Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (16 page)

I drive to one of the hills we used to go to, so I can stare at the skyline, alone, after no more Good Times are left in locations like these. On one side of the road is a brown-paneled apartment complex, and on the other, the hilldrop, and far off, the skyline, where we'd look at the Hyatt and the building with the revolving restaurant, and tell jokes about who would win in a fight between a windmill and a water tower, or imagine how funny it would be if women chose boyfriends based on their Eddie Vedder impersonations
(“His baritone register on ‘Jeremy' was so much deeper than mine!”).

But then I step out of the car and onto the slippery grass of somebody's yard. I look over the hill into the way-downtown, and a huge brain-blister explodes.

Two smoke trails converge in the sky, like a wishbone, and, below them, fires, like a pair of pumpkin eyes across the darker flats of the city. Two fires, I might add, for the two drawings on NecronicA.

So I drive around to try and find Necro—just so I know he's somewhere not near there. Because if he was around yesterday, maybe that means he's around tonight. Past the A-Plus, which is now a Hess, where Necro locked himself in the freezer; past the Harro East, where Necro bought me tickets to see Rollins; past the Penny Arcade, where there's always metal, but no Necro.

Then, back in Gates, suddenly my car won't go above three miles per hour, and I realize the car has run out of gas.

I coast to a stop on a bridge over the Erie Canal, which has fog over it and a fish-skin iridescence on the water. I walk around looking for a pay phone but don't find any. So I walk, for a while, up the longish, weeds-crowded driveway that clears into the empty park and ride.

Mosquitoes hover over pond-sized puddles surrounding the bus stop—a glass enclosure that's three phone booths long. There is no noise anywhere. After leaning against one of the bus stop's outer steel posts long enough to feel like I'm posing for a photo, headlights trickle through the plant life, and the bus hisses to a stop. I get on and nobody gets off.

Inside, the bus seats are plastic, orange like a seventies kitchen. The fluorescent lighting is stale and fluttery. Ads in Spanish line the curves where the windows meet the ceiling. Three other people sit in sweats and winter jackets, stumpy as trash bags. The bus gags into gear, wavering our shoulders, shifting our fat, putting us to sleep.

Except, it turns out the bus, actually, is heading downtown, and away from Gates. But: Are you looking at this guy sitting directly across from me?

Even if I never find Necro tonight, check off the boxes: this flat-faced, toothbrush-shaped guy, skin whiskey colored, tall enough that, when he sits, his legs are spread out spider-style; this ancient leather jacket where every crease looks stiff; shaved-headed, brow and nose angled downward. One of his scars pushes the corner of his right lip inward. And: he has this ping-pong-ball-shaped divot in his head right near his hairline. In other words, he is a Raw Dog's Raw Dog.

Because, sometimes, you have to take a bus somewhere. Right, Necro?

Raw Dog steps off the bus at One Millionth Street and Crack Avenue. When I step off the bus to follow him, I'm already a hangnail salad, given that I'm still dressed for interviews, dressed for the 2028 Khakipocalypse. A woman in a wheelchair across the street vomits into a pail. There's a cardboard panel in place of a window at a Checks Cashed.

I follow Raw Dog, around the trash bags on the sidewalk, past a porn store that smells like dish detergent. Raw Dog walks fast, in eighth gear, but he walks with a
limp
. Which would be, if I were much smarter, Bad Sign No. 1.
But I'm absolutely convinced right now, four hundred percent, that Raw Dog will out-Good-Story and out-Maverick-Jetpants anything Necro might be doing tonight.

Raw Dog double-checks behind him and goes into what looks like a building whose first floor is brick and whose second floor is blue house paneling. A sign on the window says
WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO BE SELECTIVE.

The bar's door is iron and its doorframe skims my scalp, like the frame was built in the 1600s when all men were hobbits. Inside it's as dark and bacterial as inside someone's boot. When I sit down, I'm already a tourist, a neon highlighter. Everyone else there is enormous: a grizzle-fest of only men.

“I know you from the bus,” Raw Dog says, suddenly right next to me. I expect an accent, but his voice is Mr. Rogers-American. Whatever cologne he's wearing smells like sunned-up propane.

“Yeah, I ride the bus,” because that's what I think people in the way-downtown say.

Raw Dog swats it off. His small-pupiled eyes are like tiny concentric rings of bluebird feathers.

“Did I see you at something down here, a while ago?” he says. Which should be Bad Sign No. 2: The Proto-Stachening, the way he phrases this, without specifying.

“Weapons of Mankind?” I say. “I went to one a while ago downtown?”

“I'm sure that's where,” Raw Dog goes. “What's your name?”

“Nate,” I go, trying not to stare at his head-divot. “I'm friends with Andrea. I was trying to find him.”

“Andrea; right. Welcome aboard,” Raw Dog goes, not introducing himself back. He shakes my hand, this soft, hairstylist-type handshake.

“Come here in this place twenty years ago?” he goes. “Guys getting thrown out of windows. The Inn upstairs, they shut it down. The phone keys were plucked off. A raccoon was living in one of the bathtubs.”

“Wow!” I say, laughing girlishly.

“It's about to get way nicer now, it's already happening. I'm in real estate. We're fighting to get solid minds into apartments down here, and it's been working. See this thing?” He pulls up the left side of his button-down shirt. Clipped to his belt is this gray plastic box, the size of Lip Cheese's TI-82 calculator, with a tiny computer screen and a telephone cord that tucks into his pants.

“This cord?” he goes. “It goes into a generator, the size of a York Peppermint Patty, implanted up my butt. When I lose feeling in my legs and fingers, I press this button,” he points to a green button, the size of an M&M, “and these wires send an electric shock up my spine.”

“What happened?” I ask him.

“This was 1981 Old Rochester, my point being,” he says. “I had to deliver papers to Philip Ayinger—the developer who liked to bet in the Canadian lottery with certain notable Italians,” he goes, in this quick, casual way like this is a Stock Anecdote. “His wife was going to divorce him, and I found him in Bullwinkle's. I came in, envelope in hand, sat down next to him. He immediately takes off!”

“Oh man,” I say, virginally.

“I chased him out of Bullwinkle's all the way up Lake Avenue, past the Kodak lot, past a CVS; I chased him up to near Holy Sepulchre. I chased him past three post offices. I chased him into the suburbs. And then, Ayinger swings around into the lot of a CVS, a different one, reaches into a dumpster, and pulls out a gun, like he'd taped it to the dumpster's inner wall in advance. So I run at him. I'm running—” He points his right index finger into his ribcage and his left index finger into the small of his back to mimic the bullet path. “The bullet chipped my spine. So if you want to get shot, get shot in the leg. Or, just take it through the head and get killed.”

Raw Dog nods to a white guy across the room who has a beard the size of a grocery bag. “But problems like Shawcross? The Columbus Day bombings? They come in twenty-year cycles. That guts the landlord business.” He gestures toward my tie. “But for a well-to-do guy like you, looking to make a move, you could get in cheap in this part of town, month to month. This building I'm talking to you about, I just rented out the second floor to a stockbroker. A day later, the city announced plans to turn some abandoned lots into parks. Gangs? You only have to worry about gangs if you're in prison.”

I make a chin rest with my thumb and forefinger. A real-live Nate HQ: I'm already imagining Necro and Toby, groveling before me in designated shifts.

“We can drive down now, take a look,” Raw Dog says. “I can get you in there next week. First month: Free. Hardwood floors, a billion square feet—you could turn this place into a nice little fuckpad.”

We leave the bar, get into his rust-acne'd car, a Volkswagen hatchback. He revs the car until the engine sounds high-pitched, like a paper-shredder motor, then makes a right onto Lake Ave., where any walk alone is a long walk, and whose low slabs of closed businesses are broken up by grass and abandoned lots. A payphone's front panel has been ripped off. A man in a running suit is lying, facedown, on the sidewalk, arms at his sides.

And right when you think I'm going to out-Necro Necro, Raw Dog turns toward me and becomes Total Roasted Face of Satan: “Growing up here,” he says, voice slower now, “there used to be a place that made white hots. I'd go in, they'd always say: Get out of here you bum! But I loved their white hots. They made the best sausage casing, Nate. I'm very specific about sausage casing.”

He nudges his elbow toward the red Country Sweet restaurant, where there's a crowd outside, backlit by the light inside the place.

“All these niggers,” Raw Dog goes. “They just walk around, man. Shitty apartments but everyone's got nice cars. What you doing, man? Not much, just hiding my drugs under this porch here, just hitting people in the head with a hammer. You know what these people need? They need to get somebody pregnant. Fatherhood,
that's
the real best policeman.”

Get your free month, Nate, is the thought I'm clinging to. After that, find some job, and Raw Dog will be a name on a rent check.

We turn down some streets I don't recognize. Raw Dog stops the car. We get out. I don't see any apartment building,
any lit-up entrances. Worse, there are no streetlights, and everything looks dark and algae-covered. Raw Dog stands over me. He leans his head-divot down toward me. “Go ahead. Stick your finger in it.”

The air tightens in on me.

“You've been looking at it. Stick your finger into my head dimple.”

“Oh—I can't, stick my finger—”

“Dammit, Nate, dammit!” He slaps his palm on the hood and leans his head-divot closer.

I'm stuttering for pay now: “What? I—”

“Can't, comes from the ancient word
cunnan
, which comes from Cunnahos, the ruler who burnt his children!”

“What?” I say.

“Can't, comes from
cunnan
! Which comes from Cunnahos, the ruler who burnt his children!” He is screaming this. His breath is warm like a neck against a cold hand. “Repeat it!”

“Um, can't, comes from Cunnahos, the ruler who—”

“Say it harder!” his voice echoes.

“
Can't comes from cunnan which comes from Cunnahos the ruler who burnt his children!
”

I press my finger into the divot and look away. It has this smoother-than-bone feeling, like skin over plastic. Technically speaking, my Holy Grail Points have punctured the heavens. But it is clear: I Have Made a Terrible Mistake Tonight.

When I look up, Raw Dog is holding a rusted crowbar.

“Hand over your wallet and don't ever come to the city again,” Raw Dog says. “Hand over your wallet, with your precious, moneyed, lightened, plural hands.”

Except out of nowhere, I feel something like rabies gush through my spine. Because I can't get a job, can't get a Plan, can't get a Home or a Cash and can't get a Nate HQ. Suddenly I'm whipping index fingers, closing my eyes, and yelling into the air in front of me: “You thought I was rich? You thought I could move into an apartment and make a place nicer? My food chews itself, out of fear. When I make love to the ground, trees grow! I hope you have a lot more room up there besides that prod, because—”

I don't see or feel it so much as I get this computer reaction of: I have been hit, in the forehead, with a crowbar. A sneaker scrapes the pavement near my ear, everything the color of burlesque. I feel my wallet float upward, whispering against my pocket lining's fabric, and a second later, feel it slap down between my shoulder blades.

When I wake up, I'm nowhere to be found. A van is parked nearby with missing tires. The boltwork of the overpass above me loosens when cars pass.

I stick a newspaper to my head and stand up. The top three inches of my head feel like they're draining through a water filter. The blood tonguing down my face turns everything mucus colored.

After years of sidewalks and store-window gates, I walk into what is apparently a diner—I can't tell completely because if I look straight ahead I get blood in my eyes. The brightness inside empties out my head.

“All right?” a waitress asks me in a Spanish accent. Forks tick against plates.

“Just call a cab,” I say.

She sits me down at a booth. “Put this on,” she says and wraps two dishrags around my head. Her face is like seeing a million pictures of moms bunched into one.

I try to scratch the back of my head, so I maybe look casual. Because, my initial reaction is, I'm actually embarrassed. As in, can I get a job looking like this? Will girls not like me because I'm bleeding? Then, I feel the first sobs being sucked out of my face. Here they come.