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| "Mind the minors, plea-uzzzh!" |
“Blessed Double Dog Dare debauches, dearest brother Binks!” I exclaim loudly, arm slung around his bulky stumbling shoulder.
“All too right, most honorable Hoff,” he chides along in good-natured fashion, taking a pronounced tipple from his parceled bottle. “But-” and he lowers his voice a bit, ever mindful of the nosey ear of the peeping tommy eyes of our general pop. “But where’re we off to now? I thought we were bringing the stuff up to King. We’re headed south.”
“Right you are, old boy,” I tell him amicably. And drawing him aside down a knock-turn little backstreet, add in a whisper, “Can’t be too careful, fuzz about and all. We’ll meander our way as best we can up the byways and side-alleys.” Because a half-pound of meth is a hell of a thing to carry, plastic-wrapped and duct-taped and sagging weightily within the jacket pocket as it does. Weighing years’ and yonks’ and lifetimes’ worth of bar-biting brutality, a menstruating mother-down cacophony of malice for honest lot like ourselves.
But it makes for a troubleless sort of venture, dark and fragrant garden plots overflowing onto crumbling sidewalks and a sky full of stars, though for the most part unseen to the urban eye. Cool air, distant train… the sort of night such things were made for. “Because what’s money anyway?” I accidentally ask aloud.
“An illusion!” Binks pipes in, never missing a beat. “A reflection of the means of production meant to hamper the proletariat.” He doesn’t stop with the jargon, “Money is the root of all evil, the great oppressor. The death of mirth, the sucker of life, the whore of-” and with a mighty – whooph! – Binks stumbles short as I elbow him sharply beneath the ribs.
“I think I hear something,” I warn him, hearing only the refreshing sounds of nocturnal silence. An ode to my personal joy, sipping on a waning bottle of cab-sav beneath this celestial bouquet of ours. “Let us continue on in silence, and take advantage of our surprising element.” He whispers agreement and we saunter on. Waning moonlit shadow puppets of monstrous oaks, slender alders. Fig trees and maples and the occasional elm. Quietly shifting in the breeze, scarcely heard above the odd hum of a latter-season air condition system or the buzzing power units strung overhead.
“Would that it would all stop,” I whisper, mostly to myself. A world without its Electric Giant, a world of worthy equals parleying about after life’s necessities. Neither trapped nor ensnared by fantasy or whimsy, living for the now, that terrible and awesome nemesis to the future and repressor of our glories past. Dwelling for the second-by-tick-tock-second, as myself and Binksie here on this darkened avenue.
“I thought we were walking in silence,” Binks mutters reprovingly, and I remember our pact. So we walk on in silence, past Weidler and Schuyler and Tillamook- to can’t quite say where, gentleman’s agreements and so forth. But after a bit of strolling back and forth we finally find the place, an unlit white-sided house hemmed with juniper bushes.
Ditching our bottles in the gutter we begin our approach up the well-kept walk, when a wild hair grips me. I grapple Binks’ shoulder. “What if we awayed with the thing?” I ask him, deadly serious. More’n a pop for a puff, couple thou lining the pockets minus the odd splurge. “Hell, we could make off for California. Buy a plot and start a farm, breed rabbits.”
“What is this, Steinbeck?” Binks spits, face flushed. “We’ll get nobbled. These guys’re animals. Let’s just dump this stuff off and get gone.”
“Sage advice,” I say to my spineless colleague. But it’s true nonetheless; best to get this burden away and disappear with the dawn. Besides, what’s money? We’ll still fork in a few hundred for the trouble. “After you,” I say, and again the thought creeps up. Run. Disappear into the night and head south. Or hell, north! Canada! Health care and Molson’s and poutine and foreign women.
But Binks is already buzzing the bell and the front door swings open, briefly basking the lawn in a column of white light before the pair of us are leeched inside from the darkness without. The doorman is a big bloke, shaved head and pierced face with enormous empty eyes, like the discs of a ceiling lamp. Very imposing. “Goat the stuph?” he asks us in an indeterminate drawl. I nod, the gether uncomfortable by the size of our host and sudden closeness in-of-doors we find ourselves in.
The Bulk ushers Binks and myself into the living room as I drag out the bindle of mealy white powder from my pocket. But I nearly drop the bag as I find ourselves surrounded by luminous blue fish tanks on every side. Stacks of them, gallons and gallons of salt and fresh tanks filled with delicate, multi-colored fish and sea creatures. “Jesus me,” I exclaim breathlessly. It’s less like being at the aquarium than a well-stocked pet shop, same unnatural humidity and all. Very dank.
“You got the stuff?” asks a voice from the hall, and in comes who I take to be the fish-fiend. Sluggish looking fella with a mop of ruddy blonde hair and acne pocks about his face, looking a bit groggy and stoned for the wear. “You got it?” he reiterates testily, and I can’t say I care for the way he’s looking down the nose at us.
I hand over the bag, which he gives a cursory glance to before chucking it across to the Bulk by the door. I wait expectantly, for bills or something. Cigarettes, wine, anything at this point; I’m starting to get the creeps from this inordinate number of steamy fish tanks. “Well, if you’ve got our money…” I begin, and the Slug sort of frowns the more deeply.
“Your money?” he asks wearily. “Your money? That’s Marestal’s problem. He’s got your drinking money, not me.”
“Look, Fish Tank,” I start to tell him, torn between a life-ending veil of red and a self-saving interest of getting the hell out. I start to say, but the Bulk takes a step forward and Binks loses what little pigment he’s got and steps a ways back. “Look man,” I begin again, lightening my tone. “Marestal said you’d pay us on delivery. Contractual and all that.”
“Fuck you,” the Slug tells me curtly. And I wanna brain the churlish monkey, take a bottle and shove it right up his pasty middle-class asshole. But I haven’t the bottle, and then the Bulk has this look of enraged disgust on his flattened face.
“I don’t think this is dust,” he says to Slug, who yawns angrily at the pair of us.
“Oh?” he purrs, and again I’m wanting out. Fucking Marestal. Talk about shoving bottles… What’s money, anyway? Bit of fluff and mirrors, light dancing offa the silver platter at the end, little man behind the curtain. Nothing worth losing the thumbs over, nothing worth getting a nostril split for. “Let me see that,” and the Bulk forks over the bag and idles taut in front of the exit. I’m shitting bricks myself, though not quite going the Binksie route with his audible whispers of harried Hail Mary’s, still yet the spineless idolater.
“Hnmmm,” Slug murmurs. “No-” and he looks at the pair of us with a positively disdainful hate. “No, I think this is best taken up with Marestal. It’s wrapped too well to have anything to do with you two.” And a burden was altogether dropped, I suppose. Everything happens so fast: Binks sighs a praise of relief, Bulk relaxes from the doorframe uneasily, my anus unpuckers as the body realizes it has months yet to go on. Hunky-dory goodness abounds in the karmic universe, save one altogether nasty chap named Marestal foolishly asleep on the south end of town. Binks and Bulk and my anus, all harmoniously at ease and relieved.
Then the Slug goes on about no paydays in bum town, or paper rain on a bum parade- I don’t know. But I hit the plump cocksucker in his pursed mouth as he’s mmm-ing out the um in bum. Think I split a knuckle in the ensuing bedlam, claptrap fat faggot falling backwards into a toppling tank of tetras, crash-smash double splash in a bacchanal deluge of blood and water as he takes a crimson tumble onto broken glass fragments. My right fist flaring screaming in a red rocket of flame I biff the bulky bouncer in the eye with my left as I’m pushing past for the door. He’s stunned, but not particularly worse for the wear. I’m thinking best make for the nearest dumpster or storm drain for a disappearing act.
Binks – goddamn trusty Binks – is putting a boot in to the Slug as I’m rounding the corner, disappearing from view. “Jesus, Hoff!” he’s shouting. “Jesus, Hoff, what’d you do!?” as he stamp-stamp-stamples down upon the fallen drug peddler fish-fiend lying amid flopping dying neon tetras. I’m one-two-three out the door and back into the dry cool air of the Portland night, urban dim-star sky yawning on above me. With preservation on my mind, a spring in my step, blood oozing from my crippled right and eyes darting for the nearest knock-turn backstreet. Trees quietly shifting in the impotent breeze, scarcely heard amid the shouts and muffled scuffle from within the white-sided juniper-hemmed house in King.
