Selling out

         A sliver of light idly slides through a hole the size of a VHS tape ripped in the tin foil thumb-tacked over the window. A scrawny, twenty something man sporting the bags of two days conscious under his eyes, Jake, occupies the couch in front of it.
      Sitting forward on the couch, he holds a hollowed out, clear light bulb in front of his face, a straw dead center of his lips connecting him to the inside of the bulb. He torches the bottom of the bulb with a cheap, see-through yellow lighter.  His fingers roll the bulb back and forth about a quarter inch in both directions, knowing it only smokes when the temporarily liquid crystal hits the cool part of the glass. His eyes focus on the point where the flame meets the glass meets the Meth. 
      A 60-watt lamp without a shade lights the rest of the bland room in the Victorian house with Carmex yellow walls. The wallpaper could be white, like it was previous to Jake moving in, with a pack a day habit. Misti, or as all his friends call her to her face, pink haired cunt (Puddle slut and Finger-Me-Elmo behind her back) earns her nickname as she sputters, “I hate that fucking thing. We should get another dickie.”  Pauses to take a breath, then stares at Jake, letting him know all their problems are his fault, “Light bulbs are for losers. And I can’t believe you still use that piece of shit lighter. You and Jimmy with those stupid pieces of shit.” She sits on a beat-up old Lazy boy. Sometimes people think Misti is Jake’s mother, eleven years of tweeking put a few extra lines on her twenty-nine year old face.
         Dropping the straw from his mouth into his lap, Jake blows a chemical white cloud of smoke from his mouth as he slides back onto the couch, props his feet on a wooden coffee table. He stares at the blackened Edison bulb, tosses the lighter on the coffee table. “It’s gone.”
         “I’m not even fucking high, Jake,” Misti trembles with near-violent agitation.
         “Neither am I, but that’s it.” Jake rubs the bulb on his pants, wiping the black muck off the outside, “’til the fifteenth.”
         “Three days? Three fucking days, Jake?” Her tongue slaps her teeth hard with every syllable. Her eyes dart around the room, a hundred and ten miles per hour. Twice passes, then dead stops on a beat up, cheap, old guitar. She stares at the red paint on the Stratocaster knock-off, at the sticker that says, “If size doesn’t matter how comes I’m so popular?” Pointing at the faux-metal carefully machine pressed somewhere in China or Thailand, to the wooden neck, “Why don’t you sell that piece of shit? It’s not like you play it, or anything.”
         “Maybe you should just get a fucking job and pay for it.” He glares at her. “I’ve shared my shards with you for a long time and I’ve never seen shit from you.” Counts on his fingers, “I could pay for dope, food, rent and even go to a movie or two. Now I got just enough to get through ‘til Friday when my check comes.” 
          “Fine.” 
         Jake shakes his head, starts tapping his fingers on his jeans rapidly. Misti glares at him, knowing this drives her ape shit, Jake continues, more and more furiously every second. Misti jumps up, slaps her hands over her ears and she shakes her head back and forth.
      “Stop right goddamn fucking now!” She screams.
Jake continues for a moment or two, smiling like his shit don’t stink, then stops, chuckles. “It gets funnier every time.”
      “It’ll be fucking funny when bust out your goddamn teeth, bitch,” she glares at him, a fist in her right hand.
        An obnoxious bell noise rattles a blue phone attached to the wall. Jake looks at Misti, entranced by the phone. She dashes to it.
      “Hello?” The caller says something that turns her frown upside-down. “What? Really?” She puts her hand over the mouthpiece, “It’s Godface.”
      “I hate that fucking loser piece of shit,” Jake motions slamming the receiver down. “Hang up on his punk ass.”
      Misti narrows her eyes, pulling back from him, aghast. “Un-huh. Yeah, really? Strawberry Quick?” She shakes her head, “No, never heard of it.”
      Jake shakes his head as well, “Baby. Baby.” She ignores him. He tries again, “Baby, Strawberry Quick is bullshit, hang up on him.”
      “Yeah, I don’t have any … Eighty a quarter? No shit?” Misti is ecstatic.
      “Misti. Honey. Honey, it’s just fucked up dope, that’s why it’s cheap; they didn’t get all the impurities out. Remember “Blue Lagoon” or “Yellow Fever?” He waves his hands trying to get her attention, “Baby?”
      “You’ll hang onto that for me?” Misti is sold.
      “Why do I even bother?” Jake puts the bulb on the table, slowly.
      Misti hangs up the phone. “Did you hear the good news?”
      “Un-huh. Sure did.” He stands up, walks over to her, “And like I tried to tell you it’s bad dope.”
      “He’s cutting us a sweet deal because we’re his friends,” she pokes him in the chest with her pointer finger, “Something you should learn from. You need to be more rounded.”
      “Out of the goodness of his heart I’m sure.” Jake takes a deep breath, “Plus it doesn’t matter. You don’t have eighty bucks.”
    “How much do you have?” Misti stares at him for a second, he doesn’t answer, she grabs his arm and shakes it, “how much money do you have, Jake?”
    “What does it matter? It’s mine anyway.” Jake stands firm, staring back.
      Misti’s fingers grab most of Jake’s t-shirt and she starts to shake him, hard. She screams so loud cats are shitless with fear ten blocks away, “How much mother fucking money do you have, Jake, you goddamn piece of shit!”
    “Jesus Christ, calm down.” She lets him go, still fuming. “Sixty bucks.”
    “Sixty bucks? Where the fuck did you plan on eating, Red Lobster?” She quips. 
    “Yeah, reservation’s in forty five minutes.”
    Misti saunters to a dark red guitar, idly resting on it’s four-dollar clearance sale stand. She grabs it, walks back to him and puts it in his hands, “You’ll get at least twenty bucks for this piece of shit.”
    Jake remains motionless, staring at her. “Well, what the fuck are you waiting for? Pick up some Ramen on your way back,” she begins to push him toward the door, “So you can eat.”
    “Ok, I’m going,” she stops pushing him. He walks out the door and is instantly hit with the early afternoon sun. It brings him to a dead stop on the porch; he puts a hand up to block the sun from his eyes and begins to walk.
    Good old, Sol Hymen, since 1910, the palace of broken dreams, where one man’s problem is another man’s sweet deal. Jake opens the door and stops. An old LP plays some acid jazz through speakers screwed into the wall. Jake knows the song all too well, he wrote it ten years ago in ‘86.
    He ambles to the transparent counter filled with handguns and jewelry, places the guitar on it, and then begins to lean on the glass. The clerk’s brown eyes slowly slide up from his afternoon “light reading,” Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols.”                        "How can I help you?” Verbalizes the clean-cut guy who could pass for fourteen, marked Dean by the blue nametag connected via pin to his dark red shirt.
    “I want to pawn this,” Jake motions to the “shitocaster” as friends used to call the beast of a guitar.
    Dean looks at the guitar, at the aged sticker, the well worn in fret board, “No way.”
    “It still works,” Jake touches the guitar, reminiscent.   
      The clerk stares at him, “We don’t help people buy crack here. You can leave, now.”
         Jake tries to retort, sputters like a broken down Lincoln. He tries to tell the clerk that he wrote this song on that guitar, that it’s worth more than the twenty bucks anyway, that the clerk can just shove his bullshit attitude up his fucking ass, all sorts of things. Instead, he falters to the door, leaving the guitar on the counter.
         “Hey, don’t leave this piece of shit here, base head,” Dean says, “We don’t want it.”
         “Sure thing,” Jake grabs the guitar, downtrodden, he walks to the door, “I didn’t want to pawn it anyway.”
         “Then I did you a favor. Please leave now,” Dean points out the door.
         Jake watches the red laces on his black shoes bobble to and fro slowly as he falters out.
        A bicyclist in denim barely paying attention to what is in front of him, focusing on Manson’s “The Beautiful People” blasting through head phones mimicking ear muffs, zooms down the sidewalk.
      “The weak ones are there to justify the strong,” he screeches along, crashing straight into Jake. The bike goes straight across the backward –toppled Jake, and straight across the “Shitocaster” making it the “brokeocaster”.
        He comes to a quick stop and tosses off the headphones, “Holy shit man, I’m so sorry, you ok?”
        “Probably,” Jake mutters.
        “Sh -- shit man,” the bicyclist is motionless, “Your guitar is t -- totally fucked, dude.”
        Jake’s diaphragm yanks his lungs down sharply, releasing his breath he screams so loud that the world stops spinning for two whole seconds.
        Jake lays on the ground for another moment, then hiccups, bouncing off the ground a bit. A tear rolls down his cheeks, splashing a little back onto his face. He rolls over, more startled than hurt. He sits up, slowly wiping a few more tears and a bit of snot from his face, he hiccups, knocking his hand into his nose violently.
        “Dude, I -- I’m s—sss-- so f-fff--fuckin’ sss – so – rrr -- or--ry, dude,” the bicyclist stutters, watching Jake’s nose start to bleed, the sporatic bobbing of his body dribbles blood on his jeans, shirt and the pavement.
        From behind Jake comes Dean out of the store, phone in hand, “The paramedics are on their way.” He leans down to Jake, “You ok there, guy?”
        “Uh --“ Jake hiccups, blood lands on the pavement, bouncing back to his jeans, “huh. Great.” Hiccup.
        Dean pulls a small, purple plastic wrapped Kleenex pocket pack from his wallet pocket, hands it to Jake.
        “Thank,” hiccup, “you.” He pulls out the tissue it glistens as it slides through the plastic.
        “You want help up, let me know,” Dean says standing back up.
Dean walks to the bike guy, “You destroyed it.”
        “Ye – Ye – Yeah. I I d -- dii –d,” he stares at the broken guitar.
        Dean points, “That’s a three hundred dollar guitar.”
        “H – h—hol – ly s – ssshiitt,” he looks at Dean. “Wha – aat d – do I d – do?”
        “Cough up the cash,” Dean says, staring at him.
        The bicyclist pulls his wallet from his pocket and pulls out one hundred and fifty dollars. He hands it to Dean.
        “Half?”
        “Th – that’s a – all I – I ha – ve.”
        Dean points, “You got a bike.”
        “It – It’s a – all h – is,” he backs away from the bike. Dean gives Jake the cash.
        Misti looks completely infuriated as Jake opens their door, “What took so goddamn long?”
        Jake hovers over the bike using it to keep him upright as he walks into the house, parks the bike, falls onto the sofa. He sits there for a moment, the light from the window making a halo on the back of his head.
         “Where the fuck’d you get a bike? You better’ve gotten that money.”
         Jake pulls out the cash, flings it at the table, he misses and it falls to the floor. “Oh well.” Misti stares at it.
         “Lets get the good stuff this time, baby,” he smiles at her.
         She walks over and kisses him on the cheek, “I love you.”
         “I know you do, baby, I know.” He watches her walk to the phone.