ed lin

(Art by spoon+fork.)

The Jersey newspapers usually run national news in the front sections.  Apart from high-school sports and construction kickback busts, there was almost never any local news.

Mr. Angrywall made the front covers of every newspaper that they let me have in my holding cell.  Only his name wasn’t “Angrywall.”  It was “Aggarwal.”

He had been growing several different kinds of marijuana in a few of the rooms on the top floor.  Some varieties were new to the law-enforcement community.

Which included James O’Keefe.  Turns out that wasn’t his real name.  His real name was Shawn Johnson.  He was a detective with the Narcotics Central Unit of the state.  I found out later that they had put Johnson on me because I was evaluated to be the most at risk of recidivism.  They wanted to see whom I would go to for more pot.

My court-appointed lawyer was a joke.  He was a nervous Oriental guy named Chuck Shu. Yeah, I’m not kidding.

He encouraged me to “remember” some sort of story of how I saw Howard regularly get pot from Mr. Angrywall.

“Better yet,” he said, “say you went with Howard to buy pot from Mr. Aggarwal.”

“Chuck,” I told him, “I didn’t see shit.  I have no idea where Howard got his pot from.”

“You’ve been apprehended in another drug-related crime, Sean.  Under your prior conviction, that’s an, ah, automatic three-year sentence.”

“So you want me to lie?”

“Oh, no, no, no — don’t lie.  But think harder.  You might have forgotten.  It could be suppressed deep down.  If you can remember a certain scenario, and testify against Mr. Aggarwal, I can probably get you an immunity deal.”

“That means no time at all for me?”

“Yes.  It could even make you a local hero.  Mr. Aggarwal was found to have an extraordinary amount of marijuana plants and, ah, associated paraphernalia.”

“What kind of sentence is Mr. Angrywall looking at?”

“Probably 20 to 25 years.  Ultimately, it could be reduced to 10, I think.”

“They wouldn’t deport him to India?”

“He’s a naturalized American citizen.  They won’t deport him.  Can’t, in fact.”

“What about Mrs. Angrywall?”

“Mrs. Aggarwal hasn’t been charged.”

“What’s going to happen to her?”

“I guess she’ll be visiting her husband on the weekends, heh.”

In my holding cell, I got back into reading, but not books.  They let me have newspapers every day with the classified sections and personal ads left out.

They were saying Mr. Aggarwal may have been the sole source of the strong marijuana that was going around grade schools in Monmouth and Ocean Counties.

An editorial in the Asbury Park Press said that “Raj Aggarwal should have used his knowledge and intelligence for good, not evil.”

Some Indian kids had been beaten in school.  One badly enough to be hospitalized.

The hotel and hamburger stand were both closed by the Shore Points sheriff.

They said that my role in the whole thing was as of yet unclear.

One paper profiled some jerk who had also been arrested under the Weed Out The Garden State measure and was now working in a gift shop, packing seashells imported from Mexico and playing organ in church on Sundays.

He said that being in jail was a wake-up call for him and that it would be a shame if it hadn’t straightened me out, as well.

They took me out of the cell and escorted me to an interrogation room.  I expected Chuck to show up, but it was O’Keefe, or Shawn Johnson.

Something smelled good.

“You like chicken or veal more?” he asked.  There were two subs wrapped in tin foil on the table.  They smelled like parmesan cheese.

“I like chicken more.  I feel guilty eating veal.”

He pushed the one marked “C” on the foil to a seat across from him.  I sat down in the chair and unwrapped the sub.  I felt moist warm bread push against the roof of my mouth and I almost choked on the first bite.

“Whoa, easy there!  You’re like a dog, Sean!”

“I don’t drink out of a toilet,” I said.  I didn’t have the balls to follow Howard’s advice.

We didn’t say anything else until we were both almost done eating.

“Now, I know you’ve had a chance to talk to your lawyer, Sean.  You got a story you want to tell me?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Now let’s look at how things are, Sean,” Johnson said, finishing his sub and slapping the crumbs off his hands.

“Can I just call you O’Keefe?  It’s hard for me to call you Shawn.  That’s my name.”

“You can call me ‘Detective Johnson’ or ‘Mr. Johnson.’”

“Mr. Johnson, what kind of spot am I in?”

“You’re in a position to help put away one of the biggest drug lords in the history of our state, Sean.  Aggarwal didn’t care who got hurt or how many families got destroyed.”

“When I think of a drug lord, I think of ‘Scarface.’”

“Yeah, he was another guy who came to this country, tried to get ahead taking the low road, so to speak.  But now he has to face the music.”

“It’s just pot, Mr. Johnson.  It’s not cocaine.”

“‘Just pot,’ huh?  What if I told you that your late pal Howard was selling Aggarwal’s pot to kids at black schools?  I’m talking about kids as young as nine.  That coward sold it early in the morning before most adults in the neighborhood were awake.

“I can’t help but take this personally.  You think black families don’t already have enough to struggle with?  Now Junior’s coming home all doped up, stealing money from his mother’s purse for more when she hasn’t got enough to buy groceries?

“Then farther down the line, Junior’s going to have to smoke more and more to get to that high again.  Then he’s going to try harder stuff.”

“Everybody I knew just stuck to pot.”

“I’ll bet nobody you knew was raised by a single mother who had to work two jobs to keep the family going.

“I don’t mean two office jobs, neither!  I mean shit jobs! Scrubbing toilets, mopping floors, and everything on the graveyard shift!  Getting paid like a parking meter!  And then she has to keep juggling jobs because they keep finding someone who will work for even less!

“There you are coming in late, not knowing where you been and all high or strung out and she’s left out a dinner plate for you in the oven because she had to go to another job and she’s praying every minute, every day that you’re going to straighten out your life on your own because she’s too damn tired to beat you or even yell!”

“You’re shouting, Mr. Johnson.”

He inhaled and it seemed like a full minute before he let it out.

“I don’t mean to shout.  I just get worked up.”

“I treated my mother badly, too,” I said.  He nodded.

“Sean, you have an opportunity to break this cycle of cruelty, of racism.  Don’t do it just for you.  Think about the children.”

“Do what?”

“Testify about what you know about Aggarwal selling marijuana to Howard, who then went on to sell it to kids.”

“I didn’t hear about anything about that.”

“You know Aggarwal was supplying Howard.”

“I don’t know for sure.  Howard could have been in that room for the first time and Aggarwal killed him to keep him quiet.”

“Just say you saw them meet up, or Aggarwal came around the hamburger stand, slipped Howard a package.”

“It didn’t happen. I never saw him come by.”  He leaned in close.

“Sometimes, Sean, you need a little lie to stop the bigger evil.  For example, if I didn’t pretend to be your probation officer, I wouldn’t have been able to gain your trust and plant a bug on you.”

“What!”

“The cell phone.  I was recording you.”

“Ha, I used to turn it off. . .from time to time.”

“The bug was a recording chip hidden inside that worked if the phone was on or off.  You talk a lot of bullshit when you’re high, Sean.”

“You can’t use any of that against me.  You didn’t have my permission to record me.”

“Au contraire!  As a convicted drug abuser, I had permission from the court to monitor your activities, your whereabouts and everything you ate, drank or smoked.  Do we understand each other?”

I didn’t say anything.

“And how about I throw in Mrs. Aggarwal for the abuse of drugs, too?  Be a shame to put such a sexy, spicy woman in jail.”

“What’s going to happen to Mrs. Angry–Aggarwal?”

“I knew you wanted to get with her.  Kinda disappointed you didn’t.”

“Hey, I could’ve.  She would’ve, too.”

“Of course.  I mean, now, she’s going to hate your guts for testifying against her husband.  But if you don’t fuck him over, you’re going to fuck her over.”

“I don’t want to fuck anybody over!”

“You have to fuck someone over!  Welcome to the real world, Sean!  You had enough practice fucking up your life and your mother’s!”

I wanted to hit him, but I was so mad I couldn’t even move.  Mr. Johnson brushed his sleeves.

“Personally, ” he said quietly, “I’d much, much rather have Mr. Aggarwal fucked over.  What do you say, Sean? Are you going to testify against him?”

I pushed my seat out and put my head on top my folded arms on the desk.  Mr. Johnson shifted in his seat to hold eye contact with me.

“What’s going to happen to your recordings of me and Mrs. Angrywall?” I asked.

“I’ll have a technical difficulty and delete them.”

“I want a copy of them.”

Suddenly, Chuck burst into the room.

“My client has nothing to say to you!” he stammered.

Mr. Johnson smiled and crumpled up the foil wrappers and tossed them into a garbage can.  He said, “We were just having lunch–a real good lunch.”

Then Chuck looked at the both of us and smiled, too.

(Part 19 next week. Ed Lin will be at GR2 on Wednesday May 23 to teach a “standing” fiction workshop — bring a phone, iPad or dead-tree notebook to participate — and also on Friday May 25 for a straight-up reading.)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tongue and Groove – Author Readings

Friday 5/25 8pm Giant Robot 2 

2062 Sawtelle Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90025 310-445-9276

In celebration of National Asian American/Pacific Islanders Heritage month, Conrad Romo’s Tongue and Groove Series will make an appearance at Giant Robot 2 featuring Frannie Choi, Chiwan Choi, Ed Lin, Traci Kato Kiriyama and others
bios

Chiwan Choi is a writer, editor, teacher, and publisher Abductions is his second book of poetry.

Ed Lin is the author of Waylaid,This Is a Bust and Snakes Can’t Run. Lin, who is of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards. The native New Yorker’s latest book is One Red Bastard, by Minotaur. He’ll be available to sign copies.

Traci Akemi Kato-Kiriyama is the creator/ producer of Tuesday Night Café in Japan Town. She is a writer, performing artist, educator and  grassroots organizer.

Franny Choi was a finalist at two of the three most prestigious poetry slams in the country: the National Poetry Slam and the Women of the World Poetry Slam. She was awarded Best Female Poet and Most Innovative at the 2011 Wade-Lewis Poetry Slam Invitational, and her team was specially recognized for Pushing the Art Forward at the 2011 College Union Poetry Slam Invitational. She was also the top-ranking female poet at the 2011 Southern Fried Poetry Slam and the champion of 2010 Seoul Poetry Slam

Giant Robot was born as a Los Angeles-based magazine about Asian, Asian-American, and new hybrid culture in 1994, but has evolved into a full-service pop culture provider with shops and galleries in Los Angeles as well as an online equivalent.

Eric Nakamura
Giant Robot Owner/Publisher
eric@giantrobot.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Writing Workshop and Author Signing at GR2

Ed Lin – New Book – One Red Bastard

Wednesday May 23nd 7-9pm

GR2 – 2062 Sawtelle Blvd LA, CA 90025 www.gr2.net 310 445 9276

Giant Robot 2 (GR2) presents: Writing Workshop and Author Signing at GR2

Author Ed Lin just released his latest novel, One Red Bastard and is conducting a writing workshop. He says to bring your iPad, iPhone or Paper. The workshop is scheduled for an hour 7-8pm.

Afterwards from 8pm-9pm, Ed Lin will sign his new book – One Red Bastard. We’ll have copies on hand.

Giant Robot was born as a Los Angeles-based magazine about Asian, Asian-American, and new hybrid culture in 1994, but has evolved into a full-service pop culture provider with shops and galleries in Los Angeles as well as an online equivalent.

Eric Nakamura
Giant Robot Owner/Publisher
eric@giantrobot.com

(Art by spoon+fork.)

Andrea Conti wanted to give me a handjob as usual, but I was done with it.  I think those anti-horny jail chemicals were completely out of my system.  I still wanted to jump on Mrs. Angrywall and I was mad at her for having that much control over me.  I guess I was mad at all women.

We were standing in the back of the walk-in van.

“Let’s not,” I told Andrea.  “It’s all right.  I held on to my zipper and pushed her hand away.

“What!”  She nearly dropped the sack of money from the hamburger stand’s receipts.

“Everything’s okay.  Just, you know, we’ll unload the food each week, I’ll give you the money, and that’s just fine.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.  It’s just. . .that’s how it’s going to be.”

“You don’t like it anymore?”  Her eyes were shining.  Christ, it was like trying to break up with someone.

“I’m gonna be honest,” I said.  “This just doesn’t do it for me anymore.  I’m tired of bunting when I step up to the plate, you know what I mean?”

“All guys are like this, aren’t they?  Deep down inside you only want to score, isn’t that right?  You just want to fuck!”

“Not all the time, but some of the time, yes, definitely.  I do have to get laid every once in a while.”

“Maybe I could suck you.”

“That’s nice, but it’s not going to do it, either.”

“I’ll give you what you want, then,” Andrea said slowly.  “But you have to wrap it and I don’t want to do it in the van.”

“Where we gonna do it?”

“How about one of the hotel rooms?”

“Here?” I said, nearly choking.

“Yeah, here.  What, are you scared or something, now?  You only want to talk about fucking?”

“Naw, it’s just that, I don’t know if they’ll let me.”

“Go ask the dot for a key.  She won’t give a shit.  You know what they do in her country?”

“Don’t call her a ‘dot,’” I warned.

“I’ll call her whatever the fuck I want!”  She crossed her arms.

“Wait here.”

“I’ll wait, but not too long.”

I rubbed my ears as I walked to the office.  I wondered if I could look into Mrs. Angrywall’s eyes and ask for a room key just like that.  Sure, she was going to ask what for.  I couldn’t lie to her, but maybe I should tell her that I’d clean the room up after, too.

Every potentially good situation always had something tough to overcome.  “Man Has to Be His Own Savior“ talked about it endlessly.  Mao had the Long March.  The American autoworkers nearly starved to get their right to a 40-hour workweek.  I could ask Mrs. Angrywall for a room key to get laid.

“You look positively gloomy, Sean.”  Mrs. Angrywall was reading through Auto Exchange, the free weekly newsletter of used cars.  “It’s a sunny day out, so chin up.”

“Are you looking to buy a car or something?”

“No, but I do like the little descriptions of the cars, particularly the antique models.  It’s a bit like reading tombstones, only one presumes the cars are still running.  I’m amused by the number of ‘easily repaired’ problems there are.”

“A lot of car dealers take out ads to make them look like some guy selling a car in his driveway.  But then you call them and show up at the address and it’s a used-car lot.  They’ll try to sell you another car for more money.”

“You speaking from personal experience?”

I thought about how I went with my mother to what turned out to be a used-car lot.  The guy was a snake.  Her instincts were good enough that she ended up not buying a car, but for whatever fucking reason she went on a few dates with him.

“No, I just heard,” I said.

“You on break now?”

“No, I just. . .I wanted to ask you for a favor.”

“I definitely owe you.  If anything, for that excellent weed this summer.  You name it.”

“Could I get a hotel room?”

“Are you throwing a party?”

“Not really.  I’ll only need it for an hour, tops.”

Mrs. Angrywall scrunched up her eyebrows and nose and tried to make them meet somewhere between her eyes.

“Sean?”

“Yes?”

“What exactly are you planning on doing?”

I put my hands on the counter and hunched down.

“I’m going to have sex with this girl.”

Mrs. Angrywall folded up the magazine and smoothed down her hair.

“Are you mad, Sean?  Just who is this tart you’ve brought in?”

“It’s Andrea Conti.”  I wanted to be as upfront as possible.

“She’s a married woman, you know!  Oh, I’ve forgotten! That doesn’t mean anything to you!  You can’t keep it in your pants!”

“Oh, it matters, all right.  But it’s not the biggest thing in the fucking world!”

“Is she aware of your plans, or are you thinking you can manage to seduce her and be through with her in an hour?”

“Andrea knows what’s going on.”

“I see.  Now, then, let me find a room appropriate for such debauchery.”

She turned her back to me to look through the key rack.

“Look,” I said to her shoulders, “I’m a man.  I’m human.  I have certain needs I have to take care of.”

“Yes, that’s completely legitimate.  All men should take care of their needs.  Otherwise they wouldn’t be men.”  She snatched a set of keys and came around the counter.  “Shall we inspect the room first?” asked Mrs. Angrywall, sweeping her arms to the stairwell.

On the second floor landing, she stopped and unlocked a small closet.

“You’ll be needing clean sheets, I assume.  I mean, for her sake, at least,” she said, standing on her toes to reach for the top shelf.  I dropped my eyes to her calves.  They were a sight I had missed from all our afternoons sneaking to the roof to get high.  They were incredibly tan, impossibly smooth.

She whirled around, two sheets over her left elbow.

“Wondering if you could seduce me, now, hey?”

“It’s not a crime to look.”

“No, it’s just rude to stare at a woman’s ass.”

“I wasn’t looking at your ass, I was looking at your calves.”

“A leg man.  And I once had you pegged for breasts.”

“You don’t know what men are like.  Hell, you don’t even know what people are like.  You only know plants, little fucking underwater green shit smears.”

“You think life is about doing whatever you want, never having to take care about anyone else.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, in America we tend to look down on momma’s boys.”

“In India, any man who treated his mother the way you treated your mother would be a perfect pariah!”

“Well, maybe that’s what I am!”  I didn’t actually know what “pariah” meant.  Sounded French.

“Let’s go to the top floor.  Some of the storm-damaged rooms might fit your fancy.”

We went up and I looked at her calves some more. There was nothing else to look at apart from rough gray concrete.

Room 424 was at the far end of the west wing.  Walking across the terrace to the room, I looked down at the hamburger stand.  It looked lopsided from that angle.  Andrea was sitting in the driver’s seat of the van, the door open and her bare legs sticking out.  A cool breeze was coming in, raking thin wisps of clouds.

“Do you want to open the door, or shall I?” she asked.  The key dangled on her finger like a little bird.

“Is Mr. Angrywall around?”

“He might be.  Do you care who knows that you’re taking care of your needs?”

“I’ll open the fucking door,” I said.  I took the key from her and tried to stick it in the wrong way.  I turned it over and slipped it into the lock, but it still wouldn’t budge.

“It’s not working,” I told her.

“Let me see.”  She couldn’t get it to work, either.  “I’ll use the master key.”  Mrs. Angrywall reached into her wrap and pulled out a key with a brass circle tag.  The door opened easily.

There was an unpleasant smell, like the carpet was woven from dirty athletic socks.  You couldn’t see much of the floor, though.  Most of the space was taken up by potted marijuana plants under a complicated system of lights and water pipes.

At some point the plants had grown to about two feet high, but they were all dead and limp, lying around like washed up seaweed.

“Oh, my,” was all I could say.

“That fiendish bastard. . .” whispered Mrs. Angrywall.

The smell got worse closer to the bathroom.  The door was closed.

I saw my hand go to the door handle.  She cupped both hands over her mouth and nose.  We both knew what we were going to find.

Howard was sprawled out on the bathroom floor.  Half his face was caved in.  There were maggots and flies in his mouth.  The stench interfaced with the most un-evolved and primitive cells of my brain.  For the first time in my life, I could make my ears twitch.

Mrs. Angrywall was out on the terrace, screaming.  I stumbled outside.  She was sitting on the concrete floor, throwing her head around, spraying spit and tears.  Her fingers were tangled in her hair.

From the east wing someone was running over.  It was Mr. Angrywall.  He slowed when he saw me.  As he got closer, he smiled.

“I changed the locks, but I had forgotten about the master key.  I forgot she had a copy, too,” he said quietly.

“You killed Howard,” I said, my voice sounding like someone said it in back of me.

“Hey, buddy,” Mr. Angrywall said, “be quiet.”  He crouched down and held Mrs. Angrywall.

He was still there when several cops led by O’Keefe charged out of the stairwell and told us all to freeze.

Of course, Howard’s body was foremost in my mind.  But right up there, in second place, was the thought that I was going to be drinking water out of the toilet for at least a few years.

(Part 18 next week.)

The former “Darkie” name is gone and the smiling minstrel face is replaced with a man of an uncertain race in a top hat, but the toothpaste is still literally called “black people” (黑人, pronounced “hei ren” in Mandarin).

Black-people toothpaste is still sold in many Asian countries (we found this our first night in Taipei at a 7-11 two weeks ago). The parent company, Hawley & Hazel Group, is 50%-owned by Colgate-Palmolive.

On their site, Colgate says that while they replaced the “Darkie” English name with “Darlie” in 1990, they kept the “hei ren” characters because “Hawley & Hazel’s research shows that Chinese consumers perceive the ‘Hei ren’ toothpaste brand to be trustworthy, international and modern.”

If that’s the case, then how come there are zero black people on Darlie’s web site?

C’mon, Colgate-Palmolive and Hawley & Hazel people!

(Art by spoon+fork.)

Howard didn’t bother to show up to work on Tuesday.  Didn’t get a phone call, either.

I wasn’t surprised.  It was just a matter of time before this would happen.  He’d been saying he’d be there for years, but losing the laptop probably soured that fucker.  He had enough money, anyway.

Based on my years of working down at the shore, the people who show up late keep showing up late the whole summer, if they don’t get fired.  That kind of worker doesn’t have the initiative to find another job or to muster enough courage to quit.

The diligent ones, the people who show up on time, are the ones who leave for good.  No two-week notice.  Their phone number and address aren’t good anymore.  Any personal stuff they had at the job was already brought home over time.  That’s quitting Jersey style.

So Howard actually broke the mold — he was the slacker who actually quit.

I was ready for my break in the afternoon when I realized I might not be able to take one.  The lock was in bad shape and I didn’t feel like jiggling my key in it for five minutes so I dragged a chair outside and propped it against the closed door behind me.

I stepped into the hotel office.

“Howard didn’t call here, did he?” I asked Mrs. Angrywall.

“Nobody’s called all day,” she said, crossing her arms and slouching lower in her seat.

“He didn’t come in today.”

“And I’m certain you miss him deeply.”

I scratched behind my right ear and said, “You know, if he quit, that means no more, ah, smoking.” Her eyebrows rose.

“I see. . .” she said.

“It’s probably for the best.  Every time I lit up, I was putting myself at risk for serious bodily harm from O’Keefe.  He’d probably get you locked up, too. Anyway it’s way too risky for me to find another dealer.”

“It’s a shame.  I truly enjoyed our time smoking together.  Are you still able to get away for breaks?”

“I don’t know.  I better call Michael Conti.”

“Smoke backy?”

“Huh?”

“Er, regular cigarettes.  Do you smoke them?”

“Sure I do.  It’s like drinking soda instead of booze, though.”

“This situation calls for a carton.  I’m off to the 7-11.  I’ll meet you back at your stand.”

I went back to the hamburger stand, found the phone number on a fridge magnet and called Michael Conti, my boss whom I had never actually met.

Someone who sounded as sleepy and unconcerned as Howard answered the phone.  I had to wait a while as he went to find Michael.

A deeper voice then said, “Yeah?”

“Michael?”

“Yeah?”

“This is Sean, at the hamburger stand in Shore Points.”

“Yeah, the pothead.”

“That’s me.”

“Is something the matter?”

“Howard didn’t show up today.”

“So spank him when you see him.”

“It would be a little tough working here by myself.  I can’t do a good job when it’s just me.”

“Take a break.  Put up one of them ‘Back In 10 Minutes’ signs.”

“Aren’t you going to hire somebody to take his place?”

“Aw, it’s almost August, that means there’s one more month left in the season.  It’s not worth it.  Look at the employee pool out there.  It sucks.  Just stick it out for me, I’ll get you a better job in the fall.”

“What if I get sick, Mr. Conti?”

“Then don’t come in.”

“What if I quit, too?”

The receiver made a sound like the other end scratched against a stubbly, scabby chin.

“What if you what!”

“What if I quit?”

“Ha!  You can’t quit!  You have to work for me for a year.  That’s the law.”

My heart sank.  Sure Howard was no help, but he was company, even if he did make too much noise when he ate or drank.  And the pot sure as hell helped.

“Come on, now,” said Michael Conti.  I didn’t realize that I was moaning.  “Don’t go blubbering on me.  I been good to you.  Who else would even give you a job, with your record!”

“Nobody.”

“That’s right.  Just hang in there, man, just a few more weeks and keep giving the money to Andrea.  And no skimming.  I watch them books like a hawk.”

“Okay,” I said.

I tried to make an iced coffee, but I hadn’t used enough ice.  I ended up making a lukewarm drink that I poured down the sink.  I had a hot cup instead.

I went outside and sat in the bad plastic chair.   Mrs. Angrywall came over and sat in the good one.

“Working hard or hardly working?” she asked.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“My, you’re rude when you’re not high.”

“I’m just keeping it real, girlfriend.”

“You like Marlboro?”  She shook her pack until about an inch of a cigarette stuck out.  I took the pack from her hands and caressed her for a few seconds.

“Sean.  Don’t!”

“I’m not!” I said, holding up my right hand.  With my left I pulled out two cigarettes, put them in my mouth and lit them.

“This is such a comedown,” I said, handing one to Mrs. Angrywall.  “It’s like Kool-Aid after red wine.”

“I’ve always despised cigarettes,” she said before taking a long drag.  “Irritates the throat.”

“Anything that burns makes smoke,” I said.  I was sucking hard and it wasn’t giving me anything.

“Back in college, my boyfriend had a vaporizer.  It was brilliant.  Just drop the leaves in and it heats them up.  You just have to inhale the little mist that comes out.”

“Those things are like a couple hundred bucks.”

“It’s worth it for the benefits, long term.  No smoke smell in the house and fewer toxins.  It’s also a more efficient delivery system.”

“Do you think marijuana is addictive?”

“Not particularly.  Anything can be addictive when you can’t find happiness in your life.”

“I was happy on Howard’s weed.  That made everything easier.  I forgot how tough it was to get through the afternoons.”

“It’s even worse indoors, trying to while away the hours,” sighed Mrs. Angrywall.  “Yes, Howard’s weed was certainly special, wasn’t it?  It’s so odd to me that my husband will never have such an experience.  He is a complete square.  A goody-goody good boy.  He doesn’t even like to light candles.”

She turned to me and tilted her head.

“Do you like candles, Sean?”

“You’re trying to seduce me, aren’t you, Mrs. Angrywall?”

“I’m just being playful.”

“But you really won’t have sex with me?”

“I can’t.  I’m married.”

“Well, anyway, do you wish we had slept together that night?”

“I don’t know.  But I would have regretted it incredibly if I had.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.  Sean, I think you repeat yourself more when you’re not high.”

I tapped my cigarette.

“Did the cops ever catch the Dotbusters?” I asked.

“No, but the police have assured me that the hate crimes unit is handling it.  ‘Hate’ crimes.  That’s quite ridiculous, right?  Is there such a thing as a ‘love’ crime?”

“Oh, yeah.  In this country we call them ‘crimes of passion.’”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a car going by.  In that quick glance, I thought it looked like O’Keefe’s car.

Let him come over here, I thought.  I’ll blow smoke in his face.

One of the taillights flickered and the car took the corner.  I wasn’t motivated enough to turn around to watch it disappear.

The ceramic plate that I used to reheat burgers I stole from work blew apart in the microwave.  There was a crack in it early on, and it was only going to last for so long.

I went into the thrift store to find a good sturdy plastic plate, the kind the Brady Brunch kids ate off of.  Plastic plates get scratched up and change colors, but they last a long time.  Think about it.  The toughest dog-food bowls are made of plastic.  That says something.

I happened to pass by the bookshelf.  It was crammed with softcovers for a dime and hardcovers for a quarter.  I saw a tattered cloth cover that looked familiar, even though the title wasn’t.  All the pages were torn out of it, but the back and front covers were still attached to each other.

“Batten Down the Hatches!” was the title.  I definitely had never read it.  But the inside of the back cover listed other books from the same publisher.  “The Corduroy Road” was the fourth in the series.  Maybe this was some sort of sign from God, or maybe even Gaia.

I looked through the stack for “The Corduroy Road,” but of course it wasn’t there.

In the back of the store, I found two plates, one red and one blue.  I got a deal on them and two sets of silverware that amazingly matched.  I was on a hot streak.

I had a scheduled meeting with O’Keefe and without Howard to cover, I just closed the stand and got on the bus to Highlands.

O’Keefe was sitting at his desk, fingers twisted into a big brown knot of knuckles on his desk.  We talked a little and I mentioned that Howard quit.

“How long,” he asked quietly, “has Howard not shown up at work?”

“Four work days.”  He exploded.

“Been four days and you don’t even bother to tell me!”

“You wanted to know?”

“You don’t think it’s prudent to keep me informed of material changes to your job?”  He untangled his fingers and pressed his hands flat like he was trying to hold the desk down.  “You need someone to slap some sense into you?”

Just when I thought we were something close to friends, O’Keefe was starting to scare me again.  There didn’t seem to be enough room in my seat for me to slide back in.

“O’Keefe, I didn’t think you cared.”

“Didn’t think I cared!” he exploded.  “Boy, I’ve been cutting you way too much slack!”

“You never asked me about Howard.  If you cared so much about him, why didn’t you ever call the hamburger stand?”

“You told the police?”

“No,” I said.  “I should call the cops because somebody quit?”  O’Keefe stomped, stood up and wrestled his suit jacket on.

“C’mon!  We’re going to the hamburger stand now!”

We got into his car.  The engine was making funny sounds at red lights — the same growling sounds O’Keefe had in the back of his throat.

“Sounds like there’s something wrong with your car.”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with my car!” he thundered back.  “Some friend you are!  Guy goes missing a few days and you don’t want to help!  You’re not concerned at all!”

“O’Keefe, a guy not showing up for work isn’t something to worry about.  If I had quit, I wouldn’t have bothered to call.  I’d let Michael Conti figure it out.”

“Yeah, and you woulda been figuring out how to put your skull back together when I found you.”

I turned to the window and watched my reflection float over the gutter.

For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why he was so pissed.  Was he that much of a control freak that he wanted to keep tabs on me and everyone I knew, too?

I guess Howard was a friend.  Hey, if someone who gave you free pot wasn’t a friend, who was?

We got to the hamburger stand and I unlocked the door.  O’Keefe charged in first.  He poked around near the chair Howard used to slump in and eat noisily.

“He didn’t take anything,” I said.

“I’m looking for clues, son.”

“He never brought anything, never left with anything.  The one time he brought something in was his laptop computer.  That got stolen.”

“Course it got stolen.  Only a dumbfuck would bring a laptop into a place with a bullshit lock like this place.”

When he got sick of looking around, O’Keefe straightened up and folded his arms.

“His last day, did Howard say anything unusual?”

“He always talked strange.”

“Did he say something about how he had to go see someone urgently, or that someone was stepping on him?”

“He didn’t seem to have any problems.”

“Did he ever mention drug suppliers?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You either know or you don’t!”

“Then, no, I don’t.  You wanna give me a lie-detector test?”

O’Keefe wiped his lips with his entire left hand from the fingertips to the wrist.

“Now I’m going to ask you something really easy,” he said. “Even a stoned white boy can answer this: Where does he live?”

“I swear,” I said with my voice breaking, “I don’t know.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s true.  I’ve never been to his house.”

“You have no idea where he lives?”

“Somewhere, not too far,” was all I could squawk.

O’Keefe exhaled heavily and stared into my eyes the way all of my principals did.

“That hindu woman know?” he asked.

Leave Mrs. Angrywall out of it, flashed in my head.

“Why don’t you call up Michael Conti?”

O’Keefe brought his lips together and nodded.

“I can see that you didn’t smoke all of your brain away, boy.”

When he turned around to dial on his cell phone, I gave him an elbow-bird.

“Yeah, lemme speak to Conti.  Yeah, Michael.  Speaking, eh?  Hey, this is Sean Kerry’s probation officer.  Oh, yeah?  How’s he doing?  Well, he better be.  Anyway, I’m actually interested in another one of your employees, Howard, the other boy, er, guy you had. Where does he live?”

I got up to fix myself a soda.  O’Keefe shot a look at me.  I pointed to the soda fountain and then back to him while raising my eyebrow.  He shook his head and hand at the same time.  I made myself a mix of Sprite and Coke.  O’Keefe continued on the phone.

“Can’t tell me, huh?  Privacy, I see.  Feel strongly about that, huh?  Well, how about I put a call into my cousin over at the health inspector’s?  Oh, not for the hamburger stand, for your main restaurant!  I’m sure everything’s as good as it was since the last visit, right?”

O’Keefe turned to me and smiled broadly.  I took a long sip from my soda.  I felt better now that O’Keefe had found another target.

“I see, I see.  Well, you can trust me, Michael.  Who could ever know?  That’s right, that’s right.   Where’s that intersection? DuPont and Surf Avenue, huh?  Okay, I’ve got it.  Thank you, Michael.”

I barely finished off the soda when O’Keefe grabbed my elbow and growled, “C’mon, boy!”

We crawled down Surf Avenue, which ran parallel to the shoreline.  It was popular as a cruising street during the summer and a racing street in the off-season.  DuPont was just past where the boardwalk ended.  On the weekends, the sidewalks glittered amber and green with smashed beer bottles.

O’Keefe eased up next to a typical DuPont rental, which looked like a trailer that had been bricked in.

“This is the place,” he said.  O’Keefe reached over and jerked the glove compartment open.  It smelled like roller-skate ball bearings, oily and metallic.  He pulled out a gun in a leather holster.

Run, I thought.  Get out and run fucking run run run.  That motherfucker’s crazy.

“You look scared, Sean,” O’Keefe said casually.  “You shouldn’t be.  This is for our protection.”

I got out of the car and I couldn’t stop rubbing my kneecaps.

“Get up there!” O’Keefe said, indicating the front door.  “Get up there and knock.  Say you just want to talk.”

I went up to the front door.  In the late afternoon light I could see at least three layers of paint flaking off in the sea air.  The doorknob was crooked.

O’Keefe snuck up against the house, under the front window.

“C’mon, c’mon!” he whispered at me.

I looked behind me.  The street was empty and no people were around.

I knocked.  There no answer.

“Call out to him, Sean!”

“Howard,” I yelled.  My voice was louder than I meant because of the adrenaline pumping through my system.  “Howard!  Howard!”

I tried the door.  It was open.

“Shit!” said O’Keefe.  “Let me through!”  He pushed his way in.  I don’t know why I followed.  The place was a mess.  That wasn’t out of the ordinary, especially for a single stoner guy.

There were piles of videogame magazines and porn.  Two opened and empty boxes for Macintosh laptops sat on the couch.

In the bedroom every dresser drawer had been jerked open, with long-sleeved shirts crawling out like wounded soldiers in a trench.

The bathroom was disgusting.

In the kitchen there were three bottles of beer in the refrigerator.  O’Keefe took out two and handed me one.  He slammed the cap off against the counter edge and took a deep drink.

“Bitch took off!” he growled.

I knew Howard wasn’t coming back to the burger stand, but O’Keefe insisted he might.

“I’m going to be prowling just around the block,” he said. “Don’t be surprised if you turn around and see me in your back pocket.”

“I don’t think there’s enough room for you back there.”

“Don’t tell me there ain’t room!  You with your skinny ass!  And let me tell you something else: Don’t you even think of trying to warn this Howard to stay away.”

“He’s not my friend,” I said weakly.

“Well maybe he is and maybe he ain’t.  All I know is — and this is from extensive field testing — is that you white people always stick together and back each other up.”

“That’s not true!” I said.

“Like hell it ain’t!”

“That’s not true!” I said again, but not as clearly because my throat was closing up.  “None of my friends came to visit me in jail.  My mom didn’t even send me anything.”  My nose was caking up with mucus and I had to breathe through my mouth.

“Well, that’s what you get for only having white friends,” said O’Keefe.

I felt tears dripping off of my chin so I wiped it with my palm.

“Can’t we be friends?” I asked O’Keefe.

“Only if you stay clean.  Then we’re friends.”  He had on a tight little smile.  “Believe me, you don’t want me as an enemy.”

That was the truest thing he ever said.

(Part 17 next week.)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

When I staggered into work two days later Howard took a look at me and said, “You just lucked out big time.”

“Why? I’m not late.  Am I?”

“No, cops just left!  The Dotbusters came here last night and put posters all over the place!”

“Jesus!  Are the Angrywalls all right?”

“I don’t think they’re hurt.  Just some property damage.  The guy was pretty pissed off, yelling at the cops and all.  Like that’s gonna help, Apu.”

“I’m going to see if they’re OK.”

I put on a pot of coffee before leaving for the motel office.  When I got closer to the door, I saw two fliers wheat-pasted to the glass that both read: “Go Back to India Smelly Curry Motherfuckers — the Dotbusters.”

The office was empty, but I heard some grating sounds coming from the stairwell.  I found Mrs. Angrywall there, working with a butter knife on the fliers.

“Bloody cowards, all of them!” she yelled, her voice sounding huge and ethereal in the stairwell’s spiraling chamber.  “They put most of them in here where people in the street couldn’t see them.  They only had enough balls to put two up on the office door before running away!”

“Maybe you should get those two in the front first.”

“No!  I want to keep them up!  I want everyone to know that this is a business run by dots!  And that we smell!”

“Where’s your husband?”

“He went down to the police station to harass them some more.  They had the nerve to blame us for not staffing our office 24 hours a day!”

“I’m going to get a knife and clean off the front doors.”

“Sean!  Don’t!”

I left anyway and came back with a rusty old spatula I found under the hamburger stand’s sink.

Mrs. Angrywall sailed out with her finger pointed at my throat.

“Put that down!  Don’t touch that front door!”

“I have to get those fliers off!”

“Why do you need to get them off of there so badly?  You people put them up!”

“Don’t blame me, man!”

“Well there isn’t a chance in hell that someone black did it!  Only a white man would have the entitlement to tell us to get out of his country!”

“How do you know?”

“I know!”

“Well, anyway, there’s no point in leaving it like this.  If you let them vandalize your office, they win and they’ll be back to do something worse.”

I stepped around her to get to the door.  She grabbed my wrist.

“Don’t you dare!  You. . .you. . .motherfucker!”

I was shocked at her outburst and loosened my grip on the spatula.  She ripped it out of my hand and winged it.  We listened to it clatter on the concrete.

We both turned to the door.

“Why us, Sean?  Of all the hotels, of all the Indians in this entire state, why us!”

“Because you were here and they saw you.”

“Can’t they tell by the way this place looks that we haven’t got money?  Why don’t they go after the big hotels and the rich Indians who are prospering on the Jersey shore?”

“These Dotbusters, I bet they’re like high-school kids and they’re not too bright.  And the better hotels probably have an office open 24 hours with staff walking around.”

“You’re probably right,” Mrs. Angrywall said.  Then she ran her hands through her hair and shifted her feet.  “You don’t happen to have any idea who did this, do you?”

“I really don’t know.”  But Howard might, I thought.

She turned and walked away.

(more…)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

I was about to cross the street, far from the crosswalk, when I had to stop for a Jetta coming down.

It was moving just fast enough that I couldn’t cross the street but also slow enough that the driver wanted me to know he was holding me up on purpose.

I swept both arms to the left to suggest that the car speed the fuck up.  To my amazement, the car turned slightly and bared down upon me.  The sun was low and threw a glare on the windshield so I didn’t see Mrs. Angrywall in the driver’s seat until she was nearly on top of me.

“I thought it was you, Sean!” she yelled out the window.

“Hi, Mrs. Angrywall.”

“Can I give you a ride?”

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere in particular.”

“You’re just driving around?”

She smiled and shrugged.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I said.  “I don’t want to piss off your husband.”

“It won’t piss him off.”

“He looked pretty mad last time I saw him.”

“That’s how he gets from time to time.”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s out of town right now, if that really makes a difference to you.”

I shook my head and came around to the passenger side.  I sat down and strapped myself in.

“Which way?” she asked as she let up off the brake.

“Go down to the third light, make a left.”

“Are you just going to go home now?”

“That’s what people do when they’re done with work.”

“No!  The Americans go out and have fun in tacky corporate pseudo-pubs!  Go down to Applebee’s or TGIFs!”

“I’ve never been to a TGIF!  That’s for yuppies!”

“Do you want to go now?”

“God, no.  What’s gotten into you, Mrs. Angrywall?”

(more…)

Wow, hope this scene isn’t in the reboot! (Flied Liceburgers — I get it!)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the Roman Catholic Church I went to before my father freaked out, was also the place where I went to get my flu shot.  It was especially terrifying because Maximilian was killed by a lethal injection in the arm by the Nazis.  Who designated this church to give shots?

My Sunday school teacher told me that despite how crass and crude the Italian race was, they hadn’t lost the True Religion, and that was to their credit.  The English had broken from God because Henry VIII was horny, she told me.   I was six.

If you didn’t do the rosary everyday, you could lose your faith.  The devil was real and was always working to get between you and God.

“Even I could lose my faith,” she admitted.

“How could the devil get you?  You’re a nun,” I said.

“When I dress like a nun as a matter of routine and not ritual, then I am lost.”

My father was a heavy drinker but unlike most alcoholics he was home a lot. He usually lay face down or up on the couch but he would get up to make coffee in the afternoons and to get the mail.  I looked forward to when I was old enough to drink and grow stubble.

One day he got a letter from his brother in Ireland that told him that his mother had died.  He folded it up and put it in his back pocket.

My mother begged for him to pray for his mother’s soul in purgatory, that we all should say the rosary together.  He refused.  She begged again.  I got scared when he laughed.

“Her spirit’s in another baby right now,” he said.  “She’s being born again.  She doesn’t need prayers.”

He woke me up that night, his breath stinging my eyes.

“The entire Irish race is being punished.  We let the Christians pervert our Gods and smash our altars.  They built churches over our sacred sites.  This is where the troubles come from. ”

I didn’t know what the troubles were back then, but I kept quiet.  I would have been stupid to ask him.  My father hated listening to anything–people, news or music.

He had something under his coat.  He took out a set of cheap dinner knives, still in the cardboard holder.  The metal looked like tinsel in the light coming in from the streetlamps.  They must have come from the 99-cent store.

“Boy, come with me.  We’ll throw knives in the water to celebrate grandma’s life!”

I suddenly had a premonition as bright as operating-room lights.  My father was going to bring me down to the beach, stab me and cut my throat.  Then he was going to throw my body into a marsh.  I would be found centuries after my death, perfectly preserved like those bog bodies I saw in National Geographic.

I rolled over and wedged my legs between the bed frame and the wall.

“No!” I cried out.

“Shhh!” said my father.  “You’ve gone bloody mad!  Want to wake up the neighborhood?”

I held fast and closed my eyes.  When I opened them, he was gone.

The next day, when my father was asleep, I was in the kitchen with my mother.  I told her about the knives.  She shook her head but held her tongue.

“What’s wrong with Daddy?” I asked.

“He came here because bad people were killing each other in the streets.  His sister was blown up by a bomb.”

“How come Jesus and Mary didn’t help?”

“Daddy doesn’t talk to them anymore.”

“Daddy doesn’t believe in Jesus because his sister was killed?”

“Daddy’s lost his faith.  We have to pray for him every day.  We don’t want him to end up in Hell.”

I prayed so hard and kept my thoughts so pure, I didn’t even think about eating candy.  I said Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and even the Apostles’ Creed, which was so fucking long.

My reward for my new fanaticism was my father ripping apart my Bible in front of me.  He warned my mother and I that if we ever went back to Saint Maximilian Kolbe, he would burn the church down.

I spent Sundays in my room, wondering what Purgatory felt like, if they allowed you to sleep when you were tired.  I was scared to walk into the living room and disturb my dad.  He would be asleep on the couch or doing the crossword puzzle with a pencil that he would snap and tape back together.  If the house wasn’t quiet, he’d make it quiet.

There was nothing fun for me to do in my room, so I started doing my homework.  I think my grades went up a little.  One day I came home with straight Bs on my report card.  I thought it would cheer up my mother.  I found her lying in bed, her eyes all puffed out and veiny like jellyfish.

She told me that Dad had found a ship to take him and most of his money back to Ireland.  He was over here illegally and was lucky he didn’t get taxed, thrown in jail and deported.

I asked her if we were going back to church.  She said that she was in her wandering years now but before she died she would get it right with God.

A few years later I became the last person in my family to lose my faith, when I shoved my fishing rod down that sewer grate.

When I got in, Howard was crouched over something on top of the ice-cream freezer.

“What have you got there?” I asked, looking at the dry cutting board that should have been dripping with tomato slices.

“Sean, I wanted to show you some of my poems, but I couldn’t get my printer working today,” he said, sitting up.  One hand was lightly perched on the keyboard of the laptop computer.  “I felt a little inspiration once I got in so I wrote a few lines, just off the top of my head.”

I went straight for the coffee machine.  I tore open two packets of grounds and poured them into the brass filter.  I pressed both palms against my eyes to hold back the headache that would get worse if I didn’t have a cup soon.

I needed to feed the caffeine monster before I could start doing the prep work that Howard had spaced on.  I always over-compensated, so the daily joint in the afternoon really took the edge off.

The machine pissed coffee into the pot.  I took two plastic cups and shoved them together.  I pulled away the pot with one hand and put the double cup under the coffee stream.  Spilled coffee sizzled on the burner.

“Hey,” said Howard, “You’re taking the strongest brew right off the bat.  You’re going to make the entire pot weak.”

“You’re weak, motherfucker,” I muttered.  When the coffee level was about to top off in the cup, I swung the pot back in.  The burner hissed some more and a coffee mist rose up.

I walked over to the order window.  I put the cup to my lips and blew gently.  Then I breathed in the smell and my sinuses crackled.

I looked at the window and saw small dots of paint on the glass around the handle.  I managed to get a few sips of lava-hot coffee.  I opened the glass window and closed the screen.  Air came rushing in with the salt from the ocean, spiced with the smog from the California kids’ cars.  They would drive even a lousy 10 blocks instead of walking.

I had some more coffee.  I stared at a dirty seagull frozen in space with his beak open.  I got the feeling that I wasn’t going to get laid the entire summer, and somehow I was okay with that.

The coffee started to kick in.

“Lemme see those poems, Howard,” I said.  “I’ll read them as long as you cut up those tomatoes and lettuce.”

“I’ve been giving you free weed!  You can’t expect me to do a reasonable share of the work!”

“Well forget it, then.  I don’t want to read them.”

“Okay, okay. You win!”  Walking like he was on the sea floor, Howard slouched off to the fridge and took out a crate of tomatoes and a crate of lettuce.  He opened up the hood to the condiment bins and found yesterday’s knife, unwashed and sticky.

I read his first poem as I finished my coffee.

“My bones, chewy as calcium tablets,” it started.

Even if I didn’t know him, I’d think he did massive pot.  I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t laugh out loud and hurt his feelings.  I moved down the page a little.  The laptop was really nice and the keys were soft as butter.  They didn’t even make clicking sounds.

I read the 10 lines and forgot them immediately.  I walked back to the coffee machine for a refill.

“Damn, you read fast!” Howard said, watching me.

“I’m a speed reader,” I said.

“Did you like it?”

“Oh, yeah.  You’re a deep thinker.  A real visionary.”

“I’m not a visionary.  Right now I’m just sticking to a personal context.  But I do want to move on to the next plane.  I want to take the long view on life and write universal themes.  We don’t see much art from Jersey because of the density of the population.  There’s too much stimuli to provide the isolation a poet needs to thrive in.

“Jersey has only really produced two true poets:  Springsteen and Danzig.  Songs are really poems put to music, and their verses have already stood the test of time.  In fact they are probably more poignant than ever in a post-9/11 world.”

“Hey, what about Bon Jovi?  He’s a genius.”

“That’s party music.  You don’t listen to it for the words.”

“Howard, how much was that computer?”

“Couple thousand.”

“How could you afford that?  I thought you didn’t finish paying for college.”

“I’ve been saving.  Keeping that college debt on my balance sheet helps reduce taxes for me.  If I really wanted to, I could pay it off today.”

We went back to the laptop and he threaded a thin metal cable through a security latch and looped it through the slot on the back of a plastic chair.  He snapped a special lock through the loop.

“Not that I don’t trust you,” he said.  “But people train like ninjas to steal one of these babies.”

When I came back from my smoke break with Mrs. Angrywall, I found Howard pacing outside the burger stand.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Look!” he shouted, pointing to the shattered back of the plastic chair.  “I went to take a piss and they stole my laptop!  I was gone two minutes!  They’re fucking good!”

“You call the cops?”

“No. Why bother?  You know how this ends up.  The police go on the lookout for a young black male and never find any suspects.”

“Did you see the guy?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“How do you know he was black?”

“Of course he was black!  You think one of those white California kids stole it?  Use your head!”

“You were really gone for two minutes?”

“Two minutes, tops.  Anyway, it’s not really the money.  I can get another one.  It’s all my personal stuff on my hard drive.  It can’t be replaced.”

“You can remember your poems and retype them, right?”

“I had a lot of contacts saved on there, too.”

“Contacts?  What the hell are you talking about, Howard?”

“People I stay in touch with!  In the working world, if you don’t have a support network, you won’t get anywhere!”

When Howard said he got another laptop the next week, I knew that he was a bigger dealer of modified weed and other things than I had previously thought.

(Part 14 next week.)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

The only reason Mrs. Angrywall came fishing with me was because I promised her we would throw all the fish back, even the ones good enough for keepers.

We went out on a cloudy Monday afternoon to Island Beach State Park, pretty close to where I had hooked the squirrel.  When I was a kid, it seemed to take forever to bike there.  Now it was just a 30-minute walk.  Usually the best time to catch kingfish was dawn or dusk, but when it’s overcast or storming, they bite all day.

I bought some sandworms from a bait shack and had selected the two most innocent-looking hooks.  I bet those hooks couldn’t pierce the rough patch on my right heel.

Now I was really glad I hadn’t asked Howard to go fishing.  I had enough of his ass, six days a week.  But I hadn’t had enough of Mrs. Angrywall’s ass.

There’s something very innocent about walking with a woman when you’re each holding a fishing rod, even when you think she’s more attractive every time you see her.  What hidden intentions could you have? You have someplace to go and your purpose is clear: fishing.

It’s not like you’re sitting in a bar, spinning a wet coaster on its edge and wondering how many more drinks it’s going to take.

Mrs. Angrywall had found the center of balance on the rod and carried it daintily, as if about to twirl it like a baton.

(more…)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

I used to love fishing.  I never got so deep into it that I would make my own flies or drift live bait in the water.  I was a sandworms-and-frozen-spearing kinda kid.

It’s true what I told O’Keefe that I gave up on the filleting jobs on boats because they started making me nauseous.  But it was something else that stopped me from fishing altogether, and why the thought of baiting a hook made me feel sick for years.

I really wasn’t thinking the day that it happened.  That’s my defense.  You can think fishing is fun because when you have a fish with a hook through its cheek, you don’t hear it scream.  Other animals are different.

I went fishing at Island Beach Park, on the surf, with Al Lombardi.  We were about 14 or so.  Al was a guy who later got put into private school so this was one of the last times I ever saw him.

I had a sandwich bag of sandworms packed in seaweed to keep them lively.  Sandworms would be scary if they were bigger.  They have two fringes of hundreds of feelers on either side of their body.  Those feelers would wriggle around a lot, especially when you cut up the worm to bait on your hook.

Al brought a small pile of corn kernels from a can.  What the hell are you going to catch with corn kernels?  Nothing.  I let him use my worms.  I had to cut them for him, too, because he was such a pussy.

We were trying to get kingfish.  Despite its name, the kingfish is actually pretty small and only weighs a pound or so.  Bluefish and sea bass were made by God to be caught by men.  The kingfish was made to be caught by kids.

For whatever reason, nothing was biting that day.  No kingfish, anyway.  But we were pretty close to a cluster of evergreen trees and a squirrel was running in, stuffing his mouth with Al’s useless corn and then scurrying away with it.  He came back to refill a few times.

For a joke, I stuck a kernel on my hook and put it in the middle of the corn pile.  I didn’t think the squirrel was actually going to take the bait.  He could see it, couldn’t he?

Suddenly my line jerked.  The squirrel was rolling and flopping around.  It was screaming, too, like a mother bird when you’re too close to its nest.  I didn’t know squirrels could be so loud.

I was scared and I couldn’t move.

“What the fuck did you do?” cried Al.  He ran over and grabbed the squirrel.  He managed to get the hook out and released the squirrel.  Al’s hand was bleeding where he had been bitten and scratched.  I knew then he was way braver than I ever was.

The squirrel ran off about 20 feet.  It stood up, turned its back to me and stroked its face.

“It probably can’t eat anymore!” Al yelled at me.  “It’s going to die!”

I grabbed my pole and jumped on my bike.  I pedaled harder than I ever had.  Maybe I was trying to go back in time and make us go shoplifting instead of fishing, or at least far back enough so that I didn’t bait the corn.

I shoved my pole down a sewer grate and that was the last time I touched one before the thrift store.  Satan had acted through me to trap God’s squirrel.  I could never face Him again.

I had a dream about that squirrel years later in jail.  He came up and touched my face.  I thought he was going to rip my cheek where my fishing hook had got him.  But his face was smooth and furry like nothing had happened to it and his little claws felt soft on my skin. His black and bottomless eyes seemed to say that it was useless to say anything to me.

When I woke up I had a corner of the sheet twisted into my mouth.

I managed to get the reels untangled. I called O’Keefe and asked if he wanted to go fishing with me.  He sounded surprised to get my call, and not too pleasantly.  He decided he didn’t feel like it.

“You look like a fool out there,” he said.  “You look like a bigger fool when you don’t catch anything.”

“Come on, we’ll catch something.  It’ll be fun.”

“Not fun for me.”

“I’ll bet you’ve never gone fishing with a white boy before.”

“That’s true, but I’m not going to be your slave Jim gone fishing with you, Huckleberry!”

After he said goodbye and I hung up, I stared at the phone.

I used to know so many people.  Guys I could call and we’d go hang out.  Girls I kinda boomeranged back to (but of course if a guy picked up the phone, I had the decency to hang up).

It was a different world now.  People moved on, changed their numbers and e-mail addresses.  You find out who your real friends are when you are moving to a new house or when you get out of jail, my inmate instructor at DEPCOR had told me.

I turned the phone over in my hands.  What is a “real friend,” anyway?  I lay down in bed and played with the phone some more.  Was a real friend someone who hurt you for your own good?  Did real friends stop you from smoking pot or get you a nicer bong?

Sure, Jesus was your savior, but was He a real friend?

I turned on my side and saw the stack of books the prison staff had given me as a going-away present.  Three that had their spines to me were “Fast Food Nation,” “One Hundred Years Of Solitude” and “Down These Mean Streets.”  I had read more books in a year than other guys had read in 10, they told me.  Now that I was out, I hadn’t read anything.  I had reverted to a dope-smoking moron with a retarded job.

I thought about Mrs. Angrywall teaching me British English words in the marsh.  Maybe a real friend helps you become a better person.  I could have lay down and listened to her talk all night.  She could have re-taught me English right from “aardvark.”

Suddenly, I thought about this book I had loved many years before prison, back when I still could have been anything when I grew up.

The book was called “The Corduroy Road,” which our class read in fourth grade with Ms. Daley.  It was about a family of pioneers crossing America in covered wagons.  The title always made me think about my pants, but it really referred to the roads made of logs laid across lengthwise where the mud was bad so the wagons could cross.

The teacher had tried to section it out so we would stop reading the book on the last day of class, but everybody loved the book so much, we read it out loud for an extra half hour every day.  Because we were such wonderful readers, when the class finished the book early, we’d gotten to see movies for the rest of the year.

But I had missed the last few chapters and the big ending because I had something close to strep throat.  I was drinking a lot of Hawaiian Punch and Hi-C.  This girl brought the book out of my desk at school to my house.  She wanted to read me the last few chapters, but I waved my arms and shook my head.  I wasn’t in the mood to hear it.  When she ran out, my mother came in and for the first time looked at me as if she were the one I had hurt.  I would get that look a lot from her, later on in life.

My mother used to dream that I’d be the first man in the family to wear a shirt and tie to work. But every one of her dreams had been smashed to pieces and all she could do was watch them fall off the mantelpiece from the next room over.  When the truant officer brought me home from the arcade.  When she found a used condom in her bed.  When they wouldn’t let me walk in the high-school graduation ceremony.

The truth is that I felt terrible for her, but I also resented her for making me feel that way.  I really hate to say it, but she never should have hooked up with my father.  I’ve seen pictures.  She could have been in music videos.  She could have found someone really special, or someone really fucking boring with a decent job, but she threw herself away on an illegal Irish bastard.  Then she had a bastard herself.

People were talking about me and my family in church, but nuns would come up and, unprompted, remind everybody within shouting distance that Mary was unwed when she gave birth to Jesus and that all unwed mothers and their children were blessed by the Holy Father.

Maybe they were trying to be nice, but it didn’t hurt that I was a good-looking bastard.  I got my mother’s frigid blue eyes and perfectly symmetrical eyebrows.  I got my father’s feet, and their casual manner of walking away from things.  Too bad neither of them could give me brains.  Where I got my height from was anybody’s guess.

My mother still had most of her looks, at least the last time I saw her.  While I was catching up on reading in jail, she had my stuff boxed up and put into storage.  She moved in with some guy in Philadelphia who made it clear in a postcard that if I dared to show up at the door he’d put a pickaxe through my head.

Unfortunately, my mother had picked the storage place by the Holland Tunnel entrance.  It had burned down while I was locked up.  The only thing I had left from her was the shirt I was arrested in and got back when I was let out.  I still considered myself lucky, because some people had been living in those storage spaces and died in the fire.

I remember how upset I was when I got better and came back to school and my copy of “The Corduroy Road” was missing from my desk.  The janitor had taken all the books and stacked them up in the storage room.  He already had it in for me because I had Krazy-Glued his metal tools together earlier in the year. So I wasn’t surprised when I asked him to get one for me so I could finish it and he just laughed and laughed.

Nobody in class felt like explaining how the story ended because the teacher had cried and everyone got weirded out.

Maybe if I had let that little girl read me the end of “The Corduroy Road,” I would have turned out a better person. It made me a little sad.  Someday I could look for that book on eBay.

That pioneer family had to have made it all the way West.  There was no way they were going to let them all get killed by Indians, right?

(Part 12 next week.)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

Work on Monday was going as OK as it could until this guy spazzed out on me when I told him we were out of tomatoes.

“Son of a bitch, let me talk to your manager!”  He had on a pair of insect-eye sunglasses, the kind that only California assholes wear.

“We’re out of tomatoes, sir,” Howard called out.  He was sitting on a milk crate and slumping against the freezer door, just out of view of the customer.

“A burger’s not a burger without tomatoes!” the customer yelled, sticking his face in the opened order window and looking around for Howard.

“McDonald’s doesn’t use tomatoes, and some people think they sell hamburgers,” Howard’s voice called out again.

The guy flipped the sunglasses on top of his head and rubbed his temples.  One eye was bloodshot.

“All events are neutral,” he said quietly.  “It’s our own values that we put on them that make them good or bad.”  Then he looked at me and said, “I’ll have two hot dogs.”

I walked over to the freezer and pried out two hot dogs from the frozen mass of what used to be the lowest shelf.  Because of a power outage, the freezer had melted and frozen again. The inside was one big discolored sheet of ice that looked like polar bear fur stained with piss.

“Can you just deep-fry them instead of grilling them?” asked the man.  That was the classic New Jersey way of cooking dogs.  Most tourists didn’t want them like that because frying them split the skin and the flesh would burst out.

“The dogs are frozen solid, they’re not thawed out.  They’re not going to turn out right,” I told him.

“It’s okay,” he said.  “Frying brings out the natural goodness in foods.”

He was right.  At least they looked pretty good, considering they expired a few months ago and that the oil in the fryer hadn’t been changed all summer.

I even cooked one for myself later on, but couldn’t bring myself to eat it, knowing that it was old meat.  I gave it to Howard instead.  He ate it and I watched for something to happen.

“Let me give you some more career advice,” he said when he was done.

“Yes?”

“For the sake of practicality, get a shitty job in the city.  It will pay less than in Philly, but you only have to ride one train system instead of two and as the years go by, there will be more opportunities to advance than in Philly.”

“Going from NJ Transit to Septa for Philly does suck.”

(more…)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

Before we got started, I offered Andrea Conti a joint.

Despite the close brush at JJ’s, I couldn’t stop smoking pot.  It became even more exciting.  Pot stayed in your body 90 days, as long as a warranty if you wouldn’t buy the extra protection.

“No way, get that shit away from me,” she said, as she continued to roll up her sleeve.

“Would you mind if I smoked?”

“No, it’s disgusting.  Don’t do it.”

Andrea was getting fussy, but wasn’t any less enthusiastic in what she did, even when it took me longer sometimes.

The rules were set pretty early on.  I couldn’t touch her and she wouldn’t take off any of her clothes.  All she was going to use was one hand.

“Andrea, do you have a boyfriend on the side?” I said, as she unzipped me.

“I’m married, I don’t need a boyfriend!”

“If I were your boyfriend, you’d have sex with me, right?”

“I don’t like sex.”

“This is sorta sex already.”

“This isn’t sex, this is like my service.  I like to make people feel good.  I would never cheat on Michael.”

“He doesn’t know about this, does he?”

“Who do you think set the rules?”

Suddenly I wondered if there was a camera somewhere in the truck.  Was this going out live on the Internet?  I was distracted and went a little limp.

“You want me to talk like a black girl?” Andrea asked.  “Would you like that, boo?”

“No, don’t do that,” I said.  I closed my eyes but the thought was in my head.

I imagined Nadine from the bar.

“There we go,” Andrea said.

Nadine looking sideways at me.  Slowly she changed into Mrs. Angrywall.  The view moved from her face and down the groove in her calf to her dark brown feet with toe rings.

I wondered what Mrs. Angrywall would be like in bed, with those toe rings jingling around my ears.

When I was up on the roof with Mrs. Angrywall that afternoon, I noticed that she was wearing a pair of low-cut Converses.

“How come you’re not wearing your sandals?” I asked.

“Oh, the damn strap broke.  I drag my feet too much.”  She took a drag on the joint and passed it back to me.  “Now I have to wear these evil Western shoes.”

“They’re probably made in China.  They’re still Asian so you should like them.”

“Ah, yes, because China and India are such good mates.  We’re all Asian, aren’t we?  That’s like me telling your people that the English are your brothers.”

“From what my father told me, Irish killed more Irish during the troubles.”

“Could be true, but the provos are far more intelligent than they’re given credit for.  There was no random violence.”

“How do you know about the IRA?”

“My boyfriend in college was Irish.  From Ireland.”  She took the joint back from me.  “Oh, don’t mention that to my husband.  I’ve never told him about it.  He thought it was a white wedding.”

“He thought you were a virgin?”

“He did.  My father did, my brothers, aunts, everybody.”

“How did you get around that?”

“Hargh!  A woman has her ways around a naive and younger man.”

“Hey, I talked to him.  He seems like an average kinda guy.”

“He basically didn’t watch TV or listen to music until he was 20.  Although he’s quite the conversationalist, he’s befuddled by. . .situations.”

“Didn’t anyone know you had a boyfriend at school?”

“I didn’t have any relatives in the States.”

“Didn’t your family come over for your graduation?”

“No, they didn’t bother.”

“Not even for Harvard?”

“It was a girl graduating!”

She had a bitterness that genetically modified pot couldn’t mellow out.

“How come you’re here now?” I asked.

“I’m here to support my husband’s business.  He bought this hotel with a loan from his parents shortly before our wedding.  Earlier, he had co-founded a dot-com that went belly up.”

“How is the hotel doing?”

“Sean.  We’re doing terribly.”  She shook her head and grimaced.  “Once upon a time, we had two clerks, but we’ve had to sack them.  Now it’s me behind the counter.”

“But you people seem to be doing well.  Almost every hotel here is run by hindus.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“If it was particularly lucrative,” she said, “do you think we’d be the only ones doing it?”

I shrugged.

“I guess everyone would be doing it.”

“Right.”

“Then why are you and your husband doing it?”

“It’s still better than running a convenience store, making our money from lottery tickets and lurid magazines and videos. ”  The joint was at the end and I ground it into a black smudge with my shoe.

“Sean, I have to tell you something.  I’m Indian.  Don’t call me a ‘hindu.’”

“Why not?”

“Do a Google search.”

“I’m not allowed to use the Internet.”

“Then you’ll never know why you’re wrong, and if you don’t know why you’re wrong, you’ll never improve yourself.”

“Well, actually, I have been improving myself.  I read this self-help book in prison, “Man Has to Be His Own Savior.”  You have to be completely honest with yourself.  You have to find what you love and persevere.  That’s the secret.”

“Not everyone’s free to pursue what they want.”

“Everybody is!  They only think they can’t.”

“At first, I was excited that the hotel was right on the Barnegat Bay.  It tied into my doctoral thesis on marine grasses and macro algae.  It was no Chesapeake Bay, but still it’s an important estuary.  I applied for and was awarded with a grant to carry out a study in the area.  But I had to give it up to work at the hotel.  They asked me to return the grant or at least my data so far, but I never did.  We didn’t have the means to pay it back and the scant information I had was useless.”

“If you could do anything in the world, you’d want to be studying sea grass?”

“Yes, I would.  I still read about submerged aquatic vegetation online,” she said, then giggled a little.  “Sometimes I even go into my small marsh and clear out the debris.”

“You have your own marsh?’

“I like to think of it as my own marsh, but really it’s one small part of Gaia.”

“Gaia?”

“That’s the idea that we’re all a part of one giant, super-organism.  Gaia.”

“Mrs. Angrywall, I didn’t go to Harvard, or nothing. . .”

“It’s got little to nothing to do with Harvard,” she said sharply.  “It’s. . .an idea.  We all have our own small part to do to keep the earth going.”

“I should probably get going and do my small part flipping burgers.  I can’t understand how our stand manages to stay afloat.  We must be cutting it pretty close.”

“Do you think you’d have a job at the burger takeaway if it were a money maker?”

“What do you mean?  We make a lot of money!”

“That stand is a tax-loss write-off for Michael Conti’s big restaurant!  He also gets money for letting an ex-con work there.”

“Hey, I understand that I’m in a pretty special situation right now.  But if I keep my nose clean a year, I can get an office job in the city.  Then I can really do my small part for Gaia.”

“You’re already converting oxygen to carbon dioxide.”

“Everybody does that.”

“Do you want to see my marsh, Sean?”

“Yes.”

She wore a pair of clamdiggers with her Converses and a loose cotton-knit top.  I saw her complete neck and upper chest exposed for the first time.  Dressed like that, Mrs. Angrywall could pass for a dark Italian.

We walked across a pedestrian bridge from the bay side of Shore Points that went out into a series of marshes.  Or maybe it was one big marsh.  The bridge seemed to be made of the same wood from the boardwalk and it kept us a foot or so above the muck.

Mr. Angrywall had gone to Asbury Park where they were auctioning off parts of a demolished hotel and ballroom.  He was looking for good cheap wood.

“How are the repairs going?” I asked Mrs. Angrywall.

“Slowly.  It doesn’t really matter, I suppose.  We couldn’t rent out the rooms even if they were pristine.”  Our footsteps sent thin ripples across the bubbly and oily surface of the marsh.  Vegetation that looked like little plucked cloverleafs covered up parts of our reflections.

“Did you know that we’re no longer in New Jersey?”

“We’re not?”

“We’re on federal land.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife bought these small islands several years ago, after my disastrous grant work.”

“These little pieces of shit count as islands?”

“Believe it or not.”

“I can’t believe they still let you back here.”

“They don’t quite ‘let’ me back here,” she said slowly.  “In fact, you might say that we’re trespassing now.”

A dim memory surfaced.  My mother and I running in the rain, taking shelter in an abandoned shack off the boardwalk.

“We’re trespassing,” my mother told me.

“What does ‘trespassing’ mean?” I asked.

“It’s when you go somewhere you’re not supposed to be in order to get to where you want to go.  Remember the Lord’s Prayer?”

“Yes!”

“We ask God to ‘forgive us our trespasses.’  So it’s okay to do bad things as long as we always ask for forgiveness.”

The rain came down hard and seemed to go on forever.  My mother lifted me up so I could see above the boards nailed over the window.  The ocean was leaping into the gray sky.  Angry walls of water crashed against the beach and seethed in the sand.

“Why are there so many waves?” I asked my mother.

“Because people on the other side of the world are splashing around.  Maybe there’s a birthday party and some boys are doing cannonballs and sending waves all the way back here.”

We got to an area in the marsh where the water was the scummiest.

“Here we are,” said Mrs. Angrywall.  She raked her fingers through her hair and magically it seemed to grow an inch longer.

“Not much to see.”

“Without the proper instruments, you can’t really appreciate what’s going on here.  You have to sort of feel it.”  She sat down cross-legged on the bridge.  I sat down next to her.

“What’s happening now?” I asked.

“There are plants taking energy from the sun, generating oxygen and filtering water.  They don’t look like much but these little smudges of green provide the basic necessities for life in the marsh.  Take them out and the shellfish and fish die, the birds fly away and the water turns toxic.  Not necessarily in that order.”

“Life is funny isn’t it?  Algae is making this all possible.”

“Algae are making this all possible.  It’s a plural word.”

“You’re making me feel really stupid.”

“I don’t mean to.  Hey, let’s get higher than kites.”

“Now you’re talking,” I said, pulling out a joint I kept in the right cuff of my shorts.  We lit up.  After a while, I thought I could decode the language of the chittering bugs in the weeds.

One was saying to the other: “They are trespassing.”

I imagined Mrs. Angrywall doing her experiments in the marsh.  Snipping leaves into plastic bags.  Filling glass jars with water.  Scooping up mud and wiping it all over her breasts.  Pulling off all of her clothes and rolling around.

I closed my eyes, turned to her and said, “I’m sorry, but I keep seeing you naked in there.”

“Where?”

“The water.”

“There’s nobody there.”

I lay back and looked up at the sky.  My mind reset itself.

“How come you didn’t finish your project here?” I asked her.

“I was too busy at the hotel.”

“You could have come back on like the weekends, right?”

“The weekends are the busiest times for the hotel!  Very nearly all the rentals are for Friday and Saturday nights.  Oh, pardon me, I meant that they once were.”

“Is it too late for someone else to take over your experiments?”

“I suppose I could have left instructions for someone else to collect data, though I would have had to analyze the information.  I certainly didn’t even have the time to do that.”

After a while, Mrs. Angrywall said, “Every time I come back here, I can feel the magic of this place.  There’s a real, tangible life force with feelings.  I had a portable radio back here once and the aerial wouldn’t work.”

“‘Aerial’?”

“I’m so sorry.  Antenna.”

“God, it’s like you’re speaking a completely different language.”

“You still understand what I’m saying, mostly, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“What’s a coach?”

“The guy who’s in charge of the team.”

“It’s a bus.  What’s a car wing?”

“Something Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has.”

“You call it a ‘fender.’  What’s polythene?”

“I don’t know.”

“Polyethylene!”

“I still don’t know what it is!”  We had the giggles for a little while.

When the silliness went away, I said, “You could still do it.  Later, I mean.  Your marsh project.  You’re still young.”

“Sean.  I’m 40 years old.”

Suddenly, I was sober again.

“Forty!  Oh my God!” I yelled out.  Married and 40.  Two reasons to really stay away from her.

“Thank you so very much,” she said, scrunching up her face.

“You. . .you look like you’re 28 or 27.”

“I feel 40.  Bloody hell, I feel 50.  This business, it’s never going to work out properly.”

“Can’t you use it as a tax-writer thing?  You know, try to lose money to make money?”

“It only works when you also have a profitable business.  You sort of get a discount on the taxes for your rich hand to compensate you for your losses on the other.”

“Oh,” I said.  I became aware of burbling sounds coming from the marsh and looked across the water.  I saw the sun’s reflection shimmering in the air and I thought about Genesis 1.

(Part 10 next week.)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

I was walking home when the phone jumped in my pants.  I reached in and answered.

“Heading home, huh?”

“Well, yeah, I’m done for the day.”

“You ain’t done, yet.  How about a drink?”

“I don’t have any money.”

“I got you covered.  It’s time for a random check-in with you.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“Just turn around, partner.”

I looked and saw an old hard-top sedan crawling behind me.  The roof was a little crooked, like the car had scoliosis, but it was completely silent.  The driver flipped up the sun visor and waved to me.  It was O’Keefe, crouched over the steering wheel like a wolf creeping up on a sheep.

“How are you doing, Sean?” he asked as I tried to shut the passenger door, which stopped about a foot short.

“Oh, let me get that,” said O’Keefe reaching over and slamming the door, his elbow glancing off my chest.  I looked over and saw that the door unlock latch was ripped out.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You asking where we’re going because I’m black, huh?  If I was white, you’d be like, ‘Let’s go cruising, dude!’”

“I’m not asking because you’re black.  I’m asking because I feel kinda weirded out that you’re following me around.”

“I’m going above and beyond the call of duty to keep you safe.  You’re an at-risk youth.  You should be happy I’m keeping tabs on you.  If your parents watched you like I’m doing now, you wouldn’t be in the spot you’re in.”

There wasn’t any music on, which was a little strange for a black driver.  But I kept my mouth shut.  I looked out the window.  We were driving down a road parallel to the beach.  There were dirty strips of red, orange and yellow in the sky where the sun was setting.

Then we made a turnoff and a row of houses with bricked-up windows went by.

“Where are we going?” I asked again.

O’Keefe cackled.

“I’m taking you to one of my favorite bars.  JJ’s.”

It became pretty clear that he was taking me to the black part of Shore Points.  Whenever we had school safety assemblies they always told us to stay away from there.  O’Keefe gave me some history of the place as the car seemed to pick up speed.

After World War II, the state built blocks of row houses and sold them cheap to returning veterans.  Over the years, most of the men found jobs in New York or Philly.  But the black ones didn’t.  They stayed, took the typical factory jobs in Jersey.  A lot of their sons went to Vietnam and the ones that made it back brought home their trauma and heroin habits.  The neighborhood got worse with the factory shutdowns in the 80s.  The township split in two and the black area got its own school district, Shore Points Heights.

“I was the valedictorian of Shore Points Heights, class of 1985,” said O’Keefe.  “And I could have done it in a white school, too.”

We rolled up on a corner next to a garbage can that was crushed on one side and leaned over like it was taking a bow.

O’Keefe yanked out the keys.

“C’mon, white boy,” he said.

JJ’s Lounge had wood paneling for the walls.  Halogen spotlights were on the ceiling.  A CD jukebox was by the door.  The floor was made of sanded-down stone tiles and grout.

Everybody there was black.  There were black men smoking cigarettes and black women laughing.  There was a bald, black bartender leaning into a tap and filling a mug.  I was terrified.

“Your feet stuck to the floor or something?” O’Keefe asked me over his shoulder.  He headed over to the bar.

I came over to him and said, “Okay, the joke’s over.  Get me out of here.”

“I ain’t got you handcuffed.  Just walk out that door.”  I swallowed and took a seat.

“Awright, the Irish are here!” shouted the bartender, slapping hands with O’Keefe.

“He’s Irish for real,” said O’Keefe, nodding his head at me.  The bartender nodded his head and stared at me.

“We don’t have no Mr. Samuel Adams, here,” he told me.  “Hope that’s okay.”

“I don’t drink Sam Adams.”

“What’ll you have, then?”

“I’ll take the same as him.”

O’Keefe laughed out loud.

“Bring us both some Michelob,” he managed to get out.

After a few sips, a woman came up to O’Keefe.  She had on a dark blue short-sleeved shirt that was buttoned to the top and a pair of jeans.  Her hair was in short knots all over.

“Jimmy, where’ve you been?” she asked.

“Here and there, here and there.”

“I’ve been missing you.”

“I’ve been calling you, Nadine, but I get to hanging up whenever your greeting kicks in.”

“Hmph,” she said, looking at me sideways.  It was a sexy look.  “Who are you?” she asked me.

“Sean.”

“You a cop?”

“No.”

“I know him from work,” O’Keefe interjected and gave her a hard look.

“Oh, you still at work, huh?  Well, that’s too bad, then.  Bye-bye, Sean.” She walked away.

“Who was that?” I asked O’Keefe.

“Nadine.”

“So I heard.  Who is she?”

“An old friend.”

It obviously bothered him, so I kept asking questions to get even with him for bringing me here.

“Is she your girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Have you ever fucked her?”

O’Keefe turned his shoulder to me and took a deep swig from his glass.

“C’mon, did you fuck her?”

He looked up at the clock and said, “I loved her.”

Nadine later left with some guy.  I didn’t know if O’Keefe saw.  We kept drinking.

“What’s going on with you, Sean?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, I’ve been by the hotel.  I’ve seen that belly dancer behind the counter.  I know you been talking to her.  I don’t know how, because them people don’t know correct English.”

“We’ve talked.”

“Nothing more?”

“Nope.”

“She have like a snake in a basket and a flute behind the counter?”

“That’s crazy.”

“You wanna fuck that belly dancer, don’t you?”

“She’s married!”

“She’s probably just part of a harem.  Them people always have more than one wife!”

At the jukebox, someone put on the first song that I knew, “Dancing in the Street.”

“Hey, O’Keefe, did you know Mick Jagger and David Bowie did this song?”

“No kidding, huh?”

“I saw the video on VH1.” Back in jail.

“I’ll bet it sounded like crap.”

“It did!  Looked like crap, too.”

I staggered off my stool.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“In the back, by the last booth.  Oh, hey.”  He pulled out a plastic cup and lid from his front pants pocket.  I was surprised he had enough room to keep it there.  Then the fear set in.

“I need to take a random sample.  Let’s go.”  He slapped my arm.

I staggered to the back and bumped into a few people.  I mumbled apologies and felt my face going numb.

When the test showed up positive O’Keefe was going to beat the shit out of me and everybody in the bar was going to stand up and cheer each punch and kick.  Then I was going to go to jail in a stretcher.

We went into the bathroom.  The stall and the urinal were both unoccupied. The window looked painted shut.  There was chicken wire running through the glass, too.  I went into the stall, my hands shaking.

“You got nothing to be scared of, if you’ve been living right,” O’Keefe said.  He swung the door wide and got right in behind me.

“I’m not used to showing guys my dick.”

“I’m making sure this is legit.  I want to see you tap it from the source.”

I unscrewed the lid and accidentally dropped the cup into the toilet.

“What the fuck!” he yelled.  “You did that on purpose!”

“It was an accident!  I swear to God!”

“I’d make you go bobbing for it, but it’s already contaminated.  Good thing I got more test cups in the car.  C’mon.”

O’Keefe charged out of the bathroom like a department-store manager coming after a repeat shoplifter.

“Put it all on my tab, Curly,” he said to the bartender.

When we got outside, he jumped into the car and slammed the door shut.  I came over to the passenger side, but it was locked.  O’Keefe stared straight ahead.  I knocked on the glass but he didn’t turn.

After about a minute, he got out, shut the door and leaned against the car.

“I lied,” O’Keefe said.  “I don’t have any more cups.”

I was so relieved I almost laughed.  Then I felt a sharp pain in my side.

“I still have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

“Hell, go back into JJ’s.”

“Can you come back in with me?”

“What!  You need me to shake it off for you?  I’m already done with JJ’s for tonight.”

I went in and stepped quickly to the back.  When I was done, I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror.

“One lucky. . .” I muttered to myself.

I came out of the bathroom and headed for the door.

“Hey, boy!” yelled the bartender. “You think you own this place?  Come in here, use our bathroom and not even buy anything?”

“I was just here,” I stammered.  “I was with O’Keefe.”

“Who the hell’s O’Keefe?”

“You know, he’s black. . .”

“Who you calling, ‘black,’ boy?”

“Curly, you saw me before!”

“Dick, you seen this boy before?”

A muscular man swung out of a booth in front of me.  He was wearing a plaid shirt, filthy work boots and a big smile.

“I ain’t never seen this cracker before in my life,” he growled.

I felt the adrenaline kick in and I dashed sideways and made a right angle for the door.  When I got across the street to O’Keefe’s car, I could hear the entire bar laughing.  I jumped in the car and got the passenger door shut on the first pull.

“I could have been killed back there!” I said.

“Nothing was going to happen.  They like to mess around sometimes.” O’Keefe pulled into the empty street.

“How do you know?  Me being in there’s like throwing blood and guts in front of a shark.”

O’Keefe grunted.

“You know, you’re not the first white guy who’s been in there.”

“I could’ve been the last.”

“It’s owned by a white guy.  Curly had some problems couple years ago.  The bank set him up with a buyer who let him keep working there, you know, keeping up appearances.”

“Why’s it called ‘JJ’s’ when the guy’s named Curly?”

“JJ was his dad.  Dropped dead in there.  Heart attack.  Wasn’t even 50.”  Looking at me he said, “That was the only death ever in that bar.”

We were heading for a bridge, but the signal went up.   The barrier went down and the drawbridge lifted, stopping traffic on both sides.  A night fishing cruise was coming back into the bay.  O’Keefe sighed and turned off the motor.

“You really got me, you know that,” O’Keefe said.  “Dropping the cup in the toilet.  I could never have expected that out of you.”

“It was really an accident.”

After a while, the boat was close enough and we could read the name on the side, “Lex Fluker.”

“Fish much?” O’Keefe said.

“I used to work on those charter cruises day or night, gutting and filleting fish for tourists.”

“Pay a lot?”

“I could get 50 bucks in tips.  But I had to stop.”

“Bet you got sick of smelling like fish for days.”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t what made me quit.  I grew taller and my center of gravity changed.  I get really seasick on boats now.  You ever go fishing?”

“I eat fish.”

“You know, I don’t remember ever seeing blacks on the fishing boats.”

“Huh, the last time we got on a boat with a white captain, we ended up picking cotton.”

I laughed, but I wasn’t sure it was supposed to be funny until O’Keefe broke, too.

“You’re gonna be all right, Sean.  Maybe when I get you fully rehabilitated and I get that promotion, I’ll go on one of those charters with you.”

“O’Keefe, do you think you’ll go back and finish law school some day?”

He let out a heavy sigh and near the end of it breathed out, “Naw.”

“You could still be a lawyer.”

“Not now.  I’m sick inside from being stuck too long in Motherfuckerland.”

The bridge came back down and we drove up into the sky.

(Part 9 next week.)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

For no practical reason I laid out five rock-hard frozen patties on the grill like the die face for “five.”

The customer had wanted some of them medium and some well done, but I was going to cook them all the same and put pickles on the plates of the “well done” ones.

Howard was slowly peeling off lettuce leaves and putting them on the open buns.

“I could have gotten into Ridderman,” Howard said to his shirt collar.  “I could have transferred there after I was done with Sack.”  Ridderman was the four-year college next door in Monmouth County. It was private and was Whole Foods-expensive.

“Why would you want to go to Ridderman?” I asked Howard.

“I’m just saying I could’ve gotten in–I didn’t want to go.  After my first year at Sack, I had a summer job at Ridderman, in the bookstore.  I even went to a few classes.  I didn’t register or anything, I just dropped in.

“It made me depressed.  All those professors are there to train you how to get a job up in an office skyscraper, take a train there and back everyday.  There was no nurturing of entrepreneurship.  Colleges just train students how to be good employees.  Bill Gates had to drop out of Harvard to become the richest man in the world.  And he did it right where he wanted to, back in Seattle.  When I have my own business, it’s going to be within walking distance to the ocean.”

I didn’t say anything because I had the opposite goal.  I had the “office job” sign above my bathroom mirror.  I nodded and pressed the spatula hard against the hamburgers on the grill to help them cook faster.  Howard kept talking.

“Now Sean, I don’t see the entrepreneurial spirit in you. That’s fine. Being a boss isn’t for everyone, otherwise who would we hire?  But let me give you some advice.

“You don’t have to work in the city or Philadelphia for a full-year job.  Probably the best jobs–in terms of pay–are in automotive repair because we’re in the 50-50 zone.  Everybody has to use their cars.”

The 50-50 zone ran across Monmouth, Ocean and Mercer counties.  It got its name from being about 50 miles from New York and 50 miles from Philadelphia, so you got the best of both worlds.  But it doesn’t really matter if you don’t have a car, like Howard and me.

“Automotive repair’s too hard. It would be more fun to work on the boardwalk,” I said. Howard shrugged.

“If you want a job at one of the stands you pretty much have to marry into the families.  Those skill stands like Frog Bog and the spinning wheels are like in the third and fourth generations running them.  The food and souvenir stands don’t want to hire Americans because they’re too unreliable.  They hire Mexicans and Bulgarians.”

(more…)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

You know you’re addicted to coffee when the first cup makes you sleepier.  The second cup gets you back to where you were.  The third cup gives you the gift of speech.

My caffeine habit had become an addiction, though it was born out of counteracting Howard’s weed.

But the real reason why I was drinking so much coffee, according to Howard, was that while I was in prison they were piping drugs into our drinking water to kill our sexual impulses.  Otherwise we’d all end up jerking off all the time or tackling each other in the shower.  Caffeine was helping to put my body chemistry back to normal.

“If you ever have to go back to jail, don’t drink the water they give you in the cup or from the sink,” Howard said.  “Drink water from the toilet tank.  They don’t add in anything and it’s still potable water.”

“I’m not drinking from the goddamn toilet.  I’m not a dog.”

“Then tell me something.  You still getting hard?”

“You want to know stories about my cock, ask your mother.”

Howard scratched at his chest.

“My mom died when I was a kid, Sean,” he said quietly.  “I thought you knew.”

“I’m sorry, man.  I did know.”

“That was one of the reasons why I got left back.  I missed my finals that year.”

“I’m really sorry, Howard.”

“It may be best to stop talking about it now, Sean.  I already know you’re sorry.”

“Howard,” I said, “you said something before about looking for a job?”

“I was saying that I know that you’re looking for another job.  I can tell.”  Howard was leaning against the sink, lightly squeezing a ketchup packet between his palms.

“How can you tell?” I asked.  I wasn’t about to explain my midday dope-smoking sessions on the roof. Never give up a good hiding spot.

“Doesn’t make sense for a man to be eating before a lunch break,” said Howard with a smug smile on his face.  I smiled back and felt like throwing the rest of my coffee at him.

(more…)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

We had to use the bathroom in the lobby of the Seahorse Hotel because the burger shack didn’t have one.  In exchange for such a privilege, we had to pick up trash in the hotel parking lot, most of which was from our customers.

The hotel was run by the hindu couple, Mr. and Mrs. Angrywall.  I thought it was a weird name, but I asked Mrs. Angrywall and that’s what it sounded like. She looked like she was my age, but she spent the whole day slumped like a grandmother behind the counter dressed in her colored togas.   Mr. Angrywall was usually prowling the rooms on the top floor of the hotel.  The ceilings on the top floor had caved in a few winters ago, before they bought it, and he was fixing the rooms himself.

“The dots are taking over, man,” Howard told me.  “Have you been to our old elementary school and high school lately?  They have totally infiltrated.”

“Why the hell are you going to our old schools for?  Are you trying to abduct little boys?”

“No, I’m not a pedophile.  I’m just saying, you’ve got little curries running all over the place.  Our grandkids are going to have to wear turbans.”

“When are you going to have grandkids?” I asked him.

“When I give up on being a free man and decide to settle down.”

(more…)

(Art by spoon+fork.)

Once a week I flossed my teeth and went to downtown Highlands to meet my parole officer.  The Shore Points border was the mushy intersection of the Shark River delta with a sand bar that separated the river from the Atlantic Ocean.

I had to take a bus over three bridges to get out. My driver’s license was revoked when I was convicted, but one thing I will swear to is that I had always waited at least half an hour before getting behind the wheel when I was high.

Highlands was the old administrative center for the British when New Jersey was a colony.  It was as close to the beach the British were willing to come.  Over the years I’ve seen and heard tourists from all over the world, but not Britain, although we do have fish and chips on the boardwalk if they showed up.

Highlands looks like Legoland.  Everything’s square, blocky and plastic.  They did a good job of trying to make the district parole office look like a dentist office from the outside, with fake brick walls, trimmed hedges and white gravel.  It didn’t fool anybody.  Cars going both ways would slow down to look at the people getting off the bus at that stop and walking into the building.

My parole officer was a black man named James O’Keefe.  He was about 35 and had short hair that was curled tightly to his scalp, and he had a bald spot near the back.  If you stared at it, he’d glare at you like he was going to hit you with a left hook.  The other parole officers had family pictures or fun little things on their desks like snow globes.  O’Keefe had nothing.  You had no indication what his life outside the office was like.  But the nameplate on his desk was the biggest I’d ever seen, bigger than any of my principals’.

The first time I met him, he said, “Sean Kerry. . .are you Irish?”

“Mostly, yeah,” I said.  “James O’Keefe. . .are you Irish, too?”

“Well, not that I’m sure of, but obviously, somewhere along the line, there was a slave master who was.”  His face told me that he was thinking about how he could rip my head off and make it look like I’d committed suicide.  Luckily for me, he kept talking.

(more…)

Is a Screw Ice-Bar better than a cigarette in bed?