story: desperado
by goodtutor2001
Posted to Stories on 2003-07-24 07:01:00
Hi! This is from my first novel, Cerebral Cyanide, which has been published.
desperado by Warren Weappa ©2001
There I was, using the bathroom at my friend Jack’s house. There were two photos in the
bathroom. One was a famous bridge out West I recognized and the other photo was Jack
and his friend Mark with a bunch of Mexicans, dressed in white clothes, wearing straw
sombreros. “Jack!”, I yelled. “Who’s these Mexicans with you and Mike?”
Mark said sharply, “Denny’s no Mexcan!”
“I’m sorry”, I apologized. “Looks the same as those other peons.”
“That’s Denny”, Jack pointed to a tall lean man, skin the color of tan leather, that Mark
and him had their arms on his shoulders.
“We learned everything from Denny”, Jack said.
“He taught me to roll.”
“Twist one up, Mark. I’ll tell the tale. This’ll take some time because a number’s got to be
perfect for Mark, no seeds or twigs or any stray garbage.”
“I heard that”, Mark said emphatically as he retrieved a cookie pan with smoke and rolling
papers from under Jack’s Lazy boy.
“What’s worth doing s’worth doing well.”
“Let me tell my story”, said Jack, anxious to begin. “I was junior at Crockett-“
“Class a seventy-two”, Mark interjected.
On the east side of Austin, in an abandoned lot strewn with malt liquor cans and broken
wine bottles between a tortilleria and a used car lot, Denny speaks in Spanish with a hard
looking man who wears an Astros ball cap and long sleeved shirt, buttoned to the neck
and shiny slacks and cowboy boots. “Control never has a practical end. Control never is an
end to nothing but more control. The perfect monopoly is when you control the drugs of
an addict. There are three rules for monopoly. Never give something for nothing nor more
than you have to. Always keep the buyer hungry and always make him wait. Always take
back what you can.”
The Mexican laughs and shakes hands with Denny in a soul shake and hands him a
suitcase, saying, “Una boca cerrada, no entran moscas. Flies can’t go into a closed
mouth.”
“I can still remember the look in Denny’s pinned eyes as he’d lay on everyone his favorite
quote, “As Freewheelin’ Franklin would say, ‘Sell three and get one free.'” Denny was
always high and always takin’ care of business. His other favorite saying was no can
ignore withdrawal.”
Mark said, “The first time I met Cheryl, she said ‘Now you know where I live, you can
come over every time.”
“Cheryl was Danny’s wife” Jack informed.
I couldn’t believe it. “You were fuckin’ his wife?”
“Every morning on the way to school our junior year”, said Jack.
“What was hard”, said Mark, “was when Denny said it was cool one night and we had to
act like it was our first time together.”
This had to be bullshit. “You fucked his wife in front of him?”
“Denny was getting’ pretty strung out to get his dick up.”
“I did heroin for seventeen days”, Mark bragged. “It gives such good dreams.”
“That was another time”, said Jack. “Keep the story straight.”
“I was sitting drinkin’ and smokin’ with Cheryl in the Armadillo Beer Garden listening to
someone get tuned up inside.”
“A guy was standing on the table.”
Mark looked up from his cleaning. “You were there?”
“YES! This guy was yellin’ revolution, rich against the poor was why MLK got it. Denny
cam up to us and told us these bullshit artists were agents.”
“Agents of the law are everywhere”, I added.
“Whose house is this?” Jack looked at me too cross with impatience in his eyes. “who’s
tellin’ the tale.”
“You are, Jack.”
“I’m makin’ the boat now”, said Mark. He had folded the rolling paper into three long
rectangles. “Loading cargo.” He started to drop smoke into the gutter of the paper he held
open in his fingers in a well-practiced fashion.
“Where was I?”, asked Jack, his brow puzzled.
“Narcs at the ‘Dillo.”
“Denny liked to say, dope gets you through times of no money better than money gets you
through times of no dope.”
Denny have any original ideas, I wanted to question but I didn’t want to piss off Jack.
“Denny was rantin’ ‘The paranoid are the divine alcoholics amongst us, stayin’ alive as the
blind herd goes over the cliffs’ and shoplifting Vicks Formula 44-“
“It had codeine then. Denny was really sick”, Mark spoke with such empathy in his voice.
“My house, Mark. I’ll tell it. He got an axe and chopped through the roof a drug store-“
“He wanted Dilaudid, his favorite-“
“He drops through the roof and breaks both ankles.”
“He was so fucked up, he’d chopped through the roof of the store next to the drugstore.
He got sent up for burglary and breakin’ and enterin’ even though he hadn’t stole nothin’.
Cheryl bailed him out and he got a public attorney fresh outta Texas. Did eighteen months
on his first offense.”
A vision of calendar pages flying off into the breeze of the midnight special see-sawed on
my synapses.
“He was completely different when he came out”, said Mark.
“He was still a stone cold alcoholic.”
Mark licked the cigarette. “Give it a second to dry”, he said with the flavor of a gourmand
and placed it in the cookie pan. “Denny came over to my house and talked and talked. I
never heard him say so much.”
“You know how much Mark talks”, I joked.
“Don’t interrupt!”, Jack reprimanded too harshly like he was jones-ing for the fresh rolled
number.
“I remember exactly what he said. ‘When “will” is accepted as the fundamental principle
of society, it proves what it is: a will to the denial of life, overpowering what is different or
weaker a principle of disintegration and decay. Life is the will to power and exploitation, a
consequence of the will to power and the primordial fact of history, is the essence of what
lives.'”
“That’s bleak.”
“Those are Denny’s words, not mine”, said Mark.
“Can you do better?”, demanded Jack.
“How about, ‘The riddle of life doesn’t exist because the answer can’t be put into words
so neither can the question.'”
“Shit”, Jack said in disgust. “Spark that up, Mark, what y’waitin’ for? Read this postcard.
Denny sent it to me when he first left.”
“Where’d he go.”
“Mexico”, Mark spoke without using his breath as he held smoke in his lungs, handing me
the lit joint.
The postcard was faded with a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe. ‘No car, so no car to
fix. No job, so no hassles. No federales, so no problems. Mescalito talks to me when I
want. Adios’
In a machine gun monotone, Jack narrated, “Denny was at the Armadillo when he got
word the FBI was tearing up Mark’s place looking for him and he lit out.”
Mark spoke in the same choked voice admiringly, “He ran the biggest social security
check scam in history. The pigs tore my place apart ’cause they saw a roach in the ash tray
when my old live-in let ’em in.”
Jack looked at me with wide eyes as he handed me the burning blunt and I decided
salvation was individual.