by Ed Kurtz
Bunk said something or another and kicked open the back door. He was still saying it as he slammed the door and stomped on down the road.
"Do you want to eat donuts with me?" I asked her. She nodded and answered that yes, if it was what I wanted, donuts would be fine.
The cell phone rang three times while we had at it. Three times it rang and vibrated both, sending it scuttling across the nightstand and crashing onto the hardwood floors. I was too busy having my head fucked into the headboard to hear it, or even to give a shit if I did. Kate hated for me to be stressed. Hated it like the dickens.
Then the home phone started to ring. Nobody uses the home phone anymore.
It went to the machine and you could hear Gumm's voice. He sounded concerned. "Deke," he said, his voice sounding faraway, but much closer than I could handle, "I NEED you to call me RIGHT AWAY. It's very IMPORTANT. No one has HEARD from you. You never SHOWED UP in Houston last NIGHT. Please CALL us as SOON as POSSIBLE."
My dick went limp. Kate, bless her heart, bounced up and down in my lap, never one to quit without a fight. She grunted and kicked like a buck hog, expecting it to magically reappear and get back to work inside her, but instead it regressed to a stubby, floppy thing, as useless as a fart. She hopped off and went face-first to my crotch. She had gumption. She had fight.
"Baby," I said. I'd come to embrace it.
"No," she panted. Her mouth made it worse, made it somewhat more embarrassing. I let her have at it a minute, then tried to stop her again. "Not now," she said. "Not yet."
But I was gone. As if I didn't have enough to worry about. I had the two biggest drug dealers in four counties trying to raise me on the phone, unaware as of yet that they'd been jacked. I had a guy in the trunk of my car, parked three blocks away so no one would know I was home. I'd lost the respect of Bunk, who was probably spilling the beans to anyone and everyone as we spoke and I had a girl beating the shit out of my limp pecker because I'd gone kaput. I put one hand over my eyes and let the other fumble around for a pack of cigarettes.
"What are you going to do?" asked Kate. She'd given up, but kept her head on my milky white thighs. Sad, pouty-lipped. Stationed there, so if things were to change, she'd be the first to know.
I'd thought on it some. I could run. I didn't have much worth keeping, so I could be in the car and headed for Louisiana in no time. A resourceful guy like me could start all over. I could say I got jumped by a couple black guys, all the money taken. It wouldn't be hard for me to arrange for a black eye or a couple bruises. Bunk and Kyle knew the truth. I'd have to make sure they stayed quiet. I could rob a bank or a gas station or even the Kroger on North Street and get enough money to hold them off.
I could tell the truth...
"I don't know," I told her. She took the cigarette from my hand, took a drag, then passed it back. She lay there, staring at my pecker as if it were a long lost love.
We'd gotten dressed and she found me pacing up a storm in the kitchen. She stood in the doorway and looked to be pondering decisions of her own. I didn't blame her. Kate liked to smoke weed. I'd put her future as a Lufkin stoner in jeopardy. She had already totted up all the parties she wouldn't be invited to, thanks to her involvement with me.
"If I ran," I said, "would you come with me?"
She laughed. That was answer enough, but she continued. "And go where, Deacon?"
I shrugged. "Somewhere. Louisiana. Dallas, maybe." Nowhere did her eyes light up. They barely even met mine. "I don't care. Anywhere. Is there somewhere you want to go?"
"Yes," she said. "I want to go lots of places. That's why I'm in school. I'm not dropping out of school."
I opened my mouth to say something, but could only manage a staccato choking in the back of my throat. That happened a couple of times before I closed it.
The phone rang again. I squatted, the backs of my thighs on the balls of my heels. I put my head in my hands and rubbed fastidiously at the temples. The phone rang and rang and rang, then it stopped ringing. This sucked.
"I'm going to have to run," I told her.
"You should talk to them," she said. "Gumm and Little John have a lot of money. Maybe everything will be okay."
I looked up at her. She seemed to believe it. Hell, I started to believe it. I wanted to scoop her up into my arms and tell her what a splendid idea that was, kiss her and fuck her and take her home for Thanksgiving, all for showing me how silly I was being.
"Will you go with me?" I asked.
I wish she hadn't waited to answer. I wish she'd have answered yes or no, either one, without a moment's hesitation. But she didn't. She put her hands in her pockets and stared at the floor. Cheap kitchen linoleum with designs that meant nothing, but meant nothing over and over and over across the floor of my kitchen. Hesitated so long I wanted to say, fuck it, I don't need you anyway, then add some really hurtful shit—she had a mole next to her left tit that looked like a warty, brown third nipple, but I pretended never to notice—and kick her out on her ass. But just before I managed the stones to say something, she answered yes. Yes she would go with me. Of course she would.
I took some goading. I tried to maneuver us back to the bedroom, because I knew if anything could divert Kate's attention, it would be a roll in the hay. But she'd been burned already and jammed a hand down my britches before we'd hit the hallway. She wasn't being duped by false advertising. Not this time. She pushed me against the wall.
"No," she said. "Not until we get back."
"What if we don't get back?"
She blinked. "Then the last time was the last time. Get your keys."
The three blocks to my car, I didn't know what to expect when we reached it. When I came around the corner of the drug store and found it still in the parking lot (in the shade), I felt no relief that it wasn't surrounded by cops or the paramedics or a gaggle of do-gooders. The car sat alone and quiet. Kyle Karver did not beat on the car from the inside. He did not scream for help or for revenge. I feared the stench of death.
I wanted to knock on the trunk, tell Kyle it was almost over. Ask him if he wanted any donuts. But I didn't want him to not answer. I didn't want to think about it.
It wasn't my fault he was in the trunk.
"Kate," I said. I turned her to face me. She must've feared another advance by my wilted winkie because she dared not make eye contact. She looked at the asphalt and kept her lips just past kissing distance. I took a deep breath. "Kate, I think I got to do this myself."
"Do what?"
I fished money from my pocket. All I had in the world was eleven dollars. I gave it to her.
"You can call a cab," I said.
"What gives?"
"I don't want you involved in this," I said. She looked up and I wanted to kiss her. I wanted her up against my shitty Lumina and then in the backseat and then at every rest stop between here and Louisiana or wherever the hell we were going to run to. But I could add. I knew the score. This was the only way out with some semblance of face still saved. "I want you to go home."
"You're going to see Gumm and Little John by yourself?" she asked. Her eyes wide, mouth gaped.
"Not by myself," I said, kissing her on the head. I let her go. I opened the car door and slipped inside. "I'm taking Kyle with me."
Walk Up
by Ben Nadler
Life was still a war for Aldo. He worked full-time as a regional distribution manager, but he was also a soldier. He wore flat-front trousers and button down shirts to work. The shirts were plaid, short-sleeved, and had little laurel wreaths on the chest, over Aldo’s heart. At first glance, these outfits seemed usual enough, fitting into the category of business casual, but then you’d notice that his clothes were a little tighter, and his pants cuffs were a little higher than anyone else’s in the office.
The tight clothes didn’t look bad on Aldo’s body. He went to the gym before work, and sometimes at lunch he’d do pull-ups on a bar down in the distribution center’s warehouse. Most of the guys in
the warehouse had short hair, but Aldo’s was just a little shorter than theirs, a tight 3/8 of an inch, based on the length guard he kept on his hair clippers. Even though he mostly worked up in the offices now, Aldo always wore steel-toed Doc Marten boots. He had to. He was still in uniform. At thirty-six years old, he was still a skinhead. Life was still a war for Aldo. He just didn’t get into so many fights anymore.
Aldo got the call at work on a Thursday afternoon.
“It’s Billy. Billy DeReccia. From back on MacDougal Street?”
“DeReccia. Yeah. Sure, I remember you.” Billy’s grandparents owned the café where the old men drank cappuccino. Billy was the same age as Aldo’s sister Josie. Billy and Josie used to smoke pot on the roof of the building. “You were Josie’s friend.”
“Yeah,” Billy answered slowly. “I was.”
“Is this about Josie? Is she okay?”
“That’s the thing. No easy way to say this.” Aldo knew what was coming next. “She’s dead. She died.”
“How?”
“It was a stroke. To be honest, I think she’d been shooting. I’m so sorry, man.”
Aldo finished out the work week and got the first bus from Boston down to New York Saturday morning. He got off in Chinatown and took the A train up to West 4th Street. Sixth Avenue was different in the ways that Aldo knew it would be. Cleaner. Richer. One more thick layer of bullshit painted over all the storefronts.
Still, some things were familiar. The bums asking for change. The guys playing pickup basketball in the Cage. The porn stores on the west side of Sixth Ave. Neighborhood legend held that the dirty businesses were all on the west side of the street because in the early ‘70s, some of the Italian grandmothers had asked the local gangsters to call on the porn peddlers. Had them explain what would happen if any of the filth ventured too close to the tenements on Thompson, Sullivan, and MacDougal streets where they raised their children and grandchildren.
“You don’t understand,” one porn peddler had pleaded, trying to make a deal.
“No,” said the gangsters, grinning and shaking their heads. “You don’t understand.”
This was decades ago, when some things still meant more than money. Before the yuppies had bought up the whole neighborhood.
Aldo was supposed to meet Billy in front of the old building to get the apartment key. 121 Macdougal Street, between Bleecker and West 3rd. Aldo got there a few minutes early, so he sat down on the stoop to wait. The concrete had a new coat of red paint on it, but other than that, it was the same old stoop Aldo always used to sit on. A guy wearing a skinny necktie came up the stairs, and gave Aldo a sidelong glance. “How you doing?” Aldo said. The man didn’t answer, just fumbled with his key. He pushed the door in with all the force he could muster, and slammed it behind him.
What the fuck was this guy’s problem? Didn’t this guy know that this was Aldo’s stoop? Didn’t he know this was Aldo’s goddamn building? Where was this cunt back in ‘88?
Billy arrived with the key. He shook Aldo’s hand. “It’s good to see you, Aldo.”
“Yeah,” Aldo said. “For sure.”
“And listen, man, I’m real sorry about Josie.”
“Yeah. Me too.” They stood for a minute, without speaking.
“Anyway,” Billy said. “You doing alright? How’s life up in Boston?”
“I’m doing fine. How you doing?”
“Good, good, real good. My parents sold the building a few years ago and moved out to Long Island, but I kept the lease on the café.”
“Cool. Glad to hear one thing is still the same. Business alright?”
“Oh, yeah, man. We sell the same cappuccino as always, but these NYU kids will pay seven bucks a pop for it, if you could believe that. Anyway, speaking of which, I hate to run like this, but I got to get back to the shop. It’s crazy in there today.”
“Sure,” said Aldo. “Thanks for the key.”
“No problem, man.” He turned to leave, then stopped. “Listen, Aldo. I haven’t been up there in three years. The place is a real shithole, no disrespect. Dirty clothes and garbage everywhere. Bedbugs. I told Josie I’d talk to her down here on the stoop, but I wouldn’t go in there no more. I’m not trying to judge the dead. I just want you to know what you’re in for.”
Aldo nodded. There was nothing to say—why waste words?
The truth was, Aldo wasn’t ready for all that crap. He didn’t want to see how his sister had lived. He opened the building’s front door and walked straight through to the back door.
The facades facing the street may have been spruced up, but the long, connected backyards were still the same. Crumbling concrete. Rusting metal. Garbage cans and handcarts left outside by supers. Aldo sat down on his old spot on the low wall along the back fence and lit a cigarette. Tobacco was his one vice other than coffee. But cigarettes and coffee didn’t dull you, they made you sharp. Aldo felt a little fuzzy; being back in New York was a shock to his system. He needed to feel sharp. He needed to get into battle mode.
The door opened and a man came out walking backwards, dragging two trash bags. For a moment, Aldo thought that it was the old super, Mr. Diaz, unchanged by time. Then the man noticed Aldo and turned towards him, and Aldo saw that it was Diaz’s son, Raph. If Raph was doing super work, it meant that he was still living in the super’s apartment behind the stairs. It meant that he had spent his entire miserable life in the same three rooms.
“Hey!” Raph shouted. “You can’t be back here. Residents only!”
“Hello, Raph.”
Raph held his hand over his eyes to cut the glare, and peered back. “Oh, shit, Aldo, is that you? What are you doing here?”
“My sister died.”
“Yeah, I know. I know everything that happens in this building. You here to clean her shit out? Anything not out by the end of the month, we’re throwing in the dumpster. Management needs to get that apartment rented.” Aldo didn’t answer. Raph started talking faster. “I hope you aren’t thinking of trying to move in. You know you need established residency to keep the rent control. Too late for that. Shit is going market rate. Management wants to finally get some money out of it. Free rides are done.”
“Raph?”
“Yeah?”
“Remember you were afraid of me when we were kids?”
“Yeah… I guess so…”
“Nothing’s changed that you shouldn’t still be afraid.”
Raph went back inside the building.
Aldo wondered why he hadn’t come to see his sister when she was alive.
Come see her? Shit, he hadn’t even spoken to her in years. It wasn’t that they weren’t on speaking terms, they’d never had a falling out or anything, it was just they hadn’t talked in a long time. Years. Four? Five?
For a while they would call each other on their birthdays, which meant they would talk twice a year. His birthday was at the end of October, and hers was in early November, so this meant that they talked twice in two weeks, and then didn’t talk for fifty weeks. That was kind of silly, so they took to just having one phone call, between the two birthdays—or failing that, later in November. Usually he was the one who made the call. Then he missed a couple years. He tried to call on the third year, but by then her phone had been disconnected. Maybe she’d gotten a cell phone, but if so she never called to give him the number.
Growing up, Josie was the wild one. Grandma was always at her throat, talking about how her skirt was too short, how she had too much makeup on, how she smelled like cigarettes. Accusing her of doing all sort of things in the back of the cars that boys dropped her off in. And later on that was all true, but even before all that, when Josie was ten, eleven years old, the old woman would give her a hard time.
She’d say to Josie, "What makes you think a pudgy little thing like you should have a cannoli?" She’d say, "What are you doing talking to those boys outside the junior high, instead of coming straight home?" She’d say, "Do you want to grow up to be a junkie slu
t, just like your mother?"
Aldo never got it as bad from his grandmother, because he was a boy, and boys could do no wrong. Eat, eat, you need food, you’re a growing boy.
Aldo wasn’t the favorite though. Grandmother’s golden boy was her own son Fernando—Aldo and Josie’s youngest uncle. Fernando was a thief, and a bully. A real piece of shit. He came by when he needed a place to sleep for a few days or weeks, or to mooch money off his mother. He loved to slap Aldo around, and the old woman never stopped him. If Aldo ever tried to complain, Grandma would accuse him of being evil, of making up lies to break her heart.
Aldo knew that Fernando did worse things to Josie. He didn’t know what they were exactly, only that something very wrong was happening. Grandma never lifted a finger to protect Josie. Aldo didn’t either, but he couldn’t, he was just a little kid.
Aldo was a growing boy, though. As the years went by, he started putting on pounds and building muscle, doing pushups on the roof and pull ups in the hallway. He understood more and more. He never went in for long hair and pot, like Fernando and so many others in the neighborhood. Aldo’s style was pure hardcore: head shaved clean from the age of twelve on. No drugs or alcohol. Fuck becoming like all the other downtown wasetoids throwing up in the bushes in Washington Square Park. Aldo believed in discipline and strength. At fourteen he got his first tattoo, an Iron Cross on his right shoulder.
By then, Josie was already out of the house, living with some guy or another. Aldo didn’t see much of her. He had other things going on.
1988 was the best year of Aldo’s life. He was going all-city with his new crew. East Side, West Side, Times Square, all the way out to the hoods in Queens on the 7 train. They were always into something: tagging, boosting gear, going to the hardcore matinees at CBGB.
Plenty of girls liked his crew’s style, and that summer Aldo went all the way with a girl named Leticia. Not Le-tish-a, like Morticia Adams, but Le-tees-ee-uh, the sexy Spanish way. Her parents were from Cuba, and she was the cutest little thing. Straight black bangs that just about covered her brown eyes.
