by Iain Levison
Then it occurred to him that he had been walking all over Westlake for half an hour and had not seen a single police car, and he suddenly knew that this thing, if done right, was going to net them some serious cash. Hell, maybe Doug really did need to go to a club to sell those damned pills. When it came to the retail of contraband materials, he seemed to know what he was doing. And he was one of the team. Mitch decided that Doug could have a martini too.
THE NEAREST CLUB that was worth going to was all the way down near Pittsburgh, an hour’s drive away over winding country roads and then a brief stretch of interstate. Mitch noticed the roads getting wider as they got closer to the city and he had a sudden urge to stay, to find work here, to never go back. As he merged onto Interstate 79, he saw the same endless rows of buildings and parking lots and fences that you found in any Pennsylvania town, but here they had an air of victory about them, as if they had triumphed over the landscape. In Wilton, it seemed like nature was always fighting back, and winning. Raised in Queens, Mitch always had the feeling that the endless walls of trees which lined the roads outside Wilton were plotting to retake the town, to evict the environmentally irresponsible inhabitants and grow back over the land that they had been cleared from by the original developers of the town. Here, though, in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, it was obvious that the trees had given up.
“It’s ugly,” Doug said, looking at the night landscape, a sprawling view of strip malls and carpet outlets illuminated by the yellow glare of streetlights. Mitch had been thinking just the opposite. It pulsed with energy, figuratively and literally. Wires and transformers and relay boxes and traffic lights and cell phone towers, every one of them representing a job, a person needed to maintain it, an opportunity. There were things to do here. Why would anyone want to go back?
“After we get the money, let’s move to Pittsburgh,” Mitch said.
“No way, man,” said Doug, and even as he was saying the words, Mitch became aware of a gulf between them and knew that this, more than anything, was the reason they would likely one day stop being friends. Doug had grown up in Wilton and liked the familiarity, and even though he frequently spoke of leaving, Mitch often noticed he had no real interest in the rest of the world, or even the rest of the country. He would travel to another city to see a Phish show, but not to see the city itself. He would talk of relocating to places like Aspen or Monterrey or any place with cliffs and girls in bikinis that he saw on the Travel Channel, sometimes with great enthusiasm. But the enthusiasm would quickly fizzle, and then he would hunker down and stare out the window at the warm glow of the metal-refinishing plant. It was an issue they had discussed only in the most superficial way, but it represented a difference between them that was beyond compromise.
“Tree-fucking hippie,” said Mitch.
“Sorry, I don’t like soot and trash and grime,” said Doug, referring to big cities, apparently unaware that he was also giving a fairly accurate description of Wilton.
He must look around Wilton with rose-colored glasses, Mitch thought. To Doug, it was home sweet home, but the thought of going back there empty-handed tonight gave Mitch a stab of anxiety.
To quell it, he asked, “You really think we can sell a box of pills to strangers?”
“There’s no telling,” said Doug, not providing the words of comfort Mitch was looking for. “Selling anything is a crapshoot.”
“But you think there’s a possibility?”
“Of course, man. I wouldn’t have suggested this if there wasn’t a possibility.”
Mitch nodded. Doug had what Mitch considered a rare social gift, a genuine enthusiasm for meeting people. When they went to parties or concerts, Doug would often disappear with random people he met and be found hours later, having had soul-searching conversations with strangers which he would claim had enlightened him somehow. And before Kevin had been busted, Doug had managed to parlay this openness with strangers into a thousand-dollar-a-week business. Since it had been so long since Mitch had seen Doug using his gifts, he had forgotten there was a creature with insight and energy inside the stoned blob of protoplasm who now spent his days on the couch, a remote control in hand.
The club was exactly the kind of place Mitch dreaded: a neon-lit, garish, New York City–wannabe dance club, where the crème de la crème of Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs could buy eight-dollar drinks and spend the evening pretending they were Eurotrash. Mitch groaned as he pulled into the parking lot and saw two Italian men in silk shirts opened to the navel going in the front door.
“Aw, come one, man. This is the best place you could think of? Look at those guys. I don’t wanna go in there.”
“We’re here to sell pills, right?”
“Yeah, but . . .” Mitch sputtered. “This is Guidoville. Isn’t there, like, a country bar or something around here?”
“Since when do you like country music?”
Mitch groaned again and banged his head on the steering wheel. Doug knew how he felt about dance clubs; they had discussed it a number of times and never reached agreement. Dance clubs were supposed to facilitate meeting women, but for Mitch they did just the opposite. He was good at conversation and bad at dancing, and the loud music in the clubs robbed him of his weapon. These clubs, he felt, gave the advantage to dumb people who couldn’t carry on a conversation about anything except shopping but who looked good gyrating.
“Man, you just gotta chill out,” Doug said. “We’ll have a good time.”
“This is a sacrifice,” Mitch said. “I’m sacrificing here. I’m taking one for the team.”
As he parked, two women in tight miniskirts and high heels walked past the car. Mitch watched, open-mouthed, as they went in the door, suddenly aware of how long it had been since he had seen a real, live, attractive woman in the flesh. He had to get out of Wilton. “Shit, man, who knows?” he said, suddenly cheerful, eyes riveted to the marching asses. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”
INSIDE, THE CLUB was exactly what Mitch had expected. Thumping, raging sound—he hesitated to call it music— filled every inch of the place like dirty floodwater, and there wasn’t enough square footage to accommodate all the patrons, a situation that apparently made the business “happening.” People crushed together was the club owner’s dream, but to Mitch it looked like a fire marshal’s nightmare.
“This place sucks,” he told Doug conversationally, who nodded, unaware of what had just been said. Doug made the motion for drinking and pointed Mitch toward the bar. Then, with the calculating gaze of a sniper, he surveyed the terrain, looking for people who appeared to want pills.
And he found them. He grabbed Mitch’s arm to make sure he had his attention and pointed to two guys standing by a rail. They were holding beers but didn’t seem interested in the women or the dancing, and they were scanning the crowd with the same sniper intensity that Doug had just displayed. One of them was bald-headed and muscular, wearing a tight T-shirt, and looked more like a bouncer than a patron. The other was just a normal-looking guy, perhaps a bit underdressed, like Doug and Mitch.
Mitch would never have noticed them. Doug pointed to them and nodded, then pointed to the bar again, instructing Mitch to go and buy beers. Mitch began to push his way through the crowd, feeling the driving beat from the speakers vibrate in his gut. He hadn’t had this much fun since he had been stuffed in the back of an armored personnel carrier in the army, bodies pressed against him, the rifles and entrenching tools of the other soldiers poking him everywhere, comfort impossible. The endless monotony of the beat reminded him of the thumping of the APC’s engine. All that was missing was the diesel fumes coming up from the floorboards. People paid a cover charge for this, he thought.
The crowd at the bar was three deep and customers were holding their money high to get the bartenders’ attention. Mitch was wondering how long it would take him to run out to the parking lot, drive to a beer distributor, and get a beer there, and considering whether or not that would be a time-saving alternative when Do
ug tapped him on the shoulder. He had the two guys with him. Doug motioned that they should go outside, which was cool with Mitch.
Mitch was amazed; Doug had been able to pick these guys out of a crowd. That had to be some kind of a marketable skill. He was a human drug dog, able to detect a possible customer in a crowded room. In the parking lot, they made their introductions and Mitch shook the two men’s hands and instantly forgot their names, as usual. Then they went to sit in their car, a luxury SUV. Mitch stretched out, enjoying the comfort of the seat, assuming his role was the heavy, the henchman. If the deal went bad, he was supposed to watch Doug’s back. But these guys seemed enthusiastic about the pills and perfectly friendly, so Mitch stared out the window and listened to the conversation.
“These are the good ones,” Doug was saying. “They’re seven-point-fives. This is about the strongest shit you can get, except for the tens, but those suckers are impossible to find anymore.” He sounded professional, like he was giving a presentation in a boardroom. Mitch almost expected him to start pulling charts and graphs out of his pocket and review the strengths of hydrocodone tablets with a laser pointer.
The bald-headed guy rolled a pill around between his thumb and forefinger for a few seconds, then asked if he could take it. Doug nodded. “Sure, man. It’s cool when the buyer takes a pill ’cause it means you’re not a cop.”
Eager to prove that he also wasn’t a cop, the other guy reached into Doug’s little box and took a pill too.
“How much you want for ’em?” he asked.
“I can get five bucks a pop for these, no problem,” Doug said. “It depends how many you want. If you buy in bulk, you’ll get a price cut.”
Doug, Mitch realized, was a good businessman. He had a thousand pills in the box, and the shifty doctor who gave them to Kevin only wanted two dollars a pill. So Doug had started out the negotiations with a possible three-thousand-dollar profit.
Staring out the window, oddly excited by the whole thing, Mitch listened as they haggled. The final price they agreed on was $2,800, which the bald-headed guy produced by just reaching into his wallet. This guy carried around more money than Mitch had seen in months. The only time Mitch ever had a stack of hundreds in his hand, he was on his way to the post office to get a money order for rent. These two didn’t look rich, yet they had a luxury SUV and three grand in cash. He was tempted to ask questions about their lives: What did they do for a living? Who were they? Did they have families? But he was smart enough to know that a parking-lot drug deal wasn’t the occasion for exchanges of real information.
The deal completed, they said their goodbyes and shook hands again as they got out of the car. Eight hundred dollars, just like that. Mitch felt a surge of adrenaline as they got back into their car.
“Holy shit, dude, that was awesome! You’re the man!” He punched Doug’s shoulder. “Eight hundred bucks! We can get a great car for that.”
“We have to get ski masks and Tasers too,” said Doug, who was hunched in the passenger seat, counting the money.
“I can’t believe it was that easy. Dude, we ought to do this full time.”
Doug shrugged. “Do you want to? I mean, do this instead of robbing the armored car?”
Mitch started his car, mulling the idea over. Today had certainly been easy money but he knew that every day wouldn’t be that easy. They had just gotten lucky. And besides, Doug had all the skill, knowledge, and bargaining ability. Mitch really didn’t bring much to the table.
“Nah,” he said. “I mean, it was impressive and all, but you did everything. All I really did was give you a ride.”
“I could do this full time,” Doug said. “Maybe we should do this instead of robbing the armored car.”
“Are you having doubts?”
“I don’t know. I’m getting kind of scared about the whole thing,” Doug said. “I mean, I just need a little bit to live off. I don’t need to be rich and shit. I don’t need millions of dollars. Money doesn’t buy happiness.”
“Sure it does,” said Mitch cheerfully.
“Look at Kurt Cobain.”
Despite the giddiness of the moment, Mitch felt anger welling up. He hated this logic on which so many people operated, the quaint, pat little platitudes they used to comfort themselves, the bumper stickers and refrigerator magnets that supposedly summed up all their struggles. Money doesn’t buy happiness. God has a plan. It will all work out in the end. It was brainwashing, calculated and perfect, the final bitch-slapping to top off a lifetime of stocking shelves or filing papers or answering phones. If he was going to spend his life making money for someone else, Mitch thought, that was fine. It was inevitable. But don’t insult my intelligence by trying to convince me money is worthless, just so you can keep the whole fucking pile to yourself.
He knew that Doug was a man of simple needs and that he really would be happy with very little. So, for that matter, would Mitch. But it wasn’t all about the money. It was about Accu-mart, about the army, about Doug’s car getting impounded. It was about everything that had ever made him feel small, that had given him the message that he owed someone something, that he had to do more, that his behavior wasn’t good enough.
“Kurt Cobain was a drug addict,” Mitch snapped. “All the people who killed themselves when they got rich were drug addicts. Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Jim Morrison. Money doesn’t buy happiness for drug addicts because they can buy so many drugs all of a sudden that they just freak out. Then rich people look at that and they say, ‘Money doesn’t buy happiness, fuckers. See what happened to Kurt Cobain? So stop asking for more money, ’cause it ain’t gonna help.’ They just use that bullshit as an excuse to not give us raises. Then they take the money and laugh on the beach in Bermuda. Dude, fuck that. If money doesn’t buy happiness, why do guys guard it with guns?”
He drew a deep breath, then continued his rant while Doug sat in the passenger seat staring at him. “They expect us to eat that shit up. They expect us to say, ‘Wow, money doesn’t buy happiness. Boy, I’m sure glad I don’t have any money. Otherwise, I’d just overdose on all the drugs I could buy. Yessiree, it’s much better if the rich people keep all the money, ’cause if I had any of it I’d just spend all day jamming heroin into my arm.’”
“Wow, dude,” Doug said, taken aback by Mitch’s sudden ferocity.
“Money buys happiness for everyone else. You fucking bet it does. It gives you mental peace, man. You know why? Because if you got money, you stop worrying. And not worrying all the time is happy enough for me.”
“You worry?” Doug asked. He sounded innocent, like a little boy, and Mitch felt a twinge of regret that he had cut short their celebration of the successful drug deal with an outburst of bitterness. But he hated seeing his friend act . . . brainwashed.
“Of course,” Mitch said. “Don’t you?”
“No,” Doug said softly. “I just figure everything will work out in the end.”
Mitch gritted his teeth. “I worry all the fucking time,” he said. “I worry about bills, about the rent, about not being able to ever afford anything. I can’t go anywhere or do anything. Shit, even any of that stuff you see people doing during the commercials in football games: mountain-biking, traveling, going to the beach, concerts, vacations. It’s like there’s this great big fucking world out there full of all this great shit, and man, we’re never gonna be a part of it. We can’t even have a little taste, you know? So, yes, I worry.”
They pulled onto the interstate, and as Mitch brought the car up to highway speed, he wondered if Doug’s silence was disagreement or contemplation.
“It’s like we’re all in this big beehive, man,” he continued, “and we’re just these worker bees. And all we’re ever gonna do is bring honey to the queen.”
“Hmm,” said Doug, which didn’t really clear up for Mitch whether Doug agreed with him or not. He didn’t feel he had made his point well. Honey for the queen. That was pretty damned poetic and Doug didn’t appreciate it. He knew Doug wa
sn’t as angry as he was but Mitch felt he ought to be. He’d just been laid off, for chrissake. It was like the dude never got mad
In reality, Mitch knew that the reason he wanted Doug along for the armored car robbery was because it was going to be a part of his life, and he knew that if something important to him was not also a part of Doug’s life, they would start drifting apart. Lately, Mitch had been getting an increasing sense of their eventual separation’s inevitability.
There was a long stretch of silence as they focused on the road, the lights of the city fading behind them, and Mitch tried to think of the perfect sales pitch to get Doug to commit. He knew he was terrible at sales. The truth always burst out of him at inconvenient moments. It was one of the reasons his attempt at working in the corporate world at Accu-mart had ended so badly, and he had the sense to know that any further forays into corporate life would end the same way.
They crested a hill and Pittsburgh became just a muted glow in the rearview mirror. The gentle thumping of the concrete road cast a hypnotic spell in the car, like white noise. Mitch’s voice was softer when he spoke again. He had decided on the positive approach.
“I’m looking forward to robbing this damned armored car,” he said. “I’m actually looking forward to it, like we’re going on vacation or something. You know why?”
“Why?”
“’Cause ever since I was in school, everyone has been trying to teach me a lesson, you know? Accu-mart, the army—always someone telling me to sit up straight, quit smoking pot, do this, do that. Stop getting in trouble for stupid shit.”
Doug nodded.
“Well, I’ve learned my lesson. I’m not going to spend any more time getting in trouble for stupid shit. No more. You understand? No fucking more. I don’t want to be the guy who is always getting in trouble for stupid shit. Next time I get in trouble, it’ll be for something serious.”
“Hmm,” said Doug.
