Neal Pollack

I work the desk at the old folks’ house, though I also live there. People come in, drug dealers, little high school gangbangers trying to score an initiation sale at the place. They figure a captive audience is all they need. I tell Benjamin, the 300-pound security guard, to toss them out on their knees. He’'s always happy to oblige. There are junkies in this place who haven'’t had a drop of their particular sauce in years, yet they never leave. They need the gatekeeper. They need me.

That’s how I met Tristam, years ago; he turned out differently than many of the little entrepreneurs, though. After some college at the UIC—that’s C Chicago-go, this shithole of a town—he flunked out, addicted to the city’s second letter. He dropped by and was so skinny and haggard I didn'’t recognize him at first.

“Goddammit, boy, you look like shit,” I said. “Plastic getting to you?”

We went on, as was our style in the days of old, about the plasticizing of the world around us. Plastic car rims, bumpers, plastic cigarette holders, plastic handles on doors to places like churches, plastic communion wafers (taking the symbolic one level higher) slated for reuse. Suck and spit, back into the offering plate. Then we struck a deal. Included in my diseased old man’s daily dose was a single helping of the vanguard Ajexo painkiller. The combination of a Valium-like synthetic with just the slightest twinge of morphine-derivative punch, these pills were then mythic among the junkie set, regarded as a sort of withdrawal cure-all. I didn'’t take them, no way, since I was long off the hard shit and they’d have been the road back to death for me. Besides, pain I could live with.

In the spirit of God’s good grace, I handed them over to the boy. He needed help.

But Tristam didn'’t keep his half of the deal: staying off the primary jolt. Time goes by and contracts lose their potency. Occasionally I'’d start when on the bus on the way to a checkup, a prescription refill, and realize with the full weight of a catastrophe that the boy had gotten off at the park again to see the man who went by Valentino, recognizable by his perpetual attire: bright-red athletic jumpsuit, sneakers, and a fedora over his pristine afro. The pusher-pimp was known over the blocks for hard shit.

One particularly momentous day, I felt like a martyr, like I wanted to be Joan of Arc or some righteous-ass Palestinian or Iraqi. Tristam and I rode the bus east on Chicago truly without an idea of what would happen. What we wanted was routine, of course, however chaotic our lives might be; we could strive. It was all I could do to resist the urge to burn the whole fucking place down, myself with it. For me, the days start nervous.

I keyed my pilot to search the data bank for the right fit; I call it “pilot”, but really it’s custom, fabricated from the body of an old cell phone. It could get me into any city database long as I had the code. Old girl Jenna Simonsen of the Logan Square halfway house gave it to me in exchange for certain connections that only I can provide. At twenty-seven minutes past the hour, I ran a background check on myself, Mr. John Arcadia, to find I'’d escaped from prison for the third time, but way back in 1987. More interestingly, I trashed the greenhouse of a neighbor in Waukegan, ended up in the hospital and with a charge of indecent exposure on top of other vandalism counts, a two-inch gash traveling the length of my buttocks. I got busted with marijuana two years later, and the cops put me in a boarding home with no hope of escape, which is to say without a goddamned chance, much less twelve jurors and a judge.

“There’s my money,” Tristam said.

The flunky pointed to the same park at the corner, by which we were presently passing; we stood each with one hand gripping overhead stabilizing poles like chimpanzees, myself keying the pilot in my other hand. The boy was getting bold. Valentino was there on the steps of the park’s field house in plain view.

“You mean you’re pointing him out to me now?” I said. “What about our deal?”

“Money,” Tristam said.

“That mean he got money, or he gone take your money?” I said, knowing too well the answer. “Boy, I don’t know why you just don’t settle on your fix with me. Settle on safety.”

“Who are you today?” he said, and before I could tell him about John Arcadia the greenhouse torcher, he gestured broadly back west, toward the church. “Meet you there,” he said, and hopped from the bus, his skinny legs forever appearing like they ought to crumple under the weight of his body, however paltry. This time he stayed aloft, floating toward the pusher-pimp. And I may have been shaken, distracted, or angered by this, and maybe it prefigured things to come, but I didn'’t get heated just yet over it. I imagine he knew well what he was doing, the fuck, cause I didn'’t miss a step, headed downtown for my checkup, preoccupied, scanning the pilot for further details.