Ken Bruen: Pimp

He is a hustler, the guy’s a pimp. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Max, Maximus, Maximum.

In the bathroom of a tenement apartment in Harlem, Max Fisher stared at his reflection. The plastic surgery had hurt like a son of a bitch and only now was the bruising beginning to fade. What looked back at Max was like Philip Seymour Hoffman after the autopsy. Max, a master of self-delusion, saw a youngish Jack Nicholson, and gave the thumbs-up to the face, went, “Ya still got it, kid.”

He was dressed in what used to be called a lounging suit but hadn’t done any lounging since Sinatra had hit town. It was bright yellow and Max’s latest babe muttered, “Looks like a canary’s abortion, mon.”

Her name was Precious and the fact that she was neither young nor precious was not apparent to Max. She must have been fifty, had ratty gray dreads, was missing a few teeth. She was Jamaican slash West Indian, emphasis on the slash — she’d recently done a sixteen-year stretch at Coxsackie for stabbing her sister in the face.

This was what Max had liked most about her, though — that she had “a past.” It was nice to have something in common with a babe. Though Max, of course, had only been in prison at Attica for a few months before he escaped, it was the highlight of his life. He looked back on it the way soldiers looked at war. He’d risen up against the enemy — goddamn Aryans — and defeated all of them. Fuck, where was his parade?

Precious went on, “You’re not seriously wearing that, are you? You’re going to be chased by a swarm of bees, mon.”

Max had been in a daze lately, trying to get his shit together, and he wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d known Precious. Three days, a week? She was so annoying he wouldn’t have kept her around at all if he didn’t need her now for her contacts.

She was going, “Come on, Maxie, I can’t be goin’ around the city with you, lookin’ the way you be lookin’, embarrassin’ me. And how old is that jacket you wearin’ anyway, mon? It looks like something you found in the Salvation Army. I think I seen my uncle Cuvis be wearin’ that jacket one time... in nineteen seventy-two. And that color, mon, is so hideous it makes my eyes water from the pain. Nobody be wearin’ bright yellow jackets anymore, mon. You’re gettin’ dressed for a drug deal, not Let’s Make a Deal .”

Precious was laughing now, on a roll, enjoying her own dumb jokes. Great, so now he was dating the Jamaican Don Rickles. How’d that happen?

Max, sick of her lip, went, “I’m sick of your lip. If you knew who you were talking to, you’d realize how stupid you sound. The Max isn’t some schmo from buttfuck. The Max knows style. I’m what we Americans call a trendsetter . And I don’t have to watch Netflix to know that yellow is the new black.”

Precious, still laughing, went, “Pa-leeze, mon. You are the most unfashionable man I ever seen. You look like you get dressed in the dark, and go shopping in the dark too.”

She continued, clapping, giving herself a round of applause. Meanwhile, Max looked at her stone-faced. He liked that they were both homicidal and that she was big-busted — had to be thirty-eights, E’s or F’s — and he thought she had a sultry, jazzy look, kinda like a homicidal Whoopi Goldberg. But the cons were starting to outweigh the pros. Her biggest con? She talked too much. Didn’t women know that if you want to keep a man around you gotta learn how to — as they say in Ireland — shit the fook up?

What was he doing with this dreadlocked bitch anyway? He had enough problems, he didn’t need another one. He wished he could remember how he’d met her.

Shit, his memory was turning into a serious issue. Max had never had great short-term memory — hell, his long-term memory hadn’t been so great either — but lately he couldn’t remember shit, probably because he’d been coasting on his own latest pharmaceutical high, a new product named PIMP.

PIMP for:

Peyote

Insulin

Mescaline

and a liberal sprinkle of Psychosis.

PIMP had been introduced to him in Portland by a young, long-haired hipster named Sage, who looked like he was right out of Breaking Bad , and maybe he was. After Max’s big prison break from Attica — yeah, just thinking about those days gave Max some serious wood — he lived in Portland under his pseudonym, Sean Mullin. Figured some tree-hugging city in the Northwest was the last place they’d come looking for him and he got a job working at — where else? — an Irish bar. An out-of-work Irish guy in the U.S., who else would hire him? It was work at an Irish bar or fuck off. As Max often lamented, we can’t all be Liam Neeson .

So Max grew a gray beard, dyed it red, and gained about fifty pounds. Jesus Christ, he looked worse than Louis C.K. Being a two-hundred-and-seventy-pound Irishman was a good disguise, but being Irish twenty-four/seven he was losing his mind. Jaysus, how did Bono do it? Speaking in that accent all the time — fook, how many times can you say Jaysus in one sentence? How much fookin’ Jameson could one man drink? The whole shebang annoyed the shit out of him. Make that the shite out of him. Sometimes he wished he’d never busted out of Attica because life on the outside was a whole other nightmare. The lamenting, the self-pity, the depression. If somebody’d told him what it was like to be Irish, he might have stayed in that cell.

Living a fake life was hard enough for anybody, but when you were an extraordinary man like Max Fisher, when you were in the one percent and a mega genius to boot, it was even harder. Talk about riches to rags — he went from running a computer networking business, being a kingpin crack dealer and leading one of the biggest revolts in the history of the American prison system to serving skank beer to wasted frat boys. Some nights, when the college kids were shouting for pitchers of Bud to replace the ones they’d puked, Max wanted to waste all of them. Just go motherfucking postal on their ninety-nine-percent asses. Over the last few years if Max had learned one thing it was that murder was like fucking black chicks — do it once, you’re hooked.

One night at O’Hennessy’s — can’t get more fuckin oye’rish than that, right? — this Kurt Cobain-looking dude started talking to him. He said his name was Sage and Max in his brogue went, “Where’s yer mates Parsley, Rosemary and Thyme?”

Friendly conversation at first, then Sage, hair hanging over his face, went smartass: “You’re not really from Ireland, are you?”

Max panicked. Had he been made? Yeah, he hated life on the outside, but he wasn’t crazy, he didn’t want to go back to freakin’ prison.

“Ah, yes, me Irish, me Irish,” Max said in his shitty fake brogue.

“You’re full of shit,” Sage said. “I have relatives in Galway, I went there when I was a kid and they don’t talk like you do.”

“Aye, that’s because me from Dublin,” Max said. “Aye, like me good mate, Bono.”

Sage — drunk, but also definitely wired on something — went, “Galway, Dublin, what the fuck’s the difference? I know how Irish people sound and you’re not Irish.”

Wanting to reach across the bar and strangle the kid, “Want some more Guinness, do ya?”

The guy squinted, went, “You don’t sound like Bono.”