J. Osborne: Black Gum

Charlie: “Like a Fruit Roll-Up.”

Shane snapped his fingers. “Exactly! Like a fucking Fruit Roll-Up.”

I said, “Are you a fortune teller? Is that what you do?”

Shook his head. “I don’t know the future. If I knew the future, I would already be living in it. What do you do?”

“Nothing, now.”

“What did you do?”

“I worked in the mall.”

He nodded.

I said, “What color is Charlie’s aura?”

Shane said, “Charlie’s aura is pink.”

Charlie shut the faucet off. “You’re gay.”

“He’s gifted. But it can grow dark. Deceitful.”

“What’s your aura?”

“I’m indigo. I can see the other worlds.”

“Like the future, then.”

“No, just other worlds. Sometimes they’re ahead of us, sometimes they’re behind. Like, for example. Me and a buddy had a trunk full of hydro and we were coming in from California. I had this vision. Came to me clear. It was Jehovah’s Witnesses coming to my door. I brought them in and gave them tea. So I tell my buddy, we have to dress like Jehovah’s Witnesses. He thought I was nuts. But we did, and on the way here, it was really snowy, icy, and we drove our car into a ditch. The cops came by and saw us there and saw that we were godly, and they helped us out of the ditch. Never searched the car.”

“That sounds like telling the future to me.”

“If I knew the future I’d know that we would crash and if I knew that I’d already be crashing. It’s not knowing the future. It’s reading the messages.”

Charlie sat down and picked up a bong and packed the bowl. “Don’t listen to him.”

“You were married.”

I got quiet.

“Now you’re not?”

“I’m still married.”

Shane reached for the bong. Charlie gave it to him, still holding the smoke in his lungs. “You know what you’re telling me?”

My brain wasn’t moving quickly enough. I just shrugged.

Shane inhaled. Let it out. “You should go back to your wife and apologize for whatever you’ve done.”

“I didn’t-“

“That’s what I’m saying. That’s what you should do.”

The room was quiet. The videogame asked us if we were ready to jog in place.

“I don’t know you,” I said.

“That’s true,” he passed me the bong. “But, I think I know you. I know what you should do. But you’re not there yet. And besides. You’re a fucking heathen now. You don’t work?”

“No.”

Shane got up and came back with a duffle bag. I coughed out the smoke. He unzipped the bag and brought out a giant mason jar full of weed on the coffee table. A Ziploc fat with sheets of acid. Another pregnant with ecstasy.

“This is what I do.”

I looked at the table, then back to him.

“Do you want to sell some drugs?”

I glanced over at Charlie. Engrossed in his phone. Back to Shane. “Sure,” I said.

He smiled at me. “How do my gums look?”

“Ugly, man. Evil shit.”

We bought white t-shirts from Walmart and cut them with a pocket knife and put them on. We bought fake blood from Party America and poured it over our heads.

Shane put the weed and the pills and the sheets in a backpack and cut open a blue bag of MDMC and dumped it onto a cutting board. He emptied Niacin pills in the sink, the tiny beads clinking in the tin. Scooped the white powder into the capsules and capped them off and licked his fingers. He tore off little strips of paper towels and sprinkled the speed onto them and balled them up and we parachuted them. I downed mine with a beer and nearly gagged.

He gave me ten pills and Charlie twenty. We put them in our pockets.

“Shit hasn’t been tested yet, it’s still an RC. So they’re not technically illegal. But when we put them in the pills like that, it’s kind of illegal.” He paused. “It’s a gray area. But it’s less dangerous than all that shit,” pointing at the backpack, “so I’ll start you off with a low risk.”

The speed took hold and I listened and I grit my teeth.

“They get one for twenty or they can get two for thirty.”

“What about three?”

“Three is fifty.”

“Okay.”

“Anything over one, the last is half. No more than that.”

Shane was DJing at the Last Call. He set up his mixers in the booth and arranged the songs he was going to play. I stood in there with Charlie and looked out at the kids arriving, all of them in zombie makeup and ripped shirts.

Shane said, “You look nervous as a chinaman in a dick-measuring contest.”

I said, “I’m not nervous.”

He said, “Low risk. Don’t worry.”

I said, “I’m not.”

When we got back to Charlie’s, we dumped our earnings on the small pool table in the corner. We picked through the money and divvied it up.

Shane held up a Walmart gift card. “Fuck is this?”

I told him, “It’s got $25 on it.”

“Does it?”

“I think so.”

He handed it to me. “Cash, man. Cash.”

I met my mother at Chili’s the next day and after all the small talk she asked me what was going on with me and my wife.

I told her that she said I was an angry person. I told her about how she started to talk to others. I told her that it was a feeling of slowly slipping. I didn’t really know what else to say. She cried and told me that she couldn’t stand to see me that sad.

We finished our food and I told her, “I brought you a present.”

I handed her the Walmart gift card and hoped there was actually money on it.

Shane and I walked from Charlie’s house to the bookstore next to the Walmart. Along the side of the store a man wearing leggings and a long shirt hopped over a small ditch run through with a trickle of brackish water. He saw us walking in and waved us over.

“Watch this shit.”

He jumped over the ditch.

We didn’t say anything.

“Now check this shit out.”

He jumped back over it.

“That’s the castle and I’m jumping over the moat.”

He wasn’t wearing any shoes.

We went inside. I browsed the shelves and picked out a few books and thumbed through them and went and sat in one of the chairs set up for customers. Shane sat next to me and tore the plastic off a porn magazine.

I flipped through my book and glanced over at him. “You do realize there’s this thing called the internet, yeah?”

He licked his thumb and turned a page. “I’m old school.”

“Old school.”

He tapped his head. “Can’t let the mind waste away. Gotta use the old imagination.”

I saw a picture of a woman having sex with a bedpost. “Imagination.”

“Mm-hmm.”

I read the first chapter of the book. Shane chuckled next to me.

I got up and got some coffee. Sat back down. “So where did you get off to last night?”

“Had a big delivery to make.”

“Yeah?”

“Yep. House out in Turtle Creek.”

“Hood shit?”

“Not really. High school hey-bitches.”

I placed the book in my lap. “High school?”

“Yeah, like fifteen, sixteen. Something.”

“Oh.”

“In the trap, though.”

“I see.”

“Yep. Got like three hundo and a phone full of titty pics. Overall I’d say that’s a win.” He plopped the magazine down on the endtable between us. “What’s that shit?”

I showed him the book I was reading.

“That seems nice. You should buy that and let me read it. I’ve been having trouble sleeping.”

He stuck his tongue out at me. Split like a snake’s.

I said, “Mr. Imagination over here.”