Rule of the Bone

FOUR. ADIRONDACK IRON

In the beginning and all winter I was only dealing small-load weed to the bikers which was cool because A, lots of kids in Au Sable were dealing then mostly in school where I never went near anyhow but everywhere around town too so we were like a swarm of flies and it was low-risk to be one of them what with so few swatters. And B, it didn’t feel like a wrong thing to be doing even though it was illegal. Especially given the way I looked at booze in those days from what I saw of its effect on the bikers for one and my stepdad for another and even my mom, which is not something I want to go into right now. Plus it was the only way I could keep my crib in the apartment over the Video Den with my friend Russ and his biker roommates.

I was pretty heavy into skunk then myself but I could’ve dumped it off easy if I’d had a good reason to, which I didn’t because like always high was better than low as those were my only two alternatives. It was cool though, so long as I had a warm squat and adequate food to eat and friends.

Russ was my friend. And the bikers were my friends too, even though they were older and kind of unpredictable. Russ had hooked up with them because of his job at the Video Den, which he’d had since before he quit school and got kicked out of his house by his mom for doing drugs. But the job was only part-time days and he couldn’t afford the apartment over the store on his own so he offered to share it with this one guy he knew, Bruce Walther who was more or less a friendly biker in spite of how he looked.

But then Bruce’d started bringing his friends into the Place because they were sort of a gang although he called them family. He like underlined it when he said it. These dudes’re fam-i-ly, man. You don’t fucking deny your family.

So they moved in, different ones, four or five of them at a time and sometimes their girlfriends who they called their old ladies or just split-tails or gash but the same ones never stayed long. The squat was this big funky apartment owned by Rudy LaGrande the guy who ran the Video Den with three bedrooms and a bunch of mostly broken old furniture. The stove partially worked though and the refrigerator but I remember the toilet was stopped up a lot that winter. Russ still paid half the rent but only got the pantry off the kitchen for his room where he had a mattress on the floor and his old stereo from home and his heavy metal tapes and Playboy collection all of which the bikers used whenever they wanted so Russ kept a lock on the door.

No question my mom and Ken truly did not want to see me anymore so I settled permanently onto this ratty old sofa in the livingroom which was okay except when the bikers were partying which they did a lot of and sometimes passed out on my couch and burned holes in it and barfed in their sleep. Once in a while like when they got whacked on crank they went crazy and Russ and I had to sleep in his car or someplace else but as long as I kept the bikers in skunk the apartment was free for me and usually peaceful so I didn’t complain. I had to unload the weed pretty much at cost to keep the bikers from buying it off of other kids or trying to buy it themselves off of Hector the Spanish guy, who was only into selling sandwich bags wholesale to kids which I think is the safest way to deal in a small town. But I still managed once in a while to pull a few bucks out for myself plus the occasional nick. Besides all I needed money for then was smokes and food which I mostly ate at the mall because if I brought anything back to the squat the bikers ate it. It was smalltime dealing for sure and in spite of it I was usually broke but it wasn’t very dangerous or wrong and my material needs were few.

Plus for a kid without a home it was an interesting way of life. The bikers for instance kept you pretty alert. Bruce was sort of the head biker because he’d been in the Gulf War and knew a lot about Arabs and desert life and weapons and he had these incredible tattoos all over his chest and back and up and down his arms of Arab guys with swords in their teeth and harem girls and suchlike. He lifted weights all day at Murphy’s Gym where he said he was one of the trainers but he only hung out there and got to use the weights free because he was a good advertisement. He had arms and pecs as big as hams and because of them and his tattoos he almost never wore a shirt except for when he went out in winter when he just wore his leather jacket and kept it unzipped. He had an incredible body for a human being, like he was from the planet of the weightlifters, and he had these awesome nipple rings and shaved the hair off of his chest and stomach several times a week. Straights gave Bruce a lot of room and he took it like it was his in the first place, like he was a cop although he hated cops and called them pigs. Bruce used quite a few of those old hippie terms.

I think he was the smartest of the bikers who actually as a group were not very intelligent. Russ was intelligent. More than me anyhow and even more than Bruce although I was two years younger than Russ whereas Bruce was probably thirty. Smart or not, Russ was only sixteen then and thus he pretty much had to take shit not just from Bruce but from all the bikers which was often some pretty stupid shit, like when after they’d seen this old biker movie they made him stand in the middle of the Grand Union parking lot one night while they drove their Harleys around him in figure 8s to see who could come closest without hitting him. I sat in Russ’s Camaro and watched and kept hoping they wouldn’t remember I was there which they didn’t because they were so whacked and into tormenting Russ who I think bugged them on account of his intelligence and the Video Den guy had put the lease in his name so Russ had to collect the rent. Also Russ tended to talk too much and too big especially when he was scared, and around the bikers he was scared a lot so they liked to punish him for that too.

Around big dogs if you’re a kid you either learn to do the little dog or you book. Russ had trouble learning the little dog but he was stuck with the bikers due to his early friendship with Bruce and his job and the apartment, and I was stuck with Russ due to my home situation and being too young to get a job yet, so in a sense like Bruce said we were a family whether we wanted to be or not which is true of real families anyhow.

Of course like always things could’ve been worse and that’s why me and Russ didn’t complain or go anywhere else. The town of Au Sable was like our home base. It was where our parents lived and where we had once been little kids and had lived with them. Plus it was where the friends were. There and up at the mall in Plattsburgh.

All the bikers rode strictly Harleys or else were planning to get one soon. Everything else was Jap shit or Kraut shit or Brit shit. What they liked was American shit— softtails, shovelheads. Bruce used to say, Harleys are iron horses, man. Fucking iron horses. He liked to repeat himself, probably because he was used to talking to people who didn’t get it the first time. Due to his obsession with weightlifting he had given them the name Adirondack Iron which they had painted on their leathers and had gotten tattooed upside down under their left forearms so you could read it when they did a power salute, like they were an actual serious-minded motorcycle gang or one of those foreign skinhead bands. They looked more organized than they were. They talked like being a piece of Adirondack Iron was the whole point of their lives and maybe it was but some of them had wives and even kids someplace who they occasionally visited when they ran out of money.

Actually the Adirondack Iron and even to some degree Bruce were all assholes who couldn’t get real jobs so they mostly stayed drunk or high all night and slept off the days or just chilled on the back porch listening to Russ’s tapes or worked on their bikes in the yard. They were like dogs and Bruce was the lead dog, sort of a German shepherd or one of those big Alaskan huskies. He made decisions and gave orders and the other guys usually followed them or else carefully ignored him.

One of the guys, Roundhouse whose real name he once told me was Winston Whitehouse, was humongously fat and hadn’t had a haircut since the third grade he said and had never once shaved or cut his beard and he’d ended up looking like one of those Sasquatches. Roundhouse’s whole body from his eyes to his toenails, including his neck and shoulders down to his hands was covered like with a pelt and when he stood up you expected to see a tail. He was from New Hampshire or someplace like that where his uncle’d been a famous murderer and when he wasn’t bragging about his uncle all Roundhouse talked about was fucking and sucking like he couldn’t get enough of it. He had a bunch of stolen credit cards that he used strictly for phone sex with orientals, Dial-a-Jap he called it, his favorite recreational activity, but whenever there were any real females around he plugged his headphones into Russ’s box and got drunk and nodded out. He owned this truly cherry ‘67 Electra Glide though, much admired and he loved his bike and when he wasn’t on the phone in the john jerking off he was down in the yard taking his hog apart and putting it back together again. Basically he was harmless and good-natured and after Bruce who due to his muscles I kind of admired I liked Roundhouse the best.

There was this other guy though named Joker whose real name I never knew, a short square-bodied guy with a head like a shovel and tiny flattened blue eyes and many facial scars. He had a bleached white buzz-cut and all his tattoos were words, Megadeth and Terminator and Suck, and even a few complete sentences, like Eat Shit and Satan Lives. All the bikers had guns I think but Joker had the most guns and he liked to clean and polish and fondle them the way the other guys did their bikes which was natural I suppose since he was one of the bikers who didn’t have a hog of his own and was always thinking about buying one soon. He had a very cool little blue Smith & Wesson Ladysmith.38 which he called his pussy pistol and this huge single-shot.44 magnum Thompson with a sixteen-inch barrel that he said was his dick stick.

Generally though Joker showed very few signs of life and almost never talked to anyone least of all me but he was the one biker I was scared of all the time, even when he wasn’t whacked. His neck went straight from his ears to his shoulders and he wore a heavy chain choke-collar around it in case you didn’t get the point from the tattoos or the guns. Sometimes when Bruce was bored he’d grab Joker’s chain and yank on it hard and say, Back, Joker! Back! Release! Joker’d growl and snap and drool and pull against the chain until his face got red and he couldn’t hardly breathe and when Bruce let go he’d back off panting and whimpering like he’d been cruelly deprived of some primo meat-violence.

But I got through the winter okay because my stepfather probably thanks to my mom decided not to let the cops put me away for my Christmas shoplifting so long as I didn’t try to move back in with them again, which was funny since the cops’d signed me over to my parents in the first place only on condition that I move back with them and take eighth grade over. The new rule was basically don’t bother your parents and don’t bother the cops or one of them will sic the other on you. All I had to do was stay out of the way of both and not flag either by going back to school who didn’t want me anyhow. Which wasn’t hard because they both tended to look in the other direction when they saw me, my parents on account of my bad attitude and drug use plus my overall funky appearance, which made them permanently pissed and ashamed of me at least my mom, and the cops because as a criminal I was more trouble than I was worth, just another homeless stoned dropout dealing small-load boom to the locals.

But even the cops know that a little weed can’t hurt anybody. Most of them when they bust you are only trying to score for themselves anyhow and once they take your stash if you lick their boots and promise never to smoke refer again so long as you live and thank them for saving you from a life of drug addiction and criminality they keep your drugs and let you go. Unless they’re after you for something else you’re not worth the paperwork. I’ve learned that’s generally true of life, if you’re not worth the paperwork adults won’t hassle you. Except for the truly dumb and the nutcases of course, people who act on principle. They’ll hassle you.

It was early spring and the nights were still cold but the days were getting warmer and the old gray snowbanks were starting to shrink and thousands of frozen dog turds and months of garbage and paper trash and lost clothes were coming up thawed and soggy all over town but especially in our yard behind the Video Den.

Not my favorite season. In winter the snow keeps reality like clean and covered in white but in spring you see everything too much for what it is. When the packed ice finally melts it leaves all these deep potholes behind and cracks in the streets and sidewalks and the snowbanks make these huge puddles of black oily water. The frozen ground thaws and turns into deep muck and soppy dead grass.

Nights are okay though because you can’t see much and it’s cold so everything freezes up but during the days the sky is always this pale yellowish color like old mattress stuffing. It makes a strange light and the town looks like it’s been through this hundred-year-war and everybody’s forgotten what they were fighting about so it’s hard for them to get too excited now that it’s over.

On account of the long winter and still having to stay inside a lot I guess the bikers had lately been into slam-dancing. It was more slamming than dancing and they didn’t even need music to do it, they just lurched around the apartment like a bunch of Frankensteins and bounced off each other’s bodies and jumped against the floor with both feet which made a lot of likable noise because of their biker boots. Likable to them, I mean, and to me too although I myself didn’t get into it but only watched from the kitchen door and tried to stay out of their way and kept poised to sneak out if necessary.

This one night they were more stoned than usual, really choked and there were a couple of decent females that Bruce and Joker had picked up at Purdy’s over in Keene which is a respectable bar, not a biker place and to impress them the guys had started doing multiple tequila shots and beer and Roundhouse had put this old truly raucous Pearl Jam tape on Russ’s box and started slam-dancing. I guess it was the only way he could figure out how to make the females notice him. He got pretty wild, all that hair and fat leaping and bouncing and pounding against the floor and then when the females seemed to like it and think it was funny the other guys joined in and pretty soon they were all slamming each other while the females watched.

The females definitely weren’t skags but they weren’t anything special either. Not babes. They had their own car and were in their thirties, my mom’s age practically and thick in the middle and big-assed like her but they thought I was real cute. The one who said she liked my mohawk was named Christie and had on a Fuck You I’m From Texas tee shirt and no bra so you could see her nipples which was cool and the other whose name was Clarissa had on this tee shirt that said My Next Husband Will Be Normal but she right away put on Bruce’s leather jacket so I didn’t have a chance to see if she had a bra on. Bruce’s nipples you could see though since as usual he wasn’t wearing any shirt and also his little gold nipple rings which always made me nervous but if you didn’t look at them especially if you’re short like me you had to look at his shaved stomach and chest and tattoos too so you tried not to look at him at all, which I didn’t. But then he always goes, What’s your fucking problem, Chappie, you got a problem? You oughta look at me when I’m fucking talking to you, Chappie.

So I go, Hey, no fucking problem, man, and stare into his eyes which are blue and cold like Joker’s but handsome and then he smiles down like he’s triumphed over a major adversary even though if he wanted he could squash me like a flea.

The music was really loud, Pearl Jam is grunge but they play loud even when the volume is turned down and the men of Adirondack Iron had it cranked and I was starting to worry that the floor would cave in from the slam-dancing when suddenly I turn around and Russ is coming through the door behind me looking seriously pissed.

Shut the fuck up! he yells. The Old Lady’s downstairs and she’s ripshit!

The Old Lady was Wanda LaGrande wife of Rudy who owned the building and the Video Den and rented out the rest although except for our squat the rest was permanently vacant because of the decrepit condition of the building and I suppose the presence of Adirondack Iron. Plus the neighborhood was not the best.

Bruce stops slamming and comes over and puts his huge sweaty arm around Russ’s skinny shoulders and says, What’s the matter, little man? It’s a party, man. It’s a fucking party. Just chill, okay?

Russ pulls away from the arm and goes, The Old Lady’s downstairs hitting on me for the rent and she’s talking eviction again unless I come up with some money and you guys are making up her mind for her. I’m serious, man, I need some money from you guys, he said.

Bruce smiles like he does and reaches down and picks up Russ like he’s a stuffed animal he won at the fair and kisses him on the nose. Still smiling he says, Fuck you, little man, and then he leaps back into the pack of slam-dancers sending them flying off his meaty shoulders against the walls and furniture. Clarissa, the one wearing Bruce’s jacket was sitting in a corner with a can of Genny in her hand and she waves at me and pats the floor next to her for me to come over. She was definitely starting to look less like my mom and more like a babe.

But then Russ says to me, C’mon downstairs, man. Wanda gets off on you, maybe she’ll lighten up and think of something else if you’re there.

I think yeah why not, it’s my squat too and I need to take some of the responsibilities once in a while, so together we go down the rickety outside staircase to the Video Den. Wanda liked to pretend that she managed the Video Den for her husband but mainly she was this dotty old lady married to a drunk who sent her out sometimes to collect the day’s cash from the till and whatever rent money she could scrounge out of Russ and buy booze with it. I think they’d both been married a couple of times before and were together now more or less out of convenience. Luckily she had a weakness for talking about colon cancer on account of her father and several brothers and ex-husbands had died from it and usually Russ could get her talking about colon cancer a mile a minute until she forgot about collecting the rent and sometimes she even forgot to empty the till, which made it easier for Russ to skim a few bucks before making the light deposit and afterwards he could say she had taken it herself when she came in earlier.

People like Wanda and Rudy LaGrande on account of being drunk for half a century have very short and unreliable memories you might say and if you don’t piss them off too much you can easily victimize them. Russ was into that. Although I myself was not and in fact I kind of liked her cancer stories. She always started in the beginning when her father or brother or whoever was healthy and unsuspecting and ended with all the disgusting details of his painful long-drawn-out death which was cool. The idea was you were supposed to be glad you didn’t have colon cancer yourself and for me it worked. Afterwards I was always real glad I didn’t have it and that made her happy.

This one night though Wanda happened to be unusually irritated with the world and was not distractable by anyone’s apparent interest in colon cancer, even mine. It was cold out, close to zero and her husband Rudy’s driving her into the night for money and more booze before the liquor stores closed had given her a crossed hair so to get even she’d been making all kinds of upper-level Video Den management moves and giving Russ a general hard time. Also the noise from upstairs must’ve reminded her that the rent was two whole months late. Which was why Russ’d come up to try and get the guys to chill.

But when we come through the door Wanda’s standing behind the counter with the empty register drawer open in front of her and the first thing she does when she sees us is throw Russ’s shearling jacket at him. It was mine actually, from my mom but I had sold it to Russ for twenty-five bucks to invest in half a bag of skunk on condition I could buy it back when I dealt the weed which I hadn’t yet. Russ meanwhile’d been loaning me his old jean jacket.

She goes, Russell, you’re a thief! Look here! Look! There is not a single cent in here! Not one penny!

Wanda’s a small woman, round and energetic like a chickadee with frizzled black-dyed hair and heavy makeup that she puts on crooked and she always dresses like she’s got a date with a traveling salesman, which is a sign I guess that she once had a good social life. She says to Russ, I happen to know for a fact that Pretty Woman was returned today and should have been paid for and also several more that were out when I went looking for them yesterday and the day before. Give me your key to the store, Russell, just turn it over now. As of this moment you’re fired.

She was right, he had been stealing. Plus I knew Russ hadn’t legally rented any videos that day or collected for any that were returned although he had loaned quite a few to his friends as he often did in exchange for a tray or even a roach sometimes or to impress girls. And Pretty Woman was one of those sensitive true-love movies that make girls hot so he’d kept it freely circulating among them ever since it first came out.

He says in his smoothest voice, Hey, hey, c’mon, Wanda, chill, it was ol’ Rudy himself who checked out Petty Woman. He does it all the time, you know that, and never even signs for them or pays either. He took it out probably for you. He himself returned it this morning, I think. He probably brought it home for you himself and forgot to tell you or left it in his car or else you guys got too busy or something…

Don’t give me that fast talk! she yells. You’re only trying to change the subject. Just get out of here, Russell, she says, calmer now. Go. And all your friends upstairs, the motorcycle gang. Get them out too. Chappie, I’m sorry, you too. Out.

Yeah, well, that’s easier said than done, Russ says looking up at the ceiling which is rumbling and starting to shake off bits of paint and plaster. You could hear Pearl Jam pretty good and could almost make out the words even.

Don’t you threaten me. I could always call the police, she says. They’ll get you out.

You could. Yes, you could. You certainly could call the police, Wanda. But the place is a firetrap, he pointed out. Then he told her if the cops came they’d probably condemn the building and she’d have to close down the whole operation. No more Video Den, Wanda. Nada.

This made her nervous. Just get out of there by the weekend, she said. All of you.

Russ was silent and downcast for a while. I doubt you could find anybody to replace us up there, he says. Who else would rent it?

She purses her orange lips. She’s thinking. She says, Two months plus this month, two hundred and forty dollars you owe me.

Right, and he could pay it off a whole lot easier, he said, if she didn’t fire him because then she could take part of the rent out of his pay, like thirty bucks a week and in a single four-week month she’d have half of what was owed her and he would definitely collect the rest from Bruce and the other guys. Definitely.

No, she says, very firm. You’re still fired. You’ve been stealing from us, Russell. From now on she would run the store herself, she told him and he would just have to come up with the rent some other way.

He argued with her for a while longer but it didn’t do any good, her mind was made up, we weren’t quite evicted yet but Russ was definitely fired.

Finally me and Russ left the Video Den and sat out on the back steps in silence. I knew Russ was thinking hard which he’s very good at. His chin was in his hands and there was like smoke coming from his ears.

I said, What’re you gonna do, man? Get a job up at the mall?

Yeah, right, Chappie. The mall. The line forms at the mall, man. They got fucking college graduates up there flipping Big Macs and carrying out the garbage. Forget it, man.

Well maybe you could sell your Camaro. You could get eight, nine hundred bucks easy for it. More maybe.

You bet your ass more. A grand and a half easy. But no fucking way, man. That car’s all I got between me and nothingness.

What, then? I was more than idly curious because in a way I was dependent on Russ, him being two years older than me and all. Russ was the same for me as his Camaro was for him, the only thing this side of total nothingness.

Well, he says nodding in the direction of the bikers upstairs, there’s a lotta empty bongs up there. Maybe I’ll start keeping ‘em filled. Plus Hector told me anytime I wanted crank to deal he had it available. Those guys may not have any money for rent but they always have it for booze and drugs.

Crank. Jeez, I don’t know, I said. That’s some heavy shit, man. I was thinking if Russ starts dealing drugs of any kind to the bikers he’s going to put me out of business but also selling speed was different from the occasional bag of weed. I was just a kid then and not too good at telling right from wrong but Russ was smart and I trusted him so I said, Whyn’t you deal just the meth, okay? You do the crank and leave the skunk to me, man. It’s sort of my specialty, you know?

Yeah, sure. Sure, man. That’s cool, he said but he was thinking hard, he was already making deep plans that probably did not include me. Except as his unwilling accomplice.