ISSN 1758-6488
|
Men in Love Fiction |
print view |
HORSESHOES.
“How’d you do it?” Candy says. “Nobody goes from twenty to a hundred dollars a day inside a week.” At one of the pooltables, a white and a Black guy go through complicated hand-slapping high-fives to celebrate a good shot.
“Tried to get fired.” I say. “I picked out middleclass whites with that blank hip college-grad look, I said, ‘Hi, want the weirdest souvenir of Wildwood-By-The-Sea you’ll ever own?’ And showed them the pen. ‘Go in and get one. Don’t fill anything out for the car, it’s a scam. Don’t listen to the guy in the cowboy hat about a condo, it’s a bigger scam. Get your pen, turn in this paper, and I get a dime, which is a scam, but very little in the scale of scams and costs you not a damn scammed cent.’”
Candy slams her hand on the bar. “It’s perfect!”
“I’m so stupid, I think I’m fucking him up. He’s all over me at the end of the day. ‘You send them in suspiciousing me!’ You know he’s trying to fool you by letting you know he’s trying to fool you when he pulls the fake accent shit. I get a kiss on both cheeks. The first few Marks surprised him. Then, he gives them a pen, waves them off, won’t talk. They figure for a free pen they could take a look. He says, no, he knows Blond Boy out front is trying to get fired, he can’t report me to the boss, he’s too soft-hearted, they got their pen. Must be he is in the charity of giveaway pens to help illiteracy in America. ‘Maybe I am so idealist, I think you write with free pens to help my native country of,’ anyplace he can call, ‘the sad toilet’s bowl of Europe histories, where my family is suffering under worse crooks who took over from Communist crooks. Being free makes suffering worse. You discover freedom is empty. You cry on the phone to your son, like my father to me. Why? my father says, why when they give you freedom it is full of nothing?’ Something like that. You know his line of shit.” I watch Strawberry shimmer like a Barbie dipped in Aloe Vera. “Marks wind up begging for a look at the cardboard skyscraper dreamtown. Closers scoop them up, he says it’s like fishing in an aquarium with a net. They tell their friends get the ticket from the blond who’s so honest about not letting yourself get scammed. And don’t take the first option, the man in the cowboy hat will cut you a better deal.”
23
