The Front of the Freeway (3 page)

“Guess what, Tony,” Francie chirps from Pauly’s blue, sofa chair lap. “Me and Pauly are pregnant!”

“What, again?” Pauly’s a grimace behind his beaming, twittering bride. “Damn, Pauly, isn’t this like your fifteenth kid?”

“Shut the fuck up, Tony.”

“Maybe you should wrap it the fuck up, Pauly!”

What’s tomorrow, Wednesday? I hate Wednesdays. The dishes are one thing, but an undersized Ecuadorian barking in your ear at six in the morning has its own place in hell.

“Where’ve you been, Tony? We missed you.”

Jess is rubbing Tony’s shoulders, now, laughing gently through the fog, her painted nails flashing like rubies around his neck and on his chest. He leans back and whispers across her cheek. She laughs again, softer this time from the back of her throat, gently biting at her bottom lip as her grip tightens around his shoulders.

“You work with Tony?” Francie offers, chin perched delicately on her fist, nose curled to a perfectly hooked beak.

“Yeah, we work at the same place.” Mellissa leans forward and plucks five clear shot glasses out from under the table, still streaked and beaded with the honey-yellow sweat of five swallowed whiskey shots. Pauly stretches behind the sofa and passes her a half-empty plastic bottle and she carefully drowns the glasses with the thin blonde syrup, sliding them around the table on the points of her fingers. “You used to work with him or something, Pauly?”

“Nah, me and Tony have known each other a real long time,” Pauly starts, shifting Francie from one bulging, blue knee to the other as he reaches for a glass. “We don’t work together, though. I’m a cop.”

“That’s right, ‘protect and serve,’” Francie giggles, proudly tracing an imaginary badge in the center of his sagging blue sweatshirt. Another cop, another empty plastic bottle. There’s no History Channel, but he’s up to the same trick, drowning the monotony of the day with one pale-gold toxic shot after another. And I get it, washing away in the night the agonizing repetition of the day, but for my father, it’s drowning him, too. He was soaking in it when my mother left, and he’s sinking even faster now, and the biting stench of the fermented fumes only turns my stomach. But who can blame him? It’s his escape, his quiet moment outside the insanity of routine, and I wouldn’t mind slipping out myself, if only for the night. And besides, I followed Tony this far from Romeo’s walls, and into the charming gloom of Pauly’s apartment, I’m suddenly eager to see how far from that cell he can take me.

Melissa slides out of her chair and eases softly next to me on the couch, and I do my best not to notice the stiff cuff of a lime green bra rounding over the top of her shirt as she hands me a glass. With a soft clink and a long nod, I empty the cup into my mouth as my lips and throat numb with the dry, lingering burn of the alcohol. After a few nauseous seconds pushing whiskey vapor through my nose, the numbness sets into my arms and legs, too, the weight of Jafar’s smoke washing through my blood, warping my vision. In the smiling haze filling Pauly’s apartment I’m starting to forget about working tomorrow or facing my father at home. Rodrigo, the kitchen, my house—they’re all slipping quietly into the dense, shifting cloud as the chemicals set in and the anxious, squirming knot in my stomach slowly unwinds.

“‘Protect and serve,’” Tony mocks from across the table, twisting his face away from Jess’s fingers gently tracing his pointed jaw. “You know my problem with cops? You guys always do what you’re told. You always say, ‘sorry, man, just doing my job’ because you have a lieutenant to answer to, and the lieutenant has a captain, and even the captain has some asshole breathing down his neck.” Francie rolls her eyes, sighing loudly as Pauly takes a patient drag from the mouth of the plastic bottle, agitated bubbles gushing from his lips into the double-distilled gasoline. “You’re not even people, you’re Robocops. No faces, just helmets and shades. Look at your badge, man, you’re a number, and your boss is protecting and serving himself. That’s the whole joke, and they got the punch line pinned to your jackets.”

“We all have our assholes. We all have our bosses,” Pauly coughs, wincing against the honeyed burn still glistening on his lips. “But we all have to get paid, too.” Tony’s squinting, irritated scowl creases to a narrow, satisfied grin as he slides a Ziploc square bulging with dried green clover off the table between two fingers.

“Yes we do, but that doesn’t mean we have to be machines. Self-employment,” he gloats, gingerly shaking the plastic stamp next to his cheek. “The only asshole I have to answer to is me.”

“Both of you shut up, we’re supposed to be relaxing, and I don’t want to hear about work,” Francie snaps, rotating Jafar with an outstretched finger until I’m staring straight down the eye of a gnarled glass tail. A second later, Melissa’s feeding the snake the hot, orange flame of a short Bic lighter as I swallow smoke, the world around Jafar tilting and bending in the pale lamplight. I lean back to push the fog from my lungs, but it catches in my throat and fires out in a fit of dry, heaving coughs, thin gusts of cloud spitting from my mouth with every sharp spasm. Melissa laughs lightly beside me, a soft, distant echo like a dream, and as the last breaths of smoke break from my lips every tense, nervous tick goes with them, lost in the swirling, sifting mist of Pauly’s living room.

Francie’s off of the couch, now, swaying slowly with the rolling, pounding bass in front Pauly, her hips tracing long, lingering rings in the drifting smoke. Pauly smirks knowingly and pulls another folded, paper wad from his sweats, sarcastically flicking twenty-dollar bills at her one after another that trickle down her body and form a loose green ring around her naked feet. Carefully, he slides a massive hand across the small of her back and draws her across his lap, and for a moment I can’t help a tinge of jealousy. Not because of her, but because of all this. I can’t see tomorrow through the sweet, hanging fog, and there’s a freedom in that. I’ve never seen a stack of bills like the one Pauly handed Tony, either, and there’s freedom in that, too.

And then there’s a hand on my leg. A coconut-buttered palm cupping my knee, and a pretty smile budding right next to me.

“So,” she says, quick like poetry. “How do you know Tony?” Could there be freedom in this, too?

“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: freedom for slave owners.”

—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Whir. Click. Punch.

My rag fist massages the grease out of a hundred plastic discs, swollen knuckles gushing antiseptic froth. There’s no window in this cell, just the meager pulse of sunlight bouncing in from the kitchen sticking to the yellowed stone walls.

7:00.

It’s dim in the morning, enough that no one should be able to tell I’m wearing the same soap-stained clothes from yesterday, enough that no one should be able to see the branching red veins crawling over the whites of my eyes, but no one’s looking back here, anyway. The smoke must still be lingering somewhere in my chest, seeping into my blood, drifting through my skull, because in the pale breaths of light, the dishes all wash together, a tired montage of grease and soap, crumbs and plastic. Soap, scrub, rinse. Tony’s laugh erupts from the register and echoes through the kitchen, a sudden brick of human expression against the mechanical drone of running water and rattling pans. How does he do it? That smile—that sprawling, sideways smirk—it never fades. It was there at 5:30 this morning, beaming over me from the foot of Melissa’s stiff, narrow mattress, leading me in hushed steps across the lightless room and past two soft, naked backs gently rising and falling in the plush blue carpet like a pair of sinking bodies. It was there last night, flashing in and out of view from behind the last bottle of rum, and it was the last glance of Tony’s face before it disappeared behind a black silk curtain of Jess’s hair.

“
Oye, cabrón,
we need the pans for the pizza oven,
vamos
!” Pizza pans, saucepans, salad bowls, metal sinks—life here is all framed in cold plastic faces and hard metal edges. But nothing at Pauly’s is so rigid, so determined. It’s beautifully impermanent; the high, the buzz, the soft warmth of Melissa’s lips branded to my neck, still lingering like a sunburn. That will fade, too, it all will. The sudden rushes of blood and chemicals, the fleeting bouts of ecstasy, they’re not meant to last. But I found something in that apartment I haven’t felt in two years in this kitchen: a pulse.

And there’s something else I found with Tony last night that I never could at Romeo’s. $150 an ounce, two ounces a night. If we start on Monday, I’ve beat next week’s paycheck by Tuesday, and if Romeo doesn’t like it, tough, because by Wednesday I can finally afford a pair of shoes that don’t hiccup pink suds with every step.

2:00. Lunch is another soggy egg sandwich I was supposed to pay for.

We.
Tony said it first, I think, right before we stumbled down the hall behind the girls in a haze of smoke and perfume. “This is an investment,” he told me, sliding a clover green Ziploc baggie to me across Pauly’s low glass table. “I’m investing in you.”

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Do whatever the fuck you want with it, JT. Smoke it, eat it, I don’t care. But if you’re smart, you’ll meet Martín in the cooler tomorrow during lunch, and you’ll bring that with you.”

2:15. The heavy iron door cracks open, and a long sliver of light cuts the synthetic fog. Martín scurries through the gap and slams the door behind him, pausing for a moment as if to make sure no one had snuck in behind him. He checks the corners first, anxiously looking for Tony, but after a few nervous glances around the freezer, he scuttles through the frozen shadows up to me, just behind a box of celery and a few tubs of Balsamic vinegar. Without a word, I pluck the Ziploc pouch from my jeans pocket, exchanging a smooth plastic square for a folded paper wad under the whipping, roaring blades of the cooler-fan. $75, easy as that.

“I’m no dealer, Tony,” I told him. “You know that.”

“No you’re not, my man, and neither am I,” he said, breaking the small plastic head off of a sleek glass bottle. “But you and me, we’re cellmates. We’re in the same fucking prison. You want out, I know you do, because we both know there’s got to be something better out there than this. We just have to figure out how to get there.”

Soap, scrub, rinse.

It’s 4:30 and I’m staring right back into the big, ticking eye above me, the mechanical god bolted to Romeo’s skeleton. An hour and a half left, not a second earlier. Those are the rules. They’re Romeo’s rules, and they’re my father’s rules, and they’re all written in black and white, etched in stone as thick as the molding walls around me, but in the shadows misdemeanors are starting to fade to grey. As far as I can tell, Jafar hasn’t bitten a soul, and Pauly’s certified LAPD. I’m imagining a new set of rules that will write me right out of here, and they’re nothing that Rodrigo or my father would be proud of.

But maybe it’s like Tony said. Maybe the only way out of this is down, down and out through the bottom.

“The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.”

—H.L. Mencken

I should break it.

It’s 6:00 and I’m standing at attention in front of the punch clock, a stiff, paper timecard folded between my fingers at my side. I should squeeze my pruned, soap-splintered knuckles into a fist and throw it right through that perfect glass face. I should shatter every smirking, ticking tooth. I should tear the box off the wall, slam it into the concrete, and drive my foot through its winding, grinding, brass skeleton on my way out the door. Or maybe I should wake up.

“Alright, Hulian, see you tomorrow,
gringo
!” Rodrigo slaps my back affectionately and nearly smashes my nose into the clock, snatching his jacket from a hook near the back door as he disappears into the parking lot. I glare after him and jam my timecard into the machine’s open skull, tetchily prodding its plastic brain and ramming the oversized bookmark back into a wooden file drawer on the wall. I can always quit tomorrow.

Between Romeo’s on 12th Street and the bus stop on 9th, there are three liquor stores, two Lavenderías, and one squat plaster shoebox with a red tile roof that sells the worst 99 cent tacos in Southern California. If I’m hungry, I can wait ten minutes for a quietly hostile sixteen-year-old Latino to try his best to ignore me while setting out a tray of cold leftover chicken. If I’m patient, I can wait thirty minutes on the bus for my father to do the same. Today, I decide to save the dollar.

As I pass the stucco-wrapped kitchen, the warm taste of popping grease and tomato-soaked rice dripping down from the slanted clay roof onto the sidewalk in front, the soft, distant chime of bells catches the wind and washes faintly over the street behind me. I hardly notice it at first, hands buried in my pockets, intently reconsidering a damp tortilla wrapped around a handful of chicken and oil, but as I cross 11th Street, the ringing grows louder, a swelling, jingling nursery rhyme bouncing up Vermont. Before I walk another block, the tinkling of electronic xylophones is on me, a howling kindergarten chorus whining from the road, and as I turn to the street, there, hanging out the long side-window of a white box ice-cream truck, is Tony, a wide hooked grin beaming under a tall paper crown.

“Hey, dishwasher! You hungry?” The truck swings sharply to the curb, the towering square body rocking to a halt, Tony swaying along inside. He leans halfway out the open, rectangular cut in the paneled frame and offers me an outstretched hand, exchanging a short, palmed greeting and an amused, unsettled stare.

“You stole an ice-cream truck?” Tony reels in the window and does his best to look hurt, eyebrows pinched to an indignant arch on his forehead.