Adam Levin - Hot Pink

“We’re talking about an act!” said Heimie. “We’re talking about the extra mile ! And I don’t know what you mean by down there . Do you know what he means, Arthur?”

“Only vaguely,” I said. “In my experience, there’s more than one down there .”

“There’s the one down there ,” said the Goy, “and there’s the other down there . To put the mouth to the one is the extra mile . To put the mouth to the other is filthy and disgusting.”

“I agree,” said the Schlub.

“I disagree!” I said.

“ I disagree!” said Heimie, looking a little farklempt. I’d stolen his fire. Or at the very least I’d stolen part of his fire. It was two-on-two now, and he’d expected one-on-three. He said, “And why filthy and disgusting?”

“Because waste comes from the other ,” said the Goy.

“Waste comes from everywhere!”

“But this kind of waste causes illness.”

“I was never ill by such waste,” said Heimie.

“Nor was I ever ill by it,” said I.

“This is filthy and disgusting,” said the Schlub.

“Do you eat shrimp?” I said. “The veritable cockroach of the ocean?”

“Yes,” said the Goy.

“Do you eat bacon?” said Heimie. “The meat of a beast who rolls in its own excrement?”

“I love bacon,” said the Schlub. “It’s salty.”

“These crazies,” Heimie said to me.

“Bacon and shrimp for them?” I said. “Indeed. Maybe even some bacon wrapped around a shrimp, but not the other down there , God forbid.”

“Shellfish and pork, Arthur?”

“Please, Heimie,” I said. “Shellfish and pork, but ass no thank you!”

What did they do, the Schlub and the Goy? They left. We didn’t try to stop them. We knew the Goy would return soon enough and, surely, to be rid of the Schlub was a blessing.

“So how often did you go the extra mile, then?” Heimie said to me.

“Which one?”

“Both,” he said.

I told him the truth. I said, “Rarely the one and never the other .”

“Same here,” said Heimie. “It’s regrettable.”

“We should’ve done more,” I said.

The fifty-third day in a row we hung out, me and Franco got all these grilled cheese sandwiches at Theo’s BaconBurgerDog from Jin-Woo Kim, who people call “Gino” cause we’re not in Korea or are in Chicago or people are lazy or two of those reasons. Gino’s dad Sun’s the owner of Theo’s, and summer afternoons, he leaves Gino alone there. We went in at three, when the place was the deadest, and Franco said we wanted a grilled cheese sandwich. Right as soon as Gino started making them, though, Franco told him on second thought to make that three sandwiches, so Gino started making a third one too, except then what Franco said was what he’d meant was three apiece, and Gino stopped moving. He was over by the fryer, facing away from us, his hand on the scoop dug into the butter tub.

“What,” Franco told him.

Gino got back to work. Grabbed bread and cheese from the rack on the counter.

“For to go,” Franco said. He lit up a cigarette.

I passed him an ashtray. A bunch were stacked up on the garbage cans behind us.

“Thanks, yo,” he said. “Hey, check this ashtray. Gino’s dad stole.”

That was probably true — all the ashtrays at Theo’s were Burger King ashtrays, the chintzy aluminum kind with crimped edges — and it’s not like I was really that tight with Gino, but we sometimes hung out when no one else was available, and I used to have some classes with him up till last year when we started the seventh and they tracked me into gifted, so I didn’t want to stand there and trash-talk his dad, but you can’t ignore Franco, so I had to do something, so I made a lippy face with my mouth and I shrugged.

Franco shrugged back.

Gino kept cooking. When the sandwiches were finished, he waxpaper-wrapped them, then stacked them in a bag and brought the bag to the register. He said, “Thirteen fifty.”

“Nah,” said Franco. “We don’t have to pay today.”

“You do,” Gino said.

Franco took the bag. “Today it’s on the house,” he said.

“It’s not!” said Gino. “Pay me. Come on.” But what could he do? Franco was sixteen and Gino was my age, plus Franco was big — not tall, but big, and not big like me, but like muscled in a way I bet girls probably talked about. Almost like a man. His mustache wrapped around his chin and wasn’t wispy.

He drummed his shaved skull a few times with his fingers, which looked like “I’m thinking, I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” then took a frosted cookie from the cookie-tree display and crushed it in his hand inside of the wrapper. He undid the wrapper and dumped out the crumbs, grabbed another cookie, and told Gino, “What.”

“Fine,” Gino said. There were tears in his eyes. We were ripping him off in his own dad’s joint. He gave me this look.

Franco flipped me the cookie.

I stuck it in my pocket, mouthing the words, “I’ll pay you back soon.” I don’t know if Gino saw, but I meant what I mouthed.

On our way back to the alley in back of his ma’s, Franco told me, “See? It’s all in the voice. That’s how you get stuff. Speaking with conviction. Makes you convincing. ‘Grilled cheese on the house, dog! Grilled cheese on the house!’ and dude’s like, ‘Fine, Franco. Fine, man. Good.’”

“I don’t think you convinced him, though.”

“What you sayin, nigga?”

“I think you scared him cause your size,” I said. “And how you crushed that cookie and then grabbed another one like you’d crush that one, too.”

“No,” Franco said. “The cookie was whatsitcalled — the cookie was fleece — not fleece, it was flair. It was just a decoration — for my conviction. I got this grilled cheese sandwich with my voice. I did it with my words. And it’s a valuable lesson in life, my man, that words get you more than fists get you sometimes if you’ve gotta use the one or the other of them. Feel me?” Saying that last part, he tapped on his temple, which reminded me of a punchline — shot in the temple — and I got so hot to tell the whole joke, I forgot to tell Franco I was telling a joke.

I said, “How do you know Abe Lincoln was a Jew?”

“Lincoln was a white, you big fatso,” said Franco.

So I didn’t say the punchline cause being called a fatso got me too depressed. It was mean for him to call me it, jokey-voiced or not, but I think that sometimes Franco didn’t know when he was mean. He might have known then, though, and felt bad about it too, cause when we got back to the alley he was above-average nice to me for almost five minutes. He gave me a grilled cheese and got his bike, an old Yamaha two-stroke, out of the garage.

He said, “I got something to show you, yo.”

Hearing us, Franco III started growling. I hated that Franco III. She was a dalmatian-bull mix and Franco’d trained her to kill on command. It was against the law to have a dog that would kill on command. It was like having a killing machine where you just flipped a switch and someone got killed. You had to make the command secret so that if anyone wanted to find out if your dog was a machine, they couldn’t. You had to make it weird, too, so that nobody’d say it by accident in front of the dog. The secret kill-command for Franco III was “Nasal spray.” I only ever saw her get told it once — on the twenty-second day in a row me and Franco hung out — but once was enough and I’ll never forget it. Franco’d brought her the bones from a full slab of ribs and she was lying on her stomach in the middle of the yard like a nice normal dog, gnawing and crunching and happy to be there. I wanted to even pet her a little. Then Franco told her “Nasal spray,” and all the sudden it was like there was nothing else in the world to do but kill me. She was chained to the fence so she couldn’t reach me, but I thought she’d pull the posts right out of the ground. She tried to kill me for at least five minutes till Franco said “Scout”—the secret stop-kill command — and then, just like that, she flopped on her stomach and chewed the bones again.