Skullcrack City

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  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 45th 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 45th 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 45th 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 45th. 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 45th 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.

  So I looked him right in his unreadable all-black dead doll eyes and I whipped out my dick.

  Hindsight would like to mark this moment with a special sticker reading, “All Is Lost.”

  Then we’re both looking down and laughing. There’s a little embarrassment in the air, because it was cold and we were both staring at my penis, but the predominant tone was shock and recognition.

  “Oh, man—you fucked up your homeboy something fierce. Jesus. Shit’s like a hockey stick.”

  Port stepped forward, curious. “Dude, you broke your dick’s neck. Daaaamn. If you threw that thing it would come right back to you.”

  Exactly how long can you stand on a street corner showing two drug dealers your scar-tissue-induced radical penis curvature? The answer is twelve seconds. After that it feels weird.

  But those twelve seconds of busted-up dick made all the difference. It was as if I’d inserted a magical key into their minds and unlocked all the trust in the world. They were going to let me buy.

  Hell, Port even stayed with us in huddle formation so I could safely pull my wallet without being scoped. And the big bearded guy told me his name was Egbert. I knew Port and Egbert probably weren’t their real names, but some childish part of my mind instantly catalogued them as “P & E: My Buddies.”

  And I’m guessing some part of their minds instantly catalogued me as “Customer: Bent Dick Guy.” Still, I had a hard time not smiling on the way home.

  The blocks back disappeared like nothing. I raced to my apartment with six Hex pills in my pocket and anticipation as an engine.

  The night was vibrating with new potential, the beautiful after-haze of adrenaline and bad ideas fully embraced. Ugly thoughts crept in, forcing me to write off a growing list of concerning data: My old dealer gone mad and roaming the sewers; Egbert’s hand—notably short on its middle and ring fingers—reaching out to me with three tiny pill baggies; gas-masked kids dodging conscious thought like a plague; a trafficked tranny more concerned with evading cops than finding love.

  Tried to pay it no mind. Externalities.

  And then I’d made it home. Confirmed Deckard was passed out under his lamp. He slept with an enviable peacefulness and resolve.

  On the opposite end of the spectrum: Me, giddy, a pile of pills singing my name from the coffee table. I forced restraint, grabbing a beer and a carton of leftover kung pao. Flipped on the news and it was more bad buzz.

  “…a second murder in the beleaguered Street of Flowers district. Police have confirmed that both have been listed as homicides, and that the second case shares the same cause of death. Official details have yet to be released, but we spoke with the neighbor who found the body from today’s murder. A warning to our viewers—what you’re about to hear is very graphic.”

  A street kid was on my screen. Did he have strap marks along his jaw from gassing, like the gutterpunk version of pillow face? The kid had shock in his eyes, but he was excited to be on TV, maybe hoping for some compensation.

  “I found his body and I thought, you know, corner [bleep], typical. Maybe he tried to step somewhere he shouldn’t. But then I noticed the top of his head was just missing, like dude who got him used a shotgun. But the weird part was, no brains. They should have been all over the place. You know. BLADOW! PSSSHHH! Brains everywhere. But there was nothing coming from his head. [Bleep] was empty.”

  I couldn’t have grabbed the remote fast enough. I turned off the screen and immediately set to forgetting what I’d just watched.

  You’ve seen that kid before, when he was even younger. With Hungarian.

  No. Fuck that. Nope.

  I had my Hex score. I had bankers to bust, secrets to sell. It was time to get focused.

  It was time to bring down an empire.

  The first pill tasted distinctly of human blood, but I chose to write off the flavor as a mix of ocean water and barbecue sauce.

  Not that a pharmaceutical, even one as black market as Hex, should taste like any of
those things, but that was the mojo in these pills. So the first wave was alien, a mouth filled with blood, and I flinched thinking I’d been busted in the chops. Then the second wave rolled in, throwing shivers across every inch of my body like an all-skin orgasm, followed by the sound rush, a beautiful child screaming from the depths of a corrugated metal well, and my eyes were painted silver and my fingers trailed melted aluminum tendrils and EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

  The feeling was like this: Imagine your legs are spring loaded. Imagine every breath you pull is processed at maximum efficiency, pumping pure light to your extremities. Everything is vital. Everything is important. None of it can hurt you. A thought translates to action before you have time to remember the thought. If you were at a baseball game and engaged in deep philosophical conversation with a beautiful girl and you heard the crowd roar, you’d be able to tell by the shifting streams of audience noise that the ball was headed your way. And you might catch that home run ball without ever turning away from the truth you were imparting. Everything is possible.

  The reality was like this: You clean your kitchen. You drink a gallon of water because you can feel it moving through you all the way down to your stomach. You jerk off, a sacrifice to the newly unearthed Goddesses of Big Booty (Vol. 3). You light candles to unknot the spunk and turtle smells that suddenly rope in your senses. You clean your bathroom. You jerk off again and it shouldn’t but your scar tissue feels so good. You realize you didn’t pack your Top Secret bank investigation notebook in your briefcase, but urgency and movement erase panic. You admire your turtle, quietly. You clean your bedroom. You clean your garbage disposal interior without flipping the switch at the fuse box. You wish you had robotic prosthetic hands, an end to the weakness of the flesh. You jerk off until the morning sun peeks in through your drapes, murders your mechanical hypnosis. You try to ignore the heavy weight on your left shoulder, the warm breath of a snorting animal on your ear, soft black earth crumbling from its paw to your skin.