CHAPTER THREE (4)

Ah, the old super-mercado, where Toddy brought only the best flautas. They were warm, filled with lard and sodium, but on the first bite all fell away and there remained nothing but the flauta and its reprobate. The thick smell of them hung heavy in the air surrounding the entire corner that housed El Super-Mercado Jose Pancho Velazquez. If one was lucky, who just happened to be passing by, one might catch the very Jose Pancho (called “Panchito” by his friends, though his given name was actually Jose Fransisco Morales Velazques) walking sturdily out of his dumpy but immense superstore, paved with neon green and pink signs that read ¡Ahora: Calabasas 89 centos cada uno! and the like. He wore an extremely fitted suit, though bulgy in girth, and his breath wreaked of brandy – but in a bad economy – vodka. But never, never tequila. “Woudn’t touch that stuff to save my life, ju know? Too many of them Mexicanos drink tequila, and you wouldn’t catch me dead with a bottle of de stuff! Babosos!” he would say, throwing his soft hands in the air and scrunching his perfectly manicured but sweaty moustache. 

Today Ryan had the pleasure of viewing the half-drunken man reach for his keys and begin the search for his car as he stepped from the automatic doors. He first attempted at a Buick, but Panchito, finding that this was indeed the wrong car – or perhaps the wrong keys – screamed some expletive about his wife and tried another. Squirley watched from his beaten, mobile, collections car, amused to say the least. His snaggle tooth peered from his full purple lips as Panchito again failed to unlock the correct car. Green light. Ryan was off.

The buildings began to become more unique as he drove south toward the University. They became colorful and were built without the uniformity of the northern and eastern parts of the city. Some were framed-stucco with hand-carved doors reflecting images of either the Virgin Mary or Jesus himself, little lambs on a pasture being delicately goaded by their master, even particular saints. It was quiet here, though children could be heard screaming for their toys, dogs were barking, sure, but only innocently at cats. A precise tranquility thus ruminated from Little Mexico; Ryan drove through it forgetting his collections, as he always forgot everything in Little Mexico, and was engrossed in the swirl of random colors and enchanting smells.

But as soon as he passed Avenida Mariposa, the iron and metal ran unyielding through out the burro. South Little Mexico (El Sur, as called by the locals – but El Diablito by the Northern Little Mexcio burrowers) was a blot, and ugly black and silver blot in the city. Literal underground tunnels ran untamed underneath the city, trafficking everything from stolen goods to drugs to women. Squirley drove hastily through this sector, but turned left suddenly on La Granada to visit his drug dealer Gato. Perhaps he might be able to sell him a pound or two – after all, there was always time to sell some weed on Campus in between Collections. 

CHAPTER THREE (3)

There were numerous accounts similar to these, each indentifying their own scuff on the car. The cumulate of these produced a spotted black surface. But what was most stirring about the LeBaron was the convertible option. The huge one and a half ton machine exposed its innards after about seven minutes of adjusting and re-adjusting its rasping leather top, revealing torn leather seats and sullied carpet upholstery. Tiny plumes of dust and debris poofed from the unfolding leather as it slowly made its way to the open position, extending the cracked and dry canvas into a taught arrangement, while various elements here and there moaned under duress. Despite the contraption’s pain, Squirley watched with pride.

The University was located at the opposite end of the city from Corrotto’s, which meant that Ryan would have to go through a sketchy part of the city in order to make his collections. Since most of his debts were from people at work, and most of the people at work attended the University, it was easy as they were all rounded-up into one two-by-one mile span. Like a shepherd, Squirley rounded his unfaithful black sheep and would reprimand them according to how much he was owed by each. The merriment of the chase is what Squirley saought with an unprecedented commitment to justice and capitalism, and by-god, he was going to get his money.

He jumped into his car and began the engine. No, no good. He tried again, without despair; this had happened before. The rummm, rummmmm of the engine signaled its distaste for that which had recently mounted it. Defiance rang through the air, but Squirley was wearing his he-man wife beater today, and who in the hell – even a damnable machine – would want to mess with him today? At last the faulty engine started the climb out of the unusually quiet apartment complex, each ride over a speed bump causing it to lose considerable weight as the dusty particles accumulated by under-use fell from the car. Squirley reached for the sunglasses, always finding their way under the passenger seat, without taking his eyes off of the street. Barley missing the sign that read: Welcome to the Monte Vista Apartment Complex: Studio Apartment Blowout!!!!!! with an unconscionable number of exclamation points, he swerved out of the complex hoping to burn a little rubber (he was, after all, in his wife-beater) but failing.

He drove south, hitting no more than the normal amount of red lights. He wasn’t particularly paying attention; there would always be at least one person whom he could track down like a mad-hungry animal and squeeze at the University. Besides, he had nothing to do today – it was Collections day. It was hot, but the air conditioner hadn’t worked for years. Niether did the speedometer, or the AM stations. The black and dusty radio in the center console emitted some incoherent hard-core rap, in Spanish or English. This is what one must play when entering through the little burro Little Mexico.

CHAPTER THREE (2)

As Toddy left, still tying his tie walking out the door, the smell of booze and marijuana invaded Squirley’s nostrils like an offensive from an army. He fought back the stench by breathing through his mouth, but it was too overwhelming. He slid off the bed feeling the crunch of the soiled carpet between his toes, and felt suddenly very alone.

Let’s see, no deals today.

His eyes followed a line straight to the Board and, as his first inclination was to sigh at the amount he owed, a thought poured into his head: Collections Day. Every once and a while, there would be a day when he had not one thing in the world to do – no work, no errands, no laundry. On these days, Suirley might find himself glued to the public access station on television, engulfed in a world of horrible acting and explicit opinions. But of those few and precious days, every once in a while – in a long, long, while – Squirley rampaged the city, all parts of the city, in the name of collecting the small amount of debt he was owed. It wasn’t as though he really wanted the money, because the more money he had, the more he’d have to keep from the prying eyes of the banks, thus the sticky fingers of the government. And they were sticky. But what he really enjoyed was the brute he became; a hard, dangerous man.

Squirley pulled on his jeans and reached for a white T-shirt. No, he thought, a wife-beater, it adds a certain statement to the whole get-up: manly yet casual. But, really, manly was the main thing. So he threw the t-shirt with little aim towards the closet (missing horribly) and put on the wife-beater. He slapped his back pockets for wallet and keys, and was at once out the door.

His feet hit the pavement with a harsh thud, thud. It was sweltering and he felt the pavement would sear right through his rubber soles. Something was missing; it was serenely quiet today. Ah, there was no one fighting on the lawn. Too hot. He dashed towards his 1989 black Chrysler LeBaron in escape from the smoltering sun.

The car had been through a few raumatic events in its life. The taillights were suspect, only admitting their age. They had been yellowed over by years without the shelter of a garage. Though the paint job was still holding strong, it was betrayed by knicks and dings here and there, each one he remembered with vivid detail their birth. Oh yes, 1993, road trip to Alabama with his brother Nate. That was a doosey, quite a fender-bender. There still remained some of the gold paint from the Buick he crashed into at that mysterious red-light in that one hick town –what was it’s name, again? And then the time when Toddy and he were fleeing from a bar downtown after effectively peeing beneath the bar itself and onto the tools, then proceeding to crush salted peanuts into the pools below their innocent feet, all the while the bar man articled some marital issues he’d been having with the wif-ee in the most demoralizing and licentious way. Another employee of course noted the fact within ten seconds of them having relieved themselves, and chased them out of the bar into the street. Squirley remembered Toddy pulling out his wine key (as they had just gotten off a miserable Saturday double-shift) and producing the harmless blunt knife for loosening the wine bottle seals. “Watch out, mistah, I’m armed!” Toddy yelled at the furious employee. The man threw full cans of Bud Light at the duo and yelled expletive after expletive. One of the Bud Light cans hit the passenger door. 

CHAPTER THREE (1)

But what was going on inside the van was too exciting. A Sublime smile had now formed on Katz’ face as needles poked and prodded him, as chemicals of various kinds were being pushed into his blood.

“What in hell are you giving him!?” Cried Mitzi as he pushed on the gas with his right foot. He made an extreme U-turn out of this fore-saken Ditrict 11, and speeded at the Mark III’s will – as fast as it could go – out of this hell-hole. No more the natives – the bums who had plagued him with their skeletal faces, the men (if you could call them that) with their scruffy faces and dying auras – could locate him in this diseased land. Mitzi, in all of his essences, fled. He fled something as he’s never fled before.

“Morphine, he needs relief. HE NEEDS RELIEF!!!” The doctor said rapidly

Katz was certainly responding to his “relief.” His eyes, those glazed, inhuman bulbs, twirled towards Mitzi, saying “Come on, I need RELIEF.” Whether he did or not, Mitzi couldn’t decide.

“Oh – so you’d give this relief to someone like Katz, but not to a native in dire need. I see…” said Mitzi, who wasn’t really focusing on the life of Katz, but really on the life of himself and vaguely on the life of all the rest in the moving vehicle. He quickly turned towards the enveloping scene in the back, and realized that Katz’s eyes found nothing but his.

The eyeballs were a metallic yellow, pupils looking defiantly into his. Why wouldn’t you let me have relief? You are just like me you piece of foul manure. You couldn’t handle what I’ve learned about the real world, you couldn-

 

CHAPTER THREE: Work and Work

 

Squirley woke to a start. The blinds let in bread-sliced visions of light rays onto his black skin. He fidgeted under his warm oven of covers, and fell back asleep. This would be the right way to go today, the warm oven. Always the warm oven of covers. It was no use now, trying to go back to sleep. Toddy was squirming under his linens on the floor, it was no use, it was just simply no use now. They both had woken under the 2 pm warm sun.

“You gotta be at work in an hour.” Said Ryan, ashe unsheathed himself from the comfotor.

“Says you, the man whose slept on an actual mattress.”

Toddy rose from the floor, his boxers half off. His chest betrayed flabby man-boobs. There was hair showing definitely from the nipples, but no real he-man hair. Despite the fact that he was 30, he had not a real forest grown on his chest. It didn’t really bother him in any way.

“Regardelss, you gotta be at work.”

Toddy reached for his white pressed shirt, or what should have been his white pressed shirt. He swathed himself in it, rolled on his rumpled Dickies and buckled the black belt. He suddenly looked like a half-dressed Ritto. 

CHAPTER TWO (18) Mitzi's dream continued...

The bundle-turned-man broke from Mitzi’s arms and crawled not towards the door to his shack, but to the warehouse behind that was at least 8,000 square feet. The pasty skin clung to his body, fearful of falling off as he crawled. He attempted to stand but in finding that he could do nothing more than scuttle towards what he referred to as his “stores,” he made very slow progress. Everyone watched in bewilderment, in total silence, in complete disgust. Here was a man who hadn’t seen daylight for a thousand years, crawling like a slimy insect in a dark cave back towards his birth.

Unable to comprehend Katz’s strength, Mitzi stood in awe. The heads smiled down on the situation. They spoke to Mitzi: “Why do you bring this back?” He had no idea; maybe because he was told to by NORML. Maybe because he had nothing else to do. Suddenly he wanted nothing more than to take all of the native and Mr. Katz in his hands and ring their necks, or join them, or leave them – anything but this. Anything but this.

Meanwhile, a pilgrim had taken it upon himself to run in front of Katz, not touching him, but blocking his path to the store-house. A hissing came from Katz, a hissing so vile that Mitzi stepped back, ready to fly from this scene at any moment. He took a few more steps back and tripped on a collection of re-barb stumps. Bringing him back to his senses, he ran once more to retrieve the man-child.

“You take the legs, I’ll take the arms.” They hoisted him up into the air, suspending his horribly emaciated midsection as if he were a show cat. His eyes had glazed, he was loosing energy (what little he had), and he began to slowly give in. They carried him to the van – this time with success – with the help of the other pilgrims. Dogbert and Vergil – those pissy little wastes of space, thought Matt – cowered among encroaching natives who seemed to be drooling over their thick bodies. Back-to-back, they hurried towards the protection of the van.

“One, two, three!” The pilgrims lifted the man into the van.

“What should we do with the other one?” He pointed over to the homeless man whose face had been blown off by a projectile.

“I dunno – toss him out?” Said another.

“K, I got it.”

The doctor, who would never have shot the man, now carelessly dragged him by the foot, a pool of blood tracing his path, and dragged him to the concrete. Thump. The body lay contorted on the pavement and left. The natives closed around the corpse and left Dogbert and Virgil to claw their way, puling one another in a war to gain the passenger’s front seat, into the security of the Mark III.

Mitzi couldn’t look back, but figured they natives – starving – were tearing apart the dead man bone from bone, joint from joint.

If he had only turned around to witness their humanity…

CHAPTER TWO (17) Mitzi's dream continued...

This – this is what he had come so far for. This thing, this half-man half-changeling creature laying helplessly in bed was what Mitzi had risked his life for? Venturing into uncharted locations along the dreaded Broadway Boulevard? He needed escape, this was all unreal. He couldn’t look at the dying thing in front of him; the long bony arms somehow arranged Christ-like, so heavy though they were so thin nailed to the flimsy, soiled sheets. But he wasn’t Christian, no, he wasn’t anything. His nose was Jewish, without a doubt, and Mitzi figured his last name was that of a Jew’s anyways. But his head was swathed in a mass of blonde hair, and his jaw-line gave him the air of something Nordic. His eyes strangely slanted and stretched, revealing Asian roots. He was a meld of so many ethnicities, there was no qualifying this man; he was them all. But Katz – no, you couldn’t call him Katz anymore – was a wasted and withered swell of fleshy bone that resembled nothing in particular of a race but what is inherently part of every race: the carcass, the bare minimum, the very thing that even after death every race, color, ethnicity came down to: a collection of bones. It was sick, this whole place was sick.

The quilted man broke the silence: “So he is not dead, then?”

“No. He is not dead.” This revelation brought Matt back to the situation at hand: the recovery of Katz. Mitzi effortlessly scooped the bundle – sheets and all – into his arms and rushed him to the occupied stretcher in the back of the Mark III. A crowd had formed outside of Katz’s station. Along with the Pilgrims, Virgil and Dogbert, and the surviving native, there stood before the travelers at least one hundred and fifty homeless men. There were there to see their oppressor off – but they didn’t smile, they didn’t rejoice in his near-death, rather, they stood there amidst the decaying cityscape expressionless as always, each of them as torn and tattered as the next. They parted beneath the smiling decapitated heads looking in on everything, saying ‘I told you this day would come,’ as Mitzi whisked a dying fiend in his arms near their impassive faces. Some would reach out and try to touch the soiled linen, but most just stared onwards.

Meanwhile, Katz had livened and begun to open his eyes. The whites were yellow. Jaundice, Mitzi thought, that means liver failure. He is almost there. From some unknown force, the heap of wiry flesh fought back against Mitzi, clawing with unprecedented strength at the confining linens. Why would a man want to escape earnestly from his savior’s breast?

“Let me go you fool…” came a soft command from the suddenly animated bundle, “I must get back… let go.”

“Mr. Katz – we must take you back to head quarters – “ Mitzi tried to explain. The bundle was now violently trying to free itself, and becoming quite successful. Mitzi dropped to one knee – the man must have weighed no more than 120 pounds at must have been more than seven feet tall, but his drive was staggering. Katz’s nails grasped whatever was fixed into the ground: cement, re-barb, electrical cord, whatever he could clench. The fragile nails broke on any one of this, but he continued mercilessly.

“I must get back to my stores. There is much more to be had!”

CHAPTER TWO (16) Mitzi's dream continued...

Mitzi was expecting a cobweb-ridden, dilapidated, dark room that was stale and acrid. He was expecting a wonderful man sitting in the midst of it all, disgusted by the filth he had to live in, victimized by a company he had given the last decade of his life to. He expected an ominous Katz to come up to him and take him by the hand and somehow force all of his prowess and erudite experience through his pores into Mitzi. He expected to be saved as the quilted man had, for the quilted man had somehow found light in such a world of darkness. This was the defining moment of his journey to the heart of District 11, where all of his expectations were met by a man who would even exceed them…

But it wasn’t like that at all. The quilted man pried the door open to reveal a somewhat organized room. It exuded no smells, was not unkempt, and it did not seem to have a cobweb anywhere in sight. At the right corner of the studio room, there, shielded by soiled blankets lay the body of the infamous Katz. His bony feet hung at least two feet past the end of the mattress, which seemed to be infested with flees. They were uncovered, showing a diaphanous and sinewy skin, much like a newborn’s. The man must have been at least seven-feet-tall, which is why his feet protruded from the sheets and the mattress. His head was faced toward the wall; Katz was either dead, near dead, or sleeping. From what Mitzi had gathered, remembering the words of his commander (“the aim was to get Katz in one piece – and if in one piece, perhaps even alive”), Katz was not in the best condition. Adding that to the quilted man’s experience with Katz, thing were not looking well.

Mitzi’s aim, then, was to gather the giant man up and whisk him away on the battered Mark III.

“Doctor,” he said to the pilgrim, “shall we begin?”

The pilgrim had already rehearsed in those few moments of witnessing the dire Katz, his last rights. But to make sure, he told Mitzi, “You should first relinquish the covers from his face. They may be smothering him.”

Mitzi cautiously walked towards the lump in the sheets. He detected movement, but the lights were so dim that his eyes played tricks on him. He protruded his hand over the body, then hesitated. What if he is dead? Would the wretched bugs have already gotten to him? What was he thinking – bugs didn’t exist in such a dark place. Fuck it…

He pulled back the sheets to reveal a sleeping Katz, serenely sleeping. It was clear that he was emaciated and probably anemic, hence the sinewy, pasty skin. He was stark naked, and on his whole body was only fuzzy hair, nothing like the hair of a man past puberty. He was pre-pubescent, he was juvenile, he reminded Mitzi of an overgrown toddler.