Meanwhile When We Left Our Hero

             

                                                       

Meanwhile, When We Left Our Hero



These Things Happen

                  The moment that Donika hit my head with the bat I got this image of Eddie Flood. Crazy, right? Here's my girlfriend playing pepper with my forehead and I'm flashing back on some kid I haven't seen in fifteen years and haven't thought about in five. But, yeah, Eddie Flood. He was two years younger than me but he bullied high school kids when he was in the sixth grade. Psycho Eddie. Your Mom or your Uncle bought you one of those all black Sox caps like N.W.A. for your birthday or some shit? Don't wear it on the 16 bus or Eddie would be jamming that bitch over his watermelon skull in about, oh, ten seconds. His favorite was catching you talking to some female you liked. I mean he lived for that shit. You think you're all smooth and she's feeling you and then like a bullet, like a train, like a baseball bat SWRAP!  You got five open fingers smacking your ear. Then he'd make believe he was sorry. Like," oh my hand didn't see you there. Hope you guys weren't having an important conversation." Then he'd do this pig snort thing he called a laugh. So when Donika was screaming "get the fuck out of my house! Get the fuck out bitch!" Just before she caught me with the heavy aluminum maybe you'd figure that would be a natural place for my brain to land.

                       But that wasn't why I was thinking about Eddie Flood.

                      Eddie left me alone. In fact if anything I'd get a wassup nod or some dap if he was really feeling it.  Eddie and my little brother Bert got tight somewhere around the fifth grade. Two years later they got caught tagging city busses together. Bert wasn't mean like Eddie. Not a bit. But I guess they just had an understanding because they stayed close and all blood relations got a pass. Of course when Eddie wasn't around Bert would sell his boy out in a crackhead's heartbeat. Tell us all the sick shit. Like how he caught Eddie wiping his ass with his hands. Or the time when Eddie showed up with a disemboweled cat in a shoebox. Its poor little catguts are all hanging everywhere and Eddie's bragging about how his pitbull caught it in the courtyard the night before. No one ever saw Eddie with a pitt. He and his mom lived in a fifth floor apartment where they didn't allow pets.

          This was a couple years before Columbine. These days they would have fed a kid like Eddie Thorazine with his Apple Jacks. But we didn't have metal detectors or grief counselors at my High school. Bullies were just part of the scenery. They were inevitable, like fat kids and teacher meetings.  So instead of  psychotherapy, Eddie tried boxing. Fucking logic, really. Every neighborhood bar has black and white pictures on the wall of local knuckleheads, hit men, and wife beaters that decided to lace them up. Boxing was big around the way.  So why not Eddie Flood? Biggest, meanest, angry for no good reasonest kid on the block? "Hey son, we can make a fighter out of you."  See, I was training two rings down. Philadelphia Heights community center, where young tomato cans grow up to become ketchup. Eddie would slink in like a book without a spine. Slap around at the heavy bag and hock lung butter on the floor. I was with the 165ers, the high end of the middleweights, so I never had to deal with Eddie. But I still remember him punching the heavy with the side of his hands. Looked like a guy squeezing mustard out of a bottle. Eddie didn't jump rope and he didn't do roadwork.  Eddie had come out the womb eating somebody else's lunch. He was a born predator. And now he was expected to…to study his craft? You were going to tell a fourteen year old Eddie Flood about punching people? Please. Must have been like when they sent Mozart to the music academy when he was ten or whatever. Little Wolfgang already got a record deal and a shoe contract and a paternity suit and these Moulin Rouge asseaters all trying to put him on some "Home on the range" garbage.

        Ok. Back to the love story. Who is this woman and why is she trying to turn my head into a hole? The short answer is that Donika is the woman I love and she hit me with the bat because I deserved it. My name is Jacob Gillem and I'm thirty three years old. Donika is thirty and we met in a recovery center of the fellowship of Narcotics Anonymous. We've been together for a little over a year which is longer than any relationship I've been in my whole life and not half as long as Donika's shortest marriage. Husbands, boyfriends, sugardaddies, sometimes it seems like there is no end to the river of dick this woman swam through before she got to mine. That morning I had come over with a bagful of doughnuts. Not sure what I was trying to prove with that. I had spent the whole night before alone in my room smoking crack until 3 a.m. She's not doing much better. By 9:00 she was pilled up. All that pretty nightskin looking flat under the blues. Her room is a mess. Tacky stripper clothes everywhere. A bra flung on top of the dying plant by her window. So, yeah, we ain't clean no more. And the doughnuts just piss her off.



         "I told you don't bring me no more of these. I don't like them. You don't listen." She hands me one of her exasperated eye rolls and the doughnuts start to smell like gas.

         "Oh good," I say, "a brand new mood. I'm sure if I wasn't your boyfriend you'd be happy to throw these bitches down your throat." You can't love somebody else when you wake up hating yourself. That's deep. Write that shit down.

         "Boyfriend," she recoiled like an alligator had crawled into her bed. The word slithering up her pillow. "I think its time for us to push back from all that."

         "Fine with me," I said. "Last thing I need is to be hooked up with some junkie bitch." After that, this is what I remember. All of the sudden Donika's jumping out of her bed and coming hard. It was the word "junkie" that got her. Her mom died underneath the needle in the back of a public library somewhere in west Cleveland. She's trying to claw my eyeballs out and I'm throwing her into the wall. Swinging her by her hands like a tetherball. I never did cut easy but Donika is strong. She went to West Virginia on a track scholarship and I'm beginning to think that if someone had just reminded her she was going to die like her mom before every meet she would have qualified for the Olympics. Suddenly, we're tangled up in her hallway.There's blood running out of my forehead. I keep trying to pin her to the wall but she slides through my hands. Donika's arms are these long, inexplicable muscle cords. Her ticket at the genetic Powerball. Finally, we're both winded and we take a break to cough and spit. For two people assaulting each other this whole thing feels kinda casual. Just another part of the long, long, day. Her words come back before her air does.

         "Out." All hoarse and dark. Then again. "you will leave my house now!" The high priestess at the exorcism. Now her power is back. "Get the fuck out my house now!" She's screaming. Pushing me to the brink of the stairs at her townhouse. She's not a big girl. And I'm not 165 pounds anymore.

         "Get your silly hands off me bitch." I sneer and slow my walk just to fuck with her.

         "Oh you gonna leave." Its a hiss and a whistle. And then we are on the stairs. And then the red aluminum bat dances into her hands like Mickey's broomstick.

         "You know what?" She says. And there it is. The first swing an exploratory jab, the soft paw. Later, she tells me I laughed when she did this. I don't remember. Then she swung again. Hard. And my ear is bleeding. And I'm thinking about Eddie. We both stare at each other for a beat. Then I turn and leave.

       

Truth Hurts

                "What's wrong Jacob?"  Kayla asks. "What happened to your ear ?"  I've known Kayla for maybe three years. She works in the smoothie shop next to my gym. She moved down here from Michigan following her rapper boyfriend who's supposedly got a multi-million dollar offer from some studio when gets out of jail next summer.

                        "She hit me with a bat, Kayla." I start crying. Yeah. In a fucking smoothie shop over a woman, hot red tears. Pitiful.

                        "When?" Kayla's looking at me

                      "Like ten minutes ago." She puts her milk down and stops cutting the oranges.

                    "The fuck did you do, Jay?" Kayla has those big caramel eyes that make men lose their shit. Funny, I'd never noticed that before.

                      "Called her a junkie." Who the fuck am I? How did I get here? Telling my business, telling her business. I'm a housewife.

                      "So the fuck what?" Kayla's hugging me now. "Truth hurts. Baby, come here." After I'm done blubbering I sit in the cafe and stare out at the parking lot. Kayla goes back to cutting oranges and making wraps. I watch her fingers while she works. I've got to watch something.

                     "You need to tell that bitch to kick rocks, Jay." I nod. A few customers come in and try not to notice me. After a while, I feel my phone vibrate. I hear the creepy text message music and I look down

                     Donika: It's over. Never call me again.

                    

          I live in Tampa, Florida. We came down here six years ago, all of us; me, Tony, Bert and Detroit.  Some of us did better than others. Tony and I hitched on to a roofing crew putting in our 45 hours a week at the construction/destruction company. Tony and Bert bummed around for a bit both of them going to jail before they both decided to head back home. Me, I stayed. Detroit did too. When the roofing and the muscle work dried up, I'd find something to keep the lights on. People down here pay union wages to have their lawns mowed or their dogs walked. At least they used to. The first couple years we were stupid in love with this place. Compared to home it was candyland. The way you learned to ride the vibe between the heat and the rain; the rythmn of the women. These days though, it just feels like one big sunny coffin. Last few summers Tampa's gone dry. Nobody's building anything except soup kitchens. I ripped my last roof eight months ago, swearing I'd never go back no matter how much they offered me. Turns out I didn't have to worry much about that. Right now, I'm sort of in between Nobel prizes but I do got a job delivering coupon books to the local bars and supermarkets. 

         I started smoking rock a few years ago. There was this guy, Hank, on the crew and he showed me how. It wasn't a big deal. On Fridays after work we'd sit in his truck and split a thirty. It wasn't anything like what I had heard. "A good kisser but a crappy lay," was how Hank described it. Mostly, we'd just goof off for about an hour always whining about how bad the shit was. What a waste of money. But nothing ever stays where you leave it.

          If you've got cancer they give you chemo. If you got A.I.D.S. they give you pills.. If you're a drug addict they send you to a room and you listen to people talk. It works, I guess. You can spend a lot of time arguing about whether it’s a disease or an affliction. Or you can at some point realize that the mountain you are running down is actually running down you. So one day you give up and you ask for help. After all it is the only disease that's against the law. Anyway, the room they sent me to was in the Town and Country Hospital around the corner from my house.

                "My name is Donika and I'm an addict. I felt I had to make a decision. I could cry about the last thirteen years that I've given to my addiction. Or I could wake up every morning and be happy and grateful that I'm going to be alive for the rest of my life." She said this at the first meeting I ever went to. It was the only time she ever shared. No one was missing her. No man, anyway. 113 pounds of make believe. Somebody told me she danced at a local club but that body explained itself. That first night outside the hospital she was flying through her Newports, waist deep in men and their good intentions. Damn, could that bitch talk. "Do not look at that girl," I tell myself. "That is not what you came here for." But then she smiled at me.

                     "How long you been clean," she asked.

                      "Uh, a day, I guess." This made her laugh.

                      "Well at least you're here." End of story.

                             

                             So what kind of fighter was he? I'm sure you're dying to know. Did the discipline of the sweet science transform young Edward from a cat gutting thug to a noble pugilist? As Detroit would say, "that's that movie shit." Fucking palooka this guy. I mean that boy was tattoo practice. After two weeks in the gym this kid had a face looked like it had been smuggled through customs. There are professional fighters who have never won a fight. It happens. I don't think Eddie ever won a round. Might not have ever won an exchange. Look, I wasn't any kind of superstar fighter. I got into boxing because I liked watching it on T.V. Turns out, so did my jaw. I found out that there were black kids who were stronger than me; Dominican kids who were faster than me and Mexican boys who just lied about their fucking age. Still, I had a better record than Eddie.             



      The one thing I really remember from the Boxing Career of the Great Edward Flood. Eddie jabs this Mexican in the shoulder. Drops his left and catches a fucking train right in the middle of his face. Nose breaks. Lip splits. And the referee (this guy Junior who was also the janitor) jumps in and starts waving his hands. Pretty standard ref stuff except he must have seen too many movies because he tried to hug Eddie. Don't do that. Eddie shucks this guy off and then just stares hard at the Mexican kid. I guess all the losing and getting mollywopped on a daily basis cut whatever brake line Eddie's sanity still had because he just howled. Sounded like an orangutan passing a kidney stone. The ring is filling up now, Junior's trying to stand and Eddie, halfway back to his corner, turns and spits a bloody tooth back at him. Now there's a lot of ways to say "fuck you" to a guy. I've tried most of them. But spitting your top jaw out on a guy who just saved your life is pretty creative.

         I was in the corner near the headgear. Cutting up with the fellas when I was supposed to be jumping rope.  And, of course, like a dumbass watching Eddie play tooth fairy made me laugh. Not sure why. Maybe it was just that scary Eddie didn't look that tough anymore. Maybe it was nerves. Anyway, one second later Roberto the gym manager was in my face. Roberto was about five foot six and could bench press 300 pounds. I'd say we were nose to nose but Roberto's had been broken so many times he probably smelled out his cheek.

         "You think that shit was funny Jay?" I wanted to explain to him I was laughing at Eddie, not Junior. But he had already figured that out.

         "You want to get in there and fight him? Huh? " Only time I ever remember that gym being quiet.  "You want to laugh at somebody I'm a laugh at you working on the bag in the corner like a bitch, Jay! When was the last time you even got in the ring, huh? Pussy."  He sneered one more time at me and stomped back to his desk. He shook his head and went to his lunch. "Laugh at him, huh? That young man got some sandpaper around his heart."

                  It turned out Donika hadn't been clean much longer than I had. The reason she knew more about recovery than I did was because this was like her fourteenth try at it. She could recite the steps; give you the address of any free bed in town without a sixth month wait list; and rattle off expressions like "doing the next right thing" in pretty much every other sentence. "I'm not going to get a sponsor because my sponsor's going to tell me to quit dancing. Then if I quit fucking dancing who's gonna pay my fucking bills? Then my sponsor gonna say you ain't gonna need so much fucking money once you get clean. And I'm a be like 'I still got fucking bills.'  I mean it ain't like you're gonna be much help with them" she said looking at me. She was a lot to handle and she knew it.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't intimidated. Straight up, the bitch scared me. Plus, I didn't know how to fuck anymore. I hadn't touched anything besides a pipe in more than a year.

                      "Why you stopping?" She'd say. "You ain't done are you?"

                    "No, baby, I was just making sure you were ok."

                  "Yeah, I'm fine. If I was bored I'd be home watching Law and Order. Let's go!" So there was that.

         I'd work the days on top of some building. Tearing the bricks or the wood off an old church or some condemned fast food hutch. This probably says more about me than anything else, but there's nothing I ever endured in a boxing ring that compares to what happens on a July roof in Tampa. There's this constant gas fire smell and you can never be sure where tar stops and your skin begins. It's tough work, man. You start thinking before you breathe. At night Donika would pick me up in her gray Monte Carlo and we'd go to a meeting or head to a diner. And the meetings weren't so bad. Corny, yeah, but real. They talked about "life on life's terms" and even though that sounds like something you'd hear on the People's Court it was the truth. We were too scared to live life any other way. She never seemed to mind the vile funk I brought down from the roof. She'd just roll the window and blow the Newports into the wind. Later, in bed we'd stare at each other in the two-paneled mirror. My body red giving to white, the contrast between us as stark as the words on this paper.

         "Oh this aint gonna work," she'd giggle. "Dark as I am and you looking like that. Umm-unh. We gonna have to get you a spray tan. Something."

         "I ain't pale, girl. You just that damn dark." I was careful not to go any farther. She was funny about her tone. After her Mom died, she got raised by her cousins who would tell her to smile whenever they would walk into a lightless room. I guess that shit stayed with her. You talk a lot when you first get clean. We'd fill the time with sex, with gossip, even prayer. Then later just before sleep, when the dread of tomorrow's workday had finally worn off, I'd stare into the ceiling fan. And somehow I felt forgiven by the world. I guess people call that gratitude. I can't lie. It was some good music. I mean all the shit I've pulled and I'm still here. There's still some me left. Unbelievable.

         "Hey, Donika, I love you."

         "Spray tan," she mumbled. And went back to sleep.

         

Everybody Thinks Everything

         I drive west on Hillsborough. Its only February but the air feels almost drinkable. If you could imagine thanksgiving on a porn set, that's Tampa. There are 3 million people in this city and no one (no one!) has pubic hair. Women at the grocery stores are barely wearing anything and its the middle of the school day but there are kids everywhere. Taco bell, Chilis, gas station, traffic. Wendys, Publix, Dollar Store, traffic, Spanish girls walking to the bus in flip flops, Burger King, Blockbuster, bike gang, Hooters, more traffic. Its not that Tampa doesn't have a personality. It just has the kind of personality that watches a lot of TV. Everyone here is kinda beautiful and kinda scuzzy. And everyone here is kind of superficial and kind of sincere. I reach up and touch the place where the blood matted my hair. Where the fuck am I driving to? Why won't she answer the phone?   



                The club Donika works at is downtown. The big sign outside says OMG THESE GIRLS ARE ON FIRE-MILITARY DISCOUNTS. They call this place port Trampa and no matter how bad the newspaper says our economy is every joint from Brandon to St. Pete is always hiring. "Everybody think this job is so fucking easy. And yeah, used to be you could make $600, $800 in a night. $300 was like 'what happened?'  It spoiled a bitch. Ain't like that no more. Too many girls. Now, a hundred dollars is a good night. Its not like it was and I'm getting old."  Donika started dancing when she was 18. She'd gotten fired from McDonalds and had nowhere to go. One of the other ladies in the shelter told her about a club in Cleveland that needed more black girls. "It was Westside but I was like fuck it, I needed a job."  That was twelve years ago. Since then she's danced in Baltimore, Detroit, L.A., Miami, Jacksonville, and Tampa Bay, the lip gloss graveyard.

            I pull over in the parking lot of a used tire shop. I wave off the kid in the overalls when he comes by and check my phone. Check my phone. Every two seconds I'm checking my phone. On the street, a group of business looking guys are leaving a Chinese buffet. My eyes are starting to hurt and some small voice in my brain is starting to make noise about a doctor.

                   "That's another reason shit slowed down. You get a champagne room that's $400. These days, guys don't just want a dance for $400. I'll tell them 'fuck that. You know how many times we been raided?' But everybody thinks everything."

          "Plus, you got a boyfriend, right?"  I’m trying to laugh.

         "Plus, I got a boyfriend. Jealous ass."



         So what's it feel like to get hit in the head with a baseball bat? A few years ago I read some magazine article where they would ask people who had been through some shit exactly that question. What's it feel like to get bit by a crocodile; what its feel like to get struck by lightning; what's it feel like to win the lottery? I don't know. I remember there was a smell like an old refrigerator and a sound that probably wasn't there. I'm almost positive I turned my head into the bat to blunt the force a little. At least that's what I hope I did. The pain wasn't sharp, more thick. Like it was going to settle in introduce itself.  What did you expect, right? We stayed clean for 186 days. 124 for her. 62 for me. My girl don't like crack, she likes blues. You sell rock or weed in Tampa, you're driving your grandma's busted up Cutlass with tape on the brake light. You got Roxy, you own this town.  Donika explained it once as "as all the bad shit that ever happened in my life, just goes away when I do a line." Bullshit. She just don't want to get sick.

          Its the sickness, the withdrawal, that makes shit happen. The sick, or the fear of the sick, is why twenty-one year old girls are blowing their heads off in CVS parking lots. The sick is why people are cannonballing off the Sunshine Skyway rather than face two weeks in county. They say its worse than death, but of course it will kill you regardless. Cold turkey's done more junkies than A.I.D.S. and cancer.  Donika's told me she's been through it maybe, forty-five times and would rather die than get good again. I guess only another dope fiend can understand that logic. Logic, that's what it feels like to get hit with a bat. It feels fucking logical.

              "Baby, what's Cleveland like?" Its probably two in the afternoon and she's working on her third Newport.

                "I don't know," she says. "Like Tampa. Colder, not as many Mexicans."

                   "You ever think about going back?"

                   "Fuck no! Why would I ever want to go back there?"

                   "What about you coming home with me?" She laughs and coughs smoke.

                   "Back where you're from?"

                   "Yeah."

                   "You're serious? Oh baby, you cute. But you ain't that cute."



                                                      Strengths and Weaknesses

         

         I'm pulled over in a parking lot standing outside my car. Its four 'o'clock now. How long have I been driving? My hands look like pink cornmeal. Both soft and gnarled from years of weights and work. Its starting to jump on me now. What I did. What I've been doing. Her phone goes right to voicemail. My ear is leaking.  I'm still in Town and Country about a block west of Hanley. ( Every street in this city sounds like its named after a dead hillbilly child.)

          STRAAWWM  that creepy guitar text message music again.

              Donika:  WHY ARE YOU SO FUCKING MEAN TO ME                                             

         

         After High School, Eddie Flood got a job robbing hotels. It was an excellent opportunity in some ways. He got to travel, work on his team building skills, and best of all no one was pasting him with twelve ounce gloves sixty times a day. It was a three man operation; Eddie, a guy named Donk, and this kid Rueben. Rueben was in my homeroom junior year and always seemed a little too smart to be mixed up in this kind of shit. He was the first person I ever heard use the word "ex-patriot."  Donk was a psychotic scarecrow with orange teeth. Bert told me Donk had gone to prison when he was nine for setting his grandmother's house on fire. He'd either had a tattoo of a knife made on his shoulder or maybe he'd had a tattoo made with a knife on his shoulder. Bert wasn't sure which. They were backed by some wannabe wiseguy from the neighborhood, but his name...that train has sailed.

        Robbing a hotel isn't like robbing a bank. You don't have to worry about dye packs or silent alarms, and your typical net is only about $600. Two guys walk in; one stays in the car. You tell the manager you have a gun and he gives you the combination to the safe which is almost always in a little office behind the lobby. Donk would then go into the back room and try the safe while Eddie waited out front with the mark. If something went wrong you grab the money out of the register.  You never take more than three minutes inside and you never leave empty handed. More than a couple times the only cash these guys got was whatever was in the manager's wallet. The whole operation worked on threat. And that's why Eddie was so perfect. Eddie Flood was really good at telling people he had a gun.

            They didn't always have a gun. They didn't always have gas. Eddie, Donk and Rueben tore up the eastern seaboard in a dark green minivan that used to belong to Rueben's grandmother. PA., Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, there's a lot of interstate and a lot of motels. Like I said , there was a fifty-fifty chance they had a gun. Sometimes they'd have a pistol, sometimes they'd have six. Other times they were unarmed, save mean faces and Eddie's hot breath. The Wiseguy apparently was not one of the deep pocketed dons you see in the movies. The money would run out and they'd fight over food and dope. Once they had two tire blowouts outside of Baltimore and they had to hock Eddie's .38 in a bar. "I loved that piece," Eddie said even though no one was really sure if he knew how to shoot it. The biggest occupational hazard was sleep. I mean where the fuck are you going to stay if you are jacking every Travelodge and La Quinta on 275? So most nights were spent in the van, three guys farting and snoring and pissing in Gatorade bottles. They were good workers and under strict orders of the guy up north, no one was to get hurt unless absolutely necessary. This and the fact that they moved around made them a very low priority to the police.

                  The night everything happened they were outside Pittsburgh (everything always happened "outside"  a city. Easier to get back to the freeway.) . It was one of those sideways Pennsylvania snowstorm nights that practically come with their own gospel song. Rueben, like always, stayed in the van. The night manager was a girl named Josephine. She was 22 and had just had a baby. She gave up the combination immediately but instead of Donk going into the back room, Eddie stiffarmed him and dragged Josephine into the office. Donk was no master of improvisation. Fortunately, for them the weather was working in their favor. Nobody was coming in. But one minute was becoming ten and then fifteen. And just when Donk was about to call it a partnership Eddie emerged slowly back into the lobby. He didn't look bloody. And he didn't look scratched up. The closest word would be "mudded" like a wet tire, but that didn't make sense either.

            "No money in the safe," Eddie reported.

          "No money?" Said Donk.

          "No fucking money."

          They pushed back into the van and torched the road to the interstate. Nobody bitched about the job or the weather. For the first time, the whole van was silent. It had been a long run and it was time to go back home. Rueben drove through the storm. About 6 A.M. the story broke on the radio.

           



         I'm in Spinner's laundromat in west Tampa. This is Detroit's place. When we all came down here, me, Bert, Tony and Detroit we shared a two bedroom walk-up by the bus station in Ybor. Six years later, he and I are the only one's left. His real name is Armando Capone and you'd think with a last name like Capone, we'd have found a better nickname than Detroit. When we were kids he had something like sixteen different Piston's jerseys, so we gave him a name after a place he's never seen. He liked basketball, not boxing and he made the team our sophomore year. Pretty impressive considering he never grew past 5'5". He still plays out behind the rec center on Jackson Springs. He has that aggravating short guy game that makes you want to go home and punch a mirror once he's done with you. When he's at work or just out drinking he likes starting arguments unprovoked about different NBA players. My favorite was when he asked a fourteen year old kid in a Magic jersey if he thought Juwann Howard was a hall of famer.

            "Uh, yeah, I think so," said the kid kinda like he was reading a book report.

            "What are you, fucking stupid? That guy couldn't get into the Hall of Fame for guys named Juwann."

                     Detroit also owns things: this laundromat, a car wash, his townhouse. While the rest of us were trying to scare up money for rent, he was putting his name on property. He says its the Cuban in him but I don't really know what that means.

                 "J.J. What the fuck happened to your ear?" He reaches up to touch.

               "She hit me with a bat." This feels so normal coming off my tongue. I've said it like five times today.

               "Jesus. Hey come back to my office. Actually, wait a second. I got to get some stuff out of there." He disappears into the back and I wait out with the industrial size dryers. Today, the only other people in Spinner's are a couple of bored Spanish women talking on their phones and their kids who have decided this place is a jungle gym.

                       "Kiko, get down," I hear one of them say. On the 18 inch Zenith dead bolted to the wall there's some old American Classic black and white shit playing. (Detroit explained this to me one time: "I only put old western's and Leave it to Beaver on. If I turned it to BET or Telemundo or whatever they'd start sleeping here.") It looks like an episode of Zorro or the Lone Ranger. After the commercial big white cartoony letters crack the screen.



                                    Meanwhile, When We Left Our Hero…….



            My back molar keeps coming apart. I think Nika might have made a little contact with that too because I feel flecks of it smacking my tongue. Inside my mouth its raining teeth.

            "J.J. come on in man. I got some alcohol for that ear." His office smells like old chicken boxes. Behind his desk is a framed Rick Mahorn jersey and a picture of sixteen year old D driving the lane at the state finals. Immediately. he's got a brown bottle of iodine and a cotton swab. I'm always struck by how fast he moves. He would have made an amazing fighter. His hands come quicker than next month's rent.

             "She hit you with a bat? You're serious?" I catch myself before I start to tear up again. That would not go over well.

         "We were fighting," the iodine takes a nice greedy bite out of my ear and I wince till I gag.

             "Yeah, I'd assume so. You guys were fighting about dope, right?" I think back. What were we fighting over?

         "Not exactly, but yeah. In a way. I had it coming."

         "Jesus, what the fuck J.J.? You got Stockholm syndrome now? Next week you'll be telling me you walked into a door." Wordlessly he produces a bottle of Hennesy and two Dixie cups from his desk. He hands me the cup and I drink till the liquor drips on my heart. "I mean look, that girl is cute and everything but-"

         "I love her."

         "Okay," he says. Its a quick eye roll. Obviously, he decides this is not a gun worth shooting. Time to change the subject.

         "Hey D, whatever happened to Eddie Flood?' In the years since we've left home, Detroit has become the de facto historian for the old neighborhood. He still has contacts back there, connections. The rest of us just got mail we never picked up.

         "Eddie…Flood…is…alive?" The question stuns him a bit.

         "Is he?"  I can tell this is not a welcome trip down memory lane. He's making a very unhappy face.

         "As far as I know that asshole is never getting out. Should never get out, considering. The fuck you want to know about him for?"

         "I don't know. I was just thinking about him today for some reason."

         "Well I was just thinking today about fucking colon cancer, thought I'd bring that up too." D is talking into his chest now. No smile. He reaches back for the desk and notes how hopeful my eyes are when they follow him. Not that, Not yet.

         "You still go to meetings J.J.?"  His voice is back to normal. This, he likes to talk about.

         "Not really," an exaggeration. I haven't been in months.

         "Maybe you should try them again. I think you were happier back then, a pain in my ass but a happier pain."

         "Yeah, maybe. No, you're right. Hey, look speaking of that…I know I still owe you a little-"

         "You do?"

         "Yeah, anyway. I get paid on friday…you think" I'm praying he won't make me beg.

         "No problem bro, I can hold you. Lot of dirty clothes in this town."  He sits back at the desk and spins around in the swivel chair. He's a year younger than me but I can already see the gray at his temples. I've never wondered why D. was so much stronger than I am. Just always assumed it was part of him. Now, I'm starting to wonder if that part isn't wearing down a little. He reaches deep into the desk and pulls out a pink baggie encasing two thick, white, yellow stones. "50, good?" He asks.

         "No problem. Friday, bro." I sweep the bag into my pocket. "Hey, D. there's something else. I wasn't going to ask, but-" The look on his face, I've seen it before. Same look he had when missed that foul shot with a minute to go against Cartwright homecoming weekend. The look said "this shit again."

         "I've got money for this," suddenly I'm all international captain of finance with my twenty one dollars. "Its just I don't want..she doesn't have anything,"

         "Unbelievable." He says. I kind of got to agree with him.

         "I just don't want to see her get sick."

         "You mean you just don't want her blowing some other guy to get her fix."

         "I've got money for this."

         "Seems like you've mentioned that."  The hands disappear into another drawer shaking his head. "You know J.J. sometimes the choices of stimulants say things about people. Things that might suggest you guys ain't exactly compatible."

         "This is your theory?"

         "How much do you owe me?" Ah, there's that. "Anyway," he resumes. "I'm just saying incompatible..and I'm not just speaking racial wise..you know what? Fuck it." He sighs and looks backwards. He swings me another pink baggie, this one with two roxies. They are so small. How do they fit all that shit in them?

          "Friday, right?"

         "Yeah, no doubt." I get up to leave and he waves the dixie cup at me.

         "You know he made me eat garbage the first day of the third grade." I barely hear him. My mind is in my pockets.

         "Who, huh?"

         " Who else?"

         



         Sometimes I would try read her mind. Just try to anticipate the things she'd think. Be her echo. But it never worked. Every time I'd try to think like she would I'd just keep thinking like I would. Every time I tried to reach into her  I'd just keep bringing back stuff that didn't belong in me. I wanted to let her know she wasn't alone. But she was alone. She got that.  Hey Donika, you're my whole life and I've got no fucking clue why you'd want to be here.

                   

                                                                  Mastermind



         Easton. That's where they got him. Easton, Pennsylvania. What do they make in Easton? Baseball bats. I remember being at my mom's house when the report came on the news.

          Local Murder Suspect/Hotel Robbery Mastermind, Edward Flood, Arrested in Easton, Pennsylvania.

         They had footage of these two cops leading him into the back of a cruiser while he was cuffed in the front. Eddie, shirtless, walking behind that big red gut of his. He had these floppy looking pajama bottoms on. It looked like they had busted him early in the morning and I remember thinking that people were going to assume they had rousted him on some 4am raid. Actually, that was how he dressed all the time. The other guys, Donk, Rueben even the cubic zirconium mafiosi caught charges too. Bert visited Eddie once a few years into his bid. Said he had started taking pottery classes and probably didn't have A.I.D.S. I'd like to tell you more about the guy but I think that's all you really need to know. Some people defy insight. He was just a brutal meatball but I wonder sometimes if he knew those reporters tagged him as being the brains behind the operation. Maybe that gives him a little satisfaction in those late hours, just before the guard comes by his tier with the flashlight.

         I sent her the first text about two hours ago. Right now I'm laying in my bed listening to the make believe thunderstorms , shivering from the rock, wishing I had more. More money, more dope, more time to deal with this shit. My come down juice, a half pint of Popov, is working way too slow.



                                                 From Me: I got you.



         That was the first text. Doing my best to sound cool, sound in charge. Then about twenty minutes later, after not hearing anything, I decided that was too cryptic. I cough, tasting blood and brillo.

         From Me:          I didn't want you to get sick (call me)

         Can't be more plain than that, right? I smoked my last stone and let the sweetness climb from my dick to my fingertips. I put the phone on my bedstead and shut my eyes. Idly, I wonder where I'm ever gonna come up with the money to pay D. back. I twist the pillow over my head and at some point sleep covers me like a light rain. I wake up a few minutes later. Reflexively, I reach for the place where she would be trying to curl into her shadow. On my phone, the text message light is blinking, a jack-o-lantern in February.

         From Donika: You?

         I roll over in the bed. Flipping on the light, shaking the coke splinters out of my brain. This room is trashed. Clothes on the floor, old wine bottles on top of the T.V. Tonight, I got some Biography channel going. Other people's lives sounding  like lullabies. I breathe one more time into my hands and then walk to my dresser drawer. The little pink baggie still sealed sitting next to my socks. The mirror paneled on my closet is dusty. There are things living in the walls. I reach up to touch that place where my ear meets my jaw. This time it doesn't hurt at all.



   

                              Isaac Boone Davis

                                        Tampa, Florida 2011