” the couch asked, and she sipped her drink.

            Laird put his hand to his face and laughed into it.  “I’m an upholsterer.”

            “That’s interesting,” said Mia, while the couch rolled her eyes and lit a cigarette.

            “I specialize in red leather,” he said, and the three of them laughed, everything was fake and Laird felt his stomach turning over and over again.

            They talked.  Laird looked at Emma’s leather jacket and figured it was worth a few bills on Dad’s credit card at some designer store- not one in Manhattan, not someplace nice, but some shop in a mall in Passaic.

            “I think that there are so many jobs open to a communications major,” Emma the Couch said, absently, but when Laird asked what kind of jobs, she shrugged and said that she didn’t like Queens very much.

            Mia said, “I don’t know what the big deal about sex is, I never really feel anything.  And if I never feel anything, then what does it matter who I fuck?”  Laird put his hand on her leg and she smiled and said she wanted another drink, and Laird told her that he’d need to be paid back and Emma let out a snort of a laugh, and Mia smiled and laughed, and Laird saw that she had some Chinese symbol tattooed on her wrist and when he asked her what it meant, she said it was the Chinese symbol for “Smoking is bad for you, but I don’t give a fuck.”

            Her hand was on his leg.

            “It says all that in one symbol?”

            “Chinese is very fascinating.  I almost went to college in Seoul, you know?”

            Laird asked Emma for a cigarette, and she obliged, and Debbie brought them another round, and there was a replay of a Mets game on the TV, and the cigarette was some generic brand that tasted like it was packed with dirt.  He smiled at Emma, “I think you should sell that ugly jacket and get a pack of descent cigarettes,” and she didn’t hear him, and he told her to never mind.

            All the while, his head was pounding and he was starting to sweat.  Warm, wet pockets in the small of his back and under his arms and he didn’t want to take off his jacket because he wasn’t cold.  There was something behind the mirror behind the bar, something behind everything he was seeing.  Steve Trachsel was walking off the mound after being hit with a line drive, Debbie chatted with Tim Tim, who had one hand tucked down the front of his jeans, the girls giggled and laughed, and talked about Descartes, and whether or not we can prove that any one thing that is not our own consciousness exists and all Laird could see behind every one of these things was a sea of blue plains and white lines and he got up out of his seat.  He almost fell down.

            “Are you, like, okay?” Mia asked and she put a hand on his shoulder.

            His heart was screaming in his chest.

            “I’m cutting you off, Laird,” Debbie said.

            He was standing in quicksand.

            Tim Tim was looking at the TV.  “I can’t believe I lost all that money, and why the fuck are we watching baseball?”

            His eyes were burning.

            “What kind of fucking name is Laird?” Emma the couch asked, and then he was stumbling across the bar for the men’s room.  He knocked over two chairs and he nearly fell and he locked the door and turned on the faucet and stuck his greasy head into the sink and let the cold water spill all around him like a cold pocket of crisp air on a warm day and he looked in the mirror and he saw Kevin instead of himself.  He saw a wide blue plain and white lines, and little diodes and capacitors and shit he didn’t know anything about and a bright flash of light spread all over everything and he fell onto the ground next to the john with his hands over his eyes, trying to see nothing.

            Everything was loud noises and flashbulbs and brightly burning lights and green, bubbling fluid everywhere.  His lungs filled up, and his stomach enlarged, and his body swelled with it.  He saw his entire life and he knew that one day, maybe even this day, he was going to die and he reached into his jacket and he took out a little bottle of pills and the chalky taste of chewed up Demerol filled his throat and mouth and his nose and he vomited all over the floor and he threw the empty bottle against the wall and he screamed as loud as he could, “The Aurora Project!” and then he fell into the dark.

12- Pink

           I’m standing in a hallway, and I can smell cat piss coming from somewhere.  Probably the ventilation system.  When I used to come to see Pink, I used to hear the slightest murmuring of kittens in the ceiling, but I don’t hear them anymore.  Maybe it was my imagination.  Maybe it was trapped kittens.  I don’t know.  All I know is that I don’t hear them right at this second, but I can smell them.

            I’m knocking and knocking on this goddamn door, in this shitty-ass apartment building with asbestos in the ceiling tiles, and holes in the walls.  My hands are shaking because I stopped taking my Buprenorphine treatments, because personally, they don’t work for shit, at least not for me.  The treatment costs $350 for the first three days, and 100 dollars for every fucking office visit- not including the prescription cost.  It’s money that I don’t have, and if I did, I’d be spending it on the real deal- not some shitty wanna-be pharmaceutical cure.

            I wanted Methadone, but they- the doctors kind of They- said it was too close to the real thing, and I’d get stuck on it.  Methadone, at least, is cheaper.

            There’s something rattling around my brain tonight.  It’s pokes and prods and probes, and an itch…a feeling behind my brain like…I’m forgetting something.

            Something…important.

            I’m not riding along the razor’s edge today, which is good, thanks to all my good friends of course.  Mr. Wellbutrin, Mrs. Celexa- thank you Mr. Zoloft, and of course the twins: Mr. Paxil and Mr. Effexor.  The docs would say that I’m not socially functional today, and I’m being my real self.

            Being my real self…smelling imaginary feline urine.

            I know she’s in there with some tricky dick, some business suit-wearing motherfucker with an Irish Springer, a wife named Jane, and Audi A8, and 2.5 kids to drive it home to.  She’s fucking his brains out acrobat-style, hanging from the ceiling and letting this guy skewer her with his married prick.

            I put my ear to the door, and I try to listen, the fucking paint chips off and crumbles around, and within my ear, and still, I can’t hear shit.  Not even the ocean.  I press my ear harder, maybe I’ll hear the bed creaking around or some shit, or maybe the TV will be really fucking loud, trying to drown out the wet slapping sounds of sex with the sounds of the Jefferson’s moving on up.

            Finally, the door opens.  She looks a little wrecked, tired, like I just woke her up.  She’s wearing a gray bathrobe and probably nothing else.

            “Jesus, Laird, you’re pounding the shit out of my door.  You’re gonna wake up the baby”

            I step inside and I tell her I’m sorry, and she leads me out in to the kitchen where she takes out a coffee can that’s in the cupboard above the beer vomit-colored refrigerator.  She pulls out a wad of money and counts out $250.

            “Here’s what I owe you.”  She hands it to me.

            “Thanks,” I say, looking around for a guy in the room- pulling up his post-coital pants or something.

            “Laird, what are you looking for?”

            “I’m looking to see if you were fucking a guy while I was waiting in that disgusting hallway.”
            “I wasn’t working.  Today’s my day off.  Besides, Todd’s asleep in there, and I don’t turn unless I have a sitter.  You know that.”

            “Can I see him?” I ask.

            “Why?”

            I smile, and I open her fridge.  “Because I want to show him what 250 bucks looks like.”

            “No, you can’t see him,” and she shuts the fridge door on me.  “Besides, he’s sleeping, and double besides, what the fuck are you ever gonna show my kid that’s worth showing?”

            “Jesus fuck…lighten up a bit.”  Eggs, bacon, vegetables, butter…she has more food than I’ve seen in a week.

            “You seen Kevin?” she asks me.  I notice the way she shifts her weight when she stands, how her legs shift, and bend under the robe.  I take mental note of this particular image and I’m going to jerk off to it tonight.  “You hear anything from him?”

            “No, I have not seen Kevin.  No one has.”

“Yeah,” she says.

Trying to care, I say, “He’s not coming back.”

            “He’ll come back,” she says.  “He’s going to take care of me…and my baby.”

            “Right,” I say.  I say this knowing that Kevin is either in a jail cell in Tijuana or dead and buried in the desert somewhere.  Kevin is a bad man who’s done lots of bad things to bad people.  Some of those bad people want revenge.  Ain’t no way he’s coming back.  Not for me, and not for her. 

Not when he owes all that money to Getch.

            “I’m sure he’ll be home real soon.”

“Is that sarcasm I hear coming out of your mouth, Laird?” she asks, pulling some ice from the freezer and sucking on it and nibbling the clear cube.  I watch her tongue glide over the smooth, wet surface of the ice cube and I have to turn away into the living room.  Stacked on top of the TV, there are a lot of old CDs- Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, Del Shannon, and about a dozen cheaply made pornos.  I chuckle a little bit to myself.

“I have money, you know.  More than you think, anyway.”

            “Working overtime at the mill?” I ask, finger-leafing through titles like Asses in the Air 3, the cover of which promises ‘more ass to mouth action than the first two films combined!’  Leafing through titles like: Big, Black Dicks, and Tight, White Bitches, and I admire their adherence to the laws of titular punctuation.

            “You’re funny,” she says.

            “I think so.”

            She sucks on the ice cube and smirks at me.  “Well, I’ve been saving, so fuck you.”

            The apartment looks different than it has in a while.  The floors have been swept- maybe even mopped, I wonder.  I go into the kitchen, where she still is, and I notice that there aren’t any crumbs on the counter by the toaster, and my hand runs over the smooth wood finish of a brand new kitchen table.  Clean, and pristine, and real estate agent perfect as this shitty place can muster.

            “Things must be good,” I say, sort of absently to myself, thinking about the busted leg of my own kitchen table.  To her, though, I say, “Got a cigarette?”

            “Don’t you have smokes?” she asks, tossing the ice cube into the sink, fishing a pack from the pocket of her robe.

            “Yeah, but you know I only smoke the cheapies,” I tell her, popping my generic menthols out for a peek.  “I want one of yours,” I say, smiling.

            “Whatever,” she says, fishing out two smokes, and tossing one to me.  “Choke on it.”

            I light my cigarette with my scratched up, nearly empty Zippo, and she leans in and lets me light hers.  Her mouth around the base of the smoke, the deep, puffing breath, and her open robe…legs bare, and chest expanding with breath.

Another image to file away for a lonely night. 

“Stop fucking looking at me,” she says.

In the other room, the kid starts crying, and Pink flashes me this ‘He was sleeping soundly until you got here,’ look, and she goes into his room.  “Don’t fucking steal anything,” she yells back over her shoulder as the door opens and then shuts behind her.

I think about stealing her coffee table, I’m not going to lie.  But getting it all the way back to Queens seems…problematic.  I took a deep breath of tar and nicotine.  Newport.  A decent cigarette.  I suck in that Virginia tobacco flavor, and that cool menthol and I realize that I’m thirsty.  That I probably haven’t had anything to drink all day.

I open up Pink’s fridge, and there’s orange juice, but I think the acid would make my stomach bleed.  There’s milk, but I hate milk.  I take Bud Light, congratulating myself for cutting carbs.

I pop it open and suck back a few swallows, and it tastes good, even if it’s Bud.  I close the fridge, and a post-it catches my eye.  Just a little yellow slip of a post-it note with red block lettering.  “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY,” and beneath that there is a phone number –where the fuck is there a 954 area code?

Is that the Bronx?

In case of emergency.

“What are you doing?” Pink asks from behind me, her hands on her hips, and her robe hanging now all the way open.

“Getting a beer,” I say.  “Want one?”
            “No,” she says popping open the freezer and getting another ice cube.  “And what are you doing going through my fridge anyway.”

“Sorry,” I say, and I drink the beer anyway.  She runs the ice cube over her face, and I wonder why she doesn’t just buy an air conditioner.  “Who’s this?” I ask tapping the note on the fridge with my can of beer..

She’s startled for a second, and I think she’s going to say something else, but she says, “An old trick.  He helps me out sometimes.”

IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.

“Do I know him?” I ask, and I go to pull it from the fridge, but she snatches it away before I have the chance.

“Who are you, fucking Dick Tracy today?” she says.  “Mind your fucking business.”

We stand there for a moment, and it’s awkward.  The baby is quiet, and I drink my beer.  She puts the post-it in her pocket, and she looks right into my eyes, and I notice that she has the ice cube trailing down the ridged path between her tits.

“When was the last time you got fucked, Laird?”

I haven’t been laid in a considerable amount of time- she knows that.  Standing there, feeling suddenly as self-assured as a fourteen-year-old boy, I start to think that she can read my thoughts.

            In case of emergency.

            “Yesterday,” I say.

            “Fuckin’ liar.  You didn’t get laid yesterday.”

            “I did.”

            “By who?”

            “No one you’d know.”

            “I know everybody,” she says, sucking on the ice.

            “Well you don’t know this girl.”

            “I’ll bet I don’t, and by you saying I don’t know her means that you’re lying and you’re just not quick enough to come up with a name that doesn’t sound fake.”  She’s smiling.

            Fucking bitch.

            “Katie.”

            “Katie?” she says, a drop falling from the ice and rolling down between her tits.  “Katie’s a little girl’s name.  Where’d you pick this bitch up at, a nursery school?”

            I don’t say anything.

            “I’m horny, and Toddy will sleep right through the five seconds it’ll take me to make you come.”

            “You serious?”

            “Do I look serious?”  She presses the ice cube to her thigh, and it melts on contact.  She lightly tugs at the edge of her panties (she is wearing panties), and shows me her magenta pink pubic hair, shaved into a little triangle.  I reach out for her and she slaps my hand.

            “What the fuck?” I say, as I wind my hand back form her waist.

            “Take your ill-gotten two-fifty and get the fuck out of here.”

            She says this while adjusting her panties and wiping the condensation from her thigh with her robe.

            “And if you talk to Kevin, just if, then tell him to come by here when he gets into town.  I really miss him.”

            The door slams behind me and I start looking around the hallway.  Ugly wallpaper, and doors with peep-holes.  I start back down towards the elevator and I swear I can hear a faint meow.

11- A Thin Sliver of Blood

     Laird stood in the middle of his living room, and he took off all of his clothes.  He did this slowly, a ritual.  Unhooking every button, and unzipping every zipper with aching precision, and when he was done, he tossed his clothes to the floor, and they crumpled together on the ground, mixed together and forgotten.  The exception was his belt.  He tossed his belt down onto the ground next to him.  It had gotten colder in the night, and a draft came through the window.  He shivered, but he stood perfectly still, holding a little bag in his right hand.

            It was the kind of thing that an electric razor would be carried around in, black, fake leather, with a small, crooked zipper that sometimes got stuck about halfway through.  He set the satchel, his kit, on the ground, and he fell down onto his knees.

            Kevin, and the old Chrysler.  Hot Pink in that lonely, lit window, smoking an unfiltered cigarette, and bright blue and white lights burning up his eyes like tiny embers.  The sky in Queens filling up with angry clouds.

            He opened the bag, and he took out an envelope of carefully folded white paper, and he set it on the ground.

            The aspirin taste of cocaine, the feeling of flying from Xanax.

            He pulled a spoon from the bag, a spoon bent into a small handle, and a small, glass syringe.  He opened the envelope, and there was a pinch of brownish powder, and his heart was beating faster, and he wiped his hands on his legs, because he was sweating.  Laird ran his fingers through his hair, and he grabbed big fistfuls of it, and he looked up at the ceiling and he screamed as loud as he could.

            He poured the powder into the spoon, and he emptied the syringe on top of it, and he opened his lighter and he started to cook.

            Kevin.

            The two of them as children, and playing basketball outside of P.S. 232, and the letter on the door, and the feeling of rough, dirty hands on his body, a the sweat-grease of palms on his hips, and saliva and the grinding of course facial hair and dry skin, and fifths of cheap, dirty liquor.

            The solution sizzled into a bubbling, boiling cauldron, and Laird dropped the lighter to the floor.  He balled up a piece of cotton between his fingers, and he wadded it up real tight, and he thrust the needle into the cotton, and the bubbling, sizzling solution filled the syringe.

            Kevin holding a beer and laughing.  Are you fucked for the night?

            He reached out into nowhere, and he found his belt, and he looped it around his bare arm, and he held it tight with his teeth.  His heart sped up.  A vein stood out at the bend of his arm, asking.  He took the syringe in his hand, and he bled it, he pressed the plunger…just a bit.  Just enough to let out a thin spray of cloudy, white fluid.  Let the pressure out.  Let the air out.  Outside, behind the dark cloud cover, there was a full moon.

            A single bubble of oxygen caught in the bloodstream could cause a heart attack or a seizure.

            He pressed the needle against his arm, and he held his breath.  He closed his eyes.

            Tim Tim jumping on the trampoline, going higher and higher into the air with his tousled hair flaring up into the clouds.  Laird pressed into his flesh, and he pulled back just a little on the plunger.  A drop or two of blood swirled into the solution like a bad special effect, and he knew he was in the vein.

            Outside, there was a full moon, and New York was filled with vampires and werewolves, and there were dogs howling and people screaming, and people disappearing.  A little girl with an Italian name in a little pink dress was swallowed whole in Bensonhurst, and five young, Latino men raped a black woman repeatedly in Central Park while the police watched and cheered, and the sky filled with thunder and lighting.  On the West Side, there were car accidents and assaults, and a white woman with a rich husband smashing another woman in the face with a claw hammer, and the sky opened up with a giant thunder clap, and there were people sitting in the streets naked in the rain, and covered in blood, and Laird could see everything.

            He could see…everything, and then nothing but black.

10- Snow Cones in the Bronx

“They say,” I say to Pink, wiping ice from my chin, “that this is the best snow cone place in the entire city.

“I don’t think the best of anything is in the Bronx, Laird.”

“Well, that’s what Tim Tim said.”

She ran her tongue slowly over blue syrup-flavored ice.  “I’m not sure exactly how sugar syrup and ice can taste any different someplace else.”

She and I were walking past the bars and gift shops around the Stadium, the roar of a Yankees-Indians game going on behind us, when she said to me, kind of out of nowhere: “I’m not going to fuck you, Laird.”

            “Huh?” I asked.  “I didn’t say any…who said anything about fucking?”

            She was wearing a halter top and pink lycra mini-skirt.  She was looking good.

            “The eyes.  I can see it in your eyes.”  Her mouth was all blue from ice and syrup.  “You’ve looked at my ass at least five times this block- and you’ve been staring at my tits all fucking day.”

            “Your tits aren’t even that great.”  Her tits are fantastic.

            “This isn’t dinner or coffee or a drink or anything like that, you fucking dirt bag.  I’m not going to fuck you.”

            My arm was itching.  I stayed sober all day for this.  Well, mostly sober.  A little Xanax, a few sugar packets and some Bufferin because I had a headache.  I looked up and around, and there were people sitting on stoops and sitting by their windows and some of them were watching us pass.  I needed a bath.  I ran my hand through my greasy hair.

          “I think I hate the Bronx,” she said.  “I think we’re the only white people on this block.  And I hate baseball.”

            “We could go back to my place,” I said.

            “I could throw up.”

            “Why?”

            “Laird- this is not a date.  If I fuck you, you’ll love me, because that’s what you’re all about.”  She licked the snow-cone and laughed at me.  “You want love just like all the men in this town, and remember that I know a lot of them in a fairly intimate way.  And that’s just shit.  Love is…” she looked up at the sky- cloudy, gray.  “…disappointing.  I don’t see the point of getting all worked up about love when it’s just the right synapses firing in your brain, the release of the right neuro-chemicals telling you that this person you’re with is so fucking great.”

            “You’re a hooker,” I said.  “Sex and love aren’t the same thing, doll.”

            “Fuck you,” she said, calm, and then, “No two people are any different, and if you were in love with me, it’ll just be some kind of scam.”  She had bright magenta hair and it was cut really short and it was waving around as she talked.  “I love my kid.  I fuck for money.  Fucking and love aren’t the same thing, but for you, and for most of these assholes I see every day, it’s all the same thing.”

            “What if we were the last two people on Earth?” I asked.  A Korean woman standing in the doorway of a little grocery looked at me as if I was from another planet and she said something to a little boy at her side in Korean.  Maybe she was Chinese.

            “Are we it, or have other people survived as killer mutants or some shit?”
            “Doesn’t matter,” I said.

            “I’d rather fuck the killer mutants.  They’d just want sex, and maybe they’d let me live if I gave it to them.  Shit, isn’t that what my life is right now?”

            “So you’d rather cross-breed killer post-apocalyptic mutant babies than suck my dick?”

            “I’d rather lick the underside of a ’72 Gremlin with a bad transmission than suck that disease-ridden thing you’ve got dangling between your legs.”

            She was a very sweet girl. Sweet as a Snow Cone in the Bronx.