“Hey Nathan.”
I don’t know who this guy is. He’s just somebody coming out of the john, one of the too-many people living here. Irene likes company. She also likes her dope delivered. People know to not show up empty-handed.
Inside I lock the door, take a leak, then sit on the toilet with the lid down. The tub has a dry, ancient atmosphere. No one has actually taken a bath in this room for some time. The bar of soap in the little soap dish in the wall looks like a piece of bleached bone. The scum that rings the inside of the tub has also aged into something hard and permanent. This room is a sort of religious sanctuary, a tabernacle of what is worshipped here. On the lip of the sink, I lay out a line from a private stash of brown. I don’t have enough to share with anyone in the living room.
I can hear Irene from all the way down the hall, through the door. She’s holding forth, wandering down memory lane. “During my heyday…” Her voice has the sound of maracas, as though little beads are rattling inside her throat. I tune out the rest of what she’s about to say, which will just be one or another story about her musical career, singing torch songs in what she calls cocktail lounges, but the truth is they were really just dives. The Bad Alibi. Whiskey Heaven. Places that didn’t even have a piano. Irene brought a boom box. Basically she was doing karaoke and passing the hat. Irene holds on to this image of herself that is not really long gone, more like it never really existed in the first place.
She has an audience for these stories, though. Tonight it’s the guy from the john, plus the Mexican father and son, and Betty, who has been in that chair for a couple of weeks now. She must get up to go to the bathroom, but every time I come into the living room, she is still in that chair. Betty’s aspiration is to become a cocaine addict. This is a financial matter; at the moment, she can only afford to be a tweaker. She is one of the few people I’ve known who enjoys both uppers and downers. She’s happy either way. Her mind is pretty well gone by now, along with her teeth.
I have to leave for work. I help out financially. I’m Irene’s helper. Before me, she had another guy. Dusty. Before him she had Lois. Both of them are dead now, Lois OD’d and Dusty fell asleep behind a truck that backed up and rolled over him, then rolled over him again going forward. She enjoys the tide of people who come in, then seep out of her life, the life around her. It’s her house; it belonged to her parents. She pays taxes out of stuff we steal, then sell. Because she’s the owner here, she calls the shots.
—Get me some nuts, she’ll tell me and I’ll come back with something nice, mixed nuts in a can. Not just a bag of peanuts. I know not to get her crappy nuts.
—You’re a sweet man, she’ll say. I like her to boss me around.
She says she doesn’t know why she is still alive. She hasn’t had a sober day since high school. She has taken some kind of drug most of those days. Even as a teenager, she and her mother took speed as a way of dieting and feeling like superheroes. The two of them vacuuming at midnight, or coloring each other’s hair or painting each other’s nails, each nail a different color.
After her parents died, Irene had the house to herself. She caught a lucky break. Some of us have never caught a lucky break. A lucky break could have made a big difference for me. I’ve had to make it with no luck at all. It’s okay. I’m not complaining. Most of the people here haven’t had any luck either. The drugs even the playing field; when we’re high, we have huge futures and big plans to fill them. The stealing is just to get the money to buy the drugs. Plus I try to only steal from the sort of people who do have luck.
When I get to work, a few of the fluorescent bulbs are flickering over the pumps, but fuck, it’s like ten degrees out with the wind. Those suckers are going to have to get changed another night. I’m busy anyway, thinking amazing, important thoughts. I haven’t had a customer in maybe an hour when I hear the thumps of a huge sound system. I don’t like the looks of the guy getting out of the pimped Camaro. Too skinny, weird beard. Also, I don’t like the neon piping beneath his door. I set my face into something like a big stone as the guy pushes a twenty into the pass-through. He wants fifteen dollars of premium and two Kit Kats. I keep my eyes locked on his as I push the candy through and punch in the amount on pump five.
I’ve never been held up at the station. This is my value to Sabir. He can leave me in the booth, go home, and get a good night’s sleep knowing no one will ever try to rob me. I weigh probably three hundred pounds. I’m six foot two. I have no muscle or strength, but you can’t see that from outside the booth. From outside the booth I am someone you would not want to mess with. I enjoy this about the job, my power. Also, I love the smell of gasoline.