by Hazel Parker
I didn’t have to wait long. Sarah always answered her phone—after all, if I was to be snarky, I could say that it was all she spent her time on it.
“Hello?” she said, her voice somewhere between bored and annoyed.
“Sarah, it’s Marcel.”
A stunned silence came at the other end of the line. She hadn’t kept up with me any more than making token visits and letters for the sake of my daughter. I hadn’t wanted her to, honestly. I just needed her to be a good or just even an attentive mother to Lilly, and I didn’t care how else she was.
“Is Lilly available?”
“You want to talk to her now?” she said, her voice as cold as a Colorado winter.
“Yeah.”
“But you would go to jail for five years? Miss her infancy and her childhood? Miss—”
“I’m aware of what I’ve missed, Sarah, and it’s why I want to talk to her. I don’t want to miss anything more. OK? May I please talk to her?”
My patience with Sarah was simultaneously zilch and infinite. It was zilch for her as a human, but however long I needed to wait to speak with Lilly, I would.
“Lilly!” she shouted, bringing a smile to my face. “Your father is on the line. Deadbeat finally got out of jail.”
I tried to let that comment roll off my back, but it only further entrenched my beliefs about Sarah.
“Five minutes. We’re going to dinner soon.”
Seconds later, I heard that angelic voice.
“Daddy!”
There wasn’t a better word to hear in the English language. The joyfulness of her voice, the exuberant pitch, and the way the word seemed to stretch out for a whole minute warmed my heart.
“Hey, my little angel,” I said, all of the hardness in my voice removed, all of the pettiness toward Sarah snapped away in a second. “How’s Daddy’s little girl?”
“Good!”
I just loved how she said even basic words like “good.” “Good” from Lilly was like if Jack said he’d just had the greatest day of my life. There was nothing not worth celebrating to a seven-year-old girl, and I prayed every day in jail that when I got out, she would know me.
In that regard, Sarah at least did something right by letting her visit me in jail and write me letters.
“Are you behaving and doing well in school?”
“Uh-huh! We’re learning math right now. Do you know what five times five is?”
I laughed, missing that naive yet utterly delightful joyfulness that she had.
“I don’t know, sweetie, what is it?”
“It’s twenty-five, ya dumb-dumb!”
“Dumb-dumb?” I said, laughing.
I hadn’t laughed like this in years.
“Well, listen, your dumb-dumb would love to see you as soon as he can. I want to come up next weekend; can that happen?”
“Next weekend?” Lilly said, sounding stung. “Why not this weekend?”
Why not? Originally, I had thought that I’d need time to adjust, and I worried that if I imposed on Sarah somehow, she’d find a way to push me out. But that was just me being stupid and nervous for no reason. I wasn’t going to get rejected, and even if I did, she was my kid. I had visitation rights.
I would know. I went to court over it.
“Daddy really is a big dumb-dumb, sweetie. I would love to see you this weekend if I can. What time do you wake up on Saturdays?”
“About six.”
Shiiiit. She’s still an early-riser. Fuck me. That’s not going to be fun when the Savage Saints Brooklyn chapter is up and running.
“Well, that’s a little early for Daddy, but I bet I can make eight. Do you want to eat breakfast and then have me come over?”
“No! I want you to come at six!”
For anyone else in the world, I would have laughed and told them to kiss my ass. For Lilly, I just wanted to kiss her cheek and squeeze her. She was arguably the one good thing I’d produced in this world, and I wasn’t about to hurt her in any way.
“Alright sweetheart, let me speak to your mother, but I will do everything to be there at six on Saturday, OK?”
I knew that was going to be a miserable day, save for the hours that I got to see Lilly, but man, would those hours with my daughter make everything worth it. Let’s just not make it a habit or a regular thing. Let’s get this girl on a normal schedule.
“OK! Mom! Daddy wants to talk to you about coming over on Saturday!”
I knew Sarah was going to love hearing that. I was sure that she was going to try and push me away. But I was also sure that she wasn’t going to defy a court order and not let me see Lilly.
“So you’re coming Saturday?” she said as soon as she grabbed the phone.
“That’s what she wants, so that’s what I’m going to do for her.”
“Well, I suppose you do have weekend visitation rights. Unless going to jail changed that.”
I took a deep breath.
“Check to make sure your most recent drug arrest didn’t change anything before you head over. Please confirm. Thanks.”
“I—”
But the line went dead seconds later. I weakly let the phone fall to the couch, cursing under my breath.
“Stupid bitch.”
I’d made a lot of dumb mistakes in my life, and I would not hesitate to say that getting romantically involved with Sarah before was one of them. But you know what?
She gave me Lilly. And anything that led to the life of my only child could not have been anything but a blessing, even if it didn’t seem like it some days.
* * *
I had mentally prepared myself to get up at five on Saturday morning so I could be knocking at the front door at six sharp. Lilly would expect me to be on time, more strictly ready than a drill sergeant in boot camp.
I had not, however, expected a pounding at my door just shortly after seven the following morning.
Asleep on the couch, I groggily woke up to the pounding. At first, I just assumed that some neighbor needed help. Then I got nervous, thinking maybe it was the police coming to drag me away.
And then, no, I realized, it was none of those things.
It was Reggie Stone, my uncle, the man who was perhaps the only white-collar worker in the family. He’d gotten some highly lucrative work in the banks and had transformed that into some hefty cash, though he was never far removed from the Stone mechanics, construction workers, and other blue-collar roles. He often bitched about how he could punch a man on-site and they’d respect him, but the pussies on Wall Street couldn’t take you putting a hand on their shoulder.
“Rise and shine, ya free fuck,” he said, his voice far more smooth and ready than it had any right to be this early in the day.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I said.
“Good to see you too, shithead,” Uncle said with a snort. “So, ya got the little club you’re wanting to start. Luckily for you, ever since your father died, I’m doing my best to live up to the promise to support everyone in the family. Well, most everyone in the family.”
Everyone except Kyle.
“And, double lucky for you, I need an outlet to deal with all these suit-and-tie shitheads out in Manhattan,” he continued. “The only downside for you is that if you want my money, you’re gonna have to work on my schedule.”
“You know there’s no MC in the world that gets up this fucking early, right?” I said, already annoyed at having said so many words at this time of day. “You know that they all wake up at noon and go to bed at three or four in the morning, right?”
Uncle, though, let himself in, grabbed my face, and shook it violently.
“Son, let me tell you something we tell everyone in the banking world, and it’s one of the few things they say that ain’t full of bullshit and money. There are no closing hours when you’re getting something off the ground. There’s on, there are quick naps, and that shit is it. You want a club? You’re gonna have to fucking live, breathe, eat, and shit a club f
or the next few months. Otherwise, I might as well put out a few hundred dollar bills and give them to you as toilet paper. At least then I know they’re keeping you hygienic.”
“Gross.”
“Ain’t nothing pretty or clean about getting a business from red to green, Marcel. You’ve always been on the employee side of things. And I know this ain’t a business, but we ain’t a charity, either. You want a club, you gotta have the money to make it work. You get that?”
As much as the early hour sucked and as much as Uncle could be a little… blunt, let’s say, even by New York standards, I fully understood everything that he was saying.
“Yeah.”
“Good, let’s get down to practicals then. I should wake your brother’s ass up, but he’s already heard this shit, so there ain’t a need for me to do that.”
Oh, he should be so lucky.
“The owner of the shop Jack works at, Brooklyn Repairs, is looking to sell, and he’s looking to sell quickly. He thinks the automation of cars is gonna make his shop useless. Course, the idiot doesn’t realize that it’ll make it more valuable—fewer breakdowns means pricier repairs—but that ain’t my problem. In fact, it’s my goddamn opportunity. It’s our goddamn opportunity. We can use that as a base of operations.”
“Perfect.”
“Perfect?”
Did I miss something? It was entirely possible at this ass-crack-of-dawn early hour.
“You realize how big that place is?” he said, tilting his head to the side. “Or rather, perhaps how small it is?”
“Yes?” I said.
“I don’t think you do.”
I was now convinced Uncle was playing a sort of mind game to question me and make me believe I didn’t know anything. Admittedly, this wasn’t totally out of left field. I loved bikes but going from loving bikes to running an MC with no prior experience in one was like saying you liked playing catch in the backyard and then managing the Yankees.
“Dunno if you’ve thought about it, son, but that place has almost exactly enough space for all the cars, a small office that might as well be a desk and you climbing over it, and a bathroom so small the customers can see your dick as you piss. If you think this will be anything like the California or Las Vegas Savage Saints, walk away now.
“California got space. Lots of it. It’ll look like a goddamn mansion compared to us. Las Vegas isn’t even a mechanic shop. It’s a goddamn burlesque theatre. In other words, one got space, one got money. We have neither. It’s fucking Brooklyn.”
“I get it, Uncle,” I said. “And I don’t care.”
Uncle raised an eyebrow at me, but he also had a slight grin forming on his face.
“I don’t give a shit what the space is like as long as we have a space. And I don’t give a shit about money as long as we have money. I want to start this club for the brotherhood of it. So I can spend my time with my brothers and make new ones. You know, since Mom and Dad died, the only thing resembling family I got is you and Biggie.”
Not even Uncle said anything smart in response to that. We only needed to look across the bridge to Manhattan to know how true that was.
“Being in jail makes you realize a lot of shit. How quickly good people can go bad. How bad people can still be good. How everyone has a code that they live by, even if that code winds up hurting others. As for me? I learned that I don’t give a shit about having a lot of money or space. I’m not fucking Kyle. I give a shit about having that bond with like-minded people. That bond will get you through tough times.”
“Cute,” Uncle said. “Not wrong. And that’s music to my ears. It’ll be a goddamn symphony to Jack, Niner, and Fitz.”
“Fitz?”
“I’ll get to him. But this is all good to us big dogs. When you start recruiting, though? When you wanna bring in some fresh blood? They’re gonna want what those clubs offer, and I don’t mean space or money. I mean bar games, fights, booze, and pussy as far as the eye can see. You’re not gonna get some pussy hipster from Williamsburg into this club, but you’re gonna get a lot of people who think such people represent the decay of America. They’re going to want to see that you offer a shitload of hot ass and nice liquor. You sure you can offer that? You sure you can handle that?”
Uncle wasn’t asking that in the sense of if I could actually handle it. Of course I could. I’d drank before. I’d hit on girls at bars before. I didn’t mind loud music, loud clubs, and lots of alcohol.
He wasn’t asking me. He was asking the side of me that only came out when alcohol broke down the bars holding him in place in my brain. He was asking the outlaw side of me that would be much more likely to emerge in a setting like those.
If I wasn’t careful, this could land me in jail faster than asking one of Biggie’s coworkers for something.
“I can offer and handle it, Uncle.”
It was worth the risk.
“I’ve got Jack on board. Jack’s bringing Niner, so if nothing else, that’s three. You’re in, that’s four. And you said some guy named Fitz?”
Uncle smirked, chuckled, and lowered his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to admit to me.
“You wanna know why I’m investing in this club? Why I’m putting up a good five figures of my reserves into this?”
I had a guess, but I let Uncle continue.
“Fitz is a friend of mine. Bit of a dork, apparently has a real thing for bikes. He’s the definition of a third-life crisis. Get him going about American literature or modern economic trends, and the dude will make you feel like you never graduated high school while he taught at Harvard. Dude is just a fucking genius. I mentioned this project to him, and he came back an hour later and demanded that he be a part of it. And let me tell you something, Marcel, if Fitz fucking told me to invest in Noah’s Ark in the Sahara Desert, I’d fucking take him up on it.”
I politely laughed at the joke, though I’m sure my laughter was aided by the fact that we had not just one, but two investors now.
And on top of that… I did the math… we had five members… that was all we needed for the club. I would be president, Biggie would be vice president, Niner, as the former cop, would be the sergeant-at-arms, and then Uncle and Fitz could pick their respective titles.
“Sounds like we got the officers lined up,” I said triumphantly. “Wanna be treasurer?”
“Why the fuck not? It’s my money; can’t embezzle against myself,” he said with a laugh. “But this is the easy part, Marcel. You’ve given these people status. Great. All of us are in, either because of bonds to you or bonds to one of us. Getting the grunts in? You better do it quickly and do it smoothly, because otherwise, this ain’t gonna be a motorcycle club; it’s gonna be an adult treehouse club.”
“I know, I—”
“And I need to say one more thing, Marcel.”
Jesus, this guy doesn’t shut up.
“You’re the president of this club because it’s your idea. OK, cool. I’m sure you wanna make your little brother VP. Fine. Let the rest fall where they may. I guess I’ll be treasurer. Anyway, the fucking point is that it’s your club, but it’s my money. And ain’t nothing run in America without money, so if you don’t get any, you’re shit out of luck.”
“I know.”
“So does everyone else I invest in, and then they get upset and say I can’t fuck them over when I decide not to invest further,” Uncle said, rolling his eyes. “They say not to mix blood and ink. I’m hoping that blood and oil are a little more compatible. You know I’m not saying this as a threat. I’m just saying this as something you’ve probably heard from a dozen different angles already. You cannot—cannot—fuck this up.”
I nodded. I was not going to. Everything Uncle said, I’d already thought about. Of course I wasn’t going to rely on the fucking club to be a charity; this was going to be my full-time gig, and I needed to take care of Lilly.
This club would take care of that. And who knew? With all the girls that we’d start to get
around, maybe, just maybe, one of them would turn out to be a far better stepmom than Sarah was an actual mother.
“You got nothing to worry about, Uncle,” I said, extending my hand. “I got this.”
“Yes, you do,” Uncle said, shaking my hand. “It’s a deal, Marcel. I hope you’re serious about knowing there are no closing hours from now until a long, long way away.”
“I know,” I said. “I guess it won’t be waking up early if I never go to sleep.”
Chapter 4: Christine
I woke up sober.
Sixty days straight now, I’d been sober. I’d officially been clean for two months, my longest streak since I started making the effort to get sober.
Lying in bed in an oversized t-shirt and gym shorts, I felt proud of myself. I even gave a smile, no small feat for the early morning. But the smile faded when I remembered what day of the week it was.
Friday. Also known as the start of the weekend.
Weekends were always the hardest, and I could never quite explain in understandable terms why they were so difficult. The best analogy I could draw was telling someone that being a recovering alcoholic on the weekend was like someone trying to lose weight having to go to a buffet every Friday and Saturday.
During the week, there were only so many options for drinking, and they were often too inconvenient to make happen. Yes, I could have purchased alcohol and brought it to the apartment, but I was never really much of a solo drinker. When I got in groups, though, the shit hit the fan, and it was not uncommon for me to get so drunk that people had to take me home—and sometimes, those people were men who saw an opportunity, not someone who needed help.
Weekends opened up that buffet. Now, instead of having to go thirty people deep into my contact list to find someone to drink with, I had a glutton’s worth of options. It wasn’t a matter of if I could get someone to go out; it was more just choosing whom I most wanted to see. A night out with girlfriends? A date with a man? A couple of liquid courage drinks for a friend with benefits? The options were endless.
And even now, having gone to AA meetings, having been sober for two months, having told multiple friends that I needed to avoid alcohol at all costs, I still struggled with it. The challenge was balancing not drinking with actually having a life. Because right now, things were pretty damn dull and boring.
