Dark Beach

by

Dan Ahearn


Smashwords Edition


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Published by
Dan Ahearn at Smashwords

Dark Beach
Copyright 2012 by Dan Ahearn

Smashwords Edition, License notes
Thank you for downloading this ebook.  You are welcome to share it with your friends.  This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form, with the exception of quotes used in reviews.

Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.  Although there is, in fact, a real Asbury Park, New Jersey, that is a wonderful town making a great comeback and bears only a superficial resemblance to the city in this book, which is a work of fiction intended for entertainment purposes only 
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Dark Beach

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chapter one


The surface of the ocean looked greasy in the cloudy gray morning light and low flat rollers broke steadily on the beach.  I put up the collar of my jacket against the wind, propped my sneakers on the boardwalk railing and drank my coffee.  
I turned to Kota and said, “Well, it’s not all bad.  Is it?  At least there’s ocean.  Right?”
Kota just looked out to sea, her white hair stirring in the wind.  The way she was staring you would think she could see all the way to Europe.  And with Kota… Well.  Who knows what she can do?
The boardwalk timbers creaked as a golf cart rolled up behind us and stopped.  Kota stood up and turned to face them. 
“No dogs on the boardwalk, kid.  Especially not a wolf like that.”  It wasn’t rent-a-cops, it was real Asbury Park Police.  Although just how real is that, when you get down to it?  
I stood up.  It’s always good to show respect.  At least to start with. 
“Kota’s a service dog,”  I said.  Kota heard her name and looked up at me.  What?
“Yeah, so what?”  the cop said, “There’s still no dogs.”  
There were two cops in the golf cart.  Nothing like New York City cops.  They were more like those two ex-bouncers from the old Mudd Club that used to visit Dad whenever he was holding pot.  
The cop who spoke was the young one.  He was driving.  He probably used to be a bully in high school and went into police work to make a profession out of it.  
The other cop was older.  He was the one to watch out for.  I forced a smile onto my face. 
“I have a medical condition and Kota helps me.”
“Yeah?”  said the young cop, “What does the dog do?  Give you mouth to mouth?”  He smirked and nodded his head.  Yeah, you’re a riot, I thought, a real comedian.  You’re ready to open for a rock band, you’re so funny.  But I didn’t say anything.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to keep my mouth shut.  
The old cop turned toward me now, his big fat ass squeaking on the cracked plastic seat.  He was pissed at me for making him go to the trouble of talking.  His nameplate said: WARNER
“What’s wrong with you?”  he said.  He was annoyed, like I was a gnat that wouldn’t stay out of his ear.  
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”  
I thought you’d learned to keep your mouth shut.  
“I have a medical condition.”  I smiled, trying to put butter on it for him.  But he wouldn’t take it. 
“Well, that’s tough, but there’s still no dogs allowed on the boardwalk.  Let’s go.”  He jerked his head toward the street.  I made myself be calm.  I pictured my heart slowing down. 
“I’m sorry, sir.”  
That’s good.  He’ll like that.  Sir. 
“But according to the Americans with Disabilities Act, a service dog must be allowed to accompany its handler into any public facility, including restaurants, schools, taxis, airplanes, stores, movie theaters, concerts, sporting events, and any other public place.”
 “Is that so?”  he said, his face flat and gray as the October sky above his bald head.  
The young cop said, “Do you have some kind of papers to show this?”
I said, “According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, it is illegal to ask for any special identification from dog service partners.”  Dumb, telling a cop he’s illegal.  
Young cop said, “Do you think you’re a lawyer, punk?”  See?
“No sir, but I know my rights.”  I stared back at him pleasantly but steadily.  Don’t blink, don’t blink.  The young cop looked at the old cop who shook his head and stared at the ocean.  They had decided something between them.  I didn’t think I was going to like it.  Kota stirred, shifting her feet.  She picks up on things. 
“You can call my lawyer, Harold Neumann.”  I was a concerned citizen helping the police with their work.  Also, I didn’t want to be late for school.  Not that they care all that much at my new school.  “I’m sure he’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have.”
The old cop snorted through his moustache and said, “Harold Neumann’s a civil rights pain in my ass.  I’ll be damned if I’m spending the morning listening to that fat bastard.”  He looked at me and said, “How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”  Only a slight exaggeration. 
“Why don’t you have a vest or something for the dog?  It would save trouble.”  
I was on the verge of explaining that according to the Americans with Disabilities Act a special identifying vest is not required.  
But the old cop’s tone had changed.  He wasn’t angry anymore, so I just said, “We have a leather harness she wears sometimes.  It was so early in the morning.  Usually nobody’s out yet.  Not when it’s cold.”  People are so weird.  One moment you hate each other, they’re thinking of beating your head in.  The next moment you’re making chat like you’re on Oprah.  Weird.  Like, for instance, the old cop was looking at Kota and smiling.  I knew he was seeing her, really seeing her, for the first time.  And she’s amazing.  She’s huge for one thing.  And she’s white, all white.  And she has pale gray eyes that look right through you.  It can be spooky sometimes.  Kota is magic. 
The old cop said, “I know I probably can’t ask ACCORDING TO THE AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT.”  He smiled sarcastically and I shrugged.  “But what does she do?  I mean, does she do anything special?”
“If I have trouble she’ll get my cell phone out and call my aunt.”
The young cop’s jaw dropped.  “No shit.”
“Really,”  I said.  Proud in spite of myself.  As if it was me that was special and not Kota. 
“What kind of name is Kota?”
“Her name is Dakota but I shortened it.”
“North or South?”  the young cop said and laughed.  He really got a kick out of himself this guy.  What a knucklehead.  I just stared at him like I didn’t know what he was talking about. 
The old cop hit the young cop in the arm to get him going.  “Have a nice day,”  he said to me.  And they rode away down the boardwalk toward the derelict old Casino.  
I wrote a couple of sentences about all this in one of the little notebooks I carry, a habit I picked up from my mother who kept a serious journal the last year of her life.  I always have a notebook and a pen in my hip pocket. 
When my mother died my father gave me my mother’s journal, a cardboard box full of those Composition books you get in school.  They were all filled with the flowing cursive script my Mom learned from the nuns at St.  Teresa’s Catholic School.  In the first composition book, my mother wrote: Everybody’s so stiff when it all it takes sometimes is a little bending.  
I could still see the cops.  They had stopped to talk to somebody else, a bike rider.  You’re not supposed to ride bikes on the boardwalk either. 
 I put my hand on Kota’s head.  She pushed against my hand but kept her eyes on the cops. 
 “Welcome to Asbury Park,”  I said. 
Kota said, Woof.  Kind of low and unconvinced. 




chapter two


It was 7:30 when I and Kota finished breakfast at Tony’s The Waves Café on the boardwalk.  My aunt is many things but she will not cook.  Gail had opened a tab for me at The Waves and that’s mostly where I eat.  Tony was cool but never awake before eleven, so mostly I dealt with Lydia, who was not exactly Tony’s wife.  She was the one who opened the café at six a. m.  
Kota and I had actually been in Asbury Park since the last week in August, but every day was like starting over.  I supposed it was typical New Kid crap.  But your typical new kid doesn’t have a big white German shepherd with him wherever he goes.  Add to that the fact that the high school is eighty percent black.  We stick out.  Our first day in school was like, “Hey everybody! There’s a new kid in school and he’s got a big white dog that he brings to class ‘cause he’s sick or something and if he starts to die the dog knows how to save his life or something! Let’s get him!”
 I exaggerate.  I was just wishing the beginning would end.  At some point we would be old news.  People would stop noticing us and we could just fly under the radar.  At some point. 
We were used to being the sore thumb, as in “sticking out like a. . .”  My father lived above 110th street in New York City.  My school was mostly African American and Latino, so I’m used to being the minority.  Then I moved to Gail’s.  
Long story short: My father was a union stage electrician for rock bands and big events in New York City.  He mostly worked at Madison Square Garden since 1985, so just imagine the bands he worked for.  But he went downhill with alcohol and drugs after my mother died.  
I have seizures.  It’s because of a head injury I got in a traffic accident when I was ten.  The seizures didn’t start all at once but they gradually became a problem when I was about twelve.  There is a little pocket of “rust”  in my brain where old blood had clotted that probably ought to be removed.  The seizures are controlled with medication but sometimes I don’t rest or forget to take the meds and I have problems. 
Anyway, my father couldn’t deal with it at all.  He started getting hammered full time after Mom died.  But we were surviving.  He was still getting the odd gig plugging up for the occasional rock band at The Garden.  I was able to function, more or less, and keep the situation at home on an even keel. 
Then I had a bad thing happen to me in New York.  I had a seizure on the street.  I lay there for a long time before anybody thought to help me.  By the time somebody called 911, some jerk had gone through my pockets and I had bled out about a pint of blood from the cut where I hit my head falling.  
Like the song says, I was born under a bad sign.
That’s when my father’s sister, Gail, got Kota to look out for me.  Dogs like Kota are rare and hard to get but Gail always finds connections to things.  She happened to know somebody who knew somebody that introduced her to a woman who ran the dog training program in a women’s prison upstate.  
I sometimes wonder about the woman who raised Kota from a puppy, named her Dakota and trained her and what crime she committed to be in jail.  Whatever it was, she did a good job raising Kota.  She knows her stuff. 
Ordinarily, the program only gave dogs to younger kids with more serious seizure problems than mine or mobility issues.  But Kota had been disqualified from the program and they were looking to place her basically as a pet.  We were never told the reason but I think it’s because she’s too big, too active and therefore kind of the wrong fit for a little kid.  She’s an official service dog, of course.  She can smell a seizure coming on and warn her partner fine.  But she couldn’t sit still for all the other stuff a little kid would need like being real gentle and cuddly.  
But Kota’s just right for me.  Since Kota came, I’ve been a lot better.  I credit this to not being so scared that I might have a fit and be helpless.  I know Kota’s there to help me.  And she’s better too.  At least that’s what she says.  All right, she doesn’t actually talk, but she might as well, her expressions and gestures are so easy to read. 
Also, don’t freak out because I said “fit”  back then.  I say what my aunt calls “hard-boiled”  things to keep it light and not feel so sorry for myself, which, before Kota came, I had a major tendency to do.  After I seized up in the street I was afraid to go outside.  I had a big league depression.  So I say a lot of non-PC stuff to keep up my morale and pretend I’m tougher than I feel.  No offense.  Okay?  It’s just a pose. 
 Anyway, my father was getting less and less reliable.  And then I had another “incident”  that was caused by my other major problem: anger.  I lose my temper sometimes.  Bad.  Especially over the injustice of cruelty to animals.  Animals are better than we are, and I just won’t tolerate anyone who abuses them. 
Which brings me back to me and Kota sticking out like a sore thumb at my old high school in New York and also how me and Kota ended up with my aunt in Asbury Park, New Jersey. 
When Kota first came to live with me it took a long time before I was allowed to take her to school.  My old high school in New York was run like a maximum security jail house.  And they didn’t want the “disruption”  of a dog in school, no matter what the federal law said.  That’s when my aunt called in Harold Neumann, civil rights lawyer, who threatened to sue everyone in sight if they did not cease and desist, etc.  But getting Kota into school was just the beginning of our problems.  Like I said, my school was pretty bad, filled with all sorts of thuggish criminal children and mental midgets.  Bringing Kota into that atmosphere was bad enough but I was really green about having a dog then and just made a bad situation worse.  
To cut it short, this group of punks started throwing stuff at Kota and I took a mop handle out of the trash and whipped this kid’s ass pretty bad.  You can really hurt somebody with a mop handle but they’ll survive it.  If it had been a lead pipe he would have been dead.  Not that at the time I would have cared.  Because ever since Kota came, my life has changed and nobody messes with her.  Not ever.  And if you think you can hurt her and I’ll stand by… well, one kid found out different.  I learned that day that “seeing red”  is more than just a cliché.  And that kid learned not to throw rocks at creatures that are better than he is.  
I know this all sounds like bogus tough talk but if it had been my mother they were hurting I couldn’t have gone crazier.  I flipped out and it’s lucky for me that the kid was basically all right and would never snitch to the cops anyway or I’d still be in Juvee Detention learning how to be a criminal.  
However.  This kid was also all ganged-up and my life was no longer worth subway fare above a Hundred and Tenth Street.  So that’s how come I and Kota ended up at the beach in the fall when it’s cold as hell.  
It’s just as well.  My father had continued his downward slide.  Finally, he couldn’t handle having me around at all and he and my aunt agreed that I should live with her.  See, he thinks I look like my mom and it depresses him to have me around reminding him of her.  So I moved to Gail’s house in Asbury Park which is two blocks from the beach.  
AP  is on the Atlantic Ocean, if I haven’t been clear.  Like, right on it.  And it used to be a big vacation spot on the Northeast Coast, second only to Atlantic City.  But then in the Sixties things went downhill, the money people deserted and AP  became kind of a dump, and people didn’t want to vacation here anymore.  
There’s a Robert De Niro movie about AP  called City By The Sea.  That’s what they called AP  in the Glory Days.  The movie is about cops and drugs and it’s really depressing but you can see the way AP  was in the 90s.  Depressing. 
Asbury Park’s only now just making a comeback: they rebuilt the boardwalk, restaurants have moved in and there’s gay people from New York City fixing up houses.  And also people like my aunt Gail.  She came to Asbury Park because of being a Bruce Springsteen fan.  You know, Greetings from Asbury Park and all.  In fact she was involved in saving a lot of shrines to Bruce like Madame Marie’s which is a little concrete box on the boardwalk where once a fortune teller named Madame Marie did business.  At least that’s what the song says.  (Now I think in the summer months there’s a whole family of gypsies peering into the future from the tiny store front. )
Anyway, Gail came to check AP  out one winter and saw that: A.  Houses were cheap, and B.  They were about to get expensive.  So she bought a couple of houses, turned one over quick for a nice profit.  She kept the other house to live in. 
I like Gail.  She’s really cool and I like living with her.  It’s a lot better than having to navigate the highs and lows of my father.  But I can’t help feeling like I failed out of Son School or something.  Even though Yeah, yeah it’s not my fault. 
Anyway.  Most kids would think, Wow! I get to live at the beach! And I guess it is pretty good but, when we first got here, there was a lot of crap to go through and worrying about my father and – Let’s just say that the coolness of the beach was not so apparent to me.  What can I say?  I’m an ungrateful shithead. 
That morning, I finished breakfast and Kota and I said goodbye to Lydia.  We passed Madame Marie’s and left the boardwalk and crossed Ocean Avenue.  Then we walked past the Wonder Bar with the big crazy face of Tillie the Clown painted on the side.  Tillie’s face is kind of a trademark of Asbury Park and it’s creepy.  Why do people like clowns?  Or do they just feel they’re supposed to?  Did a clown ever make you laugh?  Really laugh?  
The old Paramount Theatre was on the beach to the right.  We passed Sunset Park on the left.  It’s just a little patch of moth eaten grass with a statue of the guy who invented AP  or something.  This is where sometimes Kota does her dog activity which is playing with a huge stick.  She doesn’t fetch of course.  She’s not a retriever.  But she will run and get the stick.  Then she lays down and chews it until I get there and say “Stick!”  Then she holds one end and gives me the other and she pulls and pulls.  It almost yanks my shoulder out of joint, but she has fun. 
We turned and walked down Sunset Avenue.  We passed Gail’s house.  I could see that her television was on in the living room/office at the corner of the house.  Gail always has the Weather Channel on the TV.  It’s like she’s forever expecting a hurricane.  Gail was probably already on the internet trying to make money in real estate.  That’s what Gail does, buys and sells houses. 
I and Kota usually walk to school.  After the first day, getting on the bus was just too much hassle.  The aisle was too narrow for Kota to turn around in and she got real nervous.  If Kota’s nervous, so am I and that’s not good for me. 
 So we walk.  It’s not that far anyway and it’s a good chance to chill out and think. 
The high school is in an old landmark building.  It looks like a high school in an old TV show, Mr.  Novak.  My mother used to watch reruns of that show on TV Land because she liked the actor on it, James Franciscus.  He was ridiculously good looking.  Yeah, like high school teachers all look like male models.  Right.  Hey, Mr.  Model! Mr.  Model! I lost my homework! My teachers have always been kind of hideous to look at.  
School was already crowded with kids arriving.  We walked up and they turned to stare.  I tried to make myself disappear but Kota just seemed to get bigger.  She moves like a queen, ignoring the rabble.  And the bums fall back in awe.  Sometimes I wonder if I own Kota or if it’s the other way around. 


chapter three


Coffee has to find its way to the sea sooner or later.  
I pushed open the door to the bathroom and peeked in.  It looked empty.  So I went in and saw I was wrong.  Isaiah Wallace was standing at the sink staring at himself in the mirror.  I knew his name because everyone in Asbury Park did.  Isaiah was the quarterback of the football team.  There wasn’t much going on in high school, but what there was, was wrapped up in the kid standing at the sink.  He was washing his hands, of course, and if you want to know.  He was wearing his blue and black football jersey with his number on it.  Number 11.  I started to back out. 
“S’okay white boy.  You allowed.”
I didn’t know what else to do so I went in.  Kota followed at my left side. 
“Whoa! Didn’t know you had the wolf wit’ you.”
“She’s not a wolf.  She’s a service dog.”
“Oh yeah.  It’s cause you sick.  Right?”
“Well.  Yeah.  If you have to put it that way.”
“Listen, small change.  I don’t have to do nothing in this school.  Sooner you get that, th –”  He stepped back glaring at Kota.  “What chew looking at Dawg?”  
Kota was staring at him, on guard because of his hostile tone. 
“It’s all right,”  I said, “She likes you.”
“Likes me?  She like to stare a knothole out of a tree wit’ them eyes.”
“No really.  That’s what she does when she likes somebody.”  
It was a lie, but so what if it’ll smooth things over.  Everybody wants to feel special, like Oh! She likes me.  It works with almost everybody, angry dangerous kids or star athletes. 
This is what I mean about being more experienced with dogs now: I was handling things differently. 
I said, “Want to pet her?”
He stepped back.  “That’s okay.”
“No come on.  She wants you to.”  Then I said, “Kota.  Make nice.”  Which is her command to relax and let someone touch her.  Otherwise she’s on duty and doesn’t like it. 
Isaiah bent down, put his hand out.  It’s huge.  That’s how he throws the ball so well.  Kota touched his hand with her nose.  Then Isaiah scratched her behind the ears.  She looked away, let him touch.  Isaiah Wallace smiled like a five year old.  Everybody likes to think they are THE ONE, The Beast Master.  What is this strange power I hold over the animal kingdom?  They think.  
“Yeah,”  I said, “She really likes you.”  
Isaiah straightened up.  He was big.  Really big.  He said, “She just a puppy dog, ain’t she.  ”
“Not really.  She could bite your hand off.”  I can’t stand for anybody to disrespect Kota. 
It was a long time before he smiled.  Then I said, “But you’re her friend now.”
“What your name?”  Before I could answer, there was a kind of thump in one of the toilet stalls.  We both looked.  Then Isaiah made the “crazy eyes”  face and said, “That Low Life.  Later, white boy.”  He walked out.  
I said, “My name’s Dean McCarthy.”  But he was already gone. 
I went into one of the stalls to pee.  I don’t like standing at the urinals with my back to the door.  Kota sat down to watch the door.  
Was “low life”  this kid’s name or a description of his status?  Down the row of toilets I heard “Low Life”  groan.  It was a funny sound more like someone clearing their throat.  Then I heard a piece of metal clink as it hit the floor.  I looked under the partition.  I could see sneakers and jeans a couple of stalls down.  Low Life was slumped half off the toilet.  On the floor was a bent steel spoon.  
“Hey?”  I called.  “Are you okay?”
There was another low throaty groan.  Then the kid fell off the toilet onto the floor.  I finished what I was doing and zipped up. 
The door to the stall was bolted so I reached under the door, grabbed the kid’s ankles and pulled him out.  His jeans were still buckled way low around his hips, gangsta style.  He clearly wasn’t in the stall to do the usual business.  He looked small and pitiful, almost dwarfish, as if what was happening to him was making him shrink before my eyes.  There was a bubble of spit on his lower lip quivering in the ray of sunlight making its way through the grimy windows.  Then he huffed out a shallow breath, and the bubble burst.  To crystallize for me what was happening, there was a needle still hanging from his arm. 
I called 911 on my phone.  The phone with Kota’s teeth marks in it. 
Later, the word went round that the kid they called “Low Life”  was DOA of an overdose of shooting-in-the-arm dope. 




chapter four


They questioned me in the principal’s office.  Kota was moving restlessly.  I tried to get her to sit but she kept getting up and turning to the door.  Sometimes she doesn’t like being closed in.  Especially when there’s tension. 
“Did you know this boy?”  said Mr.  Garrison who was the Dean of Discipline, the guy in charge of enforcement at school.  He was a big guy, the kind that goes for the military when they’re young.  He still shaved his head on the sides.  On top was a little brush flattop held up with sticky wax.  The principal, a man named Tate, sat by quietly staring at me.  
“No,”  I said. 
“No what?”
“No, I didn’t know him.”
“You’re not off to a very good start here are you, son?”
“Hey I was just taking a leak and the kid collapsed.  Give me a break.  Don’t you think I might be a little upset.”
“Take it easy.”
“Is he dead?”  I didn’t know at that point.  I let a little fear and anger creep into my voice and Kota stirred.  The two men shrank away from the big white dog.  I told her to lie down and be still.  Gail and Harold Neumann had already gone over the Americans with Disabilities Act with them when she registered me for school, so they had made no beef about Kota staying with me. 
Tate spoke up.  “Yes, I’m afraid he died.  I know it must be upsetting.  We just want to know what your relationship was with Mark.”  That was Low Life’s real name.  Mark. 
“The only relationship we had is I called 911 for him when he passed out.  That’s it.”
Garrison said, “Say ‘Sir’ when you talk to a teacher.”
“That’s it, sir.”  What was that I said about keeping my mouth shut?  I’d learned that lesson.  I just hadn’t put it into practice.  And I felt a little angry.  That temper again, getting me in trouble.  Kota nudged my leg and whimpered quietly. 
“What’s the matter with her,”  said Garrison. 
“Nothing.  She’s just nervous cause of all the trouble.”  
“What are you sweating for?”  Garrison again. 
“I just had a kid OD while I was trying to pee.  It’s real upsetting.  Speaking of which, I don’t feel so well.  Sir.”  Tate stood up. 
“All right, son.  You can go back to class.”
We got out fast, once he said that.  Kota kept taking my wrist in her mouth and pulling gently.  I was focused on getting away from the authority and back to the crowd.  So I didn’t get it.  One of the problems I have with the onset of a seizure is I don’t recognize what’s happening.  
The fit was coming on fast by the time I realized what Kota was trying to say.  I smelled coconut.  Who’s eating coconut?  Then I had the unmistakable feeling of falling, like the first big dip on a rollercoaster.  I went to one knee and then rolled over onto my back.  
The worst thing is, I never accept it but keep fighting the seizure hoping I can stop it.  So I see things sometimes, like walls tumbling down or the floor warping and flowing like liquid.  Sometimes, I just think a weird version of some normal thing that’s been on my mind. 
And sometimes I see things I don’t understand until later. 
This time, as the seizure pulled the shade down over my consciousness, I saw the high school marching band coming straight at me.  Each kid wore a fluffy plumed hat and carried a huge three foot long hypodermic needle.  As they marched, they pumped the plungers like trombone slides, forcing black and blue narcotics into their hearts.  And a black and blue cobra rose up behind them, giant, towering over the school, its forked tongue flickering, tasting the air. 
Black and blue.  The old school colors.  Rah. 



chapter five


My mother wrote: My body has become embarrassingly unreliable.  I can’t count on it for the simplest things, but it tries.  I’ve got to be more patient with Sister Ass.  
Brother Ass is what Saint Francis of Assisi called his body, the thing he rode around in during his stay on Earth.  My mom was reading a lot of spiritual stuff that year, getting ready to die.  
When I came out of the fit on the cool marble floor, Kota was washing my face with her big warm tongue.  I opened my eyes and a face was hovering over me like a big brown Good Year blimp.  I didn’t recognize him right away.  I often can’t recognize faces for a while after a fit.  But I've since figured out it was Principal Tate.  He was wringing his hands.  Literally.  Worried about a law suit, I guess. 
Just behind him in the blur I could make out a crowd of kids.  They were gawking and excited.  A seizure makes a nice break in the boredom of the school day… as long it’s somebody else down on the floor quivering and grinding his teeth.  
I checked the edges of my teeth with my tongue.  Nothing seemed broken.  I hadn’t chewed my tongue up either which was nice.  Even better, I hadn’t peed my pants which sometimes happens.  I put my hand to my face.  I tasted leather. 
“You’re all right,”  said Tate quickly.  
Garrison the Enforcer was right behind him.  “Luckily one of the students knew what to do,”  he said.  Kota looked in his direction and woofed a warning.  Garrison stepped back.  “Gloria put her wallet in your mouth to keep you from swallowing your tongue.”  
Just for the record: Don’t do this.  You can’t swallow your tongue.  Shoving things in a person’s mouth can just cause more trouble. 
Garrison motioned to this person, Gloria, Student Neurosurgeon, and the vague shape of a girl came closer and I heard her voice.  She made comforting sounds but it was the kind of stuff you’d say to the Elephant Man, the words kind and caring, but the tone of voice shaky and freaked out.  I tried to see her face, but it was too dark in the hallway and my eyes still wouldn’t focus at that length and I gave up.  
I mumbled that I was sorry and thanks.  Now I wanted everyone to go away and let me lay there.  It’s interesting how comfortable a stone floor can be.  Kota would take care of me.  Her big white head was near my face, her warm breath hitting me in short damp puffs.  I brush her teeth every night so her breath is sweet. 
The fit goes away little by little and it takes a long time to get yourself together again.  I gave up trying to make sense of things and settled back.  They were worried all right.  My lawyer, Harold Neumann, could make a case that Tate and Garrison had brought the seizure on with their interrogation so soon after Low Life, “a fellow student, ladies and gentlemen, a classmate had perished practically in my client’s arms.”  Let them worry about that.  I was chill on the chill chill chill.  Just.  Chilling. 
Then I heard my aunt’s voice echoing down the hallway.  She was chewing somebody out already.  I smiled and went to sleep on the cool marble floor. 




chapter six


The day after you’ve had a grand mal seizure in your new high school, don’t expect life as usual.  
To begin with it frightens people.  A seizure is basically a matter of brain cells firing when they aren’t supposed to.  But people don’t like to see a human being change like that.  In the Dark Ages they thought you were possessed by the devil or something.  We haven’t progressed a lot further.  
As Kota and I walked into the lunchroom that afternoon, people nudged each other and whispered.  Nobody called me Seizure Boy or anything but they weren’t hollering “sit at our table!”  either.  Like I said, fear.  It’s not good to creep people out.  They might get ideas about doing something to make you go away.  I just held onto Kota’s leash, got my plate of Mysterious Casserole and headed for the empty table in a far corner of the room.  
Why is school always like an old prison movie?  One of my favorites is White Heat.  Check it out; you’ll see what I mean.  James Cagney plays a crazed killer who has seizures.  I identify.  Kota grew up in a prison so she feels right at home in high school.  
I was pioneering a new category of Untouchable at my new school.  There were the studying nerds (the Asian kids, with a sprinkling of white and black kids) the stoner dope addicts in training, the Special Ed class, the main population of black kids and… me.  A few Hispanic kids in the school were also searching for a place to eat but avoided even looking in my direction.  Nobody would sit with me and Kota.  New Rule.  
And that’s when the Girl Who Looked Like Natalie Wood came along and asked if she could sit down.  
Actually, first she bent down eye to eye with Kota and said, “Hello, beautiful.”  Kota licked her nose.  I didn’t even tell Kota to make nice.  She went rogue.  See Isaiah?  That’s what my dog does when she likes you.  Then the Girl turned to me smiling ironically.  
“Is this seat taken,”  she said.  The table is totally empty, remember.  I just stared with my mouth hanging open.  
People don’t much know who Natalie Wood is anymore.  Well, kids don’t.  The only reason I know is that when my mother was dying of cancer, she didn’t do much but watch old movies.  And I’ve kept it up since she died, watching Turner Classic Movie channel when I can’t sleep.  I watch and think, Mom probably watched this and did she like it or not?  
I know, it’s so self consciously Retro to like old black and white movies.  Relax.  Instead, it could be Swedish rock bands you never heard of.  Anyway, I like the old movies because they’re about people and not just fake looking computer effects and explosions and robots.  And the people are cool.  Like James Dean and Marlon Brando and… Natalie Wood.  Natalie Wood was one of my Mom’s favorite stars, especially in Rebel Without A Cause co-starring James Dean.  My mother named me Dean after James Dean. 
Anyway.  That’s what I was thinking with my jaw hanging down: She looks just like Natalie Wood.  Not that Gloria DeMaio was as beautiful as Natalie Wood.  Natalie Wood was a movie star, for Christ sakes.  And Gloria had lived a harder life in her few years and it showed in her face.  So Gloria didn’t really look exactly like Natalie Wood.  But for real life?  In Asbury Park?  Gloria looked just like a movie star to me. 
“Hello?”  she said, snapping her fingers in front of my eyes.  “Anybody home?”  I jumped and stood up making like a butler or something.  Please sit down, Miss! Right this way, your Ladyship! What an idiot.  She laughed and sat down.  You’d be surprised how well this kind of clueless knucklehead thing will work with a girl, if you’re sincere about it.  They take pity on us, I guess.  But you really have to be sincere.  You can’t fake it. 
“I’m Gloria DeMaio.  I know who you are.  Everybody does after yesterday.  Who’s this?”  She leaned over and touched her nose to Kota’s.  Kota licked her again and I felt jealous.  
“That’s Kota.  And technically she’s working.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.  You mean, like he’s supposed to be watching if you have epilepsy again.  You know, he’s really amazing—”
“She.  Kota’s a girl.  ”
“Really?  Oh yeah, I see that now.  But see, I came along just as you went down on the floor.  And Kota, he – she went and got your phone out of your pocket.  It was unbelievable.”
“Yeah.  Phone’s pre-programmed to call my aunt Gail.”
“Oh - My God.  And then what?”
“Well it’s a smart phone with GPS tracking and, using the internet, my aunt can see where I am.”
“Incredible.  You know Kota stood guard over you?  For a long time she wouldn’t let anyone come near.  I was able to put my wallet in your mouth while she was chewing on the phone.  That was me.  I heard you were supposed to do that to keep you from swallowing your tongue.”  She was really proud of this. 
“Thanks, but listen, you shouldn’t do that in the future.”  Kota looked at me.  What are you saying?  You think you have a future with a girl like this?  “Not that I- I mean I don’t do that all the time.  And you wouldn’t be there.  I’m not assuming anything, is what I mean.”
She nodded impatiently.  “I know.  But why shouldn’t I do that?  Won’t you hurt yourself?”
“It doesn’t really help.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged.  “You can’t really swallow your tongue.  And it can make things worse.”  
Now she was disappointed.  Here she had been the hero and I’m ruining it for her.  The old Dean McCarthy juju at work again.  She was about to remember she had to get her teeth cleaned or something.  I was prepared for it.  Girls have that reaction once they’ve seen you lying on the floor quivering like jelly on a plate.  
But Gloria was different.  Different in every way. 
“What should you do?”  she said. 
“Call the EMS.  And maybe turn the person’s head to the side so they don’t choke.”
“You mean if they puke?”
“Mostly just to let the drool out.”
“You’re embarrassed.”  
I could feel my face was red.  “Wouldn’t you be?”  
She thought about it.  “Maybe,”  she said.  “But what’s the worst can happen?  The creeps see you drool.  So what?  There’s worse things.  Believe me.”
“Tell me about it.  I could have peed my pants.”
“No shit!”  
“I know.  It’s gross.”
“Bull shit.  I mean,”  she said.  She was acting as if it would have been cool if I’d wet my pants.  “I mean, it’s just bodies.  I think it’s good to know what to do in an emergency.  Like my father.  He’s an alcoholic.  And other stuff.  That’s where I got that puking thing.”  She paused and looked at her cold lunch.  “My father.  Now that’s gross,”  she said quietly.  
She looked off across the lunchroom where kids were looking our way and discussing us.  I thought, most people don’t say things like that, My father’s an alcoholic.  Most people lie and pretend. 
“You’re taking a chance,”  I said.  “Sitting here with Seizure Boy.  Won’t this ruin your coolness with the school.”
“What coolness?  I don’t know if you noticed, but this is basically a black school.  We’re white and by definition not cool.  Add to that my family situation.  I was hoping being your friend would be a step up the ladder.”
Being my friend?  My mouth went open and closed but nothing came out. 
“Besides, Dean,”  she said, drawling out my name comically, “I like your t-shirt.  Who are The Ramones?”  
Kota woofed.  She knows your name. 
I told her how my father was a gofer (got coffee and stuff) for The Ramones once at a place called CBGB’s when he was just a kid.  Then I had to explain what CBGB’s was, that it was an important music club in The City before we were born.  
Gloria just said, “Oh man.  New York.  Someday I’m going there.  What did you come here for?  All I want to do is leave.”
I just shrugged.  What could I say?  It wasn’t exactly my decision.  And Gail told me never to mention braining the kid in Manhattan.  A silence started and stretched out like a math class or something.  I put a spoonful of Mysterious Casserole in my mouth.  It was even worse cold. 
“You didn’t eat your lunch,”  I said. 
“Who eats this shit?”  Gloria said, laughing.  And then that silence again.  I racked my brain for something cool to say. 
“Thanks for sitting here.”  
Kota looked at me.  Now that’s cool. 
“Think nothing of it, Dean, my man.  Besides I like your dog.”
“Love my dog,”  I said.  And then I started to turn red again. 
“Reeeeeeally,”  she said leaning toward me and batting her eyelashes.  “You’re turning all red.”
I’m an idiot.  “It’s something Al Pacino said in a movie.  This girl says ‘I like your dog and Al says ‘Love my dog.”
“Al?  Your buddy Al?  Who are you, man?”
“I’ve just watched too many old movies.”  That’s all I said.  I was already Seizure Boy, I didn’t want to be Cancer Mother Kid on top of it.  
She looked at me nodding and smiling.  “It was Serpico,”  she said finally.  “Starring Al Pacino.  Actually, the girl says ‘I like your garden’ and Al says ‘Love my garden. ’”
“Yeah.  You’re right,”  I said.  “I just got that one wrong from being under pressure.  How do you know that?  Nobody knows this old movie stuff better than me.”  
“I know a few things.  It’s what comes of hiding in your room with a TV all your life.”  
“Al is so cool.”
“I know,”  she said.  “People think of him as this old guy but he was so beautiful when he was young.  And so cool.”  
“So cool, right?”
“Did you ever see The Wild One?”  She held out her palm.  “Give me five, and ooze it on out.”  I did, not slapping but rubbing our palms together real slow, the way they do in The Wild One.  Gloria squealed happily.  It’s more fun that way and it gave me a chance to really feel her hand.  It only occurs to me now that that was what she was really doing, giving me a chance to touch her.  I’m so slow sometimes. 
“A Brando fan too, I see.  ‘What are you rebelling against?’”  Quoting the movie at me. 
“’What have you got?’”  I answered. 
“All right!”  she said.  ‘Skin me, pops.  And this time…’”  
“’Ooze it on out,’”  I said.  We laughed and we did it again, touching palms and sliding away slowly.  When you’ve got your own thing, something nobody knows about but you, the only thing better than that is finding someone else who can appreciate how cool it all is. 
Touching, pressing her smooth dry hand.  We laughed together.  I could feel my heart beat, pounding like a drum in my ears.  
Isaiah Wallace walked past followed by an entourage of thumb suckers and knuckle draggers. 
“Hey! Hey! Hey!”  he called out.  “How you doing, Kota?”  He bent over to pet Kota and she tolerated it.  She knew what was necessary.  Isaiah laughed the way an actor does in a bad play when nothing’s funny.  He was definitely onstage for his adoring fans.  Isaiah threw a “See you later, man”  at me and my stock in school spiked through the roof. 
Gloria said, “Whoa! Look at you.  Talk about cool! Isaiah Wallace is your good bud?  I knew you’d be good for me.”  Gloria touched my knee.  I couldn’t believe this day.  It was the best lunch of my life. 
We were smiling goofily at each other when a Latina chick with an attitude walked up.  She was wearing jeans and boots and a flannel shirt.  Her hair was dark and kind of short and she wore it combed back on one side over her ear.  She had one large gold hoop stuck through her earlobe. 
“Oh, hey.  This is Ramona.  Ramona this is Dean.”
Ramona scowled at me and just lifted her chin in answer.  It was clear I wasn’t worth talking to.  She was acting very possessive too.  
“Let’s go, Gloria,”  she said.  Gloria stood up. 
“Well, see you around, Dean McCarthy.  Welcome to the Dollhouse.  Stay away from the locker room.  They really do stuff you in a locker here if they catch you.  Cool dog or no.  Somebody saw it in a movie once.  And a tradition was born.  In this school the worst is usually the standard.”  She was so cool. 
And with that she walked out of my life. 


chapter seven


Out of my life.  
Or so I thought in my despair and negativity.  But as I and Kota were leaving at the end of the school day, she was waiting for us. 
“Hey, Serpico,”  she said, and I was hurt thinking she didn’t remember my name.  “You! Serpico! Where you going?”
“It’s Dean,”  I said. 
“I know.  It’s what you call badinage.  Know that word?”
“I think so.”
“It’s like repartee.  How about that word?”
“It means wise-ass.”
“Very good, Mr.  Dean McCarthy.  You’ll find that if you want to get educated here, you gots to educate yourself.  What are you doing tonight?”  I shrugged and she said, “Come out tonight.  Meet me on the boardwalk under the Casino.  We’ll hang out.  And bring your dog.”  I nodded dumbly.  I’d be there. 
Her friend Ramona with the bad attitude appeared and called her impatiently.  Gloria pet Kota and walked away.  I stared at her like some kind of mouth-breather.  I’m glad I couldn’t see my face just then.  Pathetic.  When I snapped out of it I turned to see Kota laughing at me.  
I said, “What?”  
You know. 
“It’s not a date.  We’re just hanging out.”
Kota didn’t move.  She sat like a stone idol.  Her ice gray eyes staring a hole in me. 
**************
It was dark when Gloria finally showed up.  I and Kota had been waiting for over an hour.  Kota was wearing her harness so that nobody would hassle us.  It says Service Dog on a little brass plate.  Of course assholes kept making cracks like, “What kind of service?  Room service?”  Funny stuff like that. 
It was the night before Halloween.  But it was cold and there was no one on the Boardwalk.  A couple of the good restaurants were still open, but most stuff was closed.  The vacationers were gone and it was locals now.  
There was a pitiful guy dressed in a clown suit selling little bits of junk on the part of the boardwalk that passed through the ruined old Casino.  He had on a red wig that was so old and filthy it looked like a used dish scrubber.  He had a terrible clown makeup plastered like white goo on his face.  And a big red mouth that reached from ear to ear.  He had smudged black circles around his eyes.  I guess he was supposed to be like the Joker in Batman.  But that was it, no costume or anything.  Just blue jeans so greasy and old they looked black and a denim jacket that was the same.  So pathetic and creepy. 
He was circling around on a pink girl’s bike ringing a little bell on the handle bars.  The bike was too small for him.  His big black crud-crusted boots completely covered the pedals.  
He’d disappear from sight into the shadows and all you could hear was the bell.  Jing-jing! When he was out of sight somehow he wasn’t pathetic.  The hair stood up on my neck and I had the instinct to get away from there.  Kota didn’t like him either.  She woofed a steady stream of low warnings.  
“I know.  I see him,”  I said.  But she didn’t stop.  I don’t know what he was selling out of the basket on the front of his bike.  It looked like cheap toys and souvenirs, stuff like that.  But he never seemed to sell anything to anybody. 
That’s when Gloria finally appeared and I forgot all about the Clown.  
She was wearing a cool leather jacket and her jet dark hair was shining.  If the real Natalie Wood had risen from the dead, I wouldn’t have looked twice.  My eyes were stuck to Gloria.  
She was with Ramona again.  I groaned.  Is this a permanent third wheel we’re looking at here?  Ramona also wore a leather jacket but she couldn’t wear it like Gloria DeMaio. 
“Yo, Dean!”  said Gloria.  
I smiled and waved.  Kota said woof and even wagged her tail.  Kota is always a total Marine and never does those things with anyone.  Except with Gloria.  
I put my hand on Kota’s neck.  “Traitor.  And you’re on duty now.  Don’t forget.  Don’t let me get caught short here.”  
Kota looked at me and you could see her turn serious.  Even so, she let Gloria make a fuss over her.  It’s what reassures me about Gloria: Kota approves of her. 
Anyway it’s cool because after Gloria kneels down and hugs and kisses Kota, she throws her arms around me and hugs me tight.  Like so tight I’m a little freaked out.  She was shaking.  It was like getting a hug from an electrical wire.  
And that Ramona, if eyes were daggers, I’m bleeding right then.  What’s up with her?
Gloria laughed and I knew then she was high.  I’m an expert at spotting the signs thanks to my father.  
Gloria said, “Okay, Wankstas.  Let’s go to the Hotel.”  And she took our arms, Ramona’s and mine and pulled us away, like she’s Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.  Thing is, who am I, Tin Man or the Lion?  And who is Ramona?  The Wicked Witch?  
Now that’s unkind.  I apologize.  Withdrawn. 
Then Ramona speaks.  “Mami, why we got to hang with this fucking retard and his stupid dog?”
No, she’s riding a broomstick as far as I’m concerned.  Gloria let go of me and turned on her. 
“Bitch, you don’t have the bill of sale on me.  If you can’t be nothing but a hater, get lost and get on with your life! I’m sick of this shit with you.”  
Ramona’s eyes opened wide and if I’d never seen total hurt before I saw it then.  Tears filled her lower eyelids and quivered there a moment before they fell streaking down her cheeks.  
I almost felt sorry for her.  But then she started in on this whiny tantrum.  She even stamped her foot.  Gloria grabbed her by the arm and hauled her away.  Gloria was five feet four but she practically lifted Ramona off her feet.  
I couldn’t hear what they said.  But I could see the dumb show and it wasn’t pretty.  Ramona was really crying now, pleading.  Gloria had her finger in the girl’s face.  Finally, I could see that Gloria told her friend to beat it.  She folded her arms on it, just staring as Ramona pleaded some more.  Then Ramona turned and walked away.  Her shoulders were moving up and down, sobbing.  I would have felt sorry except she called Kota stupid.  And she was trying to ruin my night.  My night?  My life, as it seemed right then.  My heart was unchained to see her walk away. 
It’s weird.  Ramona’s world is crashing and I feel better than I ever felt in my life.  How does that work?  Do others have to lose so that we might win?  And do I care?
Gloria turned and walked back to me.  You could see she was still pissed.  “Let’s get out here,”  she said. 
I could see Ramona over her shoulder watching us.  The Face of Jealousy. 




chapter eight 


The Unfinished Hotel on Ocean Avenue is just that.  A big hole with a concrete foundation.  There are bare steel construction rods rising up out of stunted concrete pillars like drowning men’s fingers.  The cratering economy bankrupted the company that was building the hotel.  Now it’s like a graveyard for dreams of wealth or something.  Kids hang out around it smoking substance or cigarettes and drinking Four Loko and sweet malt beverages.  The site’s all cleaned up and it isn’t that dangerous but the cops burp their sirens and chase the kids away whenever they swing by.  
Gloria led us to a far corner with a partial view of the boardwalk beyond the miniature golf course.  The streetlights had come on.  It was the shank of the evening in the funky off-season poor man’s beach town.  We sat on a low block of concrete and I took a bit of Pupperoni out of my pocket.  All dogs have a jones for Pupperoni.  Kota stared at it, her big jaws working, slurping the drool. 
“Want to give Kota her treat?”
“Oh, yeah,”  she said and held the treat out for Kota.  “Who wants a reward for a job well done?”
Kota reached out and delicately removed the treat leaving all of Gloria’s fingers intact.  Gloria said Awwwww and hugged Kota again.  
“Whosa bess doggie wog?”  This time Kota looked at me from within Gloria’s chokehold and I laughed.  
“Usually she won’t stand for all this hugging and baby talk but she’s taking it from you.  She likes you.”
Gloria didn’t like to be caught driving while uncool.  She looked at Kota and said in a level grownup voice, “Is that true?  You don’t like baby talk?”
Kota said woof.  
“Okay.  I can do that.”  She reached out and pet Kota slowly, gravely.  A lot of the fun was gone out of it for her.  She dialed it way down. 
“I didn’t mean to spoil it,”  I said.  “You can talk however you want.  I was just pointing out that she likes you.”
Gloria shook her head.  “No.  I was an asshole.  I hate it when people do that to me.  She deserves respect.”
Woof. 
Gloria laughed and dug into her purse.  She came out with a pint bottle full of purple liquid.  
“Want some?”  she said, offering the bottle. 
“What is it?”
“It’s syrple.  Cough syrup and vodka and sprite.”
“Jesus.”
“Just a little vodka.  Want some?”
“I can’t drink or do drugs,”  I said. 
“Because of your seizure thing?”
I shrugged.  “It messes with my medication.”
She said, “Do you mind if I indulge?”
As if it would matter what I minded.  And I was right because she was unscrewing the cap before I could gesture be my guest.  
All the kids lurking in the Hotel were smoking and drinking.  The atmosphere was a mixture of bleary manic drunkenness.  I’ve been sober watching people get stoned or drunk all my life and I’ve developed a cold neutral attitude.  It’s what people do.  Until they get older and get sense (or have a car accident and get their head whacked) and save themselves from liver disease.  Or they’re like my father and never stop but go down and down.  It doesn’t help to moralize about it.  If it didn’t contribute to my having seizures, I’d probably do the same thing.  Unmedicated reality is harsh. 
Gloria came out with a pack of Marlboros and offered me one. 
“No thanks.”
“Aw come on.  Don’t make me die alone.”
“If you put it that way.”  I took one and she lit it.  I don’t have bad associations with smoking.  Mom smoked all the time.  
Well, she’s dead now, from cancer, so that’s one real bad association.  Thanks for remembering that.  
Then like she’s reading my mind, Gloria says, “So what about the rest of your family?”  And so I told her most of the story.  She was especially interested in my mom, asking lots of questions.  When I was done she nodded and said, “Edit out the bad stuff and keep the good.  You’ve got some good memories.  Wish I did.  My mother left us a long time ago.  I hardly remember her at all.  ”
We talked about everything then: movies old and new, music we liked, and people and things we thought were cool.  We liked so much of the same stuff, we were just nodding half the time saying, “  I know.  I know.”  Again and again. 
 It’s so great when you meet somebody and they get you.  It doesn’t happen very often maybe not ever for some people.  It’s like you were alone with all these feelings and cool observations which nobody ever appreciates because you’ve been afraid to tell.  And then out of the blue sky, there’s this other person and she already knows so much about you and she digs it all even the parts she disagrees with and she laughs when you argue about it and touches you, encouraging you to say more because she’s been wanting this same thing too, not to be alone and cut off.  
Never mind.  Strike that.  It was just a cool time. 
All along, Gloria kept sipping her purple codeine/vodka concoction and pointing out different characters around us.  The stupid clown guy was slowly wheeling his bicycle around and up and down the edges of Ocean Ave.  
“What’s up with the old creep on the bike,”  I said.  
“That’s the Good Humor man.”  
He’s a drug dealer.  Kota lay down at our feet.  
“What’s he sell?”
“Crank and downers mostly.  He’s with bikers, The Demons.”  
He was ringing the little jingly bell on the handlebars, like you’d see on a little kid’s bike.  It was a weird collision of associations: innocence and corruption.  Ice cream and poison. 
“What’s with the clown thing?
Gloria shrugged.  “Disguise?  He pretends he’s here to make balloon animals or something.  But he scares the little kids away and makes their mommies go yuck.  Terrible balloon animals anyway.”
It’s not so bad as disguises go.  Wanted: Creepy the Clown.  Bring in the usual suspects.  And fifteen or twenty dope dealing clowns pop out of a Volkswagen to the delight of the crowd. 
“I don’t get it,”  I said, watching him slowly peddle in wobbly circles.  “Nobody goes near him.”  
“Oh yeah they do,”  said Gloria.  “Watch.  But don’t stare.”
So I kept him in the corner of my eye and sure enough a young black kid in a black North Face jacket ran up and Creepy the Clown took something out of his hand.  Then he peddled back and handed something to the kid who took off running into the dark. 
“See that?”  said Gloria.  “That used to be Low Life’s job.  But he got to be using product too much.  They don’t like that.  Li’l Funky Butt there don’t have that problem.”
“Funky Butt?  What kind of nickname is that?”
Gloria chuckled and dragged on her cigarette.  It was down to the filter and she stubbed it out.  
“Gimme,”  she said, taking the burning cigarette out my hand.  “You haven’t touched that.  No sense in wasting it.”  She dragged on the Marlboro and the glow lit her face.  File under Memories For When I Get Old.  
“His name’s Franklin,”  she said “Franklin B- something.  He tried to get everybody to call him F. B.  But nobody would ‘cause he’s a total wanksta.  And one day in the lunch room, he’s talking about himself in the third person.  You know: FB says dis! FB says dat! And one of the kids shouts out ‘You FB alright! Funky.  Butt. ’ And that was that.  He was Funky Butt from then on.”
“You can’t nickname yourself.”
“A sad and irrefutable fact, my friend.”
I smiled.  “Irrefutable.  That’s impressive.”
“Webster’s dictionary, Bro,”  she said leaning towards me, “It’s basic equipment.”  
And then she kissed me.  
Nothing feature film, you understand.  Just a friendly peck on the lips.  But my heart went into my throat.  And she could tell because she smiled in triumph.  A girl like Gloria knows the effect she has and needs to have it reconfirmed at regular intervals.  
And of course, I didn’t know what to do with it.  Here she’s looking at me waiting for my smooth move or whatever and I’m about to pass out from… What is it that happens to a person when you get close to what you want, and it’s offered, and you can’t step up to receive it?  Not if your life depends on it.  Why?  What can happen?  You’ll be happy for a change?
Finally Gloria shrugged and looked away. 
“You read, don’t you?  I mean like books.”
“I know how.”
“Come on,”  she said.  “I mean seriously read.  Like Dostoyevsky and, and Charles Dickens.”
“Well, maybe not Dostoyevsky.  But yeah, I read books.  How else are you going to find things out?”
“That’s what I think,”  she said quietly, as she watched her peers mess themselves up in an abandoned construction site.  “People catch you reading a book here, they think there’s something wrong with you.  Like you’re trying to… I don’t know what.  Think you’re special or something.  You don’t think that do you?”  She looked at me, wanting a real answer. 
And of course I just made a crack.  “Don’t think what?  That I’m special?  I have ‘special needs. ’”
She sighed and said, “You’re not that funny, you know.”
“I know.  And no, I don’t think there’s something wrong with you.  There’s a lot more to life than this little beach town.  Clearly.”
She and I looked at each other for a while and it was a nice feeling because for a moment we weren’t tense or weird or anything.  Just comfortable with each other.  That’s rare.  Kota knew it was happening and made the high whine she makes when she needs attention.  She doesn’t like to feel left out.  
“All right,”  I said, to Kota, “We remember you.”  I scratched behind her ears.  She likes that. 
“There,”  Gloria said.  “See?  There he goes again.”
Funky Butt ran up to Creepy Clown and made the handoff. 
“You know these guys?”
“My father does,”  she said, frowning, “He buys OXY from them.  This group of Demons was run out of the real Demons gang in Florida or someplace down south.  They’re orphans.  Pariahs.  How’s that for a word?  You know, like Hell’s Angels would spit on these guys.  But my father knows lots of losers.”  
I know what you mean. 
**********
We sat there about two hours.  Gloria sipping on her bottle of syrple and smoking.  And me smoothing the fur on Kota’s neck, wishing it was Gloria I was petting.  But the moment has passed and that boat sailed, sucker. 
When the syrple was gone, she stood up and said, “We better go now.  Round about this time things get weird here.”  And like right on cue, a girl in the dark screamed and kids started running away.  A kid ran by and a friend grabbed his arm and asked what was up. 
“Some kid got cut.  Tweakers fighting over the last of the dope.  You better get out of here.  They called for EMS.”
Gloria looked at me and shrugged.  “Told ya.  Walk me home.  I’m a little wobbly.”  We walked away up Ocean Ave.  With Kota on one side of her and me on the other, we managed to keep her on a straight line.  
I looked for him but the Creepy Clown and his shadow were gone. 
By the time we walked to Gloria’s house, Gloria had sobered up a little and opened a new pack of Marlboros.  
I was kind of turned around.  I kept losing track of where the ocean lay.  Let’s face it, I was lost.  Gloria tried to explain where we were, where “Deal”  was (It’s a town. ), where Deal Lake is and what tribes occupied the different towns on the Jersey Shore none of which made any sense to me.  When you grow up on the island of Manhattan you really only have to know two things: Bronx up, Battery down.  
Gloria pulled me into the shadows. 
“That’s it,”  she said pointing with her chin at a ramshackle old bungalow.  She pulled me across the street, staying in the shadows.  Then she crept up to a side window and, using an old cinder block as a step, was able to peek inside.  Through the window coated with grime, I could see a man staggering around the room.  There was a TV on providing the only light.  
Gloria slipped and the block fell with a thump.  The man inside might be drunk but there was nothing wrong with his hearing.  He turned and lurched to the window. 
“Go!”  Gloria whispered.  She pulled me back along the side of the house.  We went across a cluttered backyard of packed down dirt and stones and through a hedge.  On the other side was a rundown little garden with a stone bench in a neighbor’s backyard.  The house was dark.  We sat down and Gloria fumbled out a cigarette.  
Kota was nervous now and making a high whining noise.  I told her to sit and kept my voice calm.  Kota can feel how the people around her feel.  If I’m calm she’s calm.  If I get worked up, she knows something’s wrong. 
“Lie down, Kota.”  She did and lay her head between her big paws.  “What’s wrong?”  I said.  
“He’s not passed out yet.  Stay with me okay?”  She sort of spat out a lungful of smoke and kissed me.  
I didn’t like the way she was moving her mouth on mine, her lips were hard, tense.  It wasn’t like the little kiss before.  We shared something there.  This was fake and drunk and like she was throwing me a tip with money that was too dirty to put in her purse. 
“You don’t need to do that, Gloria.”
“You don’t like it, faggot?”  Her eyes were suddenly bugging with rage.  I kind of expected a punch in the nose, she seemed that angry.  
This happens when people drink.  Living with my father you learn how to handle it some.  I just looked at her a moment. 
“What’s wrong?”  I said.  “I’m your friend.”  I tried to just be calm, not criticize, not condone, not do one thing or the other and I was lucky.  The anger drained out of her as fast as it had appeared.  Usually they don’t even remember who they’re talking too.  She curled into a fetal position with her head in my lap and started to cry. 
People are messed up.  
We didn’t talk for a long time.  She just lay there shoulders heaving and making my leg wet with tears.  Finally she stopped and just like that it was over: she’d had her cry and the pipes were cleared.  She sat up and blew her nose.  And then she kissed my cheek and we went back through the hedge into her backyard.  She spied on her old man and saw that he was out cold.  If he’s mixing Oxycodone with alcohol he’ll be lucky to ever wake up again.  
Gloria kissed my cheek again and went inside.  
And that fast, I was alone.  I stood in the dark with my dog and listened but there was nothing.  It was over. 
So we started walking.  I was happy and freaked out at the same time.  I hardly paid attention where we were going. 
Luckily, Kota wasn’t lost.  She got us home. 
Gail was waiting up.  She was wearing an enormous blue caftan and was carrying a glass of red wine.  The Weather Channel was on.  She gave Kota a biscuit and a piece of the chicken she’d had at the Waves.  Then she made me eat the carry out dinner I wasn’t home to eat earlier in the evening. 
While I ate Gail gave me the third degree about Who What and Where. 
Then she gave me the bottom line: “Don’t get this girl pregnant.  Do us all a favor.”  Gail gets to the point. 
“Gail!”  I said.  “She’s just hanging with me because I’m the newest freak, that’s all.”
Gail looked weird all of a sudden.  Her eyes opened wide.  Her mouth opened to talk but she didn’t say anything.  She took a long drink of the red.  It looked like melted rubies in the kitchen light. 
Then she said, “Don’t think that way if you can help it, Dean.”
“What way?”
“That ‘freak’ stuff.  I know it’s tempting, but don’t think that about yourself.  I’ll guarantee you this girl doesn’t think that way.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.  You don’t even know her.”
“I’ll bet I do.  I know what she thinks and what she’s up to.  I may be old to you but I’m not blind.”
I twisted like a torture victim.  “Is that all?”
“No.  You should look in the mirror sometime and try to see yourself with her eyes.”
“What?!”  I said.  I was burning red in the face now.  
“Another thing.  Does this girl have a mother that will tell her what’s what?”
“No.”
“Does she have anybody?”
“I didn’t interrogate her Gail.”  I didn’t like the way my voice was sounding. 
“Then send her to me.  I’ll set her straight.”
“Gail.”  My face was so red I thought it would split down the middle like an overripe tomato.  Why don’t they know they shouldn’t do this?
“Well, I’m getting you a bunch of condoms.  Carry them with you.  And use ‘em”
“God, this is killing me.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.  Unlike some families, we don’t practice abstinence.  We do safe sex.  We have a lot fewer teenage pregnancies and diseases that way.”  
Later in the bathroom, I looked in the mirror.  I saw the same old stupid face I always do.  I don’t know what people are talking about sometimes. 
It’s so humiliating to be young. 




chapter nine


The next morning was déjà vu all over again, as they say.  I was sitting with Kota on the boardwalk looking at the ocean, which was our habit by this time.  I heard the golf cart pull up behind me.  I didn’t turn.  Then I heard it drive away and the old cop from the morning before sat down next to me.  
“You were the one that found the kid OD’d in the high school toilet?”
“Why ask, if you already know?”
“Look.  We got off to a bad start.  My name is Warner.”  He held out his hand.  It hung there until I shook it.  I told him my name.  “Did you know him, Dean?”
“Low Life?”
“His name was Mark.  Do you know his friends?”
“No.  I just got here in August.  I don’t know anybody.”  Except Gloria and maybe Isaiah Wallace.  And now Funky Butt the new drug runner.  And I wasn’t going to drag them into this. 
Warner had paused, thinking how to get through to me, I guess.  Or how to trick me. 
“Do you know what a ‘hot shot’ is?”  he said. 
I shrugged vaguely. 
“It’s an overdose.  Mark was a tweaker, a meth addict.”
“I know what a tweaker is,”  I said.  
Can’t you just shut up, Dean?  
“Then you know he wasn’t likely to be shooting pure heroin.”  Warner gave me his card and stood up.  “That’s got all my numbers on it.  If you think of anything call me.  Anytime.  Mark wanted to straighten out.  But somebody didn’t like us talking to him.  And they killed him.”  
We both stared at the Ocean, rolling in without pause.  Forever.  
“I was there,”  I said.  “He did it to himself.”
“Dean, dope dealers are greedy.  They weigh everything twice and step on it as much as the traffic will bear.  What do you think the chances are that a dope dealer will give away pure heroin by accident?”  He stared at me to give the line dramatic weight and almost ruined it.  It was pure Law & Order.  All it needed was that Tchung-Tchung sound.  
Then his partner rolled up again in the golf cart and he left without another word.  
Kota turned to watch the policemen go.  Then she looked at me.  Low Life had been murdered.  
What are you going to do about it?




chapter ten 


I found Franklin B-something, AKA Funky Butt, in front of the school that morning.  I was interested to see he was so prompt after spending all night running for the Clown. 
“Hey Franklin.  Wait up.”
He stopped and watched us walk toward him.  His eyes fell on Kota and didn’t leave. 
“Hey man,”  I said.  I put up my fist to bump and he did, so I knew he wasn’t thinking straight.  I’m calling him by his name and acting like his friend.  And I got a big freaking dog with me.  He was thrown. 
“I want to ask you something about your predecessor.”
“What’s that?  Pre- what?”  he said. 
“He that went before.  Low Life.  What happened there, man?  The cops were hassling me.  Say he OD’d on purpose.  What’s with that shit?”  I was moving around him while speaking and Kota of course was right by my side staring a hole through his head as she’s known to do.  Funky Butt backed away.  And Kota was getting keyed up smelling the boy’s fear. 
He’s real scared of me. 
And a bad thought came.  I’d seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib with the military police dog handlers menacing prisoners to make them talk.  It would be easy enough to pressure this kid.  I could tell Kota to ‘speak. ’ One bark and he’ll tell me whatever I want. 
But then I had a good thought.  I remembered how I felt when I saw that picture.  How I thought that the navy handler was betraying his dog, using his dog’s courage and loyalty to turn him into a criminal.  And how I would never do that to Kota.  
So I told her to sit. 
“Don’t worry about her.  She’s cool.  Okay?”  He nodded.  “I just wondered if Mark – Low Life – had trouble.  Would anybody hurt him?  Where did he get that bad dope?  That clown guy maybe?”
Franklin B-something pulled himself up to his full five feet nothing.  “I liked Mark all right.  I never wished him hurt.  But people get hurt talking ‘bout people.  Know what I’m sayin’?  Think about it.”  Then he turned and walked back to the school. 




chapter eleven


Even in a school that’s hard core, Halloween puts everybody in a holiday mood.  People are allowed to dress funny or sexy and other people don’t hassle them.  At least if it’s not too funny or too sexy. 
Kids were dressed like all kinds of things but mostly like Christina Aguilera or Gangsta killers.  Nobody’s going to be caught dead being anything less than tough and cool.  In New York one time this girl I had a crush on came to a Halloween party dressed like Alice in Wonderland.  She was so sexy in her short blue dress and pinafore, blond wig and patent leather shoes.  But she got teased so bad by her mean-girl friends that she spent the evening crying on my shoulder.  Mean girls are the worst. 
Not that I wasn’t grateful, bitches.  There’s nothing better than being young, every inch of you alive, and hating yourself and this really pretty girl wants you to stay with her all night on the roof and watch the sun come up over Manhattan.  Oh, the ache in my heart just to think of it. 
Then I saw Gloria.  She was dressed up like Angelina Jolie in Mr.  and Mrs.  Smith.  That’s what she said, anyway.  It was basically what Gloria usually wore, black on black on black but she had added a long black wig with bangs and a plastic forty-five automatic.  She was telling everybody it was that part of the movie after Brad and Angie have beaten each other to a pulp.  And so she had a Band-Aid on her cheekbone and one eye was blackened.  Gloria was good with makeup.  The black eye almost looked real. 
I was hanging back because I didn’t want to get shut down in front of the crowd of kids around her.  But she saw me and shouted, “Hey Dean!”  
It felt so good.  It’s so pitiful the way you need to be accepted, the way you want people to want you.  Won’t this ever go away?
Then Gloria came over and kissed my cheek.  Not like a GIRLFRIEND! or anything but just the way kids do with friends.  But it set me on fire.  I could feel the blood rushing into my face.  So pitiful.  But Gloria made it okay by laughing and kneeling down to hug and kiss Kota, who stood for it okay.  Though I knew Kota thought it was somewhat undignified.  She looked up at me, her head in Gloria’s hammerlock, eyes saying Really?
The bell rang for the start of school and Gloria arranged to meet me later that night.  What happened that’s making this so easy all of a sudden?  Am I insane or is this beautiful girl acting like she really likes me?
The bell rang again to show that they meant it and we had to go to school.  Just before she took off for class, Gloria smiled at me and really looked at me, straight on and full in the eye.  None of this sideways glances crap we all always do.  
And that’s when I saw that under all the funny Angelina special effects makeup, Gloria DeMaio had a real back eye.  A bad one. 



chapter twelve


Little got done in class most days but on a day like Halloween nothing happens at all.  It’s all the teachers can do to keep kids from tearing down the school out of sheer high spirits. 
Kota and I left at lunch time.  As I was leaving I passed the smart kid’s class.  They were all sitting quietly listening to the teacher talk.  They were taking notes.  Learning.  Another planet.  
We escaped the school and headed toward the street.  Down at the end of the broad front sidewalk I saw a figure leaning against a tree by the curb on Sunset.  It was Ramona.  She was smoking a cigarette and looking in our direction.  I had a chicken shit moment.  I could pretend I forgot something and go back into school.  I looked down at Kota.  She was looking at me. 
What?  What’s the problem?
Yeah right.  You’re supposed to be cutting and you suddenly forgot your Algebra book?  No.  Besides, I was too embarrassed to be a coward too.  So I walked on, whistling a happy tune.  So to speak. 
Ramona was giving me her baddest bad girl glare.  Which was actually a little scary.  She had on her black leather jacket, the tails of her flannel shirt hanging out.  Ramona is pretty with dark Latin eyes, but she’s not petite.  Her shoulders are broad and she’s broad on the bottom.  She dresses like a boy.  And duh, it finally occurred to me a little too late, that I was dealing with a serious case of jealousy. 
“Hey,”  I said, trying to keep it light.  She didn’t say anything.  But she flicked the cigarette into Sunset Avenue with a cool that I couldn’t help but admire.  It was the kind of gesture that has kept people smoking long after the Surgeon General’s report announced that cancer sticks are bad for you.  
She lurched up from her slouch and came toward us.  I stopped walking and waited. 
“What’s up?”  I said.  She didn’t say anything to that either.  I was getting tired of having all of my witty conversation openers ignored.  Kota huffed softly at the girl who was coming on like Vengeance itself.  There are creatures in Greek tragedy called the Furies.  When you’ve committed an unforgivable crime, the Furies come after you and hound you to your grave. And beyond.  That’s the way Ramona looked.  
She started pointing her finger and said, “Gloria don’t need no lame-ass sick sack of shit in her life.”  I just stared at her, my mind busily playing catch-up.  Call me naïve, unperceptive, or maybe just plain slow but I hadn’t seen this at all: Gloria and Ramona were more than friends.  At least as far as Ramona was concerned. 
 She had stopped walking and was standing with one hand on her hip.  
“Is there a problem?”  
“Yeah there’s a problem.  You mess wit’ my frien’ there’s a big problem.”
“What do you mean ‘messing with’?  I mean, exactly.”
“Don’t be an asshole.  Stay away from Gloria.  You got that?  She gots enough problems without you, some fool falls down on the floor and shakes like a… like a… “  
She couldn’t think of what I shook like, so I said, “A leaf?  A reed?  How about jelly?”
“You think it’s a joke?”
“I think you should talk to Gloria.  Gloria’s free.  I’m not twisting anybody’s arm to do anything.  But let me say, if she wants to hang out with me, I’m there.  And I don’t care what you think.  You got that?”
Ramona’s eyes grew large while she looked at her options.  But she didn’t have a gun, a knife or an open grave to shovel me into so finally she just spat out a frustrated “Shee-it”  and brushed past me.  She couldn’t hold off and gave me a little parting shot with her elbow.  I have to say not once in the whole episode did she ever so much as glance at Kota.  Ramona is tough.  Tougher than Isaiah Wallace, football star. 

In AP, everything in town seems to roll downhill until it stops at the Atlantic Ocean.  Kota and I wandered until, just naturally, we ended up at the water. 
We walked north along the edge of the shore until the beachfront development thinned out and you could forget about people for a while.  The tide was coming in, pushing foamy coverlets of ocean farther and farther onshore and we had to be quick a couple of times to keep from getting wet. 
I couldn’t forget the way Low Life looked as he went under.  That dusty dead man’s pallor like a Halloween mask.  That raspy ragged breathing.  That feeling you get that this person, this life was drifting away and there was nothing you could do to stop it.  That everything he ever was or knew or saw would be gone.  
Gone for good.  Like my mom dying in Mount Sinai Hospital.  Just like a kid on the dirty tiled floor of a school toilet.  And now I knew that somebody had done it to him on purpose, that somebody had snuffed him out, like swatting a fly that was bugging them.  And I knew that, if you looked into it, you would find there were other dead kids, other drug-ruined lives down to this same cancer in Asbury Park.  And it was growing. 
I had stopped walking.  Kota circled me looking up at me, huffing softly.  She took my wrist in her jaws and pulled gently.  I paid attention this time and sat down in the sand.  The seizure had started to cover my eyes like a veil but I sat quietly trying to see the horizon.  For a while, I don’t know how long, I stared at the ocean without seeing.  And then the electrical storm in my head went away.  Kota was licking my face.  I knew I had just had an “absence,”  a small seizure, You can have them where they only last thirty seconds to two minutes.  Petit mal they’re called, which is French for “little illness.”  The big ones are called grand mal. 
I felt tired and a little depressed.  I thought of all the kids hanging out at that construction site, messing up their heads on purpose.  What a waste.  Somebody should stop it.  Yeah, good luck with that.  If my father was any indication people would never get straight because they didn’t want to. 
I turned to Kota.  “People like being screwed up,”  I said.  Kota turned her head in that funny way she had when she was trying to make sense of what I said.  Like “Wha’?”  And I thought, she’s right.  It’s stupid to say “people like”  or “people want.”  It’s like those politicians who talk about “the American People.”  As if it’s one lily white group of persons all exactly alike, all agreeing on everything, especially that this dumb politician is the greatest person to come along since George Washington.  (Who, by the way, owned human beings.  So how great is that to begin with?) And that we should vote for her so she can continue to rob us blind and publish stupid books written for her by somebody else.  Kota huffed at me.  And again. 
I laughed and gave her one of the dried liver treats I kept for her in a plastic bag in my pocket.  She took it from my fingers gently and, with a little jerk of her head, scarffed it down.  Then she turned, walked a few steps and came right back.  
Let’s go! Let’s go!
She thought it was time to go home.  And like Right Now! What was she so worried about?
I laughed and said, “Okay, okay.”  We headed up the beach to the boardwalk.  We’d make faster time once we got out of the sand. 
As we were walking up the stairs I heard a loud roar as a motorcycle engine was revved and cut.  When I got up to the boardwalk, he was waiting for me.  He was built like a steel spring, skinny and strong.  And so pale I could see the blue veins snaking down the deathly white skin of his throat.  Long oily blond hair, sunglasses, a bushy Fu Manchu moustache that followed the curve of his face and fell in two dirty tufts off his jaw.  He wore a denim jacket that parted over his bare flat stomach.  He had a tattoo, a strand of blue-black barbed wire that snaked around his neck and plunged down his chest where it twisted around his body again before disappearing into the waist of his grease-stained filthy blue jeans.  He was skin and muscles and meanness without an once of extra fat.  Over the jacket he wore a black leather vest covered with patches.  One of them identified him as a one per-center, the minority of bikers that makes all the trouble.  Another patch, green and black, right over where his heart should have been, said Floyd.  Was it his first or last name?  He was sitting on his motorcycle with one hand still on the throttle grip of the tall handle bars.  I guess he thought he looked like a king on his throne.  King of the losers.  
I don’t know that much about motorcycles.  You just don’t see that much of them growing up in New York.  The weather’s all wrong for it.  His bike was customized with that long front fork and ape-hanger handlebars.  But the flames painted on the gas tank were old and chipped.  And it was just a Honda or something, Japanese, not a real Harley-Davidson chopper, so I thought maybe he’s not such a badass.  
He lifted his hand and beckoned.  But he does think he’s a king.  
“Come here, you little shit,”  he said, in a Deep South accent.  Kota huffed suspiciously.  She pressed herself against my leg to hold me back. 
“What do you want,”  I said.  I like to tell myself that I’d just had a petit mal seizure and that was why my voice was shaky.  But I was scared too.  Just because somebody is unwashed and smells and is obviously a loser doesn’t mean that they’re not dangerous.  And violence was coming off this guy like gasoline fumes. 
“Come over here,”  he said, getting pissed.  “So I don’t have to shout.  I ain’t gonna hurt you.  Yet.”
“I can hear you fine right here.”  I was aching to come up with something smartass to say, but I was too scared to think of anything. 
He sighed heavily and threw up his hands.  He was an actor, a person who enjoyed being dramatic.  He chuckled at his own antics.  He was his own best audience too, thought he was really funny even if he said so himself.  He lifted his long thin leg up and over the motorcycle.  And straightened up and walked.  He was tall and I had a post seizure vision of the devil walking the Wasteland leaving fire and misery in his wake, like in that Steven King novel.  I stepped back. 
Kota curled her lip and showed her teeth, something she never does.  She growled and the biker stopped.  His nostrils flared.  He was like a wild animal sensing danger.  Kota kept growling soft and low.  She feared him too. 
“Grab a hold of that dog, kid.”  He took cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one with a Zippo lighter.  His hands, I noticed, didn’t shake. 
I put my hand on Kota’s shoulder.  “Stay Kota.”  I tried to act like she was some kind of trained attack dog, which she’s not.  She’s there to be aware, sensitive to my physical state and warn me if I’m about to be sick.  And then make the phone call if I am.  
But she’s a dog, a big one, and I’m her pack.  He kept his distance, not because of my pretending but because he had animal instincts that warned him of danger.  He saw Kota was not to be fooled with.  Smelled it even. 
“A little bird told me you’re getting nosey.  You better mind your business and stay out of mine.  You know what happened to that little shit in the high school toilet?  That’s nothing compared to what I’ll do to you, if you don’t stay away from my people.  Got it?”
I didn’t say anything.  Mostly I didn’t trust myself to speak.  I guess Franklin B.  had reported to his boss right away.  He didn’t want to end up like Low Life. 
The tall biker took another drag on his cigarette.  His fingernails each had a thin black line of grease underneath.  I wondered if he did it with a paint brush, it looked so perfect.  
Kota moved, her voice rumbling low.  Watch out for this man. 
“You hear me talking to you, you little shit?”  He said this quietly but I felt an irrational rage building in him.  
I nodded my head and mumbled, “Yes.”
He pointed at Kota.  “And if I ever see that dog again, I’ll kill it.”
Without another word the biker turned and walked back to his lousy Japanese motorcycle.  On the back of the leather vest he wore, there were three large patches.  These are what bikers call their “colors”  which show their club and where they’re from.  The top patch curved across his shoulders.  On it in spooky black Nazi letters was stitched the word Demons.  The bottom patch read Freehold N. J.  
In between was a surprisingly good picture of a fire-breathing monster from Hell.  




chapter thirteen


When I saw my father’s battered primer gray Chevy Super Sport, I forgot the sick fear I’d been feeling and just felt sick.  The way you would if you got to see your coffin before you died.  It was the old familiar feeling of the bottom falling out of my life.  My father loved that car.  But to me it was an omen of trouble.  
My father was back in the kitchen with his sister Gail, sitting at the kitchen table.  They were talking in that irritating secrets secrets secrets way they had whenever they were together.  They had a way of speaking to each other that was understandable only to the two of them.  To everybody else they might as well be speaking a private language, made up of grunts, signs and half-words.  They could get more out of seeing a raised eyebrow than most people got out of the average news broadcast.  Growing up in their family must have been like life behind enemy lines.  They were so good at undercover, it was second nature.  How Gail came out of it as sane as she was, I don’t know.  But my father was a casualty of that war. 
He stood up and started to wave.  Then he thought better of it and put the hand in his pocket.  Then he sidled over to give me a one armed hug.  My father has a certain strange smell.  I believe I can smell an alcoholic or an addict.  It’s something about their chemistry.  
We both patted each other’s shoulders for a long time.  Then we jumped away from each other and looked at the floor.  
Gail saved the day by pouring me a coke and shoving me into a chair at the table.  My father saw Kota standing in the kitchen doorway.  
“Hey, buddy,”  he said.  He bent down and held out his hand to her.  Kota just stared.  
“Come here, buddy,”  he said again, rubbing the tips of his fingers together.  I was so embarrassed.  There he was bent over, pleading.  And I knew he wouldn’t stop.  I gestured to Kota and she walked forward.  That was all my father needed.  Face saved, he moved quickly and got in his petting, saying, “Good girl, good girl.”  As if she had obeyed his command.  Gail had the saddest expression on her face. 
We made awkward small talk for about twenty minutes and then my father got up to leave.  Kota and I walked him to the car. 
Outside, my father stopped and lit a cigarette. 
“I’m going on the road for a couple of months.  Maybe four.  We’ll see.”
“The road?”  I sounded like somebody’s mother.  The Road?  Isn’t that dangerous?  Well, for my father it was.  
“It’s a new band.  They need somebody to show ‘em the ropes.”
Yeah, I’ll bet.  
I said, “Can you handle something like that?”
“I can do this job in my sleep.”
“But what about New York?  Isn’t there anything for you at home?”
“They don’t call me for The Garden anymore.”  
We let that hang there between us.  It seemed like a sentence of death.  My father had taken one more step down the long spiral to the bottom.  
“Hey, it’s not the end of the world,”  he said.  “It’ll be fun taking a bunch of kids on their first tour.”  
I could see it now.  Just like the Brady Bunch, right?  Except we can’t wake up Dad because he stayed up too late partying with Marsha and the rest of the kids in the motel bar and he forgot how many pills he took.  
“Hell Dean,”  he said, “I got to work.”
“I know.”
“You’re doing okay here with Gail, aren’t you?”
I shrugged.  He wouldn’t look me in the eye because he could tell what I was thinking.  The two of us only functioned as family when Mom was alive.  Now that she was gone, we were a drag on each other, each pulling the other one down.  
He looked toward Sunset Lake and dragged on the cigarette.  In profile, with the afternoon light hitting him just right, he still looked like a Hollywood version of the Marlboro Man’s better looking brother.  He would still be catnip to the groupies and the girl singers, the recording company assistants looking to get their tickets punched with a little authentic rock and roll flavor.  “This is Wayman McCarthy.  He humped amplifiers for the Stones once.  Out-partied Keith Richards, man.”  
I was afraid.  I really didn’t think my father would survive another visit to the Road.  One morning they’d go to his room and he’d be dead, overdosed from one stupid excess too many. 
Then he turned back and gave me his smile.  And what could I say?  He’d been getting away with shit for forty years behind that smile.  Everybody forgives him.  Until they don’t anymore.  It might take twenty-five years but they give up in the end.  Then they just dump his calls and turn their backs. 
But he’s my family and I’m stuck with him.  I don’t have the option of walking away.  Only my father does that. 
An option he exercised, hugging me tight in a one-armed sideways awkward squeeze, telling me to take care, saying he’d call from Akron, their first stop.  
Akron.  It really was the bottom. 
He got into the old Chevy and it started with a roar.  It looked like a wreck but he kept it running for sentimental reasons, a tie to his youth and my mom.  The accident hadn’t been that bad.  
For the car.  I hit the windshield pretty hard.  
My father stepped on the gas and the Chevy took off with a rumble like the coming of a summer thunderstorm.  It was too much car for a drunkard to drive.  I watched until he was out of sight.  I walked back to the house.  Kota was waiting, watching through the glass storm door. 
Later I got out the shoebox full of old pictures of my parents.  Wayman and Carol: The Early Days.  Pictures of them from years ago when they were not much older than I was.  They were so young and so beautiful on the street outside of the Palladium before going to The Clash concert.  You could make movies with people that look like that.  
Another one, walking in the middle of a street in the East Village, reenacting the cover of the Freewheeling Bob Dylan album.  You can see they’re in love.  The whole thing about love was probably invented for two people who looked like that.  
The picture of me and my mom in the hospital soon after I was born.  It’s because of me they started to be human.  Mom looks tired.  Well, she was almost thirty six and it had been a tough labor.  I look red.  I’m screaming my objection to the whole setup.  My father’s smile is vague and distracted, as if he’s searching for the door. 
I opened one of the marbled cover Composition notebooks where my mother kept her journal.  She wrote: Wayman’s like a flame, he’s beautiful but the Wind blows him where it will. 
There was one of Gail and my father with me in the old apartment on St.  Mark’s Place.  Wayman’s always holding a drink from this point on in time.  There’s me in the hospital again with Mom.  I’m ten and I have a bandage on my head covering one eye.  You can still see the scar where they rebuilt that eye socket.  My Mom is smiling but it’s forced and her eyes tell the truth.  She’s staring at my father who is behind the camera.  
It was never the same between her and my father after the accident.  
My mom in the last picture, looking sick suddenly, but still beautiful.  There are no pictures of her wasting away, her hair falling out, her eyes sinking into her drawn ghostly face.  There are no pictures of that.  
But I remember pretty well what it was like.  
I lay down and Kota came to the edge of the bed and lay her big white head near my hand.  Her nose was damp.  




chapter fourteen


The moon was big over the Ocean.  And the surf was higher than usual.  There was something happening on the beach away to the south.  You could see the red light from emergency vehicles flashing beyond the Casino.  A helicopter buzzed the shore up and back, shining a light down into the water, searching. 
It was about eight o’clock.  On Ocean Avenue, there was a Springsteen tribute band appearing at the Wonder Bar and some local classic rock band I never heard of at The Stone Pony.  It should be said that their fans were enthusiastic.  On the Boardwalk people were crowding into the Langosta Lounge and Tim McLoone’s.  Halloween, and people were doing their best to celebrate. 
It was cold but the air was clear and brisk.  Just the way it should be for Autumn at the beach and so seldom is.  Kota and I were waiting on a boardwalk bench just south of the Lounge.  It was a real freak show.  People, grownups supposedly, were dressed up like devils or angels or… at times it was difficult to tell what they were supposed to be.  But the level of fun was way up there already and threatening to get funner.  
It was like being at a party where people are determined to enjoy themselves, even if it kills them.  Or you.  And I guessed from the level of drunkenness this early in the evening, there would be plenty of chances to die while driving home.  And the survivors can go on to a happily maimed life of flopping on the floor and quivering like a live shrimp on a hot griddle.  Just like me.  Oops.  There I go again, being all bitter and negative, ruining a perfectly good time.  Have fun folks! Drink up. 
I turned to look at the ocean and saw Gloria walking up toward me like she’d just come out of the water, dressed in black and bone dry as in a miracle.  She saw us and waved and Kota barked, something she rarely does.  Gloria was right in front of us but she had to walk a hundred feet further up the beach to get to the stairs up onto the boardwalk.  Because of this long entrance, Gloria got self-conscious and started goofing around, making faces and acting silly as if she had to entertain me.  
Ah, but little does she know that all I need is to see her, Gloria DeMaio, the Girl Who Looks Like Natalie Wood, coming to meet me on purpose, and happening now, like a movie that’s somehow become my real life.  
Gloria came walking down the Boardwalk toward us and, as if she read my thoughts, she stopped goofing and just walked, looking at me and smiling, aware, I guess, of the affect she had on me.  Of the power a pretty girl can have.  
She was dressed just the way she was at school but she had redone her makeup.  The Band-Aid was gone and the exaggerated bruise on her eye.  She had worked long and hard on her makeup that night.  And she was good at it, almost a professional.  I could imagine her sitting in front of a mirror in her room as a little girl, avoiding her drunken father, studying her face, wondering if she would ever be beautiful.  
A lot of girls cake the gunk on and they get the raccoon look.  Not Gloria.  She painted masterpieces.  She took what was good and made it great.  She almost had her black eye hidden.  But the little cut and scrape on her cheek still showed.  And what showed somehow made her look all the more beautiful. 
How hopeless am I?  I mean.  Really?  There’s a word for what I am in the presence of this girl.  Fill in the blank. 
Gloria hugged Kota.  Kota tried to lick her face but Gloria laughed and dodged it.  
“Watch the makeup,”  she said.  “It took me an hour and a half to do this.”  Then she sat down next to me.  “Hey,”  she said.  When she kissed my cheek it was easy and natural like we had known each other for years.  I said, Hey, back, smiling at her like a character in a cartoon, little hearts and birdies twirling around my head.  
She looked out to sea, tracking the police helicopter that was searching the shore.  The smile drained out of her face. 
“The waves were good today,”  she said, quietly.  “The surfers were out and one got lost.”
“Lost?”
She nodded and shrugged.  “Drowned, I guess.  The undertow’s wicked.  If you panic…”  She shrugged again.  “They been looking all evening but they’re going to quit soon.  They can’t see anything.  He’ll turn up tomorrow or the next day.”
“Did you know him?”
“No.  They’re a different bunch.  Come from all over.  It happens every year.  Couple of times.  The surf’s not that heavy here but the Ocean’s not to be taken lightly.  These guys, they go in the water almost every day, if it’s not really freezing.  But you can make a mistake and you’re dead.”
I looked at her.  She was so serious.  So I seriously said, “Something to think about.”  
She looked at me. 
“Are you making fun of me?”  She wasn’t that mad, just coming back at me if I was. 
“Yes I am.”  I said it smiling and I could feel my eyes get bigger and bigger as I looked at her. 
She looked at me, smiling.  And I kissed her and time stretched and bent with a warm slow motion.  I put my hands on her hips and felt the soft curve of her flesh pressed over the hard edge of her leather belt.  When our lips parted with a tiny sticky snap of her lip gloss, I was in a dream land of hormones and adrenalin.  If she’d asked me anything, to get her the golden fleece, to climb the mountain, name it, I would have tried. 
I stared into her eyes looking for a way in, looking for a way to make her love me. 
“I would never make fun of you.”  I said.  “You’re always right.”
“Yes I am.  And we’re alive and it’s the night before the Day of the Dead, so let the party begin.”




chapter fifteen 


I knew it was a bad omen the moment she said it.  The words were not even out of her mouth when her phone rang.  It was one of those custom ring tones and not as obnoxious as they usually are.  It was Alicia Keyes.  “Concrete jungle where dreams are made up…”  
She looked at the phone and sighed as she hit the green button.  She tried to speak a couple of times but she couldn’t get a word in.  
Finally, she said, “All right.”  And snapped the connection.  “I have to go take care of something.”  She stood up, stuffing the phone in her bag. 
“Really.”  I sounded crushed and crestfallen and totally un-cool even to my own ears. 
“I’m sorry.  I have to or he’ll–  I just have to.  Okay?  See ya.”  She turned away, then turned right back again.  “If you want to wait.  I’ll be about a half hour or so.”
I said I’d wait, a guy who clearly had nothing else he could or would do than wait for Gloria.  She didn’t smile.  She didn’t indicate that she was happy.  She just split, walking away down the boardwalk. 
She was headed in the wrong direction, walking away from the direct route to her house.  It’s not that I didn’t trust her.  But I didn’t.  And I followed her at a distance.  Sure enough she turned and walked out to Ocean Avenue and headed for the Unfinished Hotel.  She never once looked around, not caring if anybody was watching her.  She approached Funky Butt and handed him cash.  Butt ran to the Clown and passed him the money.  The Clown peddled away into the darkness to visit his stash and returned with the dope.  Funky Butt ran the little packet back to Gloria and Done! The whole transaction over in less than two minutes.  
I watched Gloria walk away, her hands shoved in her pockets, head down.  
“How you like that, retard?”  
I confess.  I was startled.  And I turned around a little too quickly and there was Ramona, eyes burning hot in the falling dark.  But not at me.  She was watching Gloria waiting until the chance of a last look was truly gone.  Only then did she aim her atomic fierce look at me.  
“How you like that, stupid?  Making his daughter buy his drugs?  He told her, this way, she get busted, no problem.  She’s fifteen, she go to Juvee and get probation.  No problem.  For him.  What they call that in health class?  Defunctioning?”
I shrugged.  “Dysfunctional?”  I didn’t know what she was talking about.  
Ramona sneered at me.  “You get a ‘A’ in health, retard.  And what a punk like you gonna do?  You gonna solve her problems?  You?  I’m laughing.”  She wasn’t laughing at all.  She pretended to spit at my feet before she left, following Gloria.  What was she doing?  Stalking us?  How long had she been watching?  
I didn’t follow, already feeling a little disloyal and kind of sneaky, as if I’d broken some unwritten rule between kids with junkie fathers: Don’t talk about It! Just Ignore.  I still had hopes she’d return so I went back to the boardwalk with Kota and watched the ocean.  Of course, I was hassled by the dog police and had to give the full explanation of Kota’s exempt legal status twice.  That’s bad enough because the second time we drew a small crowd, people having nothing better to do.  So I could never get comfortable with my disappointment.  I also think the cops thought I was deliberately trying to provoke them by hanging out so long with the Dreaded Boardwalk Defiling Dog.  Every time they went by they had something to say. 
Now let’s talk about the psychology of getting stood up.  Or let’s not.  Because it’s painful.  Just know that she didn’t come back in a half hour.  Or an hour.  Or two.  I decided to call after discussing it with Kota for twenty minutes.  
“Hello.”  Her voice was dead and flat.  She knew it was me.  She must have seen it was me.  I got tongue tied and stuttered.  I had no idea what to say.  Finally, I put this together: “What’s up?”  Clever?  Debonair?  
I heard a rasp like she dragged her phone over a rough surface and then bumped it against something hard.  I heard Gloria speaking to someone.  I couldn’t make out what she said. 
Then she groaned, “All right!”  And came back to me.  “Listen, Dean.  I’m tied up.”
“Are you going to be a long time?  I can wait.”
“Let me call you back.”  
And she hung up on me. 
I and Kota kicked our heels on the bench for another half hour.  Then we walked up and down the boardwalk watching the crowd.  
When you’re miserable, the world seems to be in blissful high spirits.  And it pisses you off. 
I called again and she didn’t pick up.  Sprint did.  Right away.  The way they do when you’ve shut off your phone. 
The worst thing about being stood up is you’re sure everyone knows exactly what’s going on.  Like you’ve got this great big red electric Bozo nose with the word SUCKER on it blinking on and off. 
Anyway, after two and a half hours, I was in a dwindling spiral of self loathing and despair.  It doesn’t take long to hand over a dose of Oxy, even if it is to your dear old dad.  Something else was going on now.  
Never mind the scenarios I worked out about what happened.  Most involved Ramona getting Gloria to better-deal me for a Halloween party or something.  Something to which I was definitely not invited.  Hey! Dump the seizure creep and come on over! That kind of thing.  I was losing my grip on reality.  Nothing was real but how much it hurt. 
Then I toughened up and left the boardwalk.  I happened to end up walking past the Unfinished Hotel.  Things were very busy of course and the Creepy Clown was doing big business.  Franklin was running his Funky little Butt off delivering drugs and money.  I could see shadowy figures of kids flitting between the concrete pillars like drunken deer in a dark forest. 
My anger and heartache (yes heartache) soon focused on the happy dope dealers.  In honor of Halloween, The Clown was wearing a cheap clown suit costume over his jeans and really weird makeup that made his mouth leery and stupid, laughing out loud.  He slowly pedaled around ringing that dumb little bell like the Ice Cream Man.  
I had been having trouble directing my anger at Gloria.  No matter what I felt, I knew it wasn’t really her fault.  Her father had interrupted us to fix his drugs problem.  But I had no such conflict with this asshole in the clown suit.  It was all his fault, starting with breaking up my evening with Gloria by hooking her father on drugs.  He killed his employee leaving me to watch him cough out his dying breath.  That was his doing.  
And that guy on the motorcycle had threatened to kill Kota.  
And if I ever see that dog again I’ll kill it.  That’s what he said. 
The hate thing always lying hidden in my stomach jumped into my head full grown and red as fire, like the boogie man on steroids.  I wanted to take a stick and beat this thing until it died and stopped hurting me and my dog.  But it was a system, a horrible kind of business.  How do you kill that?  My brain started spinning on that in high gear. 
And I hatched a plot.  It was brilliant.  I led Kota home, as I worked out the details in my mind.  
Actually I didn’t so much work anything out as replay a revenge fantasy over and over.  Reliving again and again one of the stupidest things I ever thought up, in a not so brilliant life of disastrous plans.  Somewhere in there, I even won an award from the Asbury Park Association (or whatever civic group they had for such things) for tracking down the drug operation and handing it over to the police and forcing them to do their duty.  
Yes it was dangerous and crazy but the only thing evil needs to win is for the good guys to do nothing. 
(Applause) 
Kota began to complain with small whimpers as if she knew what I was thinking.  She probably did.  But I ignored her.  Which is always a mistake: between the two of us she has more common sense.  
I said hello to Gail as I came inside.  She was sitting on the couch watching the tube.  I made a big point of going upstairs with Kota.  
I shut Kota in my room at the top of the stairs, telling her to stay and be quiet.  I didn’t want her to have anything to do with this.  That guy on the Japanese motorcycle had already threatened her life.  
She tried to come with me out the door but I closed it, pushing her nose back in and almost catching my fingers.  Then I crept down the narrow back stairway that leads to the kitchen, and out the back door.  Success.  
I took my bike out of the shed in back and walked it out to Sunset Avenue and hopped on, peddling back to the Unfinished Hotel, the Open Air Drug Market which I had decided I was going to destroy single-handed.  
No one except Kota knew I was off to mess with The Demons.  And she was locked in my room.  
I’m a Smart Guy. 




chapter sixteen


I was right in thinking it wouldn’t be long before Creepy the Clown had to re-up his supplies.  Business was booming and pretty soon The Clown stopped and handed his last hit to Franklin B.  They talked for a moment and then The Clown peddled away disappearing into the dark.  I took off after him.  My plan unfolding perfectly.  Genius. 
It was easy to follow the blood red wig bobbing down the street.  I stayed about a block behind him but I didn’t have to worry.  He never once looked back.  
Then the Clown suddenly stopped by a battered old pickup truck.  I almost peddled right into him.  I had to put on the brakes quick and find a shadow to hide in.  The clown lifted his bike and tossed it into the back of the truck with a crash.  Pulling off the red wig he got into the truck and started it up.  He was pulled out and quickly moving down the street before I got my bike moving again.  
I had some serious spinning to do to keep up with him.  I would have lost him except he hit some traffic on Main Street that slowed him down.  Then I caught another break when he almost crashed his truck.  I guess he was wasted, sampling his own wares.  He started driving very slowly and carefully after his near miss and I found I could keep him in sight with no problem.  
We got away from the center of town.  We were on Asbury Avenue one of the roads out of AP  and things turned woodsy in the area.  The trees seemed to march up and cover me as I peddled through the night.  
Finally, he turned down a small dirt road in the woods.  I followed him in, worried that without a light I was going to hit a rut and flip over.  I kept following the taillights of the pickup.  When I suddenly came upon a small clearing where the pickup was parked outside an old rotten house trailer, I jumped off the bike and found cover.  
The trailer wasn’t a double wide.  It was small enough to tow down into this little clearing.  Who knows how long it had been there?  From the rusty derelict looks of it, decades.  I lay my bike down in the brush and crept up for a closer look.  
Creepy the Clown was standing in the moonlight outside the trailer trying to light a cigarette.  He still had on his stupid cheap clown suit which he had pulled on over his own clothes like coveralls.  Smoke was coming from the trailer out of an improvised smokestack that was built into a window blocked out with sheet steel.  All the windows in the trailer were blocked.  
It didn’t take  genius to figure out what I was looking at: The trailer was the Meth lab where they were cooking the drugs.  And Creepy couldn’t go inside: the place was filled with poison gases.  That stuff pouring out of the trailer wasn’t barbecue smoke.  It was the deadly byproduct of the chemical reaction that produces crystal Methamphetamine.  Cooking Meth is very dangerous.  If the lab is improperly ventilated the drug cooks can get killed.  They usually wear gas masks on TV.  The Meth lab can also just plain explode; the chemicals are that flammable.  
All of my info on this comes of course from TV and books and the internet.  But it seemed to be accurate from what I could see. 
I remember I was beginning to get bored waiting for something to happen.  And then something did. 
From behind me, a hand came down and grabbed my hair.  I was jerked up onto my feet.  I was shoved and tripped over a rock or a tree root.  I back peddled and kept my feet but a fist hit me in the face and I went down.  I couldn’t see who was hitting me. 
All I saw as I spun down into the dirt was Creepy, his big clown mouth making a big red O.  Behind him, parked in the shadows near the trailer, I saw a Japanese motorcycle painted with flames.  




chapter seventeen


I didn’t stay out long.  It was like somebody kicked the power cord of my brain out of the socket but plugged me right back in.  It took my brain a little time to reboot, however.  And while that was happening I was dragged over to the trailer.  The Clown was making panicky noises.  I guessed he was being blamed for leading me back to the Meth lab. 
“Honest, Floyd,”  he said, “I didn’t know he was following me.”
“Well, he’s here, jackass, what are we going to do with him?”  I recognized his voice, would have known it even if I hadn’t seen his motorcycle.  The mean skinny guy with the barbed wire tattooed around his throat who threatened Kota at the boardwalk.  He roughly searched me and took away my phone.  
 “And thanks for using my name, fool,”  he said to the Clown,  “Why don’t you give him my address?”  
That’s right.  His nametag said Floyd.  Floyd the Demon Biker.  With the barbed wire tattoo.  
Floyd.  In my cracked awareness, I observed that it was an awfully dumb name for somebody so scary.  I was observing a lot, partly to get my bearings, but mostly to take my mind off my fear.  
The trailer was an old rusty little box that had a pitted aluminum trademark, Shasta, riveted to the side.  The Clown’s pickup truck had an old refrigerator lying in the bed beside his crappy old bike.  It was really old, like a prop from a movie about gangsters and G-men, about the Great Depression in the 1930s, or the Second World War.  It had one of those levers you pulled to open it.  It’s crazy but I started trying to figure out why Creepy had a refrigerator in the back of his truck.  Maybe he has a job moving things to the dump.  
I was getting over the shock and waking up enough to be really afraid.  Floyd was saying something.  He punctuated it with a kick to my ribs. 
“Get up! You stupid punk.”
I got to my feet.  At that moment the trailer door opened and a guy in a gas mask appeared in a cloud of smoke.  He walked quickly away from the trailer.  He pulled off his mask and shouted, “Get further away while it airs out!”  The Clown scrambled away and Floyd shoved me. 
Floyd said, “Maybe we ought to just tie him up and throw him in there.  He’d be dead soon right?”
Gas Mask said, “Maybe.  Who is it?”
Floyd grabbed the collar of my jacket.  “He’s a nosey little bastard, that’s what.  And he’s in the cooking pot now.  Ain’t you?  I’m ‘onna eat you all up, you little shit.  And spit out the bones.”  
He shoved me again.  I staggered a few feet and turned to face him so I could duck the next punch or see to make a break.  What was scary was how calm he seemed: he wasn’t yelling or waving his arms.  The scariest thing, when you’re scared to death, is someone who’s not.  He was cold and calm.  I couldn’t believe it was happening: he was really thinking to kill me. 
I looked up and caught a glimpse of the moon through the trees.  Like a flash it all comes back: the whole day and every stupid little aimless decision you made that got you here, the place of your death.  Death by stupidity and foolishness.  Death because a girl stood you up and didn’t answer your calls.  
A second skin of thick sweat appeared on my body and a cold weakness ran in my veins.  I was helpless.  That’s when you beg, like a baby wanting his mama to save him from the monster in the shadows.  Please make it go away get me out of here help me save me help me save me. 
And then I saw her.  Gliding like a shaft of light bounced off the moon and made into flesh and fur.  Kota. 
I heard the Clown whisper, “Oh my God,”  like he’d seen a ghost.  
She looked even bigger in the night, like a big white wolf coming straight for them.  Like a nightmare vision out of myth.  She stopped, her legs planted, the fur bristling up in spikes on her shoulders.  She drew her lip back and bared her fangs and you could hear her growl like the coming of an earthquake. 
And they were scared.  Gas Mask cursed and jumped back.  The Clown backed away muttering “Oh man, oh man.”
But Motorcycle Floyd wasn’t scared.  He just wiped at his long mustache and spat.  “Shit,”  he said to me, “I told you what I’d do if I saw that dog again.”  
And he walked into the trailer.  I saw the Demon from Hell on the back of his leather vest in the moonlight.  Gas Mask squawked a warning to stay out of the toxic fog but the tall thin biker ignored him.  He walked into the smoke and came right out with a shotgun.  It was the pump kind you see in the movies but with the barrel and the stock sawed off.  
I waved my arms at Kota.  “Kota! Get out of here! Run! Get!”  
But it was no good.  Kota didn’t have a command for running away.  And so she stood her ground.  The Demon worked the slide of the gun and I heard a round seat into the chamber.  Kota stopped and lowered her head, watching the man.  She knew.  She could feel his deadly intent.  But she didn’t run away.  The biker lifted his gun and aimed at her.  Kota lurched suddenly to the side. 
I threw myself as hard as I could and my outstretched forearms slammed into the shotgun, knocking it aside an instant before the round exploded.  I fell to my knees.  My head was ringing.  
Everything became a movie with the soundtrack turned off.  I could see, but not hear: the Clown’s mouth working like a puppet’s, shouting in pain, hands pressed to his wounded leg, his dumb clown costume pants shredded by the shotgun blast and soaked with blood.  It must have been a narrow gauge shotgun.  With a heavier gun, he wouldn’t still be standing.  I couldn’t hear, but I saw the flare of another shotgun blast light the trees as the Demon fired again.  Fired at Kota.  
I tried to get up to see her, to see if she was dead, or just wounded, but I never made it.  Someone pounded me across the back and I went sprawling again.  I rolled and sat up.  Floyd cursed and pumped the gun again and pointed it at my face.  
The black hole of the barrel’s mouth seemed to get wider and wider.  Then I was hit on the chin and the front  of my skull lit up.  The Gates opened and all the demons in Hell came out and dragged me down into the blackness. 

chapter eighteen 


I woke up calling for Kota.  And I couldn’t get enough breath to make a sound.  Not a real breath of air.  It was like breathing through a water logged towel.  I was gasping, trying really hard for air and not getting much in return.  
It was hot and I was dripping, slippery with sweat.  I was lying on my side with my knees pressed up to my chest which made it even harder to breathe.  I opened my eyes and couldn’t see.  At first I didn’t understand and I kept trying to open my eyes.  And then I realized that I was blind: my eyes were open but I could not see.  
I tried to sit up and bumped my forehead into a wall.  I reached out with my hands but they only moved a couple of inches before they touched hard surfaces.  I was too cramped to lift my hands above my waist.  They were pinned along my legs.  I couldn’t get my head around what was happening.  What?  Where was I?  I felt around as much as I could with my hands confined the way they were.  I traced the smooth walls of my prison and found a corner… I was in a box.  A very small box.  Like a coffin.  
I started to panic.  Bucking and screaming and not able to move, making me thrash and scream some more.  I don’t know why I didn’t go crazy right then.  I felt like I was crazy.  A terrible need to run was rushing through me.  And I couldn’t run, couldn’t move.  Which made me want to run even more. 
But soon the vanishing air supply and the trapped heat of my own body exhausted me.  A calm gentle voice came into my head.  Don’t, it said, you’re just using up the air.  Think of something else.  I felt a cool hand touch my forehead.  
I guess I was losing consciousness or starting to.  I had no idea how long I had been in the box.  The air must have been getting pretty thin and I was hallucinating.  
And the voice said, You have a fever, sweetie.  Lie still and think of good things and before you know it, you’ll be well again.  And I tried to think of cool mountain streams but I’d never been to the mountains and all I could see was a New York City fire hydrant that had been opened by the cops one hot summer and was spraying streams of water into the air and all the kids were running through it laughing.  
I was now breathing in huffing shallow gasps.  For a second, I struggled again but I felt very weak. 
There was nothing I could do.  And just like that, I accepted that I was going to die.  Not that I might, or probably would someday, but that very soon I would be dead.  I hoped that Kota would be okay and find her way home and scratch on the front door of the little house just off Sunset Avenue.  That Gail would look for me and maybe they’d find me and I would be curled up and small in this coffin.  And I had a fast electric hallucination of the police opening the box.  I watched this from up high and I saw that it was the refrigerator from the Creepy Clown’s pickup truck.  I was curled up inside looking small and dead.  They’d stuck me in the refrigerator and shut the door and left me to suffocate.  
My mother’s mother, my grandmother, had a house on Long Island and she had an old refrigerator in her basement where she kept beer and soda.  These old refrigerators had a rubber gasket that sealed the door.  And kept the cold air in.  And the hot air out. 
Then I felt very sad and I began to cry, feeling sorry for myself.  Sorry that I had to die so young before anything good had had a chance to happen.  And it wasn’t fair.  And I didn’t accept dying now.  I’d recovered some strength from resting.  And yeah, there was no air, but not NO air and the thing I had to do was get some more.  I touched the corner of my coffin and there was a seam, a crack where the door met the side wall of the refrigerator and it was sealed by a rubber gasket, sealing out my air.  But the crack was too narrow to fit my finger into. 
I forced my hand back between the wall and my leg until I could reach my back pocket.  I had an old pen back there with my notebook and I could just touch it with my index fingertip.  I just needed another inch of reach.  I strained and pushed and my shoulder kind of popped out of its socket and I had my second finger on the end of the pen.  It was one of those cheap stick pens but it was thin enough to force through the crack and maybe open the gasket. 
I blew all the bad air out of my lungs to give myself more room and pressed my two fingers over the end of the pen.  I had the end of it now between my fingers.  And slowly drew it up out of my back pocket.  Draw it up a little, then slide back draw it up a little, and bit by bit pull it out of your pocket. 
And then just as it came free, it flipped out of my fingers.  
It was a long patient process to get it back but I did it.  And then slowly worked my hand with the pen laying between my index and middle fingers back to the opening of the box.  I had a little more room to maneuver once I got my hand back to the front of my body and I was able to get a stronger grip on the pen. 
It was surprisingly easy to force the pen into the crack and through the gasket of the old refrigerator. 
The cold October air leaking in through the opening I’d made in my tomb, made a small circle of relief on the back of my hand.  It was enough to give me hope. 
But in a few minutes I was still gasping and I knew it would not be enough.  I tried to slide the pen up, to get the opening closer to my mouth where I could suck in deep breaths of fresh clean air.  But I couldn’t raise my hand up and hang on to the pen.  I tried to dig into the gasket and break it but I didn’t have the leverage.  And even if I could live on the tiny bit of air making it into my lungs, how long could I survive without water?  The way I was sweating it wouldn’t be long before I was completely dehydrated. 
For the second time that night I got used to the idea of death.  It was a calmer feeling this time.  Because I was so tired, it was easier to give up.  My soul rose up and looked out over the ocean.  It felt peaceful to forget my troubles, to leave the struggling gasping body trapped in a box on the Earth below and travel through the night air, free, weightless.  Nothing. 
Something was trying to bring me back, though.  An irritating, persistent sound that was waking me from rest.  Something was scratching against metal.  Scratching fast and furious.  Almost against my will, I returned to my body and then I could hear another sound, a whimper like a child’s.  High pitched and pleading.  
“Kota!”  I gasped aloud and my voice was feeble and weak.  “Kota.”
She barked loud.  I smiled and I would have cried if I had had a drop of moisture left to spare. 
She was tearing at the door now.  But her claws were sliding uselessly on the metal.  I saw the refrigerator in my mind, saw the handle that would set me free.  
I gasped in as much bad air as I could.  “Kota,”  I rasped, “Kota! Stick, Kota! Stick!”  
There was silence.  And I knew she was standing still, her head cocked to the side, thinking.  They say dogs don’t think but Kota does.  It’s why she was alive, because she knew that she couldn’t face the gun.  She figured it out.  She always thinks, standing still, trying to put together what I say.  Then I felt her hit the box with her paws and bite at the handle and pull.  It clunked as she failed to pull it far enough and fell out of her mouth.  
“Stick Kota!”
She tried three more times before she got a good grip on it with her jaws. 
And then the latch clicked and the crack widened and there was air to breathe.  I pushed open the door and Kota was licking my face.  Her huge head was keeping the air from me and I pushed her to the side.  I dragged myself out of my grave and flopped onto my back.  
The stars in the sky were sharp sparks in the black October night on the eve of the Day of the Dead.  




chapter nineteen


I lay there sucking in huge gulps of air, unable to move.  Kota kept licking my face and it helped to bring me back.  It wasn’t until my sweat-soaked clothes turned clammy and cold that I felt the urge to move.  I was lying on the bank of a deep ditch surrounded by junk and garbage.  There were worn tires and broken furniture, a crate of old scratched vinyl records, and a pair of broken skis.  It was one of those unofficial dumps where people toss their crap in the middle of the night looking over their shoulders for the cops.  The Demon Meth dealers had just pulled up and shoved the old refrigerator into the ditch.  If I hadn’t landed with the door on top I would have died there that night.  Kota could never have opened the door. 
She was still licking my face, which was beginning to feel raw.  I threw an arm around her neck and hugged her close.  And then I just lay there with my arms around her. 
You can talk about love but nothing is ever going to come close to what I felt for Kota at that moment.  How do you feel about the being that has given you life?  That cares so much, they have to follow you even if it means going against their nature and disobeying you, escaping from a locked room and performing an impossible feat of tracking you down in the middle of nowhere?  Not once but twice.  Following you to the edge and bringing you back.  What do you feel for a magical creature like that?  She comes second only to your mother. 
I say all this later, after the fact.  Then I had no thought in my head, nothing but the smell of dog and the feel of her fur and knowing what it is to be completely at one with another living thing.  And glad to be alive. 
I was exhausted.  I also had a raging thirst.  I heard a trickling of water and followed the sound down to the bottom of the ditch.  There was a small running stream of water, just a couple of inches wide, coming from an open culvert.  I got down on my hands and sniffed at it.  It didn’t smell especially horrible.  I touched my lips to it.  It tasted like ten-penny nails.  God knows what toxins were in it.  I took enough to rinse my mouth and spat it out.  I probably poisoned myself.  Years from now, probably, I’ll come down with cancer and the doctor will say, “Did you ever work in a formaldehyde factory?”
I rolled over onto my back and looked at the stars.  After the relief of still being alive begins to fade, comes anger and a feeling that the world is a cruel and vicious place.  I wanted to kill the injustice of it.  And most of all, I wanted my bike back. 
I called to Kota.  I ran my hands over her quickly, checking her for wounds.  I felt a damp spot on her hip and my fingers came away red with blood.  Not much, but definitely blood.  I felt around and came across bumps under the skin.  She’d caught some of the Demon’s buckshot.  Luckily, the gun’s barrel was sawed off short.  That tends to spread the shot in a wide pattern: deadly up close but less and less effective farther away.  I squeezed and a pellet popped into the palm of my hand.  I did the same with another.  I smoothed her fur feeling for other pellets but didn’t find any.  I looked at the two tiny steel balls in my hand. 
I walked away from Kota and called.  She came to me, moving easily.  If I’d had my phone, I could have been sensible and called Gail.  Since I didn’t, we started walking out of there. 
As much as I was grateful to be alive, as much as I loved Kota and Gail and my life, that’s how much I hated Floyd and the Demons gang.  Everything has to be paid for.  
The problem was, I didn’t know where we were or how to get back.  Kota however started walking confidently and then stopped and looked back.  This way.  THIS WAY!
She was homing in on AP  and that led us to a highway.  Then we got a ride from a young couple in their twenties who spotted Kota in the dark.  They didn’t want us to maybe get hit walking along the highway.  Meaning: they didn’t want Kota to get hit.  The woman had a phone but the battery had just gone dead, and besides she had a lousy service and had only one bar for like the last hour, can you believe it?  They had a pickup truck and let us ride in back.  They left us just outside the cutoff I took to the Meth lab.  I wasn’t about to lose that bike.  It was practically brand new.  The woman stretched out of the window to touch Kota’s head, crooning, “Bye-bye, puppy.  Bye-bye.”
My bike was still there where I left it.  I picked it up and turned to get out of there but something held me back.  
The little clearing in the woods was still as the grave.  I turned back and lay my bike down again.  I crouched down and watched the trailer.  I skinned my eyes looking for movement in the darkness.  Nothing.  I stretched my ears to catch the slightest sound.  It was so silent I swear I could hear the angry blood rushing through my veins. 
I asked Kota to stay and moved closer.  I crept up toward the Meth lab and watching for signs of life.  There was a dim light on but no movement inside the trailer.  The moon was down and the clearing was pitch dark. 
You may ask, why on a night like this, the only one of us with any good sense is taking orders from the idiot who nearly got himself suffocated in a refrigerator?  And you’d have a point.  But good sense and payback don’t usually go together.  They had tried to kill us and I wanted Floyd to feel the pain.  The worst thing I could do to him was destroy his investment.  This is the way I lose my temper, doing crazy stuff and to hell with consequences.
I pressed my ear to the side of the trailer.  The metal was cold.  I didn’t hear anything, so I tried the door.  It opened.  And nothing exploded in my face.  They were gone and left the place unguarded.  Why I couldn’t say.  Maybe the cops were nearby and they panicked.  Maybe after the trip to do me in, they had to drive Creepy Clown to a doctor and take care of his shotgun blasted leg.  And maybe, who cares?  These jerks had tried to kill me, worse they had tried to kill Kota.  And I wanted to do them all the harm I could.  I went in. 
A Meth lab stinks.  One tip-off that your neighbors are cooking Meth is that their house smells like all the cats in town have been pissing in it.  
A Meth lab is full of flammable chemicals.  That’s why they always blow up and burn the cooks.  I saw gallon jugs of alcohol.  One large bottle was labeled toluene.  It smelled like paint thinner so I figured it would burn.  I saw trays of clear (well kind of clear) fluid in a rack.  That’s the meth, I thought.  The product hardens up like candy and then they crack it and sell it.  
I decided to stop fooling around.  The Demons might be back at any moment.  They would definitely not leave their stash for long.  I took anything that smelled like it would burn and poured it out on the floor.  This was so dangerous what I was doing.  I could have mixed two chemicals that would explode or something.  I was pretty ignorant of the facts then so I didn’t worry about the hydrochloric acid or any of the really toxic poisonous chemicals that go into a delicious batch of crystal Meth.  For instance, if I had accidentally dumped hydrochloric acid on bleach it would create a cloud of chlorine gas, which was a weapon in World War I.  I was lucky I didn’t kill myself. 
Anyway, I poured the flammable liquids around.  Then I stepped outside and set fire to a book of matches.  And tossed it in.  The resulting WHUMP washed my face with heat.  I backed away quickly checking to see my hair wasn’t on fire or anything.  Then I ran to where Kota was waiting.  She was lying calmly next to my bike.  She looked up at me with a patient disgusted expression: Are you done risking our lives?
There was a big explosion and the flames leaped higher.  Now I was worried that I might set the woods on fire.  But it looked like the clearing was large enough that the trailer could burn itself out.  Good time to think about the consequences.  If I’d had my phone I would have called the fire department.  I picked my bike up and pointed it out of the woods.  
I heard somebody shout Oh No! and saw the Meth cook who I called Gas Mask running into the clearing and hopping around in front of the burning trailer’s door.  For a moment I was afraid he was going in.  That was all I needed, to kill somebody, even one of these assholes.  But he just made a couple of feints at the door and the flames drove him back each time.  Finally he threw up his hands and watched, backing away when something exploded, heated up by the fire.  They must have left him behind to finish up his work and he went into the woods to pee or take a dump.  Oh well.  Blew that one didn’t you, bonehead?
He hadn’t seen me.  As far as he knew I was still locked in a refrigerator suffocating by the side of the road.  I walked the bike down the dirt track with Kota by my side.  When we could no longer see the fire I mounted the bike and peddled slowly away Kota trotting easily by my side.  
I felt relieved and happy.  Calm.  I was glad I had done it.  And it was a good deed to help all of AP’s junkies go cold turkey at least for a while.  And I could hardly remember the fear and suffering of being buried alive.  
Revenge is sweet. 



chapter twenty


The calm satisfactions of arson don’t last, however.  If you’re a teenage kid it always comes down to wanting and longing for girls or boys, depending on your personal preference.  
That’s how I ended up peeping in the side window at Gloria’s house.  Besides, it was on the way.  
Kota was at my side.  She made a very quiet woof: Are you sure we should be doing this?  Nevertheless she understood the need for stealth.  Kota is a great accomplice on recon. 
The living room was dark except for the TV shine.  Gloria’s father was slumped in a raggedy chair with the stuffing coming out of it.  His face was lit by the light of the TV.  I knew from his expression what was going on there.  I’d seen my own father that way a million times.  It’s the I’m-so-hammered-I-can’t-focus-on-the-TV-unless-I-tilt-my-head-sideways-and-squint look.  He lifted his head and shouted something that I couldn’t make out.  But soon Gloria came in with a can of beer and handed it to him.  I was never so glad to see somebody.  Even if she was having a lot less fun here with good old abusive dad than she would at a party somewhere with cool friends and such.  It’s selfish, I know.  But at least I hadn’t been dumped for a better deal. 
Gloria was real sullen and pushed the drink into his hand.  It didn’t look as if he said thanks, either.  She took the empty off the floor where he’d dropped it and she said something.  She was leaving when suddenly he grabbed her arm and slapped her face real hard.  He pulled on her and she had to lean down.  He talked in her ear for a while and I could see his face.  He looked angry and as if he was about to cry at the same time.  I could see Gloria too but she kept her face blank.  But even in the darkened room I could tell that her face was red where he’d smacked it.  I could tell she was afraid.  
He let go of her and she left the room immediately, headed for the back of the house.  Gloria’s house is a bungalow type and everything is on one floor.  Her room was probably in the back. 
Sure enough I ran to a lighted window behind the house and looked in.  She was sitting on the bed, not really crying, just wiping her nose.  She made just one sob and then sniffled, wiping her nose with a tissue.  Then I saw the blood.  That sniffling wasn’t crying.  Her nose was bleeding. 
As angry as I had been at Gloria for standing me up, I was twice as angry now that I knew why.  And after my night in the refrigerator and being hit on the head and burning down Meth labs, I was bloodthirsty.  This is why it’s good people like me don’t have the right to carry a gun in the state of New Jersey.  If I did, Mr.  DeMaio would be dead today.  And I’d be in prison.  
So instead of committing murder, I tapped on the window.  Gloria whirled around.  When she saw it was me and thawed out of her freeze, she came and opened the window. 
“Dean,”  she whispered, “You scared the shit out of me, man.”  I was going to explain but she just asked me to wait.  She went to her closet and slipped off the black velvet sweat pants she was wearing.  Striping her pretty white legs were wide red welts, just as wide as a man’s belt.  She pulled on a pair of skinny black jeans and grabbed her purse.  Before I knew it she was climbing out the window into my arms.  She kissed me and I could feel her swollen lip on mine.  This would all have been dream come true territory if not for the obvious concerns. 
“What did he do to you?”  I said, trying to keep my voice down. 
She bent down to greet Kota and said.  “Nothing he hasn’t done before.  Let’s get out of here.”
Then she grabbed my hand and the three of us ran for it, just like the stars of Rebel Without A Cause. 




chapter twenty-one


“I said, does her father know where she is?”
“Gail, please don’t yell.  He was whipping her.”
“What?”
“Really.  You should see her legs.  And her butt.”
“And how did you get to see her butt?”
“I was looking in her window when she changed her clothes.”
Gail’s reaction to that was to pour herself another glass of wine.  Gloria was upstairs in the bathroom, cleaning up.  I guess it was almost midnight.  Halloween was about over, thank God.  We were in her sitting room which was a small parlor just off the front hallway of her house.  The last of a fire was dying in the fireplace where Kota was curled up on a soft round rug.  The Weather Channel was on the TV.  A reporter was being pounded by a storm on the beach in Nags Head, North Carolina.  The sound was off.  Gail took her wine and sat down on the velvet sofa. 
“Okay, Dean.  Let’s try to get our heads around this.”  She sounded reasonable and calm.  I thought everything would be all right.  I wish I had access to things like a nice glass of wine.  It would have been nice to calm down.  As it was I was trembling as I came down from the adrenalin rush of the night.  I guessed I would be looking at another seizure sometime in the next twenty-four hours.  Just one, I hoped. 
Gail said, “The question is, what do we do now?  She can’t stay here.  Her father could have the law on us and that’s something I’d rather not get into.”
“Gail, he’s drunk.  And he’s beaten her up tonight.  Hell, he beat her up yesterday.  What do you think he’ll do if he finds her now?  He hasn’t been sobering up for the last hour.”
Gail stared into her wine and made a decision. 
“You stay here.”
She went up the stairs.  I followed to the door of the sitting room and watched her knock on the bathroom door.  I heard Gloria’s voice and Gail went in and closed the door.  I went back in and sat down on the floor with Kota.  She lifted her head and lay it right back down.  Tired dog, is what.  I was too.  I lay down on the rug and stroked her side. 
I felt something under her fur, a little bump on her hindquarters.  Then another.  I sat up and searched and found crusty blood stains.  Shit.  More pellets from the Demon’s shot gun.  I felt along her legs and belly and she didn’t flinch so I didn’t think she was hurt bad.  Just peppered as they say.  Of course that’s what they said about the guy Dick Cheney shot in the face and he had bad trouble from that.  Kota needed medical care. 
I had a problem.  I hadn’t said anything to Gail about my problems with the motorcycle gang.  I needed to keep that secret.  With my past record of trouble something like this would mean heavy restriction.  Even Gail would get up tight. 
When she finally came back downstairs I still was not sure how to play it.  
“Gloria’s having a bath,”  Gail said, pouring more wine for herself.  “She took a bad whipping from that bastard.”  
“Are you going to make her go back?”
“Of course not,”  she said, “She’ll stay here tonight.  Then we’ll figure out what to do.”  
I said okay.  Then I remembered Kota.  
“Kota’s hurt.”  I showed Gail where the pellets were.  She immediately left the room, headed for the kitchen.  She came back with an armload of stuff, rubbing alcohol, and gauze and scissors on a thick china plate.  Gail has always had dogs and knows a lot about them. 
I played dumb about Kota’s injuries, just shrugging and muttering.  Kota just lay still letting Gail examine her.  Gail probed with her fingers, her tongue thoughtfully poking between her teeth.  Kota groaned and lifted her head, looking back at what Gail was doing.  Then Gail said, “Gotcha.”  And deposited a small metal ball on the china plate.  It rolled around and stopped against the scissors.  Gail poured alcohol on a some gauze and cleaned the wound.  Kota sighed loudly and lay her head back down. 
Gail petted her and said, “I know.  That stings doesn’t it?  But you’ll be all right.”  Gail found the other pellet and squeezed it out.  Kota didn’t even raise her head for this one. 
“We could have waited but they came out easy.  We’ll take her to the vet tomorrow morning.  How did this happen?”  I was shrugging and acting stupid for all I was worth, but a plausible lie was not coming to mind.  Gail was fortunately busy cursing out all assholes and their guns with nothing better to do than shoot at superior beings like Kota.  But I knew she would sweat the facts out of me later. 
I decided to fall back on the truth.  But before I could start, headlights flashed in the window as a car rolled into the driveway.  Gail went to the window and watched.  Then she turned and said, “Go upstairs.  Whatever you do don’t come outside.  And keep her upstairs.”  Then she went out the front door.  I watched from the window. 
How he found us I don’t know, but Gloria’s father was outside.  I could hear Mr.  De Maio’s voice but not the words.  The tone however was self-righteous drunken BS.  He hadn’t really gotten started when Gail put up her hand.  Then she started counting off on her fingers the reasons that Gloria’s father should just shut up and go home and sleep it off.  Whatever Gail said she was effective (she usually is) and De Maio went back to his car and drove away.  Gail came back inside. 
I said, “He doesn’t seem so tough all of a sudden.”
 “I know that type.  Once I let him see the door to the jailhouse he got very obedient.”  Gail poured herself another glass of wine.  “As drunk as he is he’ll probably kill himself or others driving home but there’s nothing I can do about that.”  Then she looked squarely at me.  “Are you having sex with this girl?”  She lifted her chin in Gloria’s location in the second floor bathroom.  I opened my mouth and she cut me off.  “Give me the truth for a change, Dean.”
“Honest.  I’m not.  I wish.”
Gail smiled.  “Yeah, I bet.  She’s awful cute.  But leave her alone.  At least for a while, until she gets her head straightened out a little.  Something else is going on there.  I’m not sure but… Just give her a rest.  Okay?  She may not even know it now but she’ll appreciate it.”
I shrugged and nodded.  I felt like I had a weird expression on my face from trying to figure out what my aunt was really saying to me.  But then Gloria came downstairs.  She was fresh out of a bath and wrapped in a black and red silk Chinese robe that Gail had given her.  It clung to her body in certain places like a second skin.  Yeah, sure, leave her alone.  I’m a teenager, for Christ’s sake.  Thanks a lot.  
Gail gave us something to eat.  It was fun sitting there all together eating eggs and toast and not saying anything.  It felt good and warm, like one of those illustrations you see in a magazine that’s meant to fool you into marrying somebody and starting a family of consumers.  Gloria smiled at me at one point, giving Kota the corner of her toast.  It made me ache inside, like I was already nostalgic for this moment I was living, this life I never had.  That’s what advertising does.  Makes you miss your own life even while you’re living it. 
We got Gloria settled into the spare bedroom.  She kissed me good night.  Really?  There she is, wrapped in silk and snug in bed and I’m being very cool about it, but is she going to help?  No.  She’s wrapping her arms around my neck and kissing and sighing.  She winked at me as I turned out the light, so she knew what she was doing.  She definitely thought it was funny. 
Kota and I were just down the hall.  When she’d come to my rescue I had just accepted her appearance as a miracle and let it go.  But since then I’d wondered how Kota had made her escape from a locked room on the second floor of our house.  
Well, I left the window open.  It’s that simple.  It never occurred to me she’d go out that way.  It was a five foot drop to the roof over the kitchen at the back of the house.  From there it was a twelve foot drop to the ground.  Possible, but I couldn’t see that even Kota could do it without injury.  There was one other possibility.  
There was a high fence butting up against the corner of the kitchen that hid the garbage cans and the propane tank from street view.  Kota could have done an Olympic balance beam number across the two-inch wide top of the fence.  At the end of the fence was a three foot jump over to a cedar picnic table that took two feet off the vertical drop.  It was still way up there in super dog territory.  But then we’re talking about Kota. 
She had gone immediately to her bed and laid down.  No wonder.  
Laying there, knowing Gloria De Maio, current dream girl, was under the same roof… Well, I thought I would never sleep.  I lay there listening to Kota’s even, steady breathing, already in dreamland. 
I was unconscious in less than a minute. 




chapter twenty-two


It was like struggling up out of the sea, except the sea was thick and sticky like glue and kept sucking me under.  I had a hell of a time waking up.  
I could hear Kota talking to me, that high whimper she makes when something’s wrong.  When I got my eyes open she was at the door.  And now that she was directing her attention out into the hallway, she was growling softly.  
The clock said 3:36.  There was light coming through the crack at the bottom: the hall light was on.  I could hear Gail talking, she sounded angry, cursing somebody out.  But she was afraid too.  I pulled on some pants and went to the door. 
“Kota.  Lie down.”  She went through the motions but she was tense, ready to spring up.  Who’s that?  Who’s out there?  
Gail was quiet now.  Somebody else was talking.  They were downstairs.  I couldn’t hear words, just a deep low murmur.  Sleep was still on me like a drug and I thought of the Ocean.  The surfer that had disappeared under the constant rolling waves.  Death was near. 
I didn’t have a plan.  I just opened the door, looked back to see Kota lying on the floor craning to see past me to the danger.  Gloria had opened her door a crack and was peeking out.  I held up a hand.  Like I knew what I was doing.  Then I walked to the top of the stairs and looked down.  
There was the president and chief financial officer of the New Jersey Demons Motorcycle Club.  He was holding Gail by the hair, pressing the muzzle of the sawed-off shotgun to her cheek. 
I said, “Let’s talk about this.”  
Not great last words, typical probably.  I’m sure lots of people have said the same thing when confronting the monster, the hungry beast that has finally come to your door because you just pissed him off.  And now you got to pay.  I’m just proud that I could make a complete sentence in my last moments on Earth. 
The tall biker looked up at me.  He didn’t smile; he was all business.  His six pack belly seemed red and inflamed along the line of the barbed wire tattoo.  He had a rag tied around his gun hand.  A burn, I guessed, from trying to salvage his burning drugs and I was happy that I’d hurt him.  Maybe he’d have the scar for the rest of his life.  Someday he’d look at it as he was having a beer at his new Meth lab.  He’d remember the kid who burned the old place down and caused him a little trouble a few years back.  A scar on a loser’s hand: My Masterpiece.  Some legacy. 
“Come down here,”  he said.  It was going to be simple sentences all the way.  No clever banter, no heroic prose, no dastardly threats or death bed confessions.  The simple stuff of murder. 
I backed away.  Let’s face it, I was terrified.  But he started to lose sight of me.  And made a mistake.  He let go of Gail.  He came up the stairs after me.  I was ransacking my brain for an idea, a place to run.  I hoped Gail was thinking clearly enough to beat it out the door and call the cops.  There wasn’t anything she could do to help us.  Then I heard her at the bottom of the stairs.  Talking.  
Why is she still here?  Run!
I looked and saw Gloria had come out of her room.  She was wearing the silk Chinese wrapper, clutching it together at her neck.  Pure Film Noir.  I was seeing things in shots from old movies now, sharp flashes of black and white highlighted with sick yellows and greens.  
The biker was half way up the stairs, boots making tom-tom thuds on the wooden steps.  He was a cut straight out of In Cold Blood and my mother gripping my hand on the couch of her death in New York as the killers crept through the dark farmhouse. 
I told Gloria to get back in her room and shut the door.  But sound wasn’t traveling normally.  It was like each word left my mouth and fell onto the floor with a soft clunk.  Gloria just stared at me, her eyes getting so huge.  
Because she was watching, and only because of that, I stepped up to the head of the stairs to keep the Demon away.  The biker was close, three steps down holding the shotgun along his leg.  He knew we weren’t armed.  He wasn’t worried.  A rattlesnake doesn’t sweat it either.  It just paralyzes its prey with that sound and strikes. 
I saw Gail at the bottom of the stairs, just getting to her feet.  Floyd had knocked her down and she was dazed.  
He came to the last two steps and reached out with his hand, the one that hadn’t been burned.  I could picture it easily.  He would push Gloria and me into a room and shoot us, then go back for Gail.  It would be done so fast, he’s on his Japanese bike and roaring out of town, disappearing down Highway 9 before the blood dries on the walls.  
And I had nothing.  It was my fault for starting the trouble in the first place.  And now I would get them all killed, Gail and Gloria.  And Kota.  Everybody I should be taking care of. 
The thing you forget about dogs, because they sleep so much, is how fast they are.  Especially reflex time.  A person can’t beat a dog to the draw.  Just can’t. 
I felt, rather than saw, a white streak move past me.  Floyd jumped back startled and, for the first time, scared of something.  I had one flash of white teeth rocketing forward toward a barbed wired throat.  She struck him hard and he fell.  The shotgun went off with a roar, blowing Gail’s ceiling apart as he toppled backwards down the stairs.  He went down, stiffly, like a puppet, cart wheeling over himself twice. 
We watched until the biker stopped flipping and lay on his back at the bottom of the stairs.  His head was twisted funny on his neck, his Adam’s apple bobbing spastically.  
Kota sat down and looked at me: Now what?  
Gloria had come over and was holding my arm.  We looked at the aftermath, mouths wide.  Downstairs, Gail swooped in and grabbed the shotgun away.  
I went down and bent over, looking at the body on the floor.  Floyd was still, except for a choking sound and the thumping of his boot heels on the floor.  
“Maybe we should call somebody,”  I said.  
Gail shook her head.  “Let’s just wait a minute,”  she said.  “Let’s see what happens.”
Sure enough, he soon stopped moving, not even to breathe. 




chapter twenty-three


They found the body of the drowned surfer later that morning when the sun had come up.  He was bobbing around in the high tide near the Casino.  He was nineteen years old.  We found that out later, along with his name, which I forgot to write down and has since been lost. 
Gloria and I were sitting on the boardwalk with Kota watching the EMS teams and cops and drinking coffee.  Gloria kept up a steady  feed of Pupperoni going to Kota.  Corrupting her.  It’s well known a dog will do anything for Pupperoni.  I could probably have kicked out right then in a Grand Mal seizure doozy and Kota wouldn’t have blinked.  But she deserved time off the clock.  She’d had a busy night.  None of us had slept since we were woken up by the biker and his shotgun. 
That was surprisingly easy to sort out.  Once Gail was sure Floyd the Demon was as dead as he was going to get, I got out the card that Warner, the cop, had given me.  I called him. 
He looked at the shotgun, the hole in Gail’s ceiling and ruled it a failed robbery.  Accidental death: broken neck due to being an asshole.  Warner tried to pet Kota on the head but she backed away and he didn’t push it. 
Warner, or as it says on his card, Sergeant Warner told me the Clown had been arrested at the hospital emergency room while being treated for the gunshot wound he got when I pushed the shotgun away from Kota.  Floyd the biker had left him there before coming to find me.  Sergeant Warner said there were Pennsylvania warrants for the Clown’s arrest.  He would be transferred immediately to stand trial on previous drugs charges.  
Of the crystal Meth cooker, there was no sign.  Warner told me that he would probably just drift back toward his Appalachian homeland until he found new low life friends and set up another lab.  So all in all, I was leading a charmed life and my temper hadn’t destroyed everything again.  They were orphan biker trash and nobody cared enough about them to come looking for me. 
I was glad.  Now that I had a home again, I didn’t want to leave it.  I had Kota and Gail.  And Gloria.  I promised God, or whoever, that if I could skate this one time, I would live humbly and quietly and spend my spare time trying to be happy with Kota and Gloria and try to make something positive out of my life.  I promise.  
Well, I had made resolutions before.  Maybe it would turn out better this time. 
From our bench on the Boardwalk, Gloria and I watched as they carried the surfer’s body up from the ocean across the sand.  We didn’t want to be total gawkers.  But if you want to be near the Ocean you got to accept the consequences.  And we wanted to be near the Ocean that morning.  It’s big.  And indifferent to our problems.  
We felt bad for the Unknown Surfer.  He was just a kid who liked the Ocean a little too much.  And the consequences follow, whatever they might be.  We felt for him and were as reverent as the need for coffee and Pupperoni allowed. 
I couldn’t say the same about Floyd.  He was a greedy monster that sold poison to kids and had outright murdered a boy.  That was just the crimes I knew of.  And he was going to kill us.  Besides none of us had touched him.  And Kota is the most righteous being on Earth and incapable of doing wrong. 
They put the Unknown Surfer in the ambulance.  
Show’s over.  
We got up from our bench and walked north on the boardwalk. 
I saw a figure duck back behind Madame Marie’s.  I had just seen her for a moment but I didn’t need a fortune teller to know who it was.  It was Ramona, Gloria’s jealous friend, her hoodie pulled up over her head.  There was no mistaking her, though.  She must have been stalking us all night.  I wondered how much she had seen?  
I told Gloria.  When we reached the Paramount Theatre, we could see Ramona trudging away across the park.  
Gloria shrugged and said, “Ramona’s the jealous type.  She’ll get over it.”  
That would have to be a problem for another day.  I was too wasted to worry about it. 
Kota wandered back and forth across the boardwalk taking DNA samples from spots her People had managed to pee on before they were ejected by the Asbury cops. 
NO DOGS ALLOWED.  This is the law.  
We talked about going to school but decided we were way too tired. 
Gloria said, “Let’s go home.” 
And the three of us walked back to the little house just off Sunset Avenue. 
I like the way that sounds.
###




About The Author

  Dan Ahearn is a novelist and playwright living in New York City.  His first novel, Bad August, was published by St Martin’s Press.  His second book, Black Light, published by Dell, was nominated for the Shamus Award. Look for his new book Shoot the Moon, coming soon on Smashwords.