Charlie Huston - Every Last Drop

Is she alive?

Evie.

I look away from the city, the ghosts of the lights still in my eye.

I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die any minute now. Any second. I'm gonna up and die right here if I don't get a fucking cigarette in my mouth in about one second.

I hobble down the fire escape from the roof of the Freedman Home, along a weed-choked path to the street and look down McClellan at the glowing storefront of a twenty-four-hour bodega. I'm not overly concerned about going in there with one bare foot and a considerable amount of dry blood on my clothing, this is the Bronx after all, but best to minimize the visual impact I might make.

I cut over to Walton and head north. There's a little A.M. action on One Sixty-seven around the tight cluster of stores. They re all dark except for another bodega, but its the same grouping of shops and signage you see on every merchant block up here.

Send Money, Cash Checks, Income Tax, Abogado, Peliculas, Cell Phone, Discount Fashions, Unisex Salon, Long Distance Pre-Pald, Travel.

At the corner some kids hang around the subway entrance passing a blunt and a couple bagged forties. Two gypsy cabdrivers stand outside the bodega

drinking cafe con leche.

I cross the street far down from them, my eyes scanning the tops of streetlamp posts, tree branches and the telephone and cable TV wires that cross between the big apartment blocks that line Walton.

At Marcy I spot what I'm looking for and shimmy up a lamppost and untangle the pair of sneakers that some kid has tossed up there to dangle in testament to some shit that I have never figured out as long as I have lived in this city.

I sit on the curb and stuff my feet inside, leaving the laces undone. They're too small, but the right one fits a little better than the left. Not having a big toe is already paying off.

Farther up the street I jump and grab the bottom rung of a fire-escape ladder, pull myself up and climb two stories to the landing where someone has left their laundry out to dry overnight. I take a green Le Tigre and a pair of khakis, drop them to the sidewalk and climb down. In an alley between buildings I strip out of my bloody shirt and pants and pull on the clothes.

No, not exactly what I'd buy for myself, but they were the first things I saw that looked big enough to fit.

I ball my old clothes and stuff them deep in a garbage can. All except my jacket. I roll that into a bundle inside a few sheets of discarded newspaper and put it under my arm.

At One Seventy there's another strip of shops. No one lingers outside the bodega here. I limp up the street and inside and the proprietor looks out from behind his Plexiglas kill-shield and his eyes just about bug.

Seems I could have spared the bother of getting rid of my other outfit. One-eyed white guys in full preppy mode make an impact all their own. But, bottom line, I'm too freakish just now to be anything other than a junkie. And this guy knows what to do with a junkie. -The fuck out.

I don't get the fuck out.

He takes his hand from under the counter, shows me the can of pepper spray its holding and points at the door. -Don't make me come out there and spray you, bianco.

I point at my one eye.

— Better have some sharpshooter fucking aim you want that shit to do any good.

He thinks about that.

While he's thinking, I drop a twenty in the tray that cuts under the shield. -Just give me a couple packs of Luckys and some matches.

Jeo Pitt 4 — Every Last Drop

Cash changes everything, even in the hands of a guy clearly wearing someone else's polo shirt.

He drops two packs in the tray.

I look at them. -No, no, not that shit. Give me the real ones, the filterless.

He looks at the display of smokes behind him. -I got the filters or I got the filter lights. Don't got filterless.

I toss another twenty on the tray and point. -Give me that pair of scissors hanging there.

He rings up the scissors while I open both packs of smokes. I knock the bottom of one pack until just the filters stick out, open the scissors, and slice them off. I repeat with the second pack and leave the trash in the tray with the change from my purchases.

The guy points at the mess as I make for the door. -Not your garbageman, motherfucker.

I hold up one of my modified smokes. -Buddy, you're lucky I didn't burn this fucking place to the ground.

So much for keeping a low profile in the Bronx.

Then again, so much for the Bronx.

Rounding onto Rockwood I run my hand along the bars of the fence that separates the little playground on the corner from the rest of the world. My fingers snag one by one on the bars. Kids play here during the day. I know because I can hear them when I use my bolt-hole next door. This time of year they mostly run in and out of the spray from a little fountain, returning again and again to push the silver button on a red post, triggering the water when it times out.

Not a bad sound, those kids.

Sentimental. Romantic.

Predo knows shit. Just likes to throw words like that at me. Figures they'll get my goat. Figures I got some problem with being who I am. What I am. Figures he can worm under my skin and make me jumpy.

I ever bothered time on who I am, I might get worked up about it. But why fret on something you cant change.

I come even with tonights cave, one of a half dozen or so that I like to

rotate between. A crumbling garage surrounded by ruined cars at the back of a mechanics asphalt lot. The business itself is a block over on One Seventy-two. This place here the guy uses as dead storage.

I scale the chain-link, drop inside and edge between a wall and an old red van. Back of the van are a couple steps down to a door held shut by rusty hinges. A stone rams head worn smooth by rain is wedged into a notch over the door. The walls are crumbling stone and brick. A limestone foundation visible at the foot of the wall.

Its fucking old.

I push the door and it grinds open about eighteen inches before jamming on an engine block just inside. I work myself through the gap. Inside, I push the door closed. I could have gotten a lock for the door, but it was open when I found it. Figure the sudden appearance of a lock might attract someone s interest. Some places are so forlorn, figure they're safer if they look like anyone could come in and lie down to die anytime they please.

I reach inside one of the empty cylinder chambers on the big V-8 block and find my flashlight and flick it on. If the windows weren't all boarded, enough light would filter in for my eye to work with, but that's not the case. Pitch isn't so black.

The light shows me the piled heaps of twisted rust and grease. It looks like

someone bought the scrapped wreckage of a hundred demolition derbies and dumped it all in here until it could be made use of.

How lucky for me to find such cozy lodgings.

I skirt the piles, working my way to my burrow at the base of the north wall under the buckled hood of a 49 Ford. Behind the mix-and-match seats I've wedged together for a cot, I find a filthy nylon laundry bag.

Worldly goods.

A couple plain black Ts mean I can scrap the pastel thing I'm wearing. Rarely felt better about getting rid of an article of clothing. Spare boots means I can get my feet unpinched and out of the sneakers. No backup pants just now so I'm stuck with the khakis, but they're getting nice and greasy now, so that's not so bad. Spare works. I open the kit and make sure its all there: hose, needles, blood bags.

No spare gun or switchblade or Zippo.

But lots of paperbacks. Moving from place to place these days, a DVD player is a bit of an encumbrance. And an expense. I find the copy of Shogun that I couldn't get through, unsnap the rubber band that holds it closed, open it, and take the brass knuckles and straight razor from the hollowed pages inside.