FOURTEEN
KINGPIN
Three Per Cent Assumed Net Loss
It didn’t take much for Milton to become a drug kingpin.
He couldn’t just walk in and start filling his pockets, there were cameras, and double-locked vaults with retinal scanners, and people might notice. Instead, he found an even easier way.
As Assistant Director of Regulatory Affairs, he was responsible for overseeing the receipt of each shipment of drugs. The numbers on the shipping receipts rarely matched the numbers of actual containers of drugs, they were always off just slightly one way or another. There was an assumed net loss of three per cent in the system, so he just had to keep it below that to not raise suspicion.
On intermittent orders, he’d short-count the shipment and the “lost” cases would be reported to the supplier and replaced, covered by insurance. When the replacement drugs would arrive Milton would lock them in a safe in his office and take a case in his backpack whenever he left the building. If and when they were audited, everything would always check out.
He was good at it.
It was the only thing he was ever actually good at.
Careful execution of his plan allowed him to steal an awful lot of drugs. So many that he’d have to make a couple trips per day to drop them off with Noddy. Two backpacks full, one at lunch, one after work, every day. And as fast as Milton could move them out, Noddy moved cash back in. Thousands and thousands of dollars of cash. More cash than either of them had ever seen.
Noddy schooled Milton on managing his ill-gotten gains. About not spending too much at once, about not paying cash for a new Cadillac, about building credit and spreading debts between loans and credit cards to give himself cover, about money laundering, and how if he knew a friend in a cash business, like construction, say, that friend might help him clean some of his money.
Noddy began laundering Milton’s money. It was a pittance compared to the amount he was doing for the mob. Milton would give Noddy a pile of cash, he would give him pay stubs and paycheques for 80 per cent of it and keep the rest.
Milton was now moonlighting as a design consultant for S&M Construction at $120 per hour—more than a Dog-Fucking Instrumentation Man would ever make on an overtime shift in the Alberta Oil Patch.
Medi-Drug ran trials on every kind of drug imaginable. So the drugs Milton was stealing were a real hodgepodge and were sold in a variety of ways. Some pills were worth more than others, but they were all worth something.
Some days Milton would score—that’s what it’s called in the biz—a few cases of some experimental treatment for erectile dysfunction, or maybe some new opiod pain killers—those kinds of drugs fetched the highest street value.
Other times it would be more specialized or obscure or mundane medicines, like hormone supplements or multivitamins or phony baloney herbal remedies, which would all usually be ground up into “cocaine” or “heroin” or “meth” and sold to pro athletes, stockbrokers, bankers, and puppeteers.
If there were a lot, they could be sold in bulk to the governments of poorer countries, or if they were top secret, they could be sold at huge markups to competing pharmaceutical companies.
The backpacks were going out fuller and fuller and coming back stuffed to the brim with more and more cash.
It was a great time to get into dealing drugs.
. . .
The High Life
Milton was so far removed from the smugglers and the mules and the dealers and the enforcers breaking kneecaps that he didn’t think of himself as part of some elaborate criminal enterprise. He told himself, beyond a desperate ploy to keep Leonard Cohen from murdering him, it was just like taking a few pens from work and giving them to his roommate.
“It’s just pens… It’s just pens…”
This is what he told himself. This is what he repeated under his breath for the first few weeks of walking out the front door each day with tens of thousands of dollars in stolen pills on his back.
“It’s just pens.”
Whatever his roommate did with them, and whatever lives those pens lived afterwards, that was none of his business.
“It’s just pens… It’s just pens…”
It’s what he started believing as the stealing got easier and easier, as his confidence in the scheme grew and grew. To the point that, while he genuinely believed he was doing nothing, or barely anything, wrong, he grew more and more cocky in general.
He gave less and less of a shit about trying to be anything other than himself—or himself high on the delusion that he was at once both a criminal mastermind and an innocent.
He became better at his job. His poetry got marginally better. He began to formulate his own opinions and express them to Noddy and Georgette and Ruddy and Ava and Chris or Larry on nights they were all gathered around the living room yelling at one another over the too-loud, unwatched QHL game.
“No, forget that, Ruddy. You don’t get it. You never get it. Ava is right. Beauty isn’t spread evenly through existence like peanut butter. Peanut butter isn’t even spread evenly through existence like peanut butter. Beauty is a statement of value. It’s an aesthetic construct used to differentiate things that are pleasing from things that are not. It’s not inherent in all existence. You tool. It’s not even inherent in this room. No offence, Av. It’s more like crunchy peanut butter.”
He began ordering expensive scotch, on the rocks, even though he hated the taste of it. He started smoking cigarillos, even though he couldn’t take a drag without having a coughing fit. He started wearing black turtlenecks and fedoras. He started going out more, drinking more, even drinking enough to dance once in a while.
Him and Noddy would bathe themselves in cologne every night and go to La Baraque and buy girls drinks.
Noddy would take a new girl home every night, while it took Milton a while to warm up to the idea. But a thicklycologned mysterious man in a black turtleneck buying endless drinks with a big wad of bills has a certain appeal for a certain type of person who hangs around a certain type of place.
He got a hand job, the most action he had ever gotten from anyone, on a Tuesday night in the alley behind La Baraque thanks to a puppet theatre lighting tech named Ginette.
Milton was hanging around in the alley while they smoked their crack—which was actually ground-up Medi-Drug diet pills—as the puppet troupe would do, and one thing led to another led to a fumbling back-alley hand job.
From then on it was open season.
He was still Milton, so it was still always 30-seconds of fumbling and rubbing and slobbering and awkward, sticky goodbyes and good nights. It was still always in the alley, or in a dark corner, or once on the hallway toilet in La Baraque with a biker named Flo who was a good six-inches taller than him. It was still always a bit of a letdown.
He’d always assumed there was more to it. He’d assumed it was part of something else that added up to something bigger. But it never did.
It always felt vaguely disappointing and kind of wrong. He never really felt great about any of it. And he never worked up the nerve to take any of his paramours home for the real thing. He was still Milton, after all.
But it beat the alternative, so he kept at it.
At first, he’d fall in love each time, if even for a night, with whoever was on the other end of the fumbling and slobbering and rubbing.
He carried around the lackluster memory of Ginette for weeks, thinking that maybe, possibly, potentially, she could be the one. But she wasn’t.
Of course she wasn’t.
She was high on diet pill dust at the time, in that alley, at 3:00 a.m. She called him Martin and patted his head after.
Gradually he stopped falling in love. Gradually he stopped trying to remember their names. Gradually it stopped meaning anything at all.
. . .
Moan for Man
The bikers at La Baraque hated Milton and Noddy hanging around even more than they hated the puppet troupe.
But word got around that the “les deux tête carrées” were the Godfather’s top suppliers, and the Death Riders depended, like everyone, on the Godfather’s generosity, so they tolerated them.
Tolerated to the point that Milton, feeling pretty good in his black turtleneck, with a wad of money in his pocket and a half-dozen scotches in his belly, put his name on the monthly stand-up comedy open mic list and not a single biker threw a single beer at him the entire time he read one of his latest poems, which included several parts where he closed his eyes and shook his entire body.
go
moan
for
man
go moan for man
man oh man
go moan for me
go moan for the unwashed and unshaved
go moan for the unkempt and the unclean
tugging at the frayed ends of the earth
go moan for man
man oh man
go moan for me
go moan for mountain goats and homeless cats
go moan for the dirty birds and the cowboy
boot crossdressers with something to prove
go moan for man
man oh man
go moan for me
man oh man
oh man
go moan for me
go moan for me e e e
“I see you’ve been practicing the whole poet thing.”
Milton just got off the stage, nary a beer thrown at him, even after he knelt in silence with his eyes closed and his arms outstretched for what seemed like an hour after finishing his “poem.” It was a familiar voice behind him.
“Oh my God! Robin! Hi! How are you?!”
They hugged long and hard. She touched his cheek.
“It’s good to see you. I like this new look. And that poem was… something.”
“Heh, thanks. It’s a bit different, I suppose. What are you doing here? I thought you were in Florida?”
“Yeah. Long story. Want a drink?”
“I do.”
Milton and Robin sat and talked for a long time at the bar. He caught her up on everything—well, almost everything—that had happened to him since she left: the fame, the misfortune, the unemployment, the real job, the meeting Leonard Cohen, the turtlenecks, the expensive scotch, the cigarillos.
He left out the parts about nearly being executed by Leonard Cohen, about becoming a drug dealer, about the sloppy back-alley hand jobs.
She was impressed.
“Wow, I’m impressed!”
She caught him up on the fact that her new film was off to a shaky start.
“It’s called Turkey Vultures.”
“Great name!”
“Yeah, thanks. It’s about the vultures in Florida who feed on roadkill gators. There are thousands of them. All over the place. Especially in all these suburbs that have become like ghost towns with the economy like it is. They’re really beautiful-ugly birds. I’ve got a good start on things, but this one is different than Dirty Birds—more cameras, and the sound, Jesus, the sound. Birds was basically silent, but for the couple parts that I just overdubbed. But this time it’s all live sound—vultures make these really guttural trilling sounds, they’re really quite remarkable—but it’s a nightmare with the ambient noise. So, I have this big crew, which is like a whole thing. And then one of the stupid sound guys brought his stupid dog to work one day, and the dog got loose and was running around on the road, and caused this big traffic clusterfuck, and we couldn’t get the dog back, then an alligator jumped out of the ditch and got the dog, then a car runs over the gator. It was all so traumatizing.
But then all these vultures show up, so I tell them to keep shooting. Well, guy with the dog flips out. Calls the cops on me! We have to shut down shooting while they do this big investigation thing. We’re like hemorrhaging cash while this is going on. And of course, most of my crew is from here, and none of us have work permits, so we all get deported. So, here I am. I found a good lawyer who can get us back down there with the right permits, but it’s going to cost a lot. Right now, I’m just trying to get some money together so we can go back down and finish the thing.”
As they talked, Robin kept circling back to this: how she needed money to finish her movie.
They talked about the economy: “Worst since the ’30s they’re saying.”
“I’d believe that, you should see how bleak things are down in Florida.”
About the U.S. election: “You really think this Obama guy can win?”
“Not if that hockey mom has anything to say about it.”
“Then he doesn’t stand a chance.”
About Noddy, who was down to his underwear and wrestling a biker twice his size in a kiddie pool of scrambled eggs that was meant for the evening’s post-open-mic entertainment.
“I can’t believe I hooked up with him!”
“Me neither.”
Even about Milton’s poetry: “I’m not writing nearly as much as I used to.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, just too busy with work and things. It’s just become this kind of secondary thing, I guess.”
No matter what they’d talk about, the conversation would always wind its way back to Robin’s current predicament.
“Yeah, it’s hard when external things keep you from making art, like work or money, or lack thereof. I’m so bummed. Being so broke. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to finish Vultures.”
They talked until the bartender shooed them out of the bar.
This was the longest they had ever talked. Milton didn’t want the night to end as they got up and made their way to the alley for a final cigarillo and to see what the puppeteers were getting up to.
He wanted to kiss her.
He wanted to take her back to his place.
He wanted to run away with her and live happily ever after.
He wanted to do all of this all at once and didn’t want it to start in an alley while puppeteers smoked prenatal vitamins and humping behind the dumpster.
“I might be able to help you get your movie made.”
“What? How?”
“I’ve got some money saved up, I can give you some, if you want. Why don’t we go to my place and talk it over?”
“Okay. That’d be amazing. Thank you so much!”
She said yes!
Well, she said okay, but that was enough to make Milton float home ten feet off the ground.
They talked and laughed all the way back to his apartment. She held onto his arm. They laughed. It was sweet.
He led her up the stairs, fought his sticky front door open, brought her inside, and kissed her.
She kissed back.
They kissed. He kissed her harder, she kissed back harder. They began wrestling one another out of their clothes down the hall to Milton’s room.
“This is your room?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s pretty small, and, well, gross, isn’t it? And what’s that smell?”
“It’s not great. I’m going to move soon, probably.”
Milton turned the lights back off, so it was completely dark. They went back to kissing and undressing and feeling their way around one another in the dark. Robin’s body, next to his, felt like perfection.
“Ew! Are there no sheets on your bed?”
“Uh, yeah, they’re… uh… in the wash. Just lay on top of the blanket.”
Milton laid Robin down on top of the cheap blanket he’d bought at the lingerie/baby clothes/housewares store on Parc to replace his winter coat and always damp towel he’d been using for months and months.
He kissed her neck, and down her collarbone, across her perfect breasts, down her stomach, and along the waistband of her panties. She moaned softly and pressed her hips towards Milton as he kissed down the inside of her thighs.
“Thank you so much for offering to help with Vultures. It means a lot.”
Milton stopped kissing and sat up on the bed.
“Are you just… Are we just… Is this just because of that?”
Robin sat up and half wrapped herself in the blanket.
“Because of what?”
“Are we just doing this because I offered to help you out?”
“What? No! God no! I’m drunk and horny and you’re here too.”
“That’s it? Just because you’re drunk and I’m here?”
“No, I mean, probably a bit. Like, it’s probably a bad idea. I had that thing with your roommate, and you seem to have feelings, and… I don’t know. Just shut up, this is nice. It was nice. I’m sorry.”
She reached for Milton in the dark and grabbed his knee.
“Probably a bad idea?”
He tried getting off the bed to turn the light back on, but planted the full weight of his knee on top of Robin’s ankle, she yelped as he, in an attempt to avoid breaking anything, tried to quickly adjust his weight and instead became ensnarled in the blanket and toppled off the bed and onto the floor, crashing into the unstable table and sending a pile of books and dirty dishes and 44 pounds of 98-year-old Underwood No. 3 typewriter cascading to the floor.
The typewriter landed with a curious cracking thump, later to be discovered because of the 6-inch hole it drove clear through the floorboards.
Milton, stunned and drunk on the floor in his tiny white briefs and his black turtleneck, in the pitch dark, attempted to regain his bearings and his feet by reaching out in the dark for something to hang on to.
He found the blanket and pulled on it to pick himself up, but instead he pulled Robin, half-wrapped in it, onto the floor too.
They both lay in a tangled pile of blankets and books and typewriters and dirty dishes on the floor and laughed until they were out of breath. Then they just lay there, on the floor, in a pile.
Robin was laying perpendicular to Milton, on top of him, across his legs. She stroked his shin and sighed quietly. Milton played with her still-socked foot while his legs fell asleep and went numb.
He stared up into the darkness as he grew more and more sober and more and more tired. She closed her eyes and hummed “Bird on a Wire” softly. He wanted to say something to save the night. To rally. To keep it going. To turn it into a ‘thing’. To rid himself of the suspicion he was being gamed and make it real and meaningful. To make her have ‘feelings’ too. To make her fall in love with him. But he couldn’t think of anything more convincing than lying in the pitch blackness with his boner and his turtleneck, running his hand lightly over the top of her foot.
This made him hate himself even more than usual in that moment.
He had all this money and power, all this courage he never had before. He was getting (almost) laid and getting paid often and a lot. He had everything. Except sheets on his bed. And a window in his bedroom. But mostly everything. Everything was going his way. But in this moment, the most important moment of his entire life, all he could do was tickle her foot.
. . .
Morning After the Night Before
They woke up a few hours later in the same position—on the floor, Robin still lying on top of Milton—to a banging on the bedroom door.
His head pounded, his shin—which took the brunt of the table in the fall out of bed—throbbed, and his long-asleep legs burned with pins and needles.
“What time is it?”
“Hey. Good morning.”
“Hi. What time is it?”
“I have no idea.”
The banging on the door continued.
“Putain! Milton, get the fuck up!”
“What do you want, George?”
“Nohdee phones for you. He’s in jail, says you ’ave to bail ’im.”
“What?”
“Nohdee is in jail, connard!”
Robin moved her legs off Milton and attempted to get to her feet in the darkness.
“I think I should go.”
“No, yeah. Don’t worry. Of course. It’s fine.”
Milton’s attempts at helping to extract them from the pile of trash on the floor only made things worse. They clashed heads really hard and both squealed and rubbed their foreheads.
Georgette kept knocking.
“Milton! Putain!”
“Yeah, give me a second!”
Milton was feeling his way across the floor on his hands and knees to find the light switch when Georgette threw the door open and flipped on the light. The one bare bulb hanging from a loose wire on the ceiling behind Georgette’s tribal scarf décor/fly trap flooded the room with a blinding red light. Milton and Robin both covered their eyes.
“Jesus! Turn it off!”
“Ah, désolé, Milton. I did not know you ’ad a girl with you.”
Milton peeked through his fingers and could see Robin, the love of his life, sitting on the floor in a pile of trash, in just her socks and underwear. She was exhausted and a mess. She was beautiful. He felt like he was going to throw up.
“Why are you on the floor? C’est quoi ce bordel?”
“Just turn the light off, George. Jeez!”
Robin got up onto the bed and turned her back to Milton and Georgette. She looked around for her clothes in amongst the mess. Not finding anything she picked the first shirt she could find off the pile and pulled on a wrinkled, dirty, tie-dyed CallCo Inc. t-shirt.
“Nohdee is in jail, Milton. After you leave the bar last night, ’e gets arrested. ’e calls me and says you have to come bail ’im. Said you can get cash.”
“Gah! Yeah. What an idiot. Okay, just give us a minute.”
“Tout de suite!”
Milton pushed the door closed on Georgette.
“Whee, toot sweet.”
He turned and smiled awkwardly at Robin. They squinted at one another through the burning light and their respective hangovers and embarrassment. Milton searched for something important to say.
“Sorry,” was all he could muster.
“I have to pee.”
While Robin peed, Milton kicked aside the pile of rubble they had bucked off the table and bed so that he could get to a far larger pile in the far corner.
Robin came back in while Milton was filling a backpack full of rolls of money from a large cardboard box full of rolls of money, that lived at the bottom of the pile.
“Holy god! What is that?!”
“Ah… don’t worry about it.
“That’s like… So much money!”
“Yeah, I don’t really know how much.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“It’s just my savings. It’s all legit. I just… uh… Don’t trust banks. Heh.”
When the backpack was full, he started filling a plastic grocery bag that was balled up in his pile of garbage.
“I guess I’ve got to bail this dummy out. I’m sorry for the mess… and… everything.”
“It’s okay.”
Milton finished filling the plastic grocery bag and handed it to Robin.
“Take this.”
“To bail him out with?”
“No, to finish your movie.”
“I can’t take this much. This is nuts! I thought you wanted to lend me a few bucks. But this… This is too much! I’ll never be able to repay you. I don’t even know how much it is.”
“It’s probably a hundred grand. I don’t know. But don’t worry about it. It’s not a loan. It’s a gift.”
“A gift? I can’t… You can’t… We can’t… I’m not for sale.”
“An investment then. Just give me a producer credit, or whatever. Nothing else. No strings.”
“That’s it? No strings? You don’t want sex or a blow job or anything.”
“Not like this, not for this. I’m… You’re… It’s not like that.”
“What is it like? This is a lot of money.”
“I don’t know, Robin. I… I believe in you. I guess.”
“I can’t take it. It’s too much! Seriously. Who gives someone a shopping bag full of money? What are you, a drug dealer?”
“Haha… No… Never mind where I got it. It’s yours now. I insist.”
Robin tried to hand the bag back to Milton.
“I can’t take this. It’d change things too much. And why do you have it? Last time I saw you, you were basically homeless. Now you’re handing out bags of money to women, in your underwear and turtleneck! This whole thing is too much.”
“God! Fine. Okay. It’s a long story, but Noddy dragged me into a bit of a mess so I’m selling leftover pills from work to a… to a company. It’s all legit. I get paid in cash. It’s been going on for a while, so now I’ve got this big box of money. I can’t spend it all. I don’t want to spend it all. I want you to have it for your movie. It’s an investment, not a bribe. I swear.”
“Wait. You’re selling pills?”
“Just the leftover ones.”
“Like you’re stealing pills and selling them for cash.”
“It’s not stealing, it’s like dumpstering, basically.”
“Basically?! Are you a drug dealer? Like, an actual drug dealer?”
“God no! Are you kidding? Could you imagine me doing anything like that? I give them to Noddy who sells them to another guy who sells them to somebody else. Who knows where they actually end up?”
“So, they don’t go to a company?”
“Well, a kind of company. I don’t know. It’s complicated. But it’s fine. I swear.”
“It all sounds shady, dangerous, and illegal.”
Georgette banged on the door again.
“Milton! Merde! Nohdee is on the phone for you!”
“It’s all fine, I swear. But I want you to take this and make your movie. Really. And I need to go down and bail out Noddy. He’s a horrible person, but he’s like my business partner… or something… I guess.”
Georgette swung the door open. She covered her eyes with one hand and held out her phone to Milton with the other.
“I won’t look at your naked girlfriend, just talk to this asshole, putain!”
Milton took the phone.
“Hello.”
“Jumpin’ Jesus, b’y. Will ya get your arse down here already. Do you know how many guards I had to blow to get a second phone call?”
“Yeah, I’m coming. What’s going on?”
“A big pile of bullshit. Just come bail me out. I don’t know what it’ll cost, bring, like, 20 Gs.”
“Yeah, fine.”
He hung up, handed the phone back to Georgette.
“Putain, vous êtes deux imbéciles, des putains de pathétiques.”
Milton pushed the door closed on Georgette again and held the grocery bag back out to Robin.
“Will you please take this? Please? I’m begging you.”
“If I do could I get in trouble? Honestly?”
“Gah! No! Look. I take pills from work, I give them to Noddy, he gives me a bunch of money, and gives the pills to someone else. I have no idea what happens to them from there. Neither does he. If we get caught, we’ll be in shit, but we’re just small fish who don’t know anything, and you have nothing to do with any of it. For all you know, I just cash my paycheque each week and keep it in a box in my room. Weird, sure, but I’m from Saskatchewan. After my grandpa died, we found $50,000 in small mouldy bills in a potato sack in the root cellar. So, you’ll be fine. I promise. And you can make your movie. Here…”
Milton dug another grocery bag from the pile and dumped several more handfuls of money in it.
“Take more. It’s fine. I swear. Take it all if you want. This is mostly just extra I can’t clean so I can’t really spend it.”
“What do you mean, ‘clean’?”
“Like money laundering, like in the movies. It’s messed up, I know. But you’re fine. I promise.”
“Oh, Milton. How’d you get tangled up in this mess? This isn’t you.”
“Well, when there’s a gun to your head you do what you have to keep… uh… the bad guys from pulling the trigger.”
“What? What bad guys? Are you in danger?”
“I have a box of ‘extra’ money in my room and am on my way to bail out my dumb-ass partner in a criminal plot I’m in the middle of… I’m always in danger.”
“Oh my God, Milton. I had no idea you were like this.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“But it’s also kind of badass.”
“Badass?”
“I don’t know. It’s like, horribly stupid, but you’re different than before. It’s kind of… I don’t know… hot.”
“Hot?”
“Yeah, a little. I don’t know. You should go.”
“Uh… I guess…”
“Thank you for all this. Maybe I can see you again before I go back down there?”
“Yeah, that’d be nice. Tonight?”
“Sure, meet me at La Baraque at eight?”
“It’s a date.”
Robin stepped around the piles of junk on the floor, took the bags of money out of Milton’s hands, planted a deep, long, hard kiss on him, and grabbed his ass.
“See you at eight.”