“If Cornelius will fuck with me, I can.”
“He will. I’ll set that up before I go.”
“When you gonna bounce?”
Lazarus reached over and grabbed the duffel with the bricks in it. He walked over to his closet and dumped an armload of clothes inside, then bent down and pulled a floor-board loose. Inside the hollow was a roll of dough and one more brick. He tossed those in, too. I neglected to mention that it was my bag he was packing.
“I’m ready now,” he said.
Laz took a shower, made a few phone calls. I went up to my crib and did the same, then came back down and rolled us one last spliff. We smoked in silence. Always the best way. When it was over Laz stubbed the roach, pushed off palms-to-knees, and stood. “Everything is set,” he said, and tossed me his car keys. “You might as well get used to driving it.”
We were quiet all the way to Times Square. I kept waiting for Laz to start peppering me with instructions, but he just leaned back in the passenger seat, rubbing his eyes. Occasionally, he’d sing a little snippet of a Marley song to himself: Don’t let them fool ya/or even try to school ya. Maybe it was stuck in his head and he just had to let it out, or maybe the song made him feel better. He had a good voice, actually.
I parked the car, walked him up to the ticketing desk, and then down to the terminal. The bus was already boarding. I offered Laz my hand; he clasped it, then pulled me into a shoulder-bang embrace. “Hey, listen,” he said. “That shit with Jumpshot. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to call him a nigger. I was heated. You know I didn’t mean anything by it, right?”
“I know,” I said.
He leaned in for another soulshake. “Hold it down for me, bro.”
“No doubt,” I said.
“I’ll see you in a month. And I’ll call before then.”
“Do that.”
“All right, bro. One love.”
“Be safe,” I said.
“No doubt.”
“Peace.”
“Peace.” He glanced over his shoulder, hefted the duffel bag, and disappeared up the steps.
I walked to the far side of the terminal and checked my watch. Laz’s bus was due to depart at 1:15. It was 1:13 when the two DTs I’d tipped off cut the line, flashed their badges at the driver, and boarded. I didn’t wait to see them haul Laz off, just got on the escalator, made my way back to the car, and rolled back to Brooklyn. Climbed the stairs to my apartment, triple-locked the door, and rolled myself another joint. Slipped on my brand new Jordans, stacked my eight bricks into a pyramid, and just stared out the window, taking in my new domain. So long, Lazarus, I thought. I never liked your fake ass anyway. Just another punk whiteboy beneath it all. Damn near shit yourself when I put that nine to your dome. Probably serve your whole sentence and never figure out what happened. Probably call me every week from the joint, talking about, “What’s going on, bro?” Probably expect cats to remember who you are when you get out.
Hunter/trapper
by Arthur Nersesian
Brooklyn Heights
CATCHMEFUCAN, late 30s, divorced, graduate school type, nipple and foot bottom, descriptive tinkle torture, only literary straps, no working class ropes or common place marks. Looking for a little pen pal punishment.
This enticed me for solely one reason: This would be the notice I’d post were I hunting for me. Circular logic to most, but to me this entry was bait for a sting. Still, I figured, I have the willpower to finger the flames with-out getting burned. To CATCHMEFUCAN, I wrote back, I’d love to try to be more than a pen pal — GOTCHU.
Well, GOTCHU, you can always try. Just be prepared to join the graveyard of so many others that failed, cause you won’t succeed.
Thus we started our little cat-and-mouse relationship. I figured maybe I’d get some pud-pulling tidbits. Cinch the ropes around my wrists, pour hot wax on my breasts, clamp me if I’m naughty, smack me if I’m nice… Blah blah blah, the usual stuff you’d expect from an S&M shatroom. But with her it was different.
She’d have none of that. Whenever I mentioned that I’d love to give her a tweak, she’d write something dismissive like, That’s not necessary.
It was as though some ponytailed Dorothy from Kansas had accidentally ventured into this Oz of Bondage and Domination. I could see why she didn’t get much action. No one else would have put up with her.
Do you realize that you advertized in an S&M chat room? I finally asked after weeks without so much as a slap or tickle in the endless exchanges.
Course I do, you randy lad.
And yet whenever I make any advances along that line, you seem surprised.
I have to get to know you better before I can fully reveal that side of myself to you.
This is the Internet! We’re never going to meet.
I pass a million people every day. You’re my only lovebug. A meeting of minds is far more intimate than a meeting of bodies.
So how long do you have to know someone for before we can get intimate?
The longer you can wait, the better it’ll be, she replied with all the smugness of a red-hot poker cauterizing my wounded heart.
Her e-mail exchanges always took something out of me. Afterwards, I’d have to nurse myself back to my indestructible self developing the innermost buds of fantasies that one day would blossom. On that fateful day when I finally had her, I could act out all my dreams. But even my dreams were hindered, until I found out what her dreams were. Without her realizing it, I had to learn what scared her more than anything else, to extract the sweetest nectar of her fear.
Occasionally I’d test her borders, nothing gross or icky, just little things, like Why’d you divorce? or, What are your measurements? Wondering if she was actually still married, or if she was in a wheelchair.
She’d invariably turn the questions into sarcastic come-backs.
I divorced cause I knew I’d meet you, or, You see me every night on cable, I’m Anna Nicole Smith.
So soon, in order to keep it earnest, our e-missives became little more than a line or so. One long banal conversation that lasted for weeks and then months. Whenever I turned on my computer, she was always right there. Like warm little homemade muffins just waiting for me, but they always had a little needle inside, some funny little dig. Slowly, like a voice in my head or a low-level addiction, I came to thoughtlessly expect it. I learned to eat around what used to get caught in my throat. At the end of a long, empty day, a day of resisting the urge to follow a thousand lonely ladies home and bring them to my ecstatic world, I knew I could read CATCHME’s little comments du jour. It became something to look forward to. I couldn’t go to sleep without an exchange.
One night about three months into our little chat, she must’ve had a little too much too drink, because she let out a slip: It’s three in the morning and I just made a big boo boo.
What kind of a boo boo?
A naughty one.
How naughty?
Very very naughty.
Naughty girls need to be disciplined, I pushed.
But who will take time to do that?
Just type in where you are, lost little girl, and I’ll come get you. When I hit send, I knew I shouldn’t have. I knew I was pushing too hard.
She didn’t write me back for a month after that — punishment by deprivation — and I thought I had lost her until one day I got a new message: Boy, it was a beautiful day today, wasn’t it?
I wanted to write back that she could eat my stinking shit and if I ever saw her I’d strangle her with her own intestines as I fucked her death wounds. Instead I wrote, Sure was With sudden regularity, the e-mails resumed. Though they took on a bit more depth, they still remained along the surface. She’d talk about her little garden, and soon she mentioned other potted plants of domesticity: the old oak trees on her block; the aggravating honks of trucks that double-parked in front of the supermarket around the corner, causing constant traffic bottlenecks. She mentioned that every morning while watering her rooftop plants, she could see the Williamsburg Savings Bank clock from the back of the building and the Jehovah’s Witness digital clock toward the front, and the two-minute discrepancy between them. She talked about how she liked going on strolls near the waterfront over the cobblestoned streets in her neighborhood.