The Product Line (Book 1): Product (3 page)

--You a nasty mothafucka, little man!

Ernie closes his eyes, hoping that getting shot won’t hurt as badly as he remembers it does.

Treece squeezes the trigger and a bullet flies through the meat of Ernie’s upper thigh. It burns with an unfathomable yet oddly familiar pain. He keeps his eyes tightly closed but the flash of the gun is like a spotlight on his retina and the sound echoing through the tight corridor all but eliminates what is left of his hearing.
At least it’s finally over
, he thinks to himself as another bullet whizzes by him, hitting the wall near his face, showering him in hot sharp flecks of brick. Between the fire in his thigh and the muted hum pounding his ears, he knows it is over. Finally…

Silence.

No more bullets, no more sounds from the gun. He can’t make out the sounds at the end of the corridor, but it sounds…

It sounds like—like crying.

Frantic pain-filled tears.

The queered silence of his now-bleeding eardrums is like listening through glycerin. Cautiously, Ernie opens his eyes.

One at a time.

Slowly.

Treece is on the ground, rocking side to side, writhing. Ernie can’t tell for sure, but it looks as if he is holding his shoulder. The air around Treece is filled with a thick spray of blood, lingering like red fog.

Ernie attempts to move a little closer to Treece, but as he puts weight on his leg, the pain is unbearable. The bullet must have struck bone. The shattered chips of his femur grind into the muscle like his thigh is chewing gravel.

Ernie drops to the cold damp ground, looking at his own mortal wound. The blood is pouring out of him at a rapid pace. The pain is lessening though as icy tingles start to take hold in his fingertips and toes. He’s bleeding out and he knows it. Ernie lowers his head to the ground, his vision becoming cloudy and fogged over. In his mind he is holding his Marie, just a baby, so full of joy and contentment. He can remember the smell of her angel-soft hair, how she called him “Datty.”

Through the corner of his eye he sees something. A man? A ghost? The figure gets closer, close enough for Ernie to make out the face through the fog. It is Mr. Armani who is now standing over Ernie, hands in his pockets, holes and blood covering his shirt and pants. Mr. Armani again sniffs at the air around Ernie. Ernie lets out a little chuckle, then closes his eyes. Still clutched in his hand is the picture of Marie.

Mr. Armani reaches down and pulls the picture from Ernie’s hand.

Chapter 4

Ernie’s eyes open, peeling apart the sandy gel of sleep and tears that had crusted them closed. His pupils, unable to adjust to the light, tremor between apertures. He feels like he is staring straight into a spotlight in the middle of the night. After a few moments of painful fluttering his pupils begin to shrink down, quiver into pinpoints, allowing him to take in his surroundings.

He has no idea where he is or how or even if he is still alive. More details of his surroundings begin to drip into focus. He is lying on an old barracks-style bed. His feet and arms are secured to the steel tubes with two sets of handcuffs. His skin is on fire, a burning hot sweat has drenched his armpits and back and he has a horrible thirst. A band of pain and bright light runs across his face like a steaming hot towel.

His head pounds as if with each heartbeat his skull is being slammed into a brick wall. He breathes in deeply, expecting to expel bits of blood and lung as usual, but no phlegm comes up—in fact there is no tickle in his lungs at all. The weight on his eyelids becomes strong and they close for what seems like only moments. In that time the sun has shifted its position in the sky, moving closer and closer to the horizon.

Ernie’s eyes open again and he struggles to focus against the glare radiating from the blades of sunlight cutting horizontal slices of yellow across his face and the wall. He looks down toward his chest at the medical gown he is wearing. His eyes land on the pattern and are able to zoom in on the intricate nature of the fabric, not woven but more like a pressed paper. White, red and black flattened mush, like the homemade recycled paper his daughter made for her fourth-grade science project.
How did I remember that?
It stings his eyes to look so closely. He throws his head back and closes his eyes again, the fever making him nauseous.

Clearly I am dead,
he thinks.
Either hell is a little comfier than the Good Book would lead one to think, or upstairs isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Either way, at least my leg doesn’t hurt.
He looks down at his thigh, where the bullet shattered his bone. With the little slack that he has with his hand he pulls the edge of the gown up to look at his leg, which he half expects not to be there. Instead of a gaping, festering wound there is only a small eraser-sized scab.
How long have I been out?
On the bed beneath his thigh are several different-sized bits of metal. One looks like a bullet, the others like pieces of fragmented old sheet metal.

As his mind wanders, his tongue explores an irritated section in his mouth where his right incisor used to be, before it was dislodged by some youths “trying to clean up Washington Square Park.” He slides the tip of his tongue over and around. It feels like a hard kernel or sea shell or something. If he didn’t know better he’d think it was the beginning of a baby tooth cutting in.

Ernie rolls his head to the side, trying to shake off the pain of the fever, and sees that there is a mirror hanging on the wall. As he struggles to focus on the reflection he can quickly tell that the face looking back at him from the mirror is not Ernie. It looks like—heck, it looks like some kind of pretty-boy male model who has had a line of acid painted across his face. He has a full head of hair and sparsely placed luminously white teeth, but everywhere that the sunlight is touching looks like wrinkled old man flesh and skin pitted with acne scars. He looks closer at the hole where his tooth used to be, and indeed there is a small tooth growing down into his mouth.

Where the hell am I?

The fever takes him and he fades from consciousness.

Chapter 5

Marie has always considered herself lucky, despite the heaping portions of difficulty her life serves up for her. Growing up on the edge of Spanish Harlem means that hers is a story of familiar woes. In fact, most the problems she has experienced could have come as part of the “welcome to the neighborhood” checklist. Raised in a single-parent home, check. Crippling financial difficulties from sunup to sundown, check. Alcoholic parent, check. Her childhood worries were nothing novel—what is novel is that she and her father care for each other despite the ever-growing divide between them. This is the rub. This is the reason that she finds herself out walking the streets on her free time from the age of sixteen to twenty-seven looking for her father.

The thing is, her father isn’t a bad man. She knows bad men. She’s been with plenty of them and seen their marks on the faces of many of her friends growing up. Sure, Ernie is a gross drunk, a walking breathing pile of filth, an embarrassment on every level, but even with all those smudges against him, he is still her father.

Marie remembers when she was younger, when they used to be so close. Before everything changed. Before her mother gave up her painful battle with ovarian cancer. Long before Ernie started chasing his sorrow with bourbon.

When she was a kid he would tell her stories at night, fantastical tales of magical kingdoms ruled by the loveliest of princesses, Princess Marie. He would finish her bedtime story, tuck her in with his big strong hands and kiss her on her forehead. He had all his teeth then, and his breath didn’t reek of an open garbage pail.

What makes her the saddest is to think about his hugs. He would give her the best hugs, the strong embrace of a loving father holding something so precious to him. Now, when she sees him, if she sees him, she gets the weak hug of a decaying old man, and she has to spend most of her effort trying to hold back her gag reflex.

She loves her father regardless of his appearance, and smell, and failing health. She’s always known that he loves her too, no matter his descent into an ever darkening place—he loves her.

***

Marie walks south down through the west edge of Hell’s Kitchen towards the Meatpacking District. This used to be the fringe of the city. The further south you headed the more the area would fill with prostitutes of indeterminate gender, drag queens, trannies. They were the nightmares painted in the minds of Midwestern fathers who viewed New York as the modern-day Sodom. A lot has changed since then, since it was the homosexual and deviant panacea—a lot of gentrification.

Marie knows what to look for, she knows how to think like Ernie. She looks for areas with comfortable grass inlets to sleep on, sheltered overhangs or architectural nooks that would allow for an inconspicuous nap, always close to a source for drink. Local bars with discards out back for him to drink from, or older back doors that would allow for a quick in-and-out nab of some nearby inventory.

Ernie has been caught a few times before while trying to pinch liquor. Most of the time he would be shooed away by the bartender or owner, if for no other reason than to avoid coming close to offensive smells, or God forbid actually trying to detain him. One time she found him huddled in a ball with two broken ribs after trying to steal liquor from a bar with a less than hospitable attitude toward thievery. A shoe to the rib was his punishment, but “at least he was able to hold on to the vermouth.”

As Marie continues her trek she does not see the staple characters of the neighborhood. Ernie has “friends” all over the city. People he has shared a bottle or a smoke or who knows what else with. In her travels she doesn’t see any of them.

She’s certain that she will find people out here, having exhausted her search at all the familiar outreach programs. Odd though, the areas once littered with the evidence of homelessness are clean. Marie has seen the news reports—mayoral staff and city councilmen all congratulating themselves on their innovative measures to reduce the blight of the homeless. All touting programs from tougher crackdowns to humanitarian outreach depending on which side of the party line they are playing to.

No matter what the actual policies might be, it looks like someone sent a street sweeper through. Marie turns east on Fortieth and heads crosstown, toward Transitions, an outreach program that caters to the city’s homeless: volunteers and the formerly displaced working together to create a stable environment of care and love. Ernie wouldn’t be caught dead inside, mostly because of his own aversion to being inside anywhere for more than a day or two.

What’s interesting about Transitions is that it’s one of the few places that doesn’t employ a system of “turnover.” Most shelters, due to space limitation, operate with a sort of revolving inventory where every other day sleeping space is purged. You clean up, get your things together and go outside to be readmitted at night. Typically you have to wait in line for hours to get your voucher for space that night.

The facilities that practice turnover require a stricter schedule than Ernie can be expected to uphold. Ernie always keeps his own hours, even though booze runs his timecard.

Regardless, maybe he’s found his way here, or maybe someone who knows him is here. Clearing out their bedroll or getting a meal to fill their bellies.
Maybe they have seen him or can point me in the right direction,
she thinks optimistically, holding on to hope as she walks into the building.

Transitions is a recent addition to the New York scene. Unlike other homeless outreach programs, they don’t specialize. They take in all types and have a strict doctrine to reform their residents, cure them of what ails them. Treat the drunk, rehabilitate the junkie, and restore the abused. A sort of help-all attitude toward situational hardship, hence the name Transitions.

The building itself has more than enough square footage to comfortably accommodate a sizeable contingent of the entire local homeless population, but a lot of time and effort has been put into finishing touches on the building as opposed to creating barracks-style living quarters. Instead there is an intake area with a large open section that feels more like the entryway to a gymnasium. There are fold-away benches and stackable chairs that come out during mealtime and clear away into the corners at night time. Meals and many of the occupational therapies are conducted in this main indoor courtyard.

Because they don’t practice turnover they have several stages of transition. For those who are not night-to-night, and who are looking to create more stable environment for them and for their children, there are the next few floors. These are a form of halfway-house—they’re small efficiency apartments for families in transition. They offer some degree of stability and normalcy for the recently displaced. Most of the apartments are full of women who have fled abusive relationships, leaving in the middle of the night with nothing more than what they and their children could carry in both hands.

Marie has volunteered a few times at Transitions when it first opened there last year, when she could still coax Ernie to get help at places. She would bring him into their facility for a meal and then volunteer to help out, so that she could keep an eye on him. Inevitably Ernie would sneak out when she was helping some other poor soul and disappear into an alley and a bottle.

She has seen Transitions doing a lot of good for a lot of people, but deep down feels that something is off with them. Something that just doesn’t add up. She knows of at least five floors under the control of Transitions, LLC, the 501c3 non-profit organization that runs the outreach program, but has never found out what the upper floors are allocated for. She has heard someone mention a detox area before, but that seems way outside the scope of their duties.