Patrick Quinlan - Smoked

The song was Le Freak, by something called Chic.

He remembered it. He saw himself at a Manhattan dance club, brooding, holding up the bar, watching the young girls flaunt themselves out on the dance floor as the lights strobed crazily, streaks of technicolor electricity flying through the air. Again, he felt the rage, the yearning and the frustration. Nearly 30 years had passed since those days, and in all that time he had only managed to slap a few thin coats of whitewash over the real Cruz. His personality was like a slice of linoleum pasted over a dark abyss – if you dropped through, there was no bottom.

He had done this kind of work since the age of eighteen. That year, he had been cut loose from the youth home with two hundred dollars, plus cab fare to his aunt’s house in Corona, Queens, and an appointment to see a job counselor out there a week later. They had let him go with a kiss on the cheek and a kick in the ass.

He never made it to Queens.

His aunt didn’t want him, and why should she? He had lived with her at the age of ten, then again at fourteen. He was bad news, the product of her sister the drug addict’s wasted life. His face carried a deep knife scar from one of her sister’s many boyfriends, a maniac who one night decided to cut the little boy’s eyes out. Luckily, the maniac had been too drunk to see what he was doing or hold onto the boy for long – Cruz – who ran screaming out of the squalid apartment. But the scar on his face was only an emblem of the deeper scars he carried. Cruz was trouble, and he knew it. No, his aunt would not have him, and on some level, he didn’t blame her. She wasn’t yet thirty years old herself, struggling with three young kids of her own. Cruz was enough to sink them all.

She had called him the day before he was set to leave the home. He stood at the pay phone in the concrete stairwell. A couple of younger kids were talking and laughing down at the other end of the narrow hall.

He looked at them. Gradually, they sensed his stare. Then they left.

“Chuco, do me a favor, ah?” his aunt said.

“Yeah,” he said, already knowing what was coming.

“Don’t come over here. I got enough to worry about with the kids and the rent and all the rest. You know? I like you, Chuco. You was good when you was a kid. But now… you know? It’ll be bad having you here. I don’t got the room. I don’t want the cops coming here. You understand, right?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“You’ll do good, Chuco. You’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah.”

“Just don’t come here. You come here, I can’t let you in. I’ll call the cops myself, okay? I’ll tell ‘em you stole my money.”

Cruz hung up.

He rode the cab into Manhattan, stopped at a check-cashing place, cashed the two hundred, stuffed most of it in his sock, and checked into a twenty dollar a week room at a Single Room Occupancy hotel on the west side, not far from the river. He paid for a week up front. Then he sat upstairs and cried for an hour. Cried for everything. He gave himself one hour to get the cry in, no more. He even timed it on the Timex watch one of the teachers at the youth home had given him. At the end of an hour, he stopped and looked around. The room was about twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide. There was a narrow bed and a sink. There was a cheap wooden dresser with a sticky blotter pasted on top of it. There was a closet with a couple of coat hangers. The old white paint was peeling crazily, showing a nasty green behind it – the walls, the ceiling, everywhere. A window looked out onto the fire escape. The street was three stories below. The bathroom was down the hall.

He’d never been here before, but instinctively he knew the game. There would be predators in the bathroom. They’d be looking for an easy mark on the shitter, an easy mark in the shower. People would break into his room while he wasn’t home, looking for money. Junkies would drop dead from ODs. He’d be lucky if some junkie didn’t burn the place down in the middle of the night with a cigarette or a hot plate left on. The management wouldn’t do shit about any of it.

Anyway, it was a start.

He went out. If there was an answer to his problems, he wasn’t going to find it staring at the four walls of his room. The answer was out there, on the streets. He resolved that he would find that answer, whether that meant he had to go to prison, or whether he died with his blood running in the gutter. The thought appealed to him. He would live, and thrive, and make it big, or he would die. No compromise.

He went to Times Square.

1976. The Bicentennial. 200 years of flag waving and good times. Rocky. Jaws. And in a lighter vein, 18 amp; Horny and Guess Who’s Coming. Just outside the Theatre District, the Broadway of A Chorus Line and The Wiz, Times Square lay spread like the blighted whore she was. The lights dazzled Cruz. The pimps and hookers and drug dealers hanging out with beer cans in paper bags, the streams of runaway kids, the junkies, the scumbags, the pickpockets, the johns, the freaks who wanted to fuck children – a circle of lost souls. The blood banks, the liquor stores, the X-rated movie houses, the massage parlors, the greasy spoon diners with deals going down in every booth – there was barely a legitimate business in the whole neighborhood. Times Square was an open sewer. In 1976, for someone with the right kind of eyes, it was also a glittering promise.

Cruz loved it.

He went to a live peep show and watched a big black guy tool a tiny oriental girl on a table. He bought a dollar in booth tokens, and every time the screen went down on this little act, he pumped in another token.

Then he went and bought himself two hot dogs, fries and a Coke at Nedick’s. He stayed there a long time, watching the action out on the street. The sex, the freedom, the crazy sparkling madness of the place – it was a revelation.

“Hey kid,” a fat little bald man said one night a week later. “I seen you hanging around here a lot. Wanna make some money?”

“What do I have to do?”

“You look like a sharp kid. Ever hurt anybody before?”

Cruz smiled. “Sure.”

Now, a much older man, he smiled again at the memory.

He opened his eyes and glanced around. He liked this Mercedes. It was a comfortable car, damn near the top of the line, and probably three years old. Cruz hated new cars. The new car smell made him sick to his stomach. This car was perfect. It didn’t smell like anything and had that kind of smooth ride where the bumps in the road were like a rumor you had heard years ago. You couldn’t hear the outside at all.

Quiet as a tomb.

The car was cruising the highways somewhere in New England. It didn’t matter where right now. They had passed Hartford a little while back. The kids up front were supposed to wake him up when they entered Maine. From behind his shades, he noticed the color on the trees along the highway – reds, yellows, orange.

Cruz was tired. He had flown in from New Orleans on about two hours sleep. At La Guardia, he bought a small tin of Vivarin caffeine pills, crushed two up, and snorted them for breakfast. The limo – a big Lincoln Town Car – snatched him at the airport and whisked him straight into the city. The driver – an old Polack or Russian – gave him his next gun, his next Glock. It came in a handsome padded traveling case that Cruz threw into a garbage can before they even left the airport. Cruz didn’t care about presentation – he planned to carry the gun, loaded, ready to pop.

The driver also gave him the dossier for this job, sealed for Cruz’s eyes only. The same dossier was now at Cruz’s feet. He read it while the limo took him across the Tri-Borough Bridge into Manhattan, then down the FDR Drive. He would read it again before they got to Portland. Gave him everything he needed to know about this guy Smoke Dugan, as well as the two young guys he would ride along with on this trip.