Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

So Ponyboy, he'd leaned in, reaching over the counter. Not to steal one of them promotional tote bags with the adult film starlets on the side. Just wanted to get his strongbox back was all, just wanted to hit the road. Ponyboy'd leaned in and yeah, he'd bumped shoulders with the guy in the suit. But accidentally, you know? Corporate dude, he didn't so much as look at Ponyboy. Not even an excuse me. Like he's too high and mighty to be in a dirty bookstore. What, like a motherfucker's got steel in his face, got some ink in his skin, he can't get any respect? Like if you own a fucking suit, you're too important to have manners? Or maybe the problem was that motherfucker'd had too many manners. Maybe the problem was, that prick had been too conciliatory. Maybe Ponyboy had been in need of a fix and was at an early stage of jonesing and still had some strength in his body. Maybe he just felt ornery. He felt like trouble. He'd taken the strongbox under his arm, told himself he'd have to plagiarize Kunjib's sorry name on the docket once more. He'd shouted Peace out Kunjiey and exited the side door. Ponyboy had secured the strongbox in the basket of his mountain bike and he'd stood in the store's shade, appreciating the last moments of the sunlight, embracing a few precious seconds of soft, hot wind on his face.

The wind blew and slight dust specks stuck to his chin and the valley's toxins and exhaust fumes had created one of the most beautiful sunsets man had ever witnessed, and Ponyboy'd felt like he did whenever he got one of his tattoos — one of his heavy-duty multifaceted jobbers, where the work was so intricate and detailed that just the outlining took somewhere along three hours, and filling in the colors had to be divvied up into individual sections, and each part of the tatt was like its own four-hour session. Yes indeedy, standing in the miraculous sunset of that June evening had been like a moment in the middle of the third hour of his fourth tatt session, a moment that always came when the Chink finished messing with his protective latex gloves, fiddled with the angle on the lamp for like the millionth time, and told Ponyboy to hold still, his L's sounding like R's— hord stirr, hord stirr; it was like the moment when the drill's electric whine was the equivalent to the feeling of a battery's copper ends against Ponyboy's tongue, and electricity lit up Ponyboy's skeletal structure as if it were a pinball machine on a multi-ball extravaganza, and the mingling odors of brimstone and sulfur and sweat and burning skin filled Ponyboy's nostrils, and the Chink like pulled away the needle and swabbed at Ponyboy's flesh, and that little cotton poof soaked up Ponyboy's blood and, as with the man who swears he still feels the presence of his amputated arm, Ponyboy continued feeling the small sharp jolts, thousands of pinpricks through pressure-pointed parts of his body that Ponyboy did not even know were connected, and once again the Chink fiddled with the lamp angle and once again he told Ponyboy to hord stirr, and every second of successfully hording stirr made Pony-boy want to leap, shout, bark, dance, and the Chink reapplied the needle and the pinball machine lit back up, triple f’in bonus jackpot points this time, and Ponyboy couldn't think about how much time was left or how many more sessions he needed to fill the tattoo, he was physically unable to look at the nearby countertop — at the tackle box filled with paint tubes, at the anatomically correct blow-up doll covered from head to toe with lewdly drawn images, at the small shelf of reference and art books; no, the only thing Ponyboy could do in a situation such as this would be to chew his bubble gum, get lost in the chewing, his attention centering not on the objects and world around him, but on something else — this faraway point, in the distance, on the horizon.

Outside that adult bookstore on that June night, the darkness was solidifying and some of the passing cars were turning on their headlights. Ponyboy flamed up a Marlboro. He toed at the pebbles beneath his combat boots, then checked his beeper. He took a long moment and meditated on that faraway point on the horizon. The prick in the suit exited out of the side door and Ponyboy rammed a knee through his crotch. Ponyboy followed through, thrusting his knee in an angled blow that had a chance at propelling that motherfucker's nose bone into his sorry excuse for a pea brain. Yeah, motherfucker, Ponyboy shouted. Ain't so big now. The motherfucker flopped onto his back and covered his nose with his hands and curled into a fetal ball and made gurgling sounds. Now it was a fast and easy move into that tool 's back pocket. Maybe Ponyboy stomped the guy once more, asswipe, before he got onto his mountain bike and hightailed it back into the summer heat. With his heart still beating out a fret board guitar solo, Ponyboy pedaled directly to a flower store and charged a dozen long-stemmed white roses on the guy's AmEx. Darling sweet baby Cheri, he wrote on the little gift card thing. I know we're going threw tuff timez but I U so much UR the best thing in my miserable fucking life. Ponyboy scribbled a reminder on the palm of his hand, so that when he got to Cheri's place, he'd call this hacker, sell off them credit card numbers. He started to write something else, then figured the credit card one would remind him to fence the ID, so that did not need its own note. When deliveries were slow, it was not uncommon for Ponyboy to earn a few bucks as a day laborer at nonunion construction sites. He had an on and off gig that involved roaming the streets at night, duct-taping flyers for cut-rate moving services. Cheri also had rigged it so when the Slinky Fox was in a pinch, he could man the door. There were a bunch of other piddling errands. There was some other shit he was less proud of and didn't like thinking about. He pedaled onward, crouching low to reduce the wind resistance, churning his legs and cranking his pace another notch, the extra perspiration pouring into his old Metallica shirt.

By an airport terminal for privately owned planes, billboards alerted visitors to NUDES ON ICE AT THE UNION PLAZA, HOT GIRLS: ONLY AT THE RIVIERA, and the THUNDER FROM DOWN UNDER MALE EROTIC REVIEW. There were a few split-level motor inns, a couple of office complexes, buildings so generic you could look right at them without noting their existence. This meant they were perfect for wandering. You curled up beneath their stairwells, cracked open a can of tuna, unrolled the sheet of eggshell foam that served as your makeshift bed — although that could get risky too. Nobody wants to get their sleeping ass woken by some outraged business dude at nine in the morning. Straights like that always call the cops.

The middle complex was Ponyboy's destination, and he rode around its side, away from the roads and parking lots. Then he walked the bike down a long corridor with a bunch of different doors with company names on them, to the last door, a corner suite with no name on it, no suite number, no identifying marks. Yellowed blinds were down in the window and if someone didn't know what he was looking for, basically, the place was unfindable. Taking the ice pick from his boot, Ponyboy got ready to jimmy the window, climb inside. Then he remembered what Jabba had told him and checked through the blinds. The back of a mammoth head was visible — a balding crown, a ponytail of long gray wires, the big bastard sitting in his leather swivel chair, a phone jammed between Jabba's skull and a ring of neck flab.

Life just got a lot harder for the self-anointed Jedi knight, smooch to the booch, it did. But Ponyboy mentally prepared himself. Then he nudged open the door with his mountain bike's front wheel, and guided the bike inside, into a dingy but large office, air stultifying and smelling of mold; barren walls the color of dental plaque. Immediately Ponyboy placed the strongbox and docket on the desk, right in front of Jabba. The big bastard hardly glanced up from his conversation, his face remaining as expressive as a manhole cover.