The Front of the Freeway Read online

  We. Tony said it first, I think, right before we stumbled down the hall behind the girls in a haze of smoke and perfume. “This is an investment,” he told me, sliding a clover green Ziploc baggie to me across Pauly’s low glass table. “I’m investing in you.”

  “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Do whatever the fuck you want with it, JT. Smoke it, eat it, I don’t care. But if you’re smart, you’ll meet Martín in the cooler tomorrow during lunch, and you’ll bring that with you.”

  2:15. The heavy iron door cracks open, and a long sliver of light cuts the synthetic fog. Martín scurries through the gap and slams the door behind him, pausing for a moment as if to make sure no one had snuck in behind him. He checks the corners first, anxiously looking for Tony, but after a few nervous glances around the freezer, he scuttles through the frozen shadows up to me, just behind a box of celery and a few tubs of Balsamic vinegar. Without a word, I pluck the Ziploc pouch from my jeans pocket, exchanging a smooth plastic square for a folded paper wad under the whipping, roaring blades of the cooler-fan. $75, easy as that.

  “I’m no dealer, Tony,” I told him. “You know that.”

  “No you’re not, my man, and neither am I,” he said, breaking the small plastic head off of a sleek glass bottle. “But you and me, we’re cellmates. We’re in the same fucking prison. You want out, I know you do, because we both know there’s got to be something better out there than this. We just have to figure out how to get there.”

  Soap, scrub, rinse.

  It’s 4:30 and I’m staring right back into the big, ticking eye above me, the mechanical god bolted to Romeo’s skeleton. An hour and a half left, not a second earlier. Those are the rules. They’re Romeo’s rules, and they’re my father’s rules, and they’re all written in black and white, etched in stone as thick as the molding walls around me, but in the shadows misdemeanors are starting to fade to grey. As far as I can tell, Jafar hasn’t bitten a soul, and Pauly’s certified LAPD. I’m imagining a new set of rules that will write me right out of here, and they’re nothing that Rodrigo or my father would be proud of.

  But maybe it’s like Tony said. Maybe the only way out of this is down, down and out through the bottom.

  “The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.”

  —H.L. Mencken

  I should break it.

  It’s 6:00 and I’m standing at attention in front of the punch clock, a stiff, paper timecard folded between my fingers at my side. I should squeeze my pruned, soap-splintered knuckles into a fist and throw it right through that perfect glass face. I should shatter every smirking, ticking tooth. I should tear the box off the wall, slam it into the concrete, and drive my foot through its winding, grinding, brass skeleton on my way out the door. Or maybe I should wake up.

  “Alright, Hulian, see you tomorrow, gringo!” Rodrigo slaps my back affectionately and nearly smashes my nose into the clock, snatching his jacket from a hook near the back door as he disappears into the parking lot. I glare after him and jam my timecard into the machine’s open skull, tetchily prodding its plastic brain and ramming the oversized bookmark back into a wooden file drawer on the wall. I can always quit tomorrow.

  Between Romeo’s on 12th Street and the bus stop on 9th, there are three liquor stores, two Lavenderías, and one squat plaster shoebox with a red tile roof that sells the worst 99 cent tacos in Southern California. If I’m hungry, I can wait ten minutes for a quietly hostile sixteen-year-old Latino to try his best to ignore me while setting out a tray of cold leftover chicken. If I’m patient, I can wait thirty minutes on the bus for my father to do the same. Today, I decide to save the dollar.

  As I pass the stucco-wrapped kitchen, the warm taste of popping grease and tomato-soaked rice dripping down from the slanted clay roof onto the sidewalk in front, the soft, distant chime of bells catches the wind and washes faintly over the street behind me. I hardly notice it at first, hands buried in my pockets, intently reconsidering a damp tortilla wrapped around a handful of chicken and oil, but as I cross 11th Street, the ringing grows louder, a swelling, jingling nursery rhyme bouncing up Vermont. Before I walk another block, the tinkling of electronic xylophones is on me, a howling kindergarten chorus whining from the road, and as I turn to the street, there, hanging out the long side-window of a white box ice-cream truck, is Tony, a wide hooked grin beaming under a tall paper crown.

  “Hey, dishwasher! You hungry?” The truck swings sharply to the curb, the towering square body rocking to a halt, Tony swaying along inside. He leans halfway out the open, rectangular cut in the paneled frame and offers me an outstretched hand, exchanging a short, palmed greeting and an amused, unsettled stare.

  “You stole an ice-cream truck?” Tony reels in the window and does his best to look hurt, eyebrows pinched to an indignant arch on his forehead.

  “Steal? An ice-cream truck? Man, what kind of depraved piece steals an ice-cream truck?”

  “A depraved piece of shit with a blunt behind his ear.” Tony’s hand flies to his head, cradling a neglected paper stem as his eyes dart up and down the empty sidewalk. With a more natural humility he tucks the thin white roll in the front of his candy-striped ice-cream apron and throws down a cocked, agitated smile.

  “Are you going to keep asking stupid questions the whole walk home or are you going to get in the van?” Instinctively, I shift my stare to the street and begin forming my mouth to an excuse, some invented apology about the bus or my father or my 6:00 a.m. shift, but why? There’s nothing for me at home but a television that won’t stop talking and a roommate who won’t start, and after last night I can’t help but want to reconstruct the whole strange and beautiful memory. But still, there’s something there, some vicious reflex shuddering at the suddenness and the uncertainty of it all. But Tony must have known all that, because before I can string the metro, my job, and my family into a coherent alibi, the back doors are open and Tony’s pulling me into the van by the collar.

  Despite the kaleidoscope of friendly pastels streaked across the shell of the truck, the interior has all the charm of a hospital bedroom, a sterile white box propped up on four barren white walls. A long rectangular ice-cream cooler stretches across one wall, bright Nestlé and Häagen-Dazs stickers splashed at angles across the cold metal front, as a silent body shivers nervously against it. Martín greets me with a skittish glance and buries his eyes in his lap. Tony shakes his head and snaps the gaping side-window shut.

  “What’s going on, Tony?”

  “Business, my man, business. Always business.” Tony turns and moves to cross the narrow sheet-metal cabin but loses his balance as the truck lurches and leaps back into the dense, frantic rush hour traffic. Hurling across the van in two wild, lunging steps, he catches himself on the cooler, resting his hand just behind Martín’s bowed head, gently nodding in rhythm with the sway of the cubicle. “And today,” he finishes, knocking his pointed knuckles against the cooler, “this is our business.”

  Clinging to the wall for support, I edge towards the cooler, around Martín, and beside Tony to pull back the loose white lid draped over the trunk. Inside, a dense, icy haze sifts and crawls between four glacial walls, a thick, smoky mist breathing in slow circles around the frost-coated frame that caresses three stout plastic cylinders buried in the fog.

  “January’s a bad month for ice-cream business, Tony.”

  “Who said anything about ice-cream?” The van pulls hard to the right, launching Tony hard into the cooler, as the heavy plastic tubs slide through the murk of the metal coffin. Martín’s head bobs. “People don’t need ice-cream, you know? And I always try to invest my money in the things peop
le need. Food, shelter…medicine.” He pauses, hanging on the word medicine, letting it sit and sink and weigh in the air as he plunges his hand into the swirling mist. “Supply and demand, JT, that’s what it’s all about. You got to supply what people demand. If people demand medicine, then today we give them medicine. And this right here, this is my pharmacy on wheels.” With three soft pops Tony snaps three plastic disks off of the ice-cream tubs, churning the smoke and drowning the open containers in the haze of a flustered cloud. But as the vapor settles and the plastic columns appear through the fog, the ice-cream turns to bricks: three narrow stacks of flat, square, clear-wrapped bricks, the size of business cards, separated by color, mud-brown, clay-orange, and a flawless, sugar-white. A chocolate-coffee-vanilla Napoleon, straight from Tony’s freezer.

  “Medicine?”

  “Medicine!” Big Officer Pauly growls from the driver’s seat, his swollen, bulging eyes watching me in the rear-view mirror, his leather-bound badge dangling from a beaded, metal chain around his massive neck. Los Angeles’ finest, here to escort Tony straight to the scene of the crime.

  “Well, now I know where all the ice-cream went,” I drawl. Tony looks up from the cooler and splutters a loud, surprised laugh, and even Martín breaks a timid smile. Pauly’s ballooned stare wrinkles to a bloated grimace in the mirror.

  “Listen, JT,” Tony starts, his voice sinking with an uncharismatic sobriety. “You don’t need to do anything. Just watch and listen, you know?” Just watch and listen. In a few days I’ve dropped from colleague to pupil. Or is this a promotion? I always thought Tony remarkably confident for a sandwich boy and a high school dropout, but with this, his business, I suppose it makes sense. And the ice-cream truck, and his interest in Pauly, that all makes sense, too. But what I’m doing here, that doesn’t make any sense at all. I don’t know if I’m Martín, an extra body that doesn’t threaten Tony, or if I’m Pauly, another pawn with some part to play in Tony’s game. Or maybe I’m something else altogether. But it feels good to be out of Romeo’s grip, and even if Tony has to drag me in by the collar, I know how rare it is to feel every pulse and bone and vein in your body telling you to go. So what’s one more foot in the rabbit hole?

  “Yeah, I got you.”

  “My man,” Tony sighs, convincingly pleased. As I turn to the front window and examine the street for the first time, Pauly rounds a corner slowly, easing the van into a narrow alley, a thin string of road flanked by two towering, industrial blocks. On the right, an empty brick factory drips with the signatures of a hundred of the city’s most inspired delinquents and their aerosol quills, a web of slashed and scrawled black veins pulsing under the factory’s burnt, red skin. On the left, a perfect cube of cement rises three stories from the concrete, a line of simple, geometric figures etched above the narrow slit windows coupled by one short, familiar line. Korean Christian Church.

  “So we go to church now, huh?” I mutter back to Tony, eyes fixed on the angular script carved across the simple stone monastery.

  “That’s right, the Church of Tony. You’ll meet the congregation soon.”

  “I still think it’s fucked up we’re doing this at Church,” Pauly adds from the front, edging the van into a cramped, vacant cutout in the brick tower, the van’s two backdoors staring down the open alley. “We’re going to get hit by lightning or some shit. This isn’t Christian.”

  “Not Christian?” Tony starts, his voice as warped by sarcasm as indignation. Pauly sighs and jams the gear-stick to park. “How come all the ‘acts of God’—the possessions, the plagues—they never happen in cities. They’re always in the countryside, or South America, or the Philippines. Somewhere undeveloped, somewhere nice and un-Western. What, does God only protect the capitalists? That’s not very Christian of him, is it?”

  “It would be an act of God if you’d shut up for ten minutes,” Pauly sighs, a wrench in the gears of Tony’s mounting sermon, gaining steam with every gasped breath. “Don’t you ever stop preaching?”

  “No, I do not stop preaching! I’m a prophet, that’s what we do. Prophesize!”

  “Oye, mira.” Martín’s on his feet now, hands cupped around his eyes, face pressed to the thin band of glass peering back into the alleyway. Immediately, the friction dissolves as Pauly kills the engine and Tony rushes to join Martín at the window. For a few moments Tony stares out at the street, Pauly, Martín, and I watching the back of his head in silence, tension quickly giving way to quiet unease. And then, after a short minute, Tony speaks into the glass, the whispered breathe of an order that masks the window in fog before melting into the van.

  “Alright, let’s go.”

  With two massive tugs Pauly uproots his legs from under the steering wheel and shuffles to the back cabin, the truck rocking violently under the weight of each elephantine step. Martín scampers away from the window, fluttering around Pauly’s colossal, swaying frame and settling behind the cooler. Tony doesn’t say anything at first, eyes pressed to the glass, breath condensing and vanishing in slow, pensive gusts, but after a moment he turns, and in the cold and quiet unease of the van, he fastens his stare to mine and winks.

  Just watch and listen.

  “Per me si va ne la città dolente,

  per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,

  per me si va tra la perduta gente.”

  —Dante

  With Pauly towering at his side, Martín cowering behind the ice-cream, and me frozen somewhere in between, Tony turns again to the rear of the truck and hurls the double doors open, a warm, smoggy Los Angeles breeze sinking into the still, icy air of the van. Between the unbalanced frame of Tony’s lean neck and Pauly’s hulking shoulder, three figures stalk feverishly towards us through the alley. In the center, a gawky, short-haired Korean with irritated eyes marches in brisk, agitated steps, thin strings of muscle twitching over his pointed shoulders. Tattooed frescoes blistered up his elbows and around his biceps writhe and squirm as he moves, orange-scaled koi fish and olive-tinted dragons twisting and thrashing around his narrow arms. On either side, two shorter, denser chaperones wrapped in skin-tight white tank-tops follow in frantic rhythm, desperately churning their stocky legs to match their partners’ hurried pace. None of them could be older than twenty-two. Their soft cheeks, the thin patches of facial hair, the nervous glances at and around the truck, it all betrays the inexperience their swollen chests and pinched expressions try to conceal. But then again, we’re the douchebags standing in an ice-cream truck.

  After a few silent seconds punctuated by the percussion of six anxious, slapping steps, the figures slow to a halt a cautious ten feet from the open trunk. The lean, unpleasant-looking centerpiece stops first, suspiciously eyeing Pauly, then Martín, and then me, but after a moment his glare settles on Tony as he extends a wrinkled brown-paper lunchbag from his waist.

  “OK, Tony, let’s get this over with.” Without so much as a nod, Tony stretches one arm back into the truck and faintly signals Martín with two pulsing fingers. Martín springs from the floor and scrambles noisily around the cooler, fumbling over the metal lid and slapping it sharply against the wall. He hoists the brown barrel out first, a faint, chestnut shadow running straight down through the white plastic ice-cream tub, and rolls it across the tin floor to Pauly, followed by the white and orange flavors. Pauly lines them up at Tony’s feet and snaps the lids off one by one, exposing their short, squared spines to a timidly approaching audience, three distrustful Koreans and me with no more trust than they.

  “There’s some frosted flakes, some coco pebbles, and that—well that’s just some cheap meth,” Tony starts, brushing through felonies with the severity of a Kellogg’s commercial. The customers glance at each other shortly, pausing to tighten their glares, and approach the open plastic wells as Pauly empties the contents onto three pristine silver scales. The quiet tense creeps in around Tony’s smiling monologue again as every eye but his watches the digital screens flicker and flash under the weight of the small brick towers. 50.7,
50.5, and 49.8. Maybe these scales measure prison sentences, too.

  Without a word, the young tattooed general nods, and Pauly smoothly brushes the Crayola towers back into their tubs. Martín shuffles between Pauly’s legs and collects the scales, sinking back into the comfort of Tony’s shadow, but as Tony’s factory bustles around him, Tony himself hops down from the truck and approaches his clientele on level ground, casually striding a few steps to face the nervous, glowering wall. The koi fish twists and rises to greet him as the customer lifts his bloated brown bag to Tony’s chest.

  “Ten g’s, you can count it.” Pauly seals the last bucket with a curt snap as Martín waits patiently for instruction, but Tony doesn’t signal an order or turn from the grimacing tower frowning over him.

  “I’m not going to count that, my man, because I know there’s not ten g’s in there.” The silence settles in, again, a heavy, sneering silence, Tony smiling in the heart of it, perfectly still, perfectly unimpressed. Pauly drops the bucket and turns to face the negotiators as the two white tank-tops shuffle uneasily beside their mouthpiece.

  “Ten grand, Tony. Fifty-a-gram, that’s standard.”

  “Standard?” Tony’s voice raises an eyebrow—low, impassive, but with the unmistakable pique of discontent. “You take the tubs at five each, you can move grams at one-twenty a pop and turn a profit, or twenty for a hit. You make money, we keep doing business. Everyone’s happy. But if you try to shortchange me five thousand dollars, my man, believe me, nobody’s going to be happy.” The Korean may have a head on him, but Tony’s gathered himself to his full height now, and in the heavy unease of his trade, he swells and towers over the empty lot. Pauly steps down from the truck and moves to join him, a small mountain rocking restlessly at Tony’s side, and Martín climbs timidly out from the shadow of the truck.

  “I told you, one-and-a-half kilo’s, ten g’s. I can get that anywhere in this city.”

  “No, man, you can’t, and I know you can’t because I own this city. Five for the white rice, five for the brown rice, and five for the teriyaki. That’s non-negotiable, motherfucker. You don’t like it you can take your ass back to the dry-cleaners.” The anxiety in the Korean’s stance is gone now, overwhelmed by the tall, twitching confidence of a slighted ego, bolstered by the eager, twisted scowls at his side. Pauly’s fingers drum his pocket excitedly as the white shirts encircle them, but Tony doesn’t move. He waits, absolutely patient, flawlessly calm, surrounded by the subtle tics of foresight.