South Baltimore, 1985
There he stood, on a cold SoBo corner, Barney and Russell to be exact, waiting for some motherfucker—any motherfucker—to come cop some dope. He always wondered about that term, when the last person you ever wanted to cop dope from your punk ass was a cop. He should be done by now, off this corner. But somehow it seemed like he had been here, in this biting cold, forever, while his whore mother made her bread in the biblical sense in the penthouse of that money hive between and above Charles and Light, just beyond his sight…
Yeah Bro, as soon as some fiend makes a buy I’ll have my nut and be able to call it a day without Stag beating my skinny ass!
Come on!
It’s cold out here.
There has got to be another one of you city hicks looking to get stoned!
I knew I should have lifted some long-johns and thermal shirts from those Korean pricks at the flea market.
Damn this shit is cold.
“Good morning to you too, Miss Rich Bitch, and have a nice day in your warm fucking mansion!” he blurted, as the tall well-dressed white woman in the fur coat walked by like she owned the world.
Well she owns some rich dick! Wrought iron on the front door, twenty large around her pasty neck!
I should have been a mugger.
Oh the hell with that. The pigs will always come around to avenge that.
Maybe I can start whacking those Greek pricks up on the Eastside, take their shit. Nobody cares about those motherfuckers. Shit, I—look at this Leave it to Beaver motherfucker here, pulling up in Mom’s rice-burning, get-my-ass-to-the-office sedan.
The young, clean-cut man, looking only a few years older than RayRay, who was 15, rolled down the window as a gust of bitter wind blew trash up out of the gutter between them. RayRay was not exactly a salesman—why bother, they are addicted to this shit—as he cocked his head and snarled, “What took you so long, motherfucker—have to wait for Mom to get off work? I’m freezing my ass off out here, you fucking fiend!”
The customer, who RayRay had never seen before, caught him off guard, “What’s up, RayRay. Come around and get out of the cold.”
What the fuck?
“Alright, Beave.”
Don’t trust this prick—a fucking narc I bet!
He slid into the nice warm seat and got smart—well, he didn’t have to get smart, he woke up that way—“Okay, so the Partridge Family moved in next door and the redheaded faɡɡot stole your dope, so you come looking for some from me, right, twerp!”
The clean-cut, white-bread prick cracked a smile to cover up the fact that he was nervous and put it in drive. RayRay continued with business, “Okay, bitch-boy drive down to Port Covington. I need to re-up and my stash is there. How much you buying?”
The older boy swallowed hard. “I need two-hundred beans worth of powder—I don’t smoke rock.” And then his voice cracked.
“Okay, pussy—I got you. Drive, bitch.”
Just keep putting it on this prick, sweat his ass and get some extra for that powdered rock. His dumbass won’t know it’s not real powder—already smashed to shit. Making my nut? Shit, I’m making bank today off of this numb nut!
It was late on a Wednesday afternoon in January, already growing dark as the sun went down behind the Patapsco River, when ‘Beave’ pulled in behind that old shack that looked like it was made of crumbling mortar held together with shards of brick. ‘Beave’ looked over at him as he turned off the car, white of face, the blood having drained to wherever pussies kept it when they got ready to piss themselves.
“Look, RayRay, I’m a police cadet, buying from minors. I’m not supposed to arrest, just serve you up in court after they rip you off the corner when I drop you off.”
The sneaking, conniving, backstabbing narc took a pregnant pause while RayRay pretended to listen astutely and fuss with the collar of his bomber jacket, but was really fishing for the Lincoln Log piece that formed the butt of his skewer—Got it!
The narc continued, “So, RayRay, you’re probably not even sixteen. How about if I just drive you over to detective—aaaggghh!”
“That’s right, motherfucker! Choke on that!”
He could hear the sounds of the stainless steel shish kabob skewer popping the right side of the narc’s neck, fishtailing off of the cervical spine, popping through both sides of the wind pipe, and then popping with a gush and some splatter noises out the other side of the neck. As the narc shook and shivered and gurgled and clutched at the wheel—not man enough to fight, and not animal enough to claw at the thing that was transfixing his throat—RayRay whispered in his ear, close enough to kiss him, “Die, you prick narc! And I’m no kid, a man now, thanks to you!”
My first kill Pap, a Statist, Puppet Soldier!
Jaxodus
The cadet was not even dead yet when RayRay stuffed him in the trunk in a panic, retrieved his sacred narc-whacking skewer and wiped the bloody hand prints off of the rear fender and trunk with the narc’s socks. He kept the shoes. They were about the right size and he would need spares. He drove, and drove, up around the Westside, out Route #40, and off into Western Maryland.
His head seemed to swim and Time itself seemed to flex, a bubble of endless night with him riding the membrane like a gnat on the ass-end of a swollen world. Fortunately, he mused, as he faded and merged and faded through once un-guessed dimensions.
Where the fuck am I?
Sleeping on the toilet, watching a bathtub full of naked, stoned, SWAT cops, try to emerge from the opiate stupor your skank ass has plunged them into.
Nah, you read too many comics, ass-wipe. You're driving Pap's pick up...
No, I'm driving Beave's rice-burner, taking the narc-who-new-my-name funeral procession, up through Hillbilly Hell.
Eventually, in the dark of night, having turned off Route #50 above the Duck River, he ran the coffin/car into an old mine shaft, a place his Pap had showed him when he was but nine, learning how to poach for table food. He spent the next week hoofing it over ridges and through hollows in knee deep snow, eating snow, pretending to be Little Boy Fucking Lost whenever he stumbled upon some bleeding heart old broad, and starving his skinny ass off the rest of the time, until he made it to Ma’s house up in Wheeling West Virginia.
Pap had passed. But Ma gave him a whipping for running away that past summer just as Pap would have. He never told her that he had moved to Baltimore, and had subsisted, unbeknownst to his high class whore of a mother, in the trash blown streets beneath her 30th floor penthouse, as a lookout, then a runner, and finally a corner boy, for Lieutenant ‘Stag’ Hay, the cop who ran the Russell Street drug market.
That crooked old bastard will be pissed! I sure am glad my name is not RayRay Barnes, and that I'm not from Winchester Virginia.
I'm a man—fifteen stone-fucking-cold years young, and a man.
I miss you, Beave, you faɡɡot, miss you more than I ever would have guessed.
Randy Sterling Bracken, alcoholic, drug addict, murderer, hate-filled cop killer, and [secretly] half Korean white supremacist—and possibly the best argument against time travel—did indeed rest his lean hind parts upon a toilet seat. Six weeks from going back to 212 B.C. to snatch Archimedes from the bloodthirsty clutches of some ancient dago drill sergeant, Randy had failed to stay out of trouble, failed miserably, he discovered, when he woke to a better than average hangover, perched on a commode that he had pissed blood into in one of his lesser moments, gazing bleary-eyed across a well-appointed yupster nest bathroom, at what could have been Mom's bathtub, loaded with a tangle of drunk, stoned, naked pigs, arranged by his own uncaring hands in the most suggestive postures.
Randy then came to his senses, which could only make things worse for everyone involved and for those anonymous souls not yet aware that they existed only to entertain him.
"Oh, yes, of course, Officers Too Friendly, I will take your man love portrait—yes, on all four of these smartphones and send it to every one on the contact lists."
The pile of drooling, snoring, nuzzling cops did not answer back, so Randy answered for them, "Dude, you are such a dick!"
"Click."
