All the burros to him seemed one hundred suburbs looking for a city to call their own to Squirley. He would drive through them, his wake interconnecting each and every suburb (Little Mexico, the University, the City district, the Mile), but he never felt comfortable in any one burro. In the City he felt distant, like an outsider looking in on all the happy businessmen who owned their club memberships to the YMCA and drove home in their Cadillacs (always east so the sun wouldn’t offend their eyes) to their doting wives and perfect children. In Little Mexico he felt immersed in a land whose language was little known to him, but also a black man caught in a world where it wasn’t okay to be white, and its was the norm to be brown. But where did he fit in to that spectrum? Black is darker than brown… In the Mile he felt most security, but realized that things went on around him that he couldn’t comprehend, that women sold their bodies to men like Toddy literally five feet away in the next studio-condo. That he could be blown to pieces by the nearest meth-lab (wherever that might be). He knew none of his neighbors, and their only presence was marked by volatile conversations.
But as he parked his beat-up car and stepped out onto the campus of the University, bearing on the outside his tough-man person, deeply he felt isolated from everyone. True, he had once been part of this burro as well: a humble student advancing his mind in a fertile environment of frat houses and beer bongs, days filled with murky, weathered library books while he reticently played the part of Mr. 4.0/Mr. Hangover, afternoons filled with scalding mocha lattes in pricey coffee houses while he, the English major, crammed for a futile biology midterm. Yes, this was once his forte. Yet, now he planned to offend what little credit the institution clung to with skeletal fingers by selling drugs and making good some debts he was owed.
Squirley walked along the highly manicured campus, weaving his way through students, like androids, texting on their phones. One girl with frosty blonde hair and downward trodden eyelashes ran into another girl, both of them texting without perceiving the oncoming impact. The collision, as Squirley watched from afar, made him chuckle. Other seemed as though they were walking aimlessly, solely focused on the tiny machines between their thumbs. I’m glad I don’t own one of those, Squirley thought. But then his eyebrows furrowed and he felt pity for himself that he, too, didn’t own a cell phone.
Suddenly, a Ritto walked by. Squirley checked his wrist watch: he’d only been waiting an hour at the stuffy campus. A blonde haired, baby-faced, blue eyed boy with a backpack immense for his body stole through the pedestrian’s walk way. He dashed behind a red-brick building with ivy growing up and around the corner, blocking any view that Squirley had of his debtor. It was now a tactical game, and Squirley’s wife-beater persona built his confidence higher than any sky-scraper in the City district. He rolled his sunglasses perched atop his already-receding hairline, catching shades of oil from his baby-curl hair, and sauntered – but flexing his muscles all the while – towards the blond. He stopped just short of the ivy.
“I think you know what you owe me, Dev.” He said, his voice a hue deeper than normal. Here he was: Mr. Bond, James Bond, that is, praying on the unjust – taking names and kicking ass.
There was no response from around the corner. Rusting was heard as leaves crunched between someone’s shoes and concrete.
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