The year was 2025 and men still didn’t understand a damn thing about women. He tried his best to mime and perform his way into her dress. It was like watching a trained monkey… Slightly amusing, yet ultimately leading into pitiful patronizing. I tapped on the poor bastard’s shoulder before he could emasculate himself any further. The champagne thoughts in his brain were starting to roll off of his tongue. An elegant black dress clung to her hips like static. She sat on the bar-stool and kept her finger on the rim of her shot glass as she pretended to listen to this loser gushing with one-liners straight out of some pick up artists wet dream. I noticed her legs and thought about how my hands might scrape and scar them with one caress. She sat unamused, of course, her eyes rolling. The only naked man that would be by her bed that night was made out of gold and holding a saber. Best Actress in a supporting role and America’s sweetheart, she found no sanctuary in the bar at the after party.
I tapped on the drunk son-of-a-bitch’s shoulder one more time. “Excuse me, son,” I said. He turned around and looked me in the eye.
“Who the hell are you?” He asked.
I flashed Miss Hollywood a knowing look out of sympathy. This guy had the type of smugness on his face that made you want to tear it off and throw it at his feet. He looked like a young man who was always two steps away from crying when challenged. He would be the type to spend an endless amount of energy proving to every man in the world that he could get a woman in bed quicker than Casanova on Viagra. His acting skills were overrated and he wasn’t worth much without the Monroe throwback he screwed on screen. The only moment he was worth his salt was when he was having fake sex for money. I sort of began to feel sorry for him. Sort of.
Miss Hollywood’s real name was Lana Watson. Twenty-four years old, and already making me feel old with the premature weariness twenty-somethings seem to exhibit.
“I said, who the hell are you?” Blurted the same poor bastard who was still not taking Lana off the menu.
“I have unfinished business with a pretty lady.” I said.
He stared blankly at me, as if not getting the point.
“Not you…THAT young lady.” I said pointing in Lana’s direction while refusing to make eye contact with him.
If he was a dog, the hair on the back of his neck would have stood up. But dogs had more fight than him.
Our eyes locked and he proceeded to stare me down. His eyes broke contact first when he realized that just maybe, I had the ability to damage the only thing getting him a stable paycheck — His face. He stumbled away and I sat in his stool like I bought it. Lana let out an amused smirk as her eyes darted to the right in order to catch a glimpse of the young man’s bruised ego. I pointed at the bottle of Vodka in the bartender’s hand.
“On the rocks.” I said. I honestly couldn’t give less of a shit about a drink. Lana looked at me with a condescending amusement; like I was never a human being to her until that moment. The only reason I was there was to give her pictures of her husband screwing his intern from behind while she clenched her crimson bed sheets in her overpriced loft on the West-side.
“They don’t have anything on you Ray!” Lana said as she waved her hand in front of me.
I could tell she had a new pair of those damn contact lenses. The kind that fed you all the useless information that everyone already had on their phone 15 years ago. Apparently, looking down at your phone became arduous labor some time ago. So now you had 3D cameras, your contact lists, your e-mail, and this little shitty facial recognition application that looked your face up on The Grid. I missed when we just called it “The Internet.” But… if you tried to one up me, I was always two steps ahead. I had contact lenses too. I couldn’t really explain how they worked but the wiry underground salesman who hocked them to me said that something about them threw off the facial recognition technology that the others had. He was disheveled enough and had this Forty-year-old virgin vibe that made me put my full trust in him, along with ten grand out of my checking account. I always trusted a guy who put his expertise before a woman. I dropped a fortune and I still hadn’t been able to see anyone of notice when I look over my shoulder, so under my best assumptions, a third of my savings was put to good use. I’m the type of guy who fancies being a ghost among the numbered.
“Do you ever stop working?” Lana asked. She had this look in her eyes like she’d been in this walking coma, living on Xanax and anger.
“Look, I’m not your friend.” I said. “No need to fake it. I’m in, and I’m out before you’re buzzed off your first shot.
It was clear she didn’t want to hear about anything I’d spent the past few days drummin’ up, but hell, I needed the money, and I needed to get on with my life. But something in the way she looked at me, told me right then and there, that she didn’t want to know the truth.
“I’m not gonna bullshit you Ray. I think it’s sick. Not that you’re sick, mind you. Everyone’s got their thing, but the whole rigamarole is something out of those gossip columns, I swear. I was suspicious, I was angry, I cried a Friday night here and a make-up session there, but it’s all eyes on me tonight, Ray. My agent cares a whole helluva lot less about the role I slink in on the screen and a whole helluva lot more about the role I play every day out here in this little wild west we got set up. I thought I wanted to know. But now I don’t really give a shit anymore. I’ll still give you the money. We can pretend like this little fiasco never happened. Look at it like an exercise of sorts you know? What’s it matter as long as you get the money? As a matter of fact… you should be thanking me! I’m willing to pay you what your worth because of who you are! There isn’t one other person in this town willing to cut you a check for anything more than that, honey! Am I right?”
Her tongue ran off like an AK-47. Then she just looked at me, waiting for a response.The bartender brought me my drink. I looked it over, swirled it in my hand. Like hell she didn’t wanna know. Everyone wants to know the truth. Rather, everyone wants the stomach to be able to handle it. Sometimes they’re just not so blessed with a cold heart and an iron chest. It’s like she was in a fairy tale without a prince charming. And somehow I was supposed to be the white knight in this screwed up fairy tale. Instead I was just here to give her another reason to have another drink. We just sat and sipped, while some lonely soul sat next to us, scrolling through news broadcasts on his tablet. Seemed like he was short a pair of headphones because all of a sudden I was too damned interested about what came blaring out of that thing.
The newscaster rattled on and on about the new technology making it’s way around the Silicon Valley. Everybody and their grandmother ran it at least twice through the rumor mill. I looked at Lana hoping that the look on her face would let me know that maybe she understood it and could explain it better than I could.
“Ha ha ha!” Laughed the loneliest man in the bar.
He looked around him. Judging by his body language he was expecting others to be over his shoulder. The tablet looked brand new, able to do only two things better than everyone else’s products at this point in the fiscal year. He was easily the type of man who threw money at himself and expected people to gather around him like pigeons on feed. He then looked in the direction of Lana and I. I just stared at him, the same way I did at the young eunuch who was hitting on the starlet, who at this point was sitting on his ass on the floor with breath so rank he might as well have been sucking on a cotton ball doused in isopropyl.
“You ever forget somethin’? But know it was on the tip of your tongue?” He asked, still halfway laughing.
“Every hour.” I said, looking over at Lana, who was sufficiently amused by this sad man.
“Well they’re saying that, now…. You can hotwire your freakin’ brain. And download all that shit!”
I raised my eyebrows. “All of it?” I asked.
“As long as you got the drives to stick it in.” He said.
“So you’re tellin’ me that my brain is basically nothin’ but a damn Hard Drive now?” I asked.
“Damn right!”
“Uncle Sam’s gonna have a field day with that ain’t he now? Ain’t like he hasn’t messed with enough shit these days, right?” I said. Lonely man went quiet. Face suddenly looked sick like I kicked him in the balls.
“You have a slight drawl in your tone. Like a tiny, itty bitty taste of racist. Where’s home for you?”
Smug son-of-a-bitch.
“Just some place you’ve never been.” I said.
I flashed a smile that said “fuck off” as much as it said “have a good night.” He looked right back at his tablet. Arbitrarily swiping away.
Looking back at Lana I saw her eyes still trained on the tablet screen. I noticed she had this lump in her throat that she couldn’t swallow away. I could tell the liquor was causing it to tighten. She put her hand on my shoulder. I checked to see if anyone was watching.
“Why the hell do you care who sees? No one even knows who you are.” She said.
“I can’t be doing what your husband does.” I said.
“You know what I wish? If I could wish for one thing, and one thing only, you know what it’d be? I had to hear her answer.
“What?” I asked.
“That I could just erase ‘it.” She said. “The memory. The suspicion. Just that. That way he wouldn’t have to lie. I’m a gullible girl when I want to be, you know? And I could believe it. It’s just one nagging suspicion. And you’re the only one keeping me from that. And as long as I don’t know, and as long as I can’t see. It never happened right?”
“I think that’s the tonic talking, sweetie.”
“I’ll pay you… don’t worry about it. Just don’t come back, Ray… don’t come back. This town, just isn’t healthy for you. Go back to ‘Crown Town’ where they still live in 2002.”
She was my only client who was hell-bent on calling me by my first name. She was so desperate to feel like she really knew someone that she just faked it. It made sense. Her whole livelihood was based on faking it. But it was in those forced moments that she was trying to get to something real. She just wasn’t going to get it from me.
I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I raised my hand to her face and proceeded to caress it. She let me. Her lower lip quivered. Everyone in that dark club noticed. Maybe it was just me, but for a split second you could hear the snap of a camera phone. I looked down, down in to her cleavage. And I wanted her so bad. That dress looked so beautiful on her. I wasn’t looking at her breasts because I wanted them for myself… I was looking because of the botched air brushing job on her skin and a couple of red marks that the HD television cameras and red carpet interviewers couldn’t see.
Then I looked at her wrists and noticed the slight puffiness of her skin, concealed by flashy bracelets. My gaze settled on her pooling eyes. Everything connected. I stayed silent for an uncomfortable period of time, and then, I told her…
“His safe word is ‘dolce.”
I got up, walked away, and refused to look back.
Putting my head down and maneuvering through every mask in that circus, I couldn’t walk out of the bar fast enough. There was no way I was going to wait for her reaction. Therapy wasn’t my strong suit, but I did think of her little secret. There was no way in hell that she was going to dump the bastard.
I got in my car and sped down the 101 into the Barrio.
***
“Ray! What up, ese?” Said David Reyes.
He was a force of nature, with arms sculpted by the chisel of God’s judgement. He had a demeanor that scared you… not of what the man could do to you, but of what stories he would recall to you alone over a beer.
“David, is your mama makin’ that Pozole this Christmas?” I asked.
“Ray, my moms is gonna make that pinche Pozole till God comes back. Why? You ain’t got nowhere to go for Christmas? Lemme tell you, you ain’t the first homie in line for that bowl of heaven.”
“It’s just, I ain’t the best when it comes to that seasonal food, ya know? Bland spaghetti and mom’s roast beef, it’s all I really know.” I said.
I pulled a pack of cigarettes out of my pocket. “Can I?” David shook his head.
“My moms got that lung cancer ese. You can smoke it outside though.”
I shoved it back in the box.
“Shit… Sorry bout that, David.” I looked around the living room I sat in. It had that moist mildewy smell that old houses have. It had to have been built ages ago, at least 1984. It was the type of odor that should make you frown and wrinkle your nose in disgust, but instead left you feeling nostalgic and fuzzy. The room was dimly lit by lamps that gave off a lame hue of orange, not nearly bright enough to read by or be able to tell if the carpets were properly vacuumed. David and I went way back. He was my cousin on my father’s side. When things went rough for him and his parents, and his real mother passed, my dad took him in.
David’s achilles heel was his temper. He was a hothead with a penchant for stickin’ his neck through the wrong doors. Cocaine blues were ringin’ loud for him one night, and when my old man found out about the vice, he kicked David through the front door into the dust face first. Nonetheless, he never held a single thing against my father. “How’s your madre?” David asked.
“Judging by the time, I’d say on her third sleeping pill in the second state of dream-space.” I said.
“You got somethin for me?” He asked.
“I’ve got some looped audio of this bottom feeder yappin’ around.” I said.
“Case stuff?”
I shook my head. “Personal stuff.” I said. “I need you to be able to figure out what this little rat’s route is. He likes to nip at people, and I think he needs to learn how it feels to get nipped if you catch my drift. You hear what I’m sayin’ homes?”
“Simon carnal.” Reyes said. Spanish slang for, “Absolutely, brother.”
I played it over and over again on my phone while David downloaded it and analyzed the sound byte. He ran it through a clunky looking application on an outdated laptop. As it played through, bits of code and coordinates popped up on the monitor. David was tapping into cell phone calls and voice-mails made within a specific radius in the city. He’d play this loop of audio I scoured spying on Lana’s man-whore husband. Using that, he would be able to get a trace on his phone, tap into it’s GPS capabilities and voila! A do-it-yourself lo-jack for a washed-up low-life.
I needed to corner him off the beaten path, away from home and from anyone who’d give a damn.
“It takes like a few passes but it should work. This is how we get those pinche vatos who don’t pay up.”
“I’ll be damned David, you coulda been a rich man.”
“But, I’m a powerful man, Ray.”
“That you are…” I said.
“So who is this bitch?” David asked. “He’s bout to get a front row seat.”
“To the greatest show on earth my friend. The greatest show on earth.” I said.
I heard some indiscernible chatter in the next room and peeked my head through the nearby doorway, peering into a bedroom. David’s sister, Margo, sat on a bed watching a TV that sat on top of a dresser in the corner of the room. I looked at the screen, and saw her… Lana, dancing around, goddess of the frame. It was one of those moments where you felt like bragging to the world about how much you didn’t know someone. I never cared for whatever movie it was that she was in that year, but I saw her different. Margo turned to face me, aware that I had been watching over her shoulder.
“What’s up cowboy?” She said.
“Stayin’ out of trouble Margo?” I asked.
“I am the trouble, Ray.”
“Course you are you little heartbreaker.”
“Ray, stop hittin’ on my sister and get the fuck back in here.”
The girl was only 18. I didn’t rob cradle.
***
Mark Roman was the type of man who would ride a horse even if it had no legs. A washed up producer of forsaken reality shows, he was always trying to reach for a resurrection that would never come for him. He used to produce the kind of shows where people think they could sing. The ones who could would just get pimped out by the company that ran the show for the next ten years. Like all proud men with pitiful foundations, he fell off his high horse, and flat on his face on the front of his own windshield. It was a little difficult to figure out how David was able to launch a man on the hood of his own car, but it happened as easily as swinging a dead cat at a window. It was a clumsy toss, but terrifying in that awkward sort of way.
“How you like gettin’ the shit kicked out of you ese?” Reyes said.
“Aw Fuck! I don’t what the hell you’re-”
Steel toe boot to the bridge of his nose.
The funny thing about fights in real life as opposed to the brawls you see on the movie screen is how uncool they look. Any man who thinks they look the strongest and most intimidating in a street fight, hasn’t seen a street fight. There is nothing calm and collected about shuffling around in brand new shoes, slipping over your own blood and latching on the sleeves of an attacker while raising your shins to to his thighs and calling it a kick. And the man who has the upper hand looks like a bigger punk who just happens to land more punches. The dark parking garage echoed with every landed blow.
“Stop! Stop! Please!” Roman pleaded like the reaper was dangling his soul in front of him. His eyes were so wide, that they twitched from the tension of being held open. The adrenaline coursing through his veins made him look so wired that you could have confused him for a tweaker. The grunts began to descend into tears and whining. What was once a towering facade of bravado was crumpled next to a Bentley making ripples in a puddle of his own sangre.
“Get up and fight me like a man, puto!” David said.
David stepped back, as Mark shuffled his feet back and forth lying horizontally and trying to discover where the strength in his arms went. He struggled like a 12 year old having an epileptic seizure. David grabbed him by his collar and pulled him up to his feet.
“Listen to me holmes. I hear you like to punch your chick. So, I’ma give you a chance to try to take your manhood back. Throw your hands my way and see if you can tangle.”
David’s homies, Jose and Ruiz, just stood on either side of Mark, just in case the bastard tried to run away.
“Listen, I got money!” Mark pleaded.
“You don’t think we know that?” David asked.
“I’ll pay you whatever you want.”
“Bitch, do you know who you’re talkin’ to? Your money can’t buy me anything I don’t already have.”
David lifted his tight fitting t-shirt. Not to show off the muscles that basically already tore through the fabric. No, he wasn’t that vain. He bared his abdominals to Mark. Mark’s eyes widened like a cottonmouth’s jaws. That tattoo might has well have been etched by Satan himself. David had since said goodbye to the cliqua, but Mark didn’t know that. Neither did the cliqua. David’s days were numbered. And he was here to wreak judgement on anyone like himself. Blood in, blood out was the law, but David wasn’t gonna let blood spill without spillin’ some himself. “What do you want?” Asked Mark.
“I want you to stay the hell away from that pretty little dime you smack around.” David said.
“Why do you give a shit?” David’s hand came down like guillotine, open-palmed slap diagonally across the front of Mark’s face. I’d never seen a slap draw blood out of someone’s nose like a geyser, until that moment.
“That’s enough, homie!” I said. Mark looked around, frightened like a deer surrounded by a pack of wolves. I just stood there in the shadows of that Parking garage, only accompanied by a cockroach who just stood next to my shoe watching the whole thing too. I took the slowest steps you could take. Hell, it drove me crazy. I wanted him to piss himself, I wanted him to think I was the coldest son-of-a-bitch this side of Mickey Cohen at a speakeasy in the 1940s. His puffy eyes were starting to obscure his vision. I had a ski mask over my face. As soon as he saw it, I smelled it.
Weak bladder.
“Mr. Roman.” I said.
“Who the fuck are you?” He asked.
“Mr. Roman.”
“I can pay you handsomely!”
“MR. ROMAN!”
“WHAT?”
“Do you believe in God?”
“What?”
“Mr. Roman.”
“No no, I don’t.”
“Haven’t even considered it while these three vatos just beat the shit out of you? Huh? Well that makes you a special kind of stupid don’t it? Hell, I bet even the staunchest of atheists woulda at least had a passing thought. You see him? Roman, you see that vato up there? He’s got some German blood in him somewhere, look at that stature. Some nights, I swear Mark… some nights, Reyes is the Devil.”
This cold shiver ran up Mark’s spine.
“That BITCH tell you I hit her?” He asked with a demonic rage.
“You won’t be seein’ her again.” I said.
“Hell if I won’t.”
“Son of a bitch, Mark, we we were gettin’ somewhere a minute ago, now I think you’re making the wrong decisions again.
“Who the hell do you think you are? Do you know who I am?”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I ripped the ski mask off my face and chucked it like a fastball at that tender nose of his. He screamed and cursed while I crept up right on his face, inches away, showing him my real mug.
“You see my face? I ain’t scared to show it. You remember this face. Because if you see this face again, it will be the last thing you see. And that won’t be because you’re dead. It’ll be because Mr. Reyes over here would rather a blind bat than a dead rat. You hear me?”
The chill came back. It was working.
“But since you test my hand, I gotta make sure that your ego doesn’t rise so high again.”
I reached into my coat jacket.
“Woah woah woah, man, I get it. I get it!”
“Nah you don’t… they never do.” I pulled out a few photographs and grabbed Mark by the back of the head, forcing him to focus on the images. There in the photo was him and little miss intern in the throes of sexual excitement.
“That’s how they’re gonna know ya. That’s how you’re gonna get divorced. That’s how you’re gonna explain to all your high rollin’ friends why you never see that pretty little wife of yours again. That’s why you don’t show up at the red carpet, that’s why you keep your head low and your mouth shut! Because this is just a foretaste of how we can take your life, and make it the scariest damn carnival you’ve ever been to.”
Oh he went full church mouse on us. He looked like the type to cuss his mother out when he was spoiled pre-teen, only to have her plead with tears for him to be a better boy. That’s not how you reason with people like Mark. People like Mark Roman only respond to fear. No debates, no negotiations. No, his ears and senses were too clogged with money to listen at this point. The only remedy was no nonsense, Old Testament fear. “And you’re not gonna tell anyone who talked to you tonight.” I said.
He had this perplexed look on his face as if asking “What the hell am I to do?”
“We’ve got it handled.” Reyes said.
Reyes went on to bash in the passenger window of Mark’s beautiful Bentley. Roman had this defeated look in his eyes as if he had reached the absolute pinnacle of pain.
“Now listen, you were simply on your way home from a long ass day, and this vato over here confused for some dude who screwed his chick. He beat the shit out of you and dinged your car up-” His eyes narrowed.
“Ok, a little more than dinged, but then when you said who the hell you were.”
“I get it… I get it.. I won’t tell anyone.” He said.
I smiled the most twisted sadistic grin that I’ve ever felt spread across my face. It made me sick on the inside, but to Roman, I was the sickest son of a bitch he ever met.
***
“I’ll give you the five for seven G’s” I said to the scrawny blonde dude with frosted tips. His gaunt face looked like an anorexic meth addict. He wore a Giants jersey that was way too big for him. Might as well have been a body bag. We were sitting at a Dodgers’ game for goodness’ sake. I half expected a fan to come down with a kitchen knife and butcher this man any second. He sat there for a second, mulling over my offer.
“I don’t do that shit. Give me a ‘middle finger’ to a politician, a police officer, a damn pope. Not this shit.”
The way this kid talked didn’t fit his get-up. So out of character. That was because it wasn’t him talking. He was a man possessed, for lack of a better word. He was just the floating head of the wizard of Oz controlled by someone behind the curtain. He carried a microphone on him that relayed to Dylan Rockwell, the polar opposite of the scrawny frame of skin and bones sitting next to me. Dylan Rockwell stood on the balls of his feet when he walked. He had this smooth float to his gait followed up by a weight that seemed counter intuitive to his cool nature, but it worked. He had a man-with-no-name swagger. His charisma was electric, but when you looked him in the eye, you knew there was danger dancing in that iris. His black complexion and facial structure was not unlike a young Denzel Washington.
“Listen… you owe me for Pershing Square cabrón.” I said.
“Stop talking like you’re a damn Mexican.” That wasn’t from Dylan.
“Listen Frosty.” I said. “Shut that meth rotted hole in your face so you can get your blow money before I break that jaw off like the ugly honeycomb that it is.”
I could hear Dylan screaming out of that earpiece. Curses and violent threats. If there was one thing that Dylan hated, it was disturbing his cool. It was blasphemy. Dylan was a curator of all things controversial. A kid got his mug shot off by a new patrolman on the job… Dylan debuted it first through the cracks, online, anonymously. Now, back in the 2010s, the concept of being anonymous online was like being a terminal cancer patient, dying in denial. Despite all the rabbit holes, IP tracking and all that other NSA nonsense I never understood, Dylan had a way to break stories on “The Grid” with an unmatched speed and reliability. He was known as a “Gun.”
That’s what they called rogue journalists who independently and anonymously posted news that even the brightest of investigative journalists couldn’t get their hands on. I mean, the Grid trumped anything the original Internet could have been with it’s break-neck speed that almost induced fear into the most veteran of users. Content would spring toward users with an immediacy not unlike that of a psychic. If you were the type to be a bit skeptical of police, then maybe a video of a kid getting shot by a cop snuck in your news feed.
But maybe you never subscribed, maybe it wasn’t legal, or maybe the “media gods” just didn’t know how to get it to stop. It was a hacker’s wet dream. undermining the system while flipping it off and informing you about the shit you just didn’t think you needed to know.
And just maybe they never caught Dylan. That’s what made it so damn brilliant. He was the ultimate Whistle-Blower. What people knew as the internet suddenly became the Wild West. It was always a war for information, but now it was a Mexican Standoff, and the first one to shoot was truly faceless this time. Yet here I was, asking Dylan to stoop to the level of a two-bit paparazzo.
“Get the hell outta here man, I don’t deal in smut.” Dylan said.
“Dylan, you owe me your freedom.” I said.
No names was the rule. But he knew I was right. I could expose him, here and now. Who knows who was listening in? But I could bet all I owned that Frosted Tips made the “Watch-List” five times just in the past ten hours.
“I thought we had some sort of loyalty here.” Dylan said.
“Listen, if I turn on the television and hear about this girl gettin’ a single bruise on her face. If I hear her take time off ‘for personal reasons’ as a PR move to hide her ass from getting beat, you can take whatever loyalty you’ve got shoved sharply up your -” “Send me the damn pictures.”
“I want it everywhere. Everywhere. Blogs, forums, YouTube, I want it in on billboards, I want it to interrupt season finales of TV shows. I want Roman to be scared to stick his head out of the gopher hole he’s going to need to dig for himself.”
“This isn’t you Ray.” Dylan said.
“I can say the same for you.” I said.
I got up and lent my hand out to Frosted. He refused, and just kept eye contact with me. I pulled out a cigarette and made my way to the stairs. It was like tossing that cigarette I held into a field of rolling tumbleweeds. The pictures were everywhere. The trends on every social network were through the roof. Censored versions hit the more mainstream sites. The uncensored bits went to every over — caffeinated twenty-somethings favorite buzz blog, message board and image sharing site. That was the deadliest thing I had ever done up to that moment. For the first time the next morning, I looked at the pistol I carried in the glove compartment of my car and felt unarmed. It seemed like it was time to get away… just for the weekend.
***
Norco is a place for people who just aren’t ready for the present. A perfect time machine, just enough years behind to be considered slow, and just enough small town charm and nostalgia to keep you from wanting to blow your bored brains out. I drove up a dark road, with the windows down. The fresh cool wind billowed through the car with that woodsy smell that is reminiscent of a dying campfire in the distance. The relaxing scent got to me as my eyes drooped. Fatigue was beginning to set in. Just as I was about to veer off the road in slumber, my headlights caught a flash of something up the road. I quickly sat up and clutched the steering wheel tightly as opposed to the lazy one handed way I was driving and squinted my eyes to see what was ahead.
There was nothing for a few moments until my headlights splashed across the trees and tall grass ahead as I hit a dip, catching a Coyote’s eyes. He stared my car down as if defying my ability to run it over and burst every working organ in its skinny frame. At the last second he dipped away into the night.
Coyotes screwed with my head worse than any cholo with a cuvete. The way they stared at you in the night, alone, knowing that four of their friends lurked patiently in the foliage, just waiting for you show that moment of weakness giving them the permission to swoop down and pick you clean. But the scariest part about them was that they never did take advantage of those moments of weakness. That restraint always sent a chill down my spine.
In places like this, the only gang signs you flashed, were signs of providence. You represented the strength to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, or the weakness to drift about in a quiet darkness at the mercy of the graceful. If that meth stole your soul, if that wife of thirty years left you, if that job of forty years fell out from under your feet, at best, your pack of coyotes was your church. If you didn’t have that, you were just an invisible ghost begging on the side of an off-ramp with no hustle and bustle to hide your desperation, and no metropolis to swallow you up. No privacy to wallow in your misery and no pack to support your scavenging.
I drove into my mother’s driveway. It was a quaint brick house, with a brick laden driveway. A bit unkempt on the outside, but it was the only house for an easy two blocks either way, although there weren’t any city blocks at that point in the road — just trees across the street that obscured the bare hills in the distance. A few pots held dried plants that were long past dead, and the lawn… well, there used to be a lawn. I walked up the door and knocked four times. Ma had social anxiety and only answered to my knocks. When you snort ‘the white,’ a bit too much, it strips your anticipatory fortitude for the future.
She opened the door, and there she was. Brown-haired Irish beauty. No one would believe she was forty-eight years old. She had me young and I could’ve sworn that I induced more wrinkles on that face than it seemed to show.
“Hi Mijo.” She said.
She was still Irish I swear, but she held her own in a barrio for sixteen years before meeting my father. We spent the night arbitrarily talking about shit that we both knew the answers to.
“How are you?” I’d ask, while I looked around the house trying to inspect every carpet stain, unwashed dish and any other sign of negligence to the bare essentials of being a functional adult. Every answer to my questions was an eloquently veiled variation of, “Loaded out of my fuckin’ mind.”
It was late that night, and I didn’t have the patience to investigate just how much my mother Mary had been abusing her prescription. I slowly stumbled into the guest bedroom and plopped on a bed with springs so loose it was like falling into gelatin. She stood in the doorway, looking at me, as if she had seen my father for a split second.
“Hasta mañana ma. It’s been a very long week.” I said.
“Sleep well Ray.” She said as she slinked down the hallway.
I didn’t close my eyes until I heard her door click shut. I laid there for about half an hour, feeling completely vulnerable in the quiet. It was so quiet that I could hear my thoughts. It was almost deafening. A howl ripped through the calm.
Damn Coyotes.
The next morning I made my way into the kitchen after taking the coldest shower this side of the Antarctic.
“Ma, why didn’t you tell me the hot water didn’t work?” I asked as I walked by her.
“Mijo, did you hear about that poor girl?” She asked. My mother was hauntingly beautiful with her deep green eyes and hair that was far too lush and soft for her age. She sat at her kitchen table next to a linen draped window just cracked enough for a soft breeze to billow the curtain. Her eyes would sometimes glaze over whenever she brought up a serious subject.
“What girl Ma?” I asked.
“La pobre niña que committed suicide, Pues.”
No matter how used to it I was, there was always something half-amusing about seeing a lily white Irish woman uttering Spanglish when she was flustered.
“Nah, Ma, I haven’t heard anything. What did she do?”
“Threw herself out a window.”
She crossed herself and kissed her hand. I turned on the TV. Ended up flipping through too many damn channels in search of a single news station.
“New developments say that the young woman who threw herself out of 30 story building this morning was 23-year-old Linda Walker. Ms. Walker was last heard talking to someone in a heated conversation who the authorities have now Identified as Mark Roman, the former Reality TV producer and husband of Oscar winning actress Lana Watson.” The female reporter went on and on.
My stomach leaped and caught the bottom of my throat. It hung there for about half of a minute as my head raced back and forth trying to accept and deny it all at the same time.
“Mr. Roman was recently involved in a rapidly spreading viral sex scandal the past week, involving the young Ms. Walker….” The reporter continued.
I shut it off.
“What was that for?” Mom asked.
“It ain’t good for the mind Ma.”
“Where you goin?” She asked.
“Need a smoke.” I said.
“Mijo, I’m right here, you too good to smoke a cigarette with your mother?”
“Nah Ma… I just don’t want you to know just how bad I actually am.”
Her eyes quickly averted contact with mine. If there was anything that Ma feared, it was that I was going to be just like Dad. Dad did the best he could. He just happened to be the type that carried that weight. Yes — that weight. The kind of weight that made your shoulders shift funny, made you short with your wife; made you want sex a whole lot less than the average male. It was the kind of heaviness that made an insecure wife have that paranoia that Lana had, except in Ma’s case, it was unfounded. I think she hoped to God that Dad had a mistress… at least the secrecy and awkward silences would have made sense. But what a woman doesn’t realize about even the most honest of men, is that there is always a mystery that even they don’t fully understand. It just so happened that my father’s mysteries scared even himself.
I stepped out the front of the house. The smell of of night blooming jasmine was still fresh, though the sun would burn it off soon enough. I sat in the lawn chair on the edge of the porch, overlooking the empty road. I lit a cigarette and just began to puff. Guilt is something I never really knew how to address. At this point I was numb. The days would pass and Linda would become simply a nagging fear.
I’d question my ethics, my humanity, my faith. — whatever was left of it; coming up with justifications. The dreams would probably haunt for the next few months, and then, soon enough, my heart would just scab over. The dead tissue of my remorse would toughen up. No tears would show unless severe inebriation ushered them forth. But Linda Walker’s mother would still cry on my behalf. And her father would get into bar fights anytime he heard a smart-ass call his dead princess “spank bank material.”
He’d pray to God that the little boys in the youth group he served in didn’t fulfill their lustful fantasies by looking at downloaded images of a ghost. And he just might’ve bought a .45 and prayed to God that he found the son-o- a-bitch who sent his daughter to hell. He might’ve have been able find him if he looked hard enough. He could find the son-of-a-bitch sitting on his mother’s front porch, too dishonest and too much of a coward to smoke with her.
