JASON STARR - Panic Attack

“Long day,” Johnny said. “Gotta crash.”

“Come on, man. You ain’t seen your ol’ bro in how many years and you can’t sit down and have a drink?”

Johnny really wanted to get home and away from Astoria. It was unlikely that Theresa would call the cops, but after he hustled a woman he didn’t like to stay in her neighborhood.

“I don’t drink,” Johnny said.

“Johnny Clean, that’s right,” Carlos said. “Remember everybody used to call you that shit? Never drank, never did nothin’. That’s how you stayed a pretty boy, right?”

The train was pulling into the station, the brakes screeching.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Johnny said. “Why don’t you give me your cell? We’ll hang out some time.”

“Nah, come on, sit down with me right now,” Carlos said. “We can get some coffee and cake. I got something I gotta talk to you about anyway, somethin’ where you can make some serious cash, know what I mean?”

Johnny wasn’t interested in hearing Carlos’s idea, but he knew he couldn’t just blow him off. You didn’t do that to a guy from St. John’s. Growing up, those guys had been Johnny’s whole family. He’d spent every Christmas with them, every Thanksgiving.

“Okay, let’s go,” Johnny said, “but I can’t stay out long.”

They went to the corner, to the Neptune Diner, and sat in a booth by a window with a view of the Grand Central Parkway, still a lot of traffic this time of night. Johnny was starving- a night of hustling and sex had built up quite an appetite- and he ordered a bacon cheeseburger with everything on it. After a couple of bites, he realized it wouldn’t fill him up, so he ordered another one.

Carlos caught Johnny up on guys from the old neighborhood. Everybody, it seemed, had gotten into some kind of trouble. Pedro was doing fifteen for manslaughter. Delano was at Attica for dealing. DeShawn had been stabbed to death in a fight outside a bar in Philly. Eddie had OD’d on smack.

“Sounds like me and you are the big winners, huh?” Johnny said, smiling.

“Yeah, I’m doing okay,” Carlos said. “Not in jail anyway, and I got my HIV under control.”

“Oh, shit,” Johnny said. “Sorry to hear that, man.”

“Eh, it’s okay,” Carlos asked. “The fuck you gonna do, right? And with the medicines they got, I’m gonna live longer than you.”

Carlos was sobering up, and Johnny started to have a good time bullshitting with him about the old days at St. John’s. Johnny had forgotten how much he’d needed Carlos back then. The courts had sent Johnny to St. John’s when he was nine years old after his mother was killed. They’d told Johnny she went in a car accident, which hadn’t made sense to him because she didn’t own a car, and then he found out a few years later that her mother wasn’t really a secretary, she was a hooker, and she’d been stabbed to death by one of her clients. Johnny felt like an outcast at St. John’s because all the other kids were a lot tougher than him and had known each other all their lives. He got picked on a lot- it seemed like every day somebody wanted to kick his ass- and Carlos had been the only one who always had his back.

So when Carlos looked at Johnny seriously and said, “So the thing I got goin’ on…” Johnny knew he couldn’t say no right away even though he also knew this wasn’t going to lead to anything good. He had to at least listen to his old buddy, see what he had to say, give him a little respect.

Surprisingly, Carlos’s plan didn’t seem so bad- rob some fancy house in Forest Hills while the family was away in Florida. Carlos’s ex- girlfriend, the maid, had the keys and knew the code to the alarm system.

“Shit’s gonna be so easy,” Carlos said. “The house is gonna be empty and we gonna go in and out. Gabriela, my girl, she said the lady in the house got a diamond ring. It’s so expensive she doesn’t wear it, but she keeps it right out in her bedroom. My girl’s gonna tell us where everything’s at so we can go in, out, and then we got fifty thousand dollars, twenty- five each.”

“What about your girl?”

“That’s the funny shit.” Carlos was laughing.“She was on my ass the other day, sayin’ she wanted the money split three ways, going it gotta be equal and shit or she won’t give me the keys. So I was telling her, yeah, don’t worry, baby, it’ll be three ways, anything to shut her fat ass up, right? But when we get the money, that’s it, we gone. She never gonna see our asses again.”

Carlos was still laughing, wiping tears out of the corners of his eyes with his index finger.

Johnny had to admit the plan sounded good, but that’s what worried him. In his experience, when something sounded too good it usually meant it was bad.

“How do you know the family’ll be in Florida?” he asked.

“Because my girl works there,” Carlos said. “She knows everything.”

“And when we don’t give her a cut, how do you know she won’t rat us out?”

“Why’d she rat us out and get her own ass sent to jail? The cops, they’re gonna know she got us the key and the code. Naw, trust me, the bitch is gonna keep her mouth shut.”

Johnny had some more questions, but he couldn’t find any obvious holes in the plan, and he didn’t see how he could say no. Twenty- five G’s was some serious cash- beat the hell out of the kind of pocket change he’d been making lately, a few hundred bucks here and there on the good days. The summer was coming, and he could use a break. It would be nice to take a couple of months off, go to the beach down the shore, work on his tan. How hot would he look with a tan? How many women would want to screw him then? He’d pass that thousand mark in four years, no problem.

“So,” Carlos said, “you in or out?”

Johnny looked across the table at his old buddy and smiled. The night of the robbery, Johnny and Carlos, wearing backpacks, met where Carlos had parked his car, outside a pizza place on Austin Street in Forest Hills. Johnny had come by subway, but Carlos had taken his car, a beat- up Impala. Not the best getaway ride, but if things went right they wouldn’t be in any rush. They’d just casually get in the car and drive away.

“Ready to do it?” Carlos asked.

“Hold up,” Johnny said, looking around. He didn’t like this at all. Yeah, it was better meeting here than in front of the house they were gonna rob, but it still felt too out in the open. It was 1:30 a.m., and almost all the stores were closed, but there were still cars passing by, and right across the street and down the block a little, there was a homeless- looking guy hanging out.

“What’s wrong?” Carlos asked.

“Maybe we should’ve met at the house,” Johnny said.

“You told me to park here.”

“The car’s okay. I’m talking about us. It’s not good if somebody sees us together.”

“So what if somebody sees us?” Carlos said. “We’re just two people. What did we do?”

“I mean if somebody remembers,” Johnny said. “After.”

“After what? The people’re in Florida. It’s gonna be like a week before they find out the joint got robbed.”

Johnny didn’t care, he still felt uncomfortable. The homeless guy seemed to be looking right at them. Johnny still had a bad feeling about the whole thing. He’d been on a roll lately- picking pockets, picking up women, hustling a little pool. It wasn’t big money, but it was steady, and it was safe. Why was he getting in on a robbery with a drug addict?

He was ready to back out. He was going to say to Carlos, Sorry, man, I don’t like it, and go back to Brooklyn, but he knew he’d be letting Carlos, his brother, down, and was there really a reason to? Maybe he was just overthinking it, making it more complicated than it really was. Maybe it was like Carlos said, an easy twenty- five K. He’d go along with it, see how it went. If it didn’t feel right at the house, he could bail then.