Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

Thinking about it a little later that day, I liked that being the first question he had about me. Not do you think you can kill.

“I can find it,” I say.

“That’s good,” he says. “You really want to kill somebody?”

This is when he shows me the Makarov. He calls it a “PM.”

I love that pistol at first sight. I bad-mouth it sometimes, thinking about the 1911. But it’s the first one I knew I could shoot.

I ask him, “What’s that, ‘PM’? You just use this at night?”

“You can use it at night,” Ivan says. “But it is Pistol Makarov. You want to hold this thing and maybe use it for me and then you can buy yourself something nice? You can walk around outside there and know you are big man already?”

My head was spinning from this. I had plenty of worries out there in the street. The guys in the park. The crackheads waiting in your building, in the shadows somewhere to grab you and if you don’t have money to give them, they’ll cut off your balls and sell them to herbal medicine stores for some kind of remedy. Stuff like that. I could use something to get people to pass me by.

“You want me to go blow somebody away?” I ask.

“You look like you could do it,” Ivan says. He’s got a pale face and his cheeks are sunken in and he’s real tall, taller than my dad. He’s waiting for me to answer and he’s not even about to smile. I look for that, for the bullshit, for the tease. But I can see he’s straight.

“Yeah. Sure. I want to hold it,” I say.

He gives it to me and it’s cold and it feels heavy at first. No heavier than a can of whatever dinner is tonight from Mama, but it feels heavier because it’s small. That’s a good way to think about me. I’m small, but I’m heavy. Like those stars somebody was talking about on TV. One spoonful weighs as much as everything in New York City. I held my PM and it was heavy like that and so was I. Any man try to touch me in some way I don’t want, they couldn’t even move me an inch. And now I had a thing that would kill their goddamn ass.

So I said yes to Ivan and he said good and he showed me how to use the PM and how to fieldstrip it and clean it, and it was real simple, only four parts, and I got my hands around it real good and I was hitting the target in the basement of the social club every time and Ivan never once changed how he talked to me, like I was no lad, and he gave me a beer later on and I didn’t like it the first time.

But maybe that’s the way it is the first time you do anything. One day I took the subway to Brighton Beach and it turns into an elevated train down there. I like that. You get to see all along the beach and even down to Coney Island. You can see the big Ferris wheel. I went on that once, but it wasn’t so hot. I think I remember my dad throwing me up in the air when I was little. I’ve seen dads do that sometimes, like in the park and stuff, and the kids laugh and seem to like it, but those dads aren’t so messed up that you just know, even if you’re pretty little, that he’s going to drop you sometime. I think going up in the Ferris wheel felt that same way, made me think of going up and coming down hard.

Anyway, I went to Brighton Beach that day and killed a guy for Ivan. I found myself thinking about my dad on the train and I touched my PM, which was in a little brown paper bag. Like I was carrying my lunch to school or something. That morning Ivan sits me at a table by the front window, though it’s still dark cause the window’s painted green. There’s a hooded lamp hanging over the center of the table and Ivan is sweating from the lightbulb, and he says, “This is that day you will become real man.”

“I’m a real man now,” I say. “That’s why you know I will go and do this thing. You have to be a real man already to waste a guy. Wasting the guy doesn’t make you the man.” I figure if I can think as clear as that in school, all those dumb-ass teachers would stop messing with me. But I just dry up when I’m there with all the little kids. Arguing with a Russian thug in his club, I can do that.

He listens to me careful and thinks a moment and then he smiles at me. “You are too smart already. You turn into good hit man and someday we make you honorary Russian and you go far with us.”

“Thanks,” I say. “What do I do?”

And Ivan tells me about another Russian gang, the Arbat Gang, that’s been pushing Ivan around. Ivan just wants Manhattan. He doesn’t want to get involved with Brooklyn. But these guys won’t leave him alone. They want to kill him. They’re bad guys, they do their business all wrong. “When we take money from businessman,” he says, “we give him good vodka, make him feel nice and protected. If he does not want to do business, we can maybe talk loud to him, lean on him little bit. But he for sure doesn’t want to do business with those bad gangs in Brooklyn. Those gangs will send their friends in Moscow and murder that businessman’s father.” Ivan pauses to see how bad I think this is.

I don’t bat an eye.

“And they kill his mother.”

I wrinkle my nose at this. That’s pretty bad. I think of my mother in her terry cloth housecoat opening the door of the apartment and she’s been trying to get a goddamn can of something open so she can eat lunch and some guys blow her away. That’s pretty low. But I’m still keeping quiet.

“And all of his little kids. His little malchiki.”

Being a kid can be pretty tough. Gangs like that make it worse. “Look,” I say. “What the hell you think I’ve been shooting your paper targets in the basement for?”

So I find myself on Brighton Beach Avenue and it’s stuffed full of cars and everybody has just learned how to use their horns, it sounds like, and with the el sparking and squealing overhead and guys hustling around in your face pushing sunglasses or knit caps or some kind of heart medicine and all kinds of other shit, with all that noise and action, I start to get a little nervous about what I’m going to do. Ivan says where I’m going, it’s nice and quiet. Maybe one other guy to take care of at this time of day. But I’m starting to wonder.

I go on down the street and I’m passing by shops like Vladimir’s Unisex and the Shostakovich Music, Art, and Sport School and the Hello Gorgeous Beauty Salon and there’s just too many people around, all of them tall or fat or both and I’m getting goddamn tired bumping into belt buckles and saggy tits and I’m keeping my head down but they brush up against you, too, and I don’t like to be touched. It makes me a little crazy sometimes. And I’m starting to worry that I’m going to take out my PM and use it on the next guy who bumps into me. But just thinking about the Makarov makes me calm down a little.

Then I get to the Gogol Cafe and maybe all the shit in the street is good because I’m ready just to do this thing and get it over with and I’m blaming this gang guy not just for killing little kids in Moscow but for making me walk through this goddamn crowded street. So this is his place where Ivan says nobody dares to mess with him and they never have and it should be easy. I don’t know about that. It’s somewhere between breakfast and lunch and the place is dim and it shouldn’t be open but Ivan says to push the door, so I push and I’m inside and it smells like stuff that Chef Boyardee never dreamed of in a million years. And there’s nobody around. All of a sudden I’m alone and if you want the truth, that’s what scares me. Not what I was about to do or what might happen after that. It’s standing there and, like, right away all the bustle is gone and there’s only a dark room and if something is spooky, it’s that. Being where there might be just one somebody else and you can’t even see him.