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When we were feeling really stupid, we wound up at a club. There was a certain time of night when the crowds were thick and drunk enough to ignore Frankie's stench. We could clip in between the bodies, become indistinguishable from them as they drew close to the abyss, the precipice on which we were always camped. Nobody saw the glaze in my eyes or heard Frankie's deranged mutterings. I put on a collared shirt whose stains were assumed to be recently spilled beer.
This was the closest Frankie came to women. They seemed to enjoy talking to him in the dark and colored lights. Meanwhile I could put myself at the center of the crowd and feel them pulse around me, space shrinking to the edge of my shoulders, time down to the space between beats. "Roger, I got some cash in my pocket. Let's get drunk here."
"We ARE drunk. But okay." The nights' rhythms ran together: anticipation, euphoria, depression, daylight, regret. Noon was always the worst. Everything was closed and we were out of money. Reality dripped from the sky and straight down into the tops of our skulls. My eyes bugged out like tiny men were beating on their insides.
"I've got listerine in my pocket," Frankie'd say. "Want some?"
God yes.
Once, I found a dead man and his gun. He was fat as sin, with a monstrous head and a manicured beard on what remained of his chin. His index finger was still wrapped around the trigger.
"Let's rob that one grocery. I found a gun."
"Take the bullets out."
"What?"
"It's not armed robbery if the gun isn't loaded."
"Uh. Is that true?"
"How many bullets you got?"
I opened the revolver's cylinder. "5."
"That's five dead people. I don't like dead people, Roger."
"Fine." I tapped the bullets out and dropped them on a trash pile in the alley. The one empty casing, I kept in my pocket.
"Where'd you get that, anyway?"
"Dead guy." I was having dreams about dead guy. His head was as big and squishy as a watermelon and there was a tunnel straight through it, from his neck to his crown. If you could unlatch his face, there would be a hiss of escaping air and then you'd pull it off to see this deep groove running up where his brain met his eyesockets. "Still got that mouthwash, Frankie?"
So we held up the grocery store. It was a little place downtown, open all night. Nothing like where I worked, a cozy little mart, one teenage Mexican girl working the register and no one else. I never asked her where she was from or anything, I just thought of her as Mexican. They didn't have booze but there was plenty of free cash. While she was handing it to me, Frankie was busy stuffing his pockets with OTC pharmaceuticals. "This is stupid," he said. "There's a police station right down the street."
"She's not calling the cops, though. You're not, are you?"
"What if they come in here for donuts or something?"
She just looked at me and shrugged. She was kind of cute, but didn't seem like she wanted to talk to me.
"Ask her what she's into," Frankie called from the family planning aisle.
"She won't talk to me. Also what's this goop coming out of the fridges?"
Frankie called again while munching on a bag of chips. "Hey, you remember that scene in American History X, where they pour milk all over that immigrant?"
"Woww, you know how to kill the mood. Also, what the fuck is this goop?" Thick black sludge poured from the ice cream fridge and swept towards the front of the store. "Hurry uuuupp." I had the money. It was time to go before we were eaten alive.
"Does she have any hobbies?"
"Fuck, Frankie, we're gonna die!" The sludge was gobbling twinkies, snatching stacks of lottery tickets in its tendrils. It was like crude oil mixed with blood, starch, and marrow from Satan's broken femur.
"Finefine," he said. We made it out just as the goo pressed itself against the windows, exploding into the street in a shower of glass. The cute cashier was still standing submerged in it, watching me.
"Jesus, man, we barely made it out of there alive!"
"You're crazy, Roger."
"Whatever. Get any good pills?"
