Enhanced

by Cosca, Paul

  I know that, years and years later, there are some folks who make a big stink about that record. The say that I didn’t really earn it. They say it was the virus, not me. But that’s, pardon my French here, but that’s horseshit. You could get the biggest, strongest person in the whole damn world...but if he can’t hit a baseball, he’s no good. I could put the bat on the ball, and that’s what matters. They can put an asterisk on that if they want to. But the record on my hat right here? No room for an asterisk there.

  September 9th, 1999

  I’ve had a very long check-in process to meet my interview subject for today. My car was inspected before I was allowed in the parking lot. I was inspected before I boarded the shuttle bus that took me through the second gate. I had to pass through a metal detector to get in the first building, sign in, then get sniffed by a dog before I could go in the next building (I’ve never been a fan of big dogs). Finally, almost two hours after pulling in, I find myself in the visiting room.

  The visiting room in White Sands Penitentiary is different than in other prisons. Here, there are no face-to-face visits whatsoever, even for the most well-behaved inmates. I am able to purchase an ice cream bar and a soda (as I’d agreed in the letters we’d sent beforehand) and give them to a guard to be set up on the other side of the thick glass that will separate us. White Sands Penitentiary is home to every Enhanced inmate in the nation, and they take no chances here.

  Jared Mark Laramie is led in by a guard, his black jumpsuit rolled up at the sleeves and pant legs. For good reason too, because if the air conditioning is working in here, I certainly can’t tell. The baking summer heat seems to pour in through every window and through the roof itself.

  Jared gives me a nod, then digs into the ice cream sandwich, which is quickly melting. He nods at the ice cream.

  JARED: That’s good, man. Damn. You get used to simple shit like ice cream when you’re out there, but in here it can be a long fuckin’ time before you see a good ice cream sandwich. This soda mine?

  I tell him it is. He grins and pops it open, guzzling at least half the can at once, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

  Shit, bro. That is awesome. I used to get people comin’ here to visit once and awhile, but that shit dries up pretty quick. Nobody wants to come all the way to fuckin’ Utah. I still get letters and shit. But I’m a long way from home, man. Nobody wants to drive out here to see my ass.

  So all this is goin’ in a book, right? That’s cool. I don’t read much, but I’d buy a book if I was in it. But...I know the kind of shit you wanna know isn’t gonna make me look too good, so that kinda sucks. But I guess the good thing is that nobody I know does much reading either, so it won’t matter too much.

  I’ve been in and out of jail most my life, I guess. I got busted the first time when I was thirteen. And man, I’ve seen some crazy shit in prison, but nothing as brutal as when I went to juvie. You want to fuck up a kid forever, just stick him in juvie for a while. I got busted for stealing tapes, like, music. I was only supposed to be there for a night, but my folks didn’t pick me up, so I ended up there for a week. On my second or third night I watched one big kid rape another little kid and then slit his throat. That’s some brutal shit, man. That was like being in fuckin’ Desert Storm or something.

  Okay, okay. This ain’t my fuckin’ life story or anything. Anyway, I got here this time two years ago, and I got another twenty-three years as part of my plea. I first got here when I was twenty-two. Got caught boosting a car and got three years for it. Not too bad, ‘cause it was in minimum security. You hear some scary shit about White Sands, but minsec really isn’t too bad. But you want to make sure not to fuck up, because ad seg here seriously sucks.

  Anyway, I was doing my first stint here and I met a few guys who were in the same kind of situation. All busted for petty shit like theft, all just doing a few years. And we started thinking...we all kept on getting busted when trying to pull shit off on our own. And some of us even had actual Enhancements and shit. Why not join up and see what we can do?

  By the time I got out, there were already four guys who’d met up, down in Texas. I wanted to just get started, but they wanted to wait. So we hung around for another year and a couple more guys joined up.

  It’s kind of funny. We hung around for a year, all living together in a

  big house. We all took on odd jobs to pay the rent. I guess if we were better guys, we could have just kept on doing that. But man, that honest shit is boring. Finally, I got fed up paintin’ houses and shit.

  We picked up a couple trucks and campers to get around in. Cops have a hell of a time finding you when you don’t have a home, you know? We drove around, pulling little jobs here and there. At first it was mostly liquor stores. We’d cover the plates and pull up late at night. One of the guys on our crew had crazy strong fingers. He could climb like a fuckin’ monkey. He’d hop right up to the roof of a place, then either dive in the vents or just cut a hole in the roof and let us in the front door. We’d get a little money, but mostly it was just booze and food. And hell, what else do you really need?

  Some of the guys…well one guy, he wanted to step things up. He wanted to try knocking over an armored car. So we rolled into Tucson and looked up armored cars in the yellow pages. Maybe that sounds a little simple, but it’s what we did. We scoped out one of the places and waited. A couple days later, one of those big trucks rolled out and headed for the highway and we followed it as it went around.

  We drove for about an hour and passed a bottle around to settle our nerves. One of the campers pulled in front of the truck and started to slow down a little, which I think made the guys in the armored car nervous. But they never got the chance to do anything, because the door at the back of the camper popped open and a guy on our crew named Tallahassee jumped out and crashed right through the windshield of the armored car. He was lucky he didn’t get himself killed right there, which probably would have been better for everyone. But it was still pretty badass to watch.

  Shit went off the rails pretty quick, though. We had a few guns we’d boosted from a pawn shop, and we made the guards open the back of the truck. I guess you see a few movies and whatever and you figure you’ll open up an armored car and see it full of cash. But there was only about 8000

  bucks back there. Then, I figured we were just going to tie ‘em up, but Tallahassee…man. He made ‘em get in the truck, then he shot ‘em both and locked it up. We got back in the campers and drove. Drove all the way to New Mexico before we stopped and sorted out all the shit that went down.

  I really wasn’t comfortable with all that. I know I was charged with a bunch of murders this time around, but I’m a thief. I don’t mind stealing shit, but I got a problem with hurting people. Like, physically. I really wanted to just back out, but Tallahassee said we were already in too deep, and what we needed was to get enough money together to for all of us to get out of the country. And while I didn’t like the way he handled shit, I thought the plan made sense.

  Over the next two months we took down another six armored cars all over the Southwest. Gotta keep moving around so you don’t get caught. We ended up with like 30,000 bucks, and since there were only eight of us, I figured that was enough cash to get away. But Tallahassee said we were gonna need at least ten grand each to get out. And by that point, whatever Tallahassee said, we did.

  He figured what we really needed to do was pull a bank job. The only guy on our crew who’d done one was a little guy named Gomes, and that’s how he ended up in White Sands in the first place. It wasn’t a good sign. But Tallahassee figured we could do a better job together. And if we did it right, this could be our last job. All we had to do was break into a bank vault. Made sense to me. I guess.

  We rolled up north to Pueblo, Colorado. One of the guys on our crew, I think his name was Terry, he grew up there and knew a little bit about it all. We found a bank on the outskirts of town that looked like it did some business. You don’t want to hit a major one, since th
ere might be security there, ya know? We figured the little bank would be pretty lax on security. I was really hoping we’d be able to pull it off without violence, but one look at

  Tallahassee told me that wasn’t gonna happen.

  We all had guns. I had a big shotgun, some of the guys had rifles, and Tallahassee had two glocks. He kept on loading and unloading ‘em. Checking ‘em. Made me real nervous.

  We walked in and Tallahassee took the lead. There wasn’t no guards or anything. Not like in the movies. Tallahassee picked up one guy, cause he was strong like a goddamn bull or somethin’, and threw him across the room. I’m pretty sure that guy died when he hit the wall. And right there, that was already way more wrong than this whole thing needed to be.

  He pulled out those glocks and told everyone to hit the floor, then popped the nearest bank teller right in the face. I was looking at the rest of the crew, and I felt like we were all thinking the same thing. Tallahassee wasn’t a thief. He was fuckin’ psychopath. He was also one dumb mother fucker, because it hit me as he was screaming at some teller about finding the vault...this was a tiny little bank. Where the fuck were they gonna keep a vault?

  The teller he was screaming at told him they only had a safe, so Tallahassee hit him and dragged him over to the safe to open it, and told me to come over and guard the last teller. I didn’t want to...but I went over and pointed my gun at her. She was laying next to the guy that Tallahassee shot, and she was laying in a big pool of blood. She was real pretty, but she had brain and shit all over her. In her hair. And then I saw she was pregnant. Man...what the fuck were we doing? I looked at the rest of the crew and realized what needed to be done.

  I was only a few feet away from him, but I called his name. I said “Hey, Tallahassee!” and when he turned, I blew his head right off his fuckin’ shoulders. Goddamn thing practically exploded. Before that, I hadn’t never killed anyone. But he was a psycho, so I don’t feel too bad about it. But just because I’m not a killer doesn’t mean I’m some great guy. We’d already gone

  this far, I figured we might as well get the safe open. I asked the girl on the ground if she knew the combination, and she did, so I picked her up and took her to the safe. But I didn’t hit her or nothin’. She was just as ready for this shit to be over as we were. I grabbed up the money and we took off. Drove all day and all night, too. Finally stopped at a lake so we could wash up.

  When we finally took stock, we ended up with about 42,000 bucks. That seems like a lot, but there were seven of us, so we each walked away with about six grand. Then it didn’t seem like very much. Definitely didn’t seem like enough to head to Peru or nothin’. I bought a used car and headed down to New Mexico.

  Jack Downey, the guy who could climb like a monkey, I guess he went back to liquor store jobs. One night he must have been drunk as shit when he got started, because he cut a hole in the roof and then fell right in. Broke his leg and everything. When the owners came in the next day, they found him passed out near a bunch of empty bottles.

  They all ended up back at White Sands, one by one. We’d fucked up that bank job so bad, man. They had our faces. Our fingerprints. They knew exactly who we were, and they didn’t quit lookin’.

  I tried not to think about it, though. I tried just to put it behind me and live a little. I was livin’ in Los Cruces, livin’ with this chick I was bangin’. I had a little job and a big wad of cash. I’d been careful, so I still had about three grand left. One day, the chick I was bangin’ found the cash and asked me where I got it. She freaked out ‘cause she thought I was dealing drugs. I thought I’d be a good guy and tell her the truth, but that just freaked her out more. Man, women don’t want the truth. They just want the kind of lies that make ‘em feel good.

  Anyway, we got in a fight over it and I hit her. Not hard or anything...but right then I knew I was fucked. You know...I hate prison. But I hate life on the outside, too. It may really suck in here, but the real world can

  be a really scary place. In here you’ve got a schedule, man. You know what to do. It’s not like it’s good, but it’s...consistent.

  Maybe that’s stupid to say. It’s not like I really want to be in here. It sucks. And I’m going to be here till I’m almost sixty, and that really sucks too. But man, like I said before, I’ve been in and out of this shit for most of my life. When I get out, there’s nothing for me to do. I don’t have a home or a life out there. So as much as I want to get out of here...I also want to stay in. Ain’t that some fucked up shit?

  April 22nd, 1995

  I met Danny Frank completely by chance. I’ve been in Chicago all week rounding up interviews. I had a sit-down meeting with a government official, hoping to get something about the Korean War, but he turned out to be nothing but a military mouthpiece. I found myself walking through Grant Park near downtown when I came across Danny. He was sleeping, letting his cardboard sign do the talking for him: “WENT THROUGH KOREAN WAR, BUT NOBODY INVITED ME ON M.A.S.H.” I could tell right away that he would make for an interesting interview.

  He agreed to talk to me only if I bought him a carton of cigarettes. “Booze,” he said “is cheap. Smokes are really fuckin’ expensive.”

  DANNY: You know what I get sick of, man? What really fuckin’ chaps me are all these anti-war guys. These faggots waving signs and shit like that. Sometimes you need a good war, man. And yeah, I was there. So I know how shitty war is. Well shit man, me being there means I know firsthand how much you need it from time to time. There are always going to be people who want to go out and fight something, and you need to give those fuckers something to do, man!

  You think in the old times, like with King Arthur and shit, that they always fought because they had to? No way! Sometimes those knights just went out there so they could hit something with a sword! Come on, if someone handed you a big fuckin’ sword, wouldn’t you want to just go out and cut a dude once and awhile?

  It’s not like we’re so different now. We’re no different than the knights. The crusaders. The fuckin’ gladiators. We got plenty of dudes who are built to fight shit. It’s in their blood to go out and hit. Kill. So when you build up enough of those dudes, you gotta let ‘em go off someplace and start shooting shit or they’ll just go crazy. You see it, man. Every ten years or so, another thing breaks out somewhere. And the ones who really need to fight

  will go find it.

  That’s how I was back then, man. I was so fuckin’ stupid. Not about fighting. Just about everything. I loved being stupid. I pulled the dumbest shit all the time. And that goes hand in hand with fighting, man. Maybe not every guy that likes a fight is stupid, but every stupid guy likes a fight. You put enough stupid people in a room together, someone’s gonna throw a punch. That’s how I was. I just wanted to punch things all the time. So when someone told me that we were probably going to war with Korea, I didn’t even wait to be drafted. I just went down and signed up. Go and punch me a gook. And when I signed up, they asked me if I wanted to be a superhero.

  Now when I was in high school, I lived on pussy, booze, and comic books. Some of those old fuckers will try to tell you that everything was all peachy keen back then, like “Happy Days” or some shit. But that just ain’t true. Shit was just as crazy back then. So I, like any proper teenage shithead, wanted to be a superhero. Like American Justice or The Viper. So when the recruiter said “Do you want to be a superhero?” what else was I supposed to say? Hell yeah!

  The way the guy explained it to me...this was a program they’d had running since WWII. You take normal dudes and you pump ‘em up with some kind of...shit, and then some of them turn into superheroes. I mean...I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but that’s what I got out of it. It used to be that you didn’t get to choose if you were in the program. They’d just pick people and make ‘em do it. But I guess when Truman became president he was like...no way, man. That shit is not cool at all. You’d better let those dudes know what’s going on. So now you’ve got a choice.

&
nbsp; The bad side to the whole thing is pretty bad. A lot of people ended up dying. So...that sucks. Dying’s a pretty big buzz kill, ya know? But there are some seriously good reasons for joining up with the program. First off...you could become a fuckin’ superhero. And really, I shouldn’t even need a fuckin’

  second reason, because that’s awesome. But second, the pay is a lot better. At least it was when I was there. Basically, whatever rank you make it to, you make the pay of the rank above you. And that goes whether you live or die. And while my dad was a serious asshole, I knew my mom could use the money if I croaked, so it was a pretty easy decision.

  At this point in the conversation we had to take a break so I could get him another beer from a store on the corner. When I got back, he was gone. I figured I would not see him again, but the next day he had reappeared on his bench, this time with a different sign: “GOING TO BE IN A BOOK. NEED MONEY FOR A COPY.” I awaken him and we begin again.

  Hey, man. Sorry about that. When you left, I...sometimes I get these weird spots. I just totally forget what the fuck is going on. Sometimes it’s like a blackout. Other times I feel like I just woke up from a weird dream. But that’s what happened last night. I checked in...or out...or whatever, and just wandered off. By the time I remembered you, it was like four in the morning. Good to see you though, man!

  So...uh...where was I? Oh! I was talking about being in the service. In the program. Uhhhh…so I was doing all my training and shit. And they gave me that stuff they give everyone down there. Everyone was kind of waiting to see what it would do. For me, it took a bit. At first I didn’t know if I was just imagining it or what. But it was there. And pretty soon the doctors figured it out. My hearing was getting better. I could hear like...fuckin’ freakishly well. If it got quiet enough, I could hear another dude’s heartbeat in the room with me. It was crazy. It’s not nearly that good anymore, but for a while it was really something. And yeah, I know super hearing isn’t the most awesome super power, but it was still pretty sweet. For the first time in my life, I was important. And I was treated that way.