Authors: Jeremy Robert Johnson
No response. Just a dry shuffle indicating he’d noticed the earthworms.
“Go get ’em, Deck. Fuck ’em up.”
The earthworms died quietly, as always. Bisected, gut trailing, trying to wriggle away from the maw. Soon enough their friends would be filtering through their turtle-rendered remains.
I flipped on all the lights in the apartment. Too bright. Drank that coffee too fast. Cracked a twenty-two of stout to counter-balance—I rode the chemical teeter-totter roughshod, all day. I assumed the ride was over when I was asleep, but I often woke to soaked sheets and a sore jaw which said otherwise.
Digging in my bedroom closet yielded a thin collection of suit jackets, dress shirts and pit-stained undershirts, a few pairs of crumpled jeans, and external hard drives marked “Turtle Movies,” “Family Pics,” “Kung Fu,” and “Big Booty Only Vol. 1.”
The kitchen was even more spare—a randomized collection of Tupperware, plastic plates, and mismatched utensils. All the same stuff I’d looted from my parents’ house when I got my first apartment over a decade ago. Flashlight search under the fridge and stove revealed dried old Choco Loops and uncooked macaroni. When I was dating someone, it was very much about going to restaurants and staying at her place whenever possible. I wasn’t a hoarder, but I knew my place gave off a Feral Child Hidey Hole vibe.
Foyer closet—one pea coat, one snow jacket, three stolen bowling balls with other people’s initials engraved. Oh, and under a pair of winter gloves, my prized “Big Booty Only Vol. 3” hard drive—such a glorious rediscovery that for a moment I almost forgot my search for the phone.
Under the coffee table? Bupkus. Behind the entertainment center? Some kind of dust bunny civilization creating grand structures from dander.
Hit the streets? Head to Hungarian’s old haunts?
I was hoping to make a call first. Verify he was still the right guy. Apologize profusely. Try to defuse any future stabbing urges. Avoiding answering the question, “What is a blood moustache?” seemed paramount.
Frustration made my apartment feel smaller, the air more reptile-tainted.
Maybe it’s time to cool down? Are you sure this is the right move, pal? Have another beer. Turn on the television. Check your accounts. Let Deckard out for a roam. Maybe you just need a relaxing weekend. Sleep on it.
That voice. Always preaching reason and paths of least resistance. The gear pin locking me in place.
No. I looked at myself in the mirror above my entertainment center. Bloodshot eyes, hunched back, neck tie still in place. Decades would pass—an ever-faster whirlwind of free donuts and supplications and the gradual crushing of whatever the fuck I was supposed to be and night after night I’d sleep on it until one day I woke up in Willy Loman territory with an elderly turtle as my only heir.
“Deckard, I’ve got to head out for a while. Keep this spot on lockdown, okay?”
No response.
I grabbed a can of Hi-Pepper Bear Spray—a vestige from the week after I read
Walden
and decided I’d redefine myself as a woodsman—stashed on top of my fridge. It was the closest thing I had to a weapon, a provisional measure in the event Hungarian decided I was still persona non grata.
I turned on Deckard’s heat lamp and dropped in some TetraVit flakes for him. He stared straight at the flat rock corner of his enclosure where half a worm was trying to find purchase on a glass wall. The gutted worm flopped toward me, as if to say, “Hey, buddy, can you help me out of here? I think the big guy over there’s going to eat me.”
But I knew his situation was even worse. Deckard was full. The half-worm flopping himself to a slow death was the night’s prime time entertainment in turtle town.
I know it’s irrational to anthropomorphize a feeder worm, but it was an ugly way to end. My heart went out to that worm chunk like he was an elderly woman who had to stop for walker oxygen every third step. I reached in to crush the guy with my fingers. Deckard hissed. I snapped back to the now.
I drained my stout, threw on my pea coat and left my beautiful brute of a turtle to revel in his homemade snuff show.
The moment your car reaches 45
th
Street, you lock your doors. Even a tourist who accidentally strays into the red zone can feel it in their bones. This is not a safe place.
Since 45
th
was a major thoroughfare the city council pushed to have it rechristened “The Street of Flowers” and devoted taxpayer money to developing curb planters and medians full of roses and lilies.
It took the residents of 45
th
exactly ten hours after ribbon cutting to strip and re-sell the landscaping. Medians became dealer/whore islands, curb planters became impromptu biohazard bins blooming with needles.
I had walked to 45
th
. I had no car doors to lock in protection, and a pocket full of anti-bear spray so old I wasn’t even sure it would work. My jacket and tie sold me as square, but it also said I was looking to buy. My face wasn’t busted open and my hands weren’t shaking, so the dealers and pros knew it was likely I hadn’t been robbed yet. That made me a mark.
I wasn’t close enough to the chaos yet to make a venture at Hungarian’s location. The stretch of 45
th
closest to my apartment was refreshingly low on tweekers. The drug trade here was more rigidly enforced, and the arbitrary shitbird behavior of the Hex clientele brought too much attention and risk. If you were moving Hex here, you did it as a tangential, on the low and at great danger. The Kept Squad played this territory tight, and the rumor-mill put them at the center of last year’s anti-Hex art installation: One dealer, one tweeker, barbed-wire bound at the torso, eyes plucked, arms slashed, left to bleed out on an intersection roundabout. This wasn’t the kind of art open to subjective interpretations. Hex heads got the message. I’d have eight blocks or so to walk before I had a shot at finding my guy.
The Kept Squad blocks reminded me of the office. Plenty of slow/sad grinds. Plenty of getting by. But Fire-Day Friday down here was far more likely to put you in the ground.
I clutched my bear spray tighter, felt nostalgia for the quiet warmth of my apartment.
In my twenties, slumming down here had a fun edge to it. That kind of edge gets sanded right the fuck off the first time someone puts a gun to your head and says, “Your wallet. Now. No joke.”
Shit—I’d kept my wallet on me. Car and house keys, too, when I could have just key-coded my way back in when I got home. I was forgetting the old protocols: Bring nothing you don’t want stolen. Dress down. Walk fast. Head aimed at the pavement three feet in front of you. Ignore everything. Hear something, shrug it off. See something, shrug it off. Eye contact is a liability unless you suddenly need to sell yourself as crazy (and then you better be ready to fill that bill of sale in an ugly way). Quiet customers get served first. Empathizing with hunger is not the same thing as living inside of it. Do not make assumptions. Don’t laugh, even if it seems okay—that flash of bared teeth reads SUBMISSION.
This wasn’t anything I was proud of knowing. These were lessons I learned by being stupid and lucky and knowing that same luck runs out.
I was out here on a series of questionable assumptions: That Hungarian was still in the Hex game, that he was extant at all, that he’d be willing to extend his clientele list to include a man he’d last sent away bleeding. I heard alleyway sounds, the kind of muffled, fleshy smacks which could only be producing a variety of traumas. A far-too-young tranny pro dressed in an American Flag bikini and faux fur coat called out “Kirby on the block,” which I assumed triggered cop watch. Had it been so long? Was I now reading lawman instead of twenty-something fuck-up? Maybe my hints of gray hair popped in the streetlight.
I picked up my pace. I was already drawing too much attention.
Another block, a slight shift in demographic. Gutter punk kids spending the day’s spare change getting blasted. Gassing hard like they had auxiliary brains on back-up. I’d tried gassing once—face locked inside a gas mask with spray paint-soaked filters—and got a concussion and a three day headache for my interest. Never again. I’d learned to apply my bank brain to drugs, running a cost/benefit analysis, determining return on investment. Gassing paid zero dividends next to something as transformative as Hex.
Next block, and I knew I was headed the right direction. More punks, two of them pointing at a friend who was punching himself in the groin and shouting, “This is the steel forged in Valhalla!” He ran over to a burn barrel and started baboon humping. “I will impregnate the Earth’s core!” His buddies were dying, tears from laughing.
They spotted me watching. I was rusty. I blew it. I smiled. Maybe camaraderie would play?
“Whatchu creepin’ on, faggot?” Guy with a bullring in his nose pulled a hammer from his back pocket.
I decided to keep my teeth. Head down. Damn near running. Two more blocks and I heard the call.
“Toppers. Benzos. Twoferfiddy over here.”
Normally I would have a pre-set amount of cash ready and folded for fast hand-off. This time I was going to have to pull my wallet. Perhaps I should have just worn an LED-wired jacket flashing, “Rob me.”
I scanned the street, found my guy. Got the single nod in response.
I moved toward him slowly, remembering the pro pegging me for a cop, remembering Deckard hissing. I stepped close enough for him to speak. Everything was a delicate ritual.
“Fuck you need, Kirby?”
Shit, I was blowing it without opening my mouth, and copping from this guy would be so much easier than dealing with Hungarian. I decided on eye contact, so he could read my face. He needed to see real exhaustion with a side of desperation. He squinted, taking me in with all-black eyes. Looked about twice my size, a Viking amount of man. Maybe ten years my younger and he’d had his irises removed. Head shaved and tattooed. Beard like a lumberjack soup trap. A slice of his septum missing to make his nose more of a nozzle. The standard freak show chic bullshit which had beset the generation after mine thanks to a string of wildly successful reality shows centering on competitive body modification.
I’d had fun watching
Manual Mutants
and
Oddfellas
when they first started, but then
The League of Zeroes
came along and made things too grotesque. They lost me when Rectal Rachelle died on the table during her ass-neck implant surgery. She was just a kid, barely eighteen. How many assholes did she need for us to love her? Tough not to feel complicit in her death. I hadn’t watched in months.
Still, I’d read an episode recap during lunch that day. I knew enough to take a calculated risk.
“You watch
League of Zeroes
last night?”
Cue a heartfelt can-you-believe-this-motherfucker snort. “Man, that’s
my
business. What’s yours, Kirby?”
“I just…I mean, I thought it was kind of lame how they kicked AsparaGus out of the Big Top.”
“Yeah, well, Gus was always a third rate SaladMan knock-off. I wouldn’t have been able to live with that smell, either, but…listen, man, you think ’cause we watch the same show that I don’t see your wallet bulging out of your pocket? Maybe some pepper spray on you, too? How many of your buddies are watching us right now?”
“None. I…”
“Basically the only thing that would make you a worse undercover would be a moustache. Maybe a badge glued to your forehead.”
“Man, I’m not a cop. I swear. I have a project I’m working on and I need a boost. Just a little bit of Hex to help me see things straight.”
“Sure, buddy. Move the fuck on.” A shift in his posture. A friend of his I hadn’t noticed stepped forward from the shadows.
Shit. I played the only card I had left.
“I used to buy from Hungarian Minor.”
His eyebrows went up. The name registered.
“Oh, did you now, Kirby? You hear that, Port. This guy says he knows Ol’ Hungo.”
His buddy stepped back into his preferred shadow. His voice came from the darkness, the slightest tint of fear to it. “That the blood moustache guy?”
“Yup, that’s him. Motherfucker is crazy. I heard that right before he disappeared he’d moved down into the fucking sewers. Like camping out. He kept telling everybody that they had to move to the conduits. ‘Only the conduits are safe.’”
Disappeared?
Hungarian was gone and this guy had already written me off. Goddamn. This was a blowout. I couldn’t even execute bad ideas properly.
My face dropped, the saddest attendee of a one-man pity party. Time to head back to the bank. Time to buy a gun and call it a life. But then Deckard would be alone, all alone. My name would become a cowboy punch line for a week before being forgotten. Fuck.
And the look on my face had finally reached Desperation Point. No cop could feign this kind of pain at hearing about the disappearance of a jacked-up Hex dealer.
The big bearded guy’s lips pressed together tight and his eyebrows crunched down. He was making a decision.
“Listen, pal. If you used to buy from Hungo then you probably have some kind of proof.”
Yes—I jumped. “Yeah, he was about my height. Long black hair. He was missing a couple of fingers on his left hand. Usually had a belt with two or three knives on the thing. He…”
“No, pal.” His patience wearing already. “I’m saying that if you used to get the good shit from Hungo, then you probably have some tweeker tracks.”
“Oh, well, I always did the pills. I never shot or…”
“What about your dick?”
“What?”
“Your dick. Your junk.”
He was smiling now. Playing a game. I could feel his buddy Port smiling from his outpost. They were still fucking with me. This was a preamble to a robbery, them regaining compensation for time lost. Watching half a worm chase escape.
He continued. “What I’m saying is that most guys who buy Silvertops end up mistaking their junk for an enemy at some point.”
And I laughed, because he was telling the truth and because the scenario was just past the point where even the most strident FUCK IT! WHY NOT? would normally carry me and yet I could feel something insane about to happen. And it felt good.