The Best American Mystery Stories 2001

Leslie Edgerton In the Zone

From High Plains Literary Review

I told Manny the whole story. We were staying in on a Saturday morning while everyone else went to the movie. Sat up at the front table, playing double sol and eating Keebler’s Chocolate Chips and smoking tightrolls, Camels. Doing the prison day-off thing.

“I was hung up on her, bro,” I said, trying to explain it to him. “She owned my ass.”

“I been there,” he said, and the way he said it I knew it was true.

“We were broke up and I was taking out some other ladies,” I went on. “One weekend, a Sunday, I must have had four different babes come over, different times, got laid each time. I was having a ball, but it was crazy. No matter how much fun I was having, I still couldn’t get Donna out of my mind. I was fucked up, man.

“Anyway, the last chick left about eleven that night, and I went to bed. To sleep.”

Manny cracked up, leaned back in his chair and laughed with his head tilted back and his mouth wide open.

“I guess you weren’t gonna pound your trouser worm,” he said.

“I guess not. I was just getting asleep when the doorbell rang, and I got up and it was Donna. ‘I got to talk to you,’ she said.

“ ‘Fuck, Donna,’ I said. ‘I’m just about asleep. We’re over, sugar. Why don’t you just leave me alone.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve really got to talk to you.’

“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m just about asleep, and if I don’t go right back to bed I won’t be able to. I oversleep and lose this job, my P.O.’ll violate me.’

“ ‘Okay,’ she said, pushing her way in. ‘You go back to bed. I’ll come with you and we’ll talk in the morning. It’s really important.’ ”

I looked over at Manny. “You know how it is when you’re just about asleep? I told her, ‘All right, come on in, but we’re not doing anything, Donna. I just want to go to sleep.’

“Well, she came in and I went back and climbed in bed and she came in a minute later and crawled in with me, buck naked. I meant what I said, though — I wasn’t going to fuck her. I turned over and closed my eyes, tried to get to sleep again. About five minutes later the doorbell rang again.

“It was a girl I’d seen a couple of times that week. Patsy. ‘Patsy,’ I said, ‘I’ve got company.’ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s cool, I guess. I’ll see you tomorrow then.’ And she left.

“When I came back into the bedroom, Donna jumped up and asked me who that was. ‘Nobody,’ I said, ‘just a friend. She’s gone.’ Donna ran to the front door and must have seen her walking away. She came back, and she was hot.

“ ‘You fucking that girl,’ she said. I said, ‘No, I’m not, but that’s none of your business anyway. We’re broke up,’ I said.

“ ‘That’s it,’ she said, slamming around and throwing her clothes on. ‘I’m outta here.’ ‘That was the original idea,’ I said back to her, and she went out, just about busting the door.

“That’s it, I’m thinking, and went back and lay down. But then I thought I heard voices and got up and opened the door, and sure enough, there’s Patsy sitting in a chair by the pool and Donna’s giving her the business, screaming at her.

“ ‘Donna!’ I yelled down. ‘Get your ass out of here right now or I’m calling the cops.’ I didn’t say anything to Patsy even though I knew she didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I knew Patsy was cool. I figured if I said anything to her that’d fire Donna up again and I’d just tell Patsy the next day what went down and she’d understand. Well, they both get up and head for their cars. Patsy always parked on one side of the complex. I watched for a minute, saw Donna was heading in a different direction, and went back inside. I layback down, but then I got to thinking — I know this bitch — Donna — I better be sure she’s left.

“I went to the front door again, and sure enough, Donna’s dogging Patsy, walking right behind her, yapping at her. I ran out of the apartment along the catwalk. All I had on were my jockeys. There’s a little space where you can look out at the parking lot, and I ran to that. Patsy’s up against a car and Donna’s got her face right up in Patsy’s. I ran downstairs and around the corner and just as I came around the corner, I see Donna’s fist come back and she smacked Patsy. She smacked her hard, dude. I never seen a guy hit another guy the way that broad hit her. I ran over to them and just as I got there Donna’s raising her hand to smack Patsy again. Only she wasn’t hitting her. She was stabbing her. It really didn’t register, though. I got there just as she was coming down with the knife and I grabbed her arm with one hand and Patsy with the other and shoved them apart. Donna went down on her knees and then started coming up, trying to cut me. I ducked my stomach back and at the same time she missed I grabbed the hand with the knife and hit it against my knee. This all happened fast, man. Really fast.

“She lost the knife when her hand hit my knee and my first thought is… find the knife. I know if I get the knife first she can’t hurt me. We’re both scrabbling around looking for it — it was dark in that parking lot — and I find it first. It was this big-ass switchblade — in fact, I gave it to her a long time ago as a present — and I find it and pick it up and she sees I’ve got it and she takes off running. I’m standing there with this switchblade and I tried to close it and couldn’t ‘cause it’s bent in two-three places. I just stand there until I see the reflection of her lights go on in the other parking lot and hear her tires burn out, and then I walk over to Patsy, who’s standing up against a car.

“Well, this sounds weird, but it’s the truth, Manny. I’ve got this knife in my hand and everything but it still doesn’t dawn on me that Patsy’s been stabbed. It just happened so fast. Patsy didn’t know she’d been cut either.

“I walk up to her and say, ‘Are you all right?’ She’s got this white silk blouse on and chinos and I see little tiny sprinkles of blood on the blouse, looked like somebody’d sprinkled red salt out of a shaker, or tabasco sauce… yeah… more like tabasco sauce. ‘You been hit,’ I said. ‘You got a nosebleed.’ ‘No,’ she says, ‘she missed me. I ducked and she hit me in the back.’

“She turned around, and man! Her whole back was solid red and blood was running down her pants like she was peeing herself. ‘You been stabbed,’ I said, what had happened finally dawning on me. ‘I have?’ she said. She didn’t even know it herself.”

Just then the dorm hack came by, motioned at us to come over. He was taking the count. Even though he knew us, he made us tell him our names and he read the numbers off our shirts, made check marks on his clipboard, and then left, probably to take a nap downstairs where his desk was.

We went back and sat down at the table.

“You sure you want to hear the rest of this?” I asked Manny.

“Fuck, yes,” he said, grinning. “This is some wild bitch!”

I went ahead with the story.

“Well, I wanted to take her over to Charity Hospital, but she said no. She wanted us to go up to my apartment and get a better look at where she’d been stuck. We climbed up the stairs, and I’m thinking she’s not that bad, being as how she can go up stairs and all. When we get to my apartment I took off her blouse and all I can see is an entry wound about this big [I held up my fingers to show about an inch and a half or so], so my mind says the knife only went in a couple inches and hit a bone. That’s what bent the blade, I’m thinking. Anybody knows you can bleed a lot from even a small cut. The blood’s not running anymore, it’s kind of just bubbling a little. I bandage her up with a bath towel and some electrician’s tape I had, and then she says maybe I ought to take her over to the hospital as she’s feeling a little woozy. That’s smart, I tell her, and we go downstairs.

“I drive her over to Charity and pull up to the emergency room entrance and the rent-a-cop comes out and they get a wheelchair after I tell them the score and wheel her in.

“I tell the rent-a-cop what’s gone down, and he calls the real deal, and when that guy gets there, a uniform, I tell him the same story and give him the knife. I tell him where he can probably find Donna. ‘Look over at the Godfather in Metairie,’ I say. ‘How’s the girl got stabbed?’ he asks, and I tell him I don’t know, I don’t think it’s that bad, and give him my reasoning about hitting the bone and all. ‘But check with the doctor,’ I said.

“Well, he doesn’t check with the doctor, just leaves, and they pick up Donna the next morning and all she gets charged with is simple assault, not assault with a deadly weapon or attempted murder or any of that, only I don’t know none of this until the next day.

“About an hour after I bring Patsy in, I’m sitting by my lonesome in the waiting area and in comes this lady and man. The man looks exactly like that guy used to be on Miami Vice, the TV show? You know, the captain? The one with all the acne scars? Remember? Anyway, this lady comes over to me, no howdy-do, nothing, and she says, ‘If my little girl dies, you die, and this guy will kill you.’ She means the scarface with her. It must be Patsy’s mom, I guess, which it is, and I try to explain how it isn’t my fault — that if it wasn’t for me Patsy probably would be dead as Donna was fixing to stab her again when I broke it up.

“ ‘Don’t matter none,’ she says. ‘If she hadn’t been at your place, she wouldn’t have got stabbed to begin with.’ I guess she’d already talked to the cops or the hospital or somebody, got the lowdown on what happened. You couldn’t reason with her. This guy she was with, later I find out he’s connected, would’ve done what she said, terminated my ass. Him I never talked to. In fact the whole time, the four hours we sat there the only ones in the waiting room, he never said a word to me or her. Just sat there mugging on me with no expression on his face. It was creepy.

“I went to the john a couple of times and each time I’m thinking, Should I just take off now, go to California or something? See, I was convinced that if Patsy died her mom meant business. There was no doubt in my mind. The only thing kept me there was I still thought Patsy wasn’t hurt all that much.

“Shit. It was serious all right. Along about daybreak this doctor comes out to talk to us. ‘We think she’s gonna make it,’ he says to Patsy’s mom, ‘but it’s still a little shaky.’ Turns out the knife went all the way in, almost came through the other side. It did hit a bone, and that’s what saved her. ‘We were looking to see if the blade hit the lung,’ he said. ‘If it had even nicked it, we couldn’t have saved her. Her lungs would have filled up with blood and she would have basically drowned.’ As it was, they ended up giving her six units of whole blood and the doc said she died on them twice and they had to bring her back from the dead. They had to wait until the blood clotted and moved away from the lung to get a clear picture. The x-ray showed it had missed, but how he didn’t know. It was a miracle.

“For her and me. Once we found out she was out of the woods, we all left. Before we did, her mom turned to me and said, ‘You’re still on the hook, Mayes. She might still die. If she does, you’re dead, Mister.’

“Way it turned out, Patsy came through fine, although she was a little sore.”

“So why’d you try to kill yourself? I don’t get it.”

“Wait a minute. I’m getting to it.” I saw Manny was getting antsy now that the bloody part was all over, so I speeded up a couple of the in-between details and cut to the grand finale. “Patsy gets out of the hospital, sore but OK, and we even started dating kinda heavy, although we had to fuck real easy or else open up her wound again. Her mom decides she likes me, and she tells me what she told me in the hospital was for true — I’d’a been dead meat if her darlin’ daughter’d croaked. She says she’s glad she didn’t ‘cause now she likes me, but somehow that didn’t make me feel a whole lot better. She’s an okay enough gal, but every time I see her I still get a little nervous.

“Anyhoo, a couple weeks go by and then I start getting phone calls at work from Donna. She don’t say hello, kiss my ass or nothing when I pick up the phone, just starts talking like we hadn’t ever stopped. ‘I drive by your work every day when I get off,’ she says, ‘and I point my gun at you while I’m going by. One of these days I’m pulling the trigger, motherfucker.’ The first time or so she pulls this I just sort of laugh it off, but after a solid week of these kinds of conversations I had enough and called the district attorney. ‘Nothing we can do,’ he says, ‘until she does something, but I made a note of this and if she ever actually shoots at you or anything like that we’ll pick her up.’ That made me feel about as good and safe as finding out I got blood in my urine. I thought once or twice that maybe I ought to do her before she does me, but when I start scheming about how to carry that off, I realize I’m still fucked up over her.”

“You still fucked up over this crazy bitch after the shit she done?” I didn’t realize Manny’s eyes could get that wide. The way he looked and the way he said it made me think maybe it was me that was crazy. “How can you even want to be on the same planet with her?”

“Because I’m stupid?” I wasn’t a hundred percent joking. I stared at the end of the cigarette I had going. “Yeah. It’s somethin’, huh? Go figure. You want me to lie about it?”

“Naw, man. It’s just… well, I don’t figure you to be pussy-whipped, that’s all.”

“You wait, Manny. Anyway, I didn’t know what to do. I knew she was just about wacko enough to pull some stunt like that — drive by and shoot me — it wouldn’t be hard — I’m working in front of this big plate glass window two feet from the street — and then I get this phone call from her.”

“What’d she say?” He was all ears.

“She said, ‘I just want to tell you why I came over that night.’ ”

“That’s right. You said she said she wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Yeah. What it was, what she said was that she was pregnant and that she murdered it. That’s the words she used.”

“You mean—”

“Abortion. She had an abortion. Man, I’m death on abortions! She knows that, the bitch!” Thinking about it all over again brought on some of the same feelings I’d had then.

“I started thinking about this baby boy — I know it was a boy — and man, I lost it. I started drinking then, went out and bought a bottle of Jack and hit it hard. I’m thinking all kinds of things. You know, ‘what coulda been’ kinds of things. Me and her. Me and her and our baby boy. I just kinda went out of my skull. It probably didn’t help I laid up in this motel room out on Esplanade for three days doing nothing but slugging down Jack and going crazy in the head. That’s when I did it.”

I told him about the Norelco razor cord and it breaking when I tried to hang myself with it. I didn’t know why I was telling Manny all this. Maybe to get it all out, make me feel better. Only it didn’t. Make me feel better, that is. I felt worse. I felt just like I had during those three days, only I didn’t have any whiskey to help take the edge off. I know one thing — if I’d been on the bricks right that minute I wouldn’t be qualifying for any of those white poker chips they give out at AA.

Time I went to bed that night I’d got it back under control somewhat. Only thing is I kept seeing Donna’s fucking face, and I hated the way I felt. Like I still wanted us to be together.

Ain’t that some shit?

If having Donna on my mind wasn’t enough, that fucker Boles came back, the one I stabbed up on the roof of the laundry. You’d think a guy had thirty-some laundry-pin holes in him would have sense enough to check outa this sorry life. I was cutting a guy’s hair when Manny came over and told me. He’d been up front, talking to the guard on duty that day. They’d put him in the infirmary.

The guard thought he’d be there at least a week before they put him back out in the population and gave him limited duty. Probably put him in the library for a while, the guard told Manny. That made sense. Put an illiterate in charge of Angola’s priceless Zane Grey paperback collection.

There was no question I had to get to him. It was obvious he hadn’t snitched on me yet, but I knew it was only a matter of time.

It’s hard to move around in prison. In movies, it seems like guys come and go pretty much as they want. All they have to do is bribe a guard or some trusty. That might be the case in Tinseltown, but at, Angola it was a different story. You couldn’t take a crap without a pass. And what’re you supposed to be bribing guards with? Packs of cigarettes?

I was still trying to cook up a scheme when the situation changed just three days later. For the better. Boles got released from the infirmary, and just like that guard had predicted, he was put in the library. He’d be much easier to get to there. I just had to dope out a way to get there without getting caught. That meant I couldn’t get a pass to the library since that’d leave a record on somebody’s pass sheet.

The smart thing to do was get to Boles quick. He was still weak from his wounds. Also, he hadn’t talked yet. If I waited too long he’d not only be stronger and harder to take down but he might have a change of heart and snitch me out.

My man Dusty came through, though. Just like in the movies.

“I got something for you,” he said when we came in that night from chow.

“What?”

“You got to fix that guy over at the library, right?”

He knew I did.

“You told me you might need some help sometime with this guy.”

I was surprised he remembered, and then I wasn’t. Dusty was no lame-o.

“So what you got?”

“Here.”

He put a piece of paper in my hand. It was a pass. “Free-walkin’ ” passes, we called ‘em. Only trusties got this kind of pass. It allowed you free movement wherever you wanted to go inside the walls. The best thing was it didn’t have your name on it. A solid gold pass, especially for what I needed it for.

Dusty told me one other thing.

“Do it tomorrow morning,” he said. I wanted to know why then. “ ’Cause, stupid, you’re gonna need an alibi maybe, and I can give you one. I’ve got to take the barber-shop towels over to the laundry, and I’m going to ask for you to help me. You got twenty minutes to do it in. I got a friend at the laundry I already talked to. He’s gonna say you came in with me, dropped the laundry off.”

It’s things like this let you know who your friends are.

All I did that night was have one nightmare after another. Practically every night I had a dream — nightmares most of the time — while I was behind bars. On the bricks I never dreamed.

I woke up after about the tenth dream where I was being chased by Donna with her fucking knife, my heart beating like I’d been doing amyl nitrate poppers, and I’m laughing like somebody in the squirrel factory, and there was some fucker in the back of the dorm ripping out these horrible sobs.

I felt the sweat chill as I threw off my blanket. I yelled, “Somebody put a dick in that asshole’s mouth!” I barefooted it over to the window and looked out and the cooking crew was heading across the quad to the mess hall in their whites so I figured it was four-thirty since that’s when they went over to start destroying breakfast.

There was no use trying to get back to sleep. They’d be rousting us for wake-up in another hour anyway, so I went and got my shaving gear and took a shower and shaved, brushed my teeth. Nice, I thought. You could actually take a shit without ten thousand guys screaming ten feet from you. I’d have to remember that and get up early from now on.

I sat on the stool longer than what I needed, just thinking. About the dream and Donna and Boles and all kinds of shit like that. Just sat there getting madder and madder. It wasn’t like I was building a hard-on so’s I could jack up Boles later on. I never needed that shit. You know, get mad so I could jump on somebody. That kind of shit’s for punks. The best way is to not even think about it. Just do it.

That’s the onliest way to do anything major. Specially when you got a choice, got two roads you can take. Like I could whack out Boles or I could do something else. Like nothing. Just not do it at all, see what happened then.

Fuck that. Boles was going down. I couldn’t believe a guy could get stabbed that many times and still live. What was he, some kind of vampire? Thirty-some holes this punk gets with a straightened-out laundry pin and he’s over working in the library like he just got over the flu. I shoulda put a wooden stake through his mother-fucking heart is what I shoulda done, prevented all this happy horseshit.

It’s like a stickup. Most outlaws I talked to got busted ‘cause they planned too much. Figure out what to do if this happens, that happens. The best way is not even know you’re gonna do it till it happens. Like, you’re in a supermarket buying a deck of butts, whatever, and on the way out you see all the checkout girls heading with their money trays to the office on account of the next shift is there. Before you walked in, robbing somebody maybe was the last thing on your mind. You see that, all them trays stacked up on the desk in the office, the safe open, and the smartest thing you can do is walk over, pull out your piece, and tell the guy in the tie to bag it up, hand it over. Zip, boom, bang, you’re out of the place and cruising down the road before you even know what you did. Just like that.

I never once in my entire life got caught on a job when I did it like that. The ones I keep getting busted on are the ones where you cased and planned and schemed for eleventeen years before and always — always — the one little thing you never thought of happens and the next thing you know is you’re trying to wipe black ink off your fingers with that one little paper towel they always give you and you feel you’re waking up from a bad dream. Into one that’s worse.

I’m thinking all this and then I just did it. Dropped a sheet over all them other thoughts about Donna and even Boles and just went into another part of my mind.

We were walking out of the dorm after breakfast and Manny was saying something to me. In fact, he was almost screaming before I noticed anything.

“What?” I said, wondering why he was yelling at me, and then Dusty, who was walking with us, said, “Leave him alone, Manny. He’s in the zone.”

He gave me a look and took a quick glance around, and then his hand touched mine and I knew what it was. I slipped it into my shirt. Without looking I could feel it was a knife, a regular hunting knife, not some piece of shit that had been jury-rigged from a piece of metal from one of the shops. This was a serious killing weapon. What he did, what I had in my hand, registered, not in the front part of my mind but in the back, where I was.

We got to the barber school and I just went on back to stand behind my chair instead of screwing around with the others. A couple of the guys walked by, said something, and I just nodded. I don’t have a clue what they said to me.

Then Mr. Dillsie came to the door of his office and yelled at me to come up front, help Dusty with the towels. I could see Dusty behind the glass. There were five large sacks. I grabbed three of them and Dusty the other two and we went out the back door.

“Run,” Dusty hissed, once we were out of sight of the school. “You gotta book, man!”

We ran all the way to the laundry and his man was standing outside waiting for us. “You got fifteen minutes, maybe twenty,” Dusty said. “Go!”

I threw down my sacks and took off again, heading up toward the quad, around the chow hall, and luck was with me. I didn’t pass a single guard, only one inmate. I kept my head down and I don’t think the guy even noticed me. The library was two buildings down from the chow hall and nobody was on the walk in front of me. Clear sailing. This was the best time. There shouldn’t be anybody else in the library except the librarian for at least another hour.

There wasn’t.

I went in quick, closed the door behind me. I could feel the knife where I’d put it under my shirt, the handle stuck down behind my belt.

At first I thought nobody was there, and then I heard something sounded like a book drop back in the office. I walked back and went into the room. He was there, bending over. He straightened up, a book in his hand, and looked at me.

“Boles,” I said. I could see the fear in his eyes.

“I didn’t snitch you out, man,” he said, laying the book down on the desk in front of him and stepping back. He moved kind of stifflike, and I guess I would too, if I had that many holes in me.

“I know. I couldn’t be here if you had, could I?”

I pulled out my knife.

“Why you gonna do this?”

“You know why.”

He took another step back and was up against the wall. I started toward him.

“Oh, man.” His voice broke. He put his hands up, palms facing me, and began edging along the wall toward the door. “Man, you’re safe. I’m not gonna tell who did me. If I was gonna tell, I’d’a already done it. I’m sorry for what I did to you, man. We’re even. Don’t you see we’re even?”

In a way, he was right. I’d had the same thought myself. The pain I’d put him through almost certainly matched what he’d done to me. In one way the score was settled.

I didn’t even feel the same anger I had when he’d raped me. The day I’d shanked him up on the laundry roof the mad had disappeared, vanishing a little bit with every hole I put in him until it was all gone. There was no revenge left in my heart, none at all. It was just pure-d empty of everything, all malice.

I walked over to him and he just stood there. I don’t think his knees would let him move. His eyes told me that. I stopped inches from him. His hands went down to his sides.

“You won’t talk? Ever?”

“Oh, man! No! I swear t’God! You’re safe, man. I just want to do my time, get the fuck out of here, that’s all.”

I believed him. I could hear it in his voice.

“You don’t even know my name, do you?” I said.

“No.” He was telling the truth.

“My name’s Jake Mayes,” I said. Then I stabbed him. Who knows why? Just like that. It started in easy enough, then hit something solid so that I had to push harder on the handle before it went all the way in. I looked him in the eyes the whole time. It seemed like it lasted for hours, us standing there, and his eyes changed, just the least little bit, in realization of what was happening, I guess, and his eyelids started to quiver like he was trying to keep from blinking, as if once he blinked it was all over, and then all the bones just seemed to go out of his face. I reached up with my other hand, grabbed his shirt, and eased him on down to the floor. His eyes were still open. He hadn’t blinked, but he was dead.

I got back to the laundry and Dusty was still there talking with his friend. I knew I had been gone longer than I should have.

“What you doing?” Dusty said, when I came up. “You’re walking like you got all the time in the world, moron. C’mon, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

The other guy turned and went back inside the laundry and we started walking back to the barber school. On the way, Dusty asked me questions. “You get rid of the knife? Anybody see you?”

Back at the school I had a customer waiting for me. Dusty did too. The guy wanted a flattop. I got out the triple-ought blade, rinsed it in the sterilizing solution. When I got done, I stepped back and looked. It was the best flattop I had ever cut. It was a fucking masterpiece, it was. You could land a plane on that flattop. I just laid down my clippers when the steam whistle blew. I knew what that meant. I looked over at Dusty and he at me and he held his hand down low so nobody else could see and gave me a thumbs-up. I just nodded. Ice cold, that’s the way I felt. Frosty. Peaceful. When that whistle blew, something happened inside. Time, as a concept, just disappeared. Just blew away in the wind, went over the wall.

A couple months later, my old rappy Bud came down from Kenner after his trial and Dusty got him into the dorm with us. It was Kimmie he’d killed, got him sent back, but he told us it was an accident. She was giving him some grief, yakking that he was always out too late, lame crap like that, and he tapped her.

“I didn’t even hit her that hard,” he said. “I hit her lots harder lots of times. It was just a freak accident.”

“Fucking life’s a freak accident,” I said, and we all laughed: me, him, Dusty, and Manny. We were all outside on the ballfield, sitting at one of the picnic tables, eating Oreos and smoking tightrolls, playing dominoes.

This is as good as it gets, I thought, looking around. I saw a bird fly up to the wall and then it was gone, flew over the side. That was all right, I thought. Good fucking riddance. This was OK too, sitting out in the grass with my buds. The green, green grass of home. No fucking broads hassling us, just good friends sitting around, having us a ball. I started to think of Donna but got that shit out of my mind. Thinking about broads is what fucks up your time in here. All I want to do now is my time.

Eight more years, thanks to Boles. Yeah, they found out it was me. Fuck it. Like I give a shit.

I can do eight years and snooze all the way through it, now that I got Donna out of my skull.

Got my head on right, now. I’m in the zone, man, the zone we all been looking for since the minute we were born. In the zone, you’re a man nobody fucks with. You’re the fucking Master of the Universe. People step aside when you walk by. You stare at any motherfucker you want, all day long, you feel like it. Cracks me up, way these chumps try and become invisible, they see me coming down the tier walk.

Invisible this, I say in my head when I walk by, and then I do whatever the fuck I want, whatever I feel like doing. Just what-the-fuck-ever. Just like that, amigo.