BugHatch: Writers Unincorporated

[leaded]

actually i wrote this last year. it started as a dream and was hijacked by it's own reality as i wrote it down.

tonight i saw 'city of god' and it reminded me of this story, or rather the doc that accompanies the film reminded me of this story. i'm recomending the dvd. i'm not sure i recomend the story but it'll probably never go anywhere so i figured i'd throw it out here. it's not had alot of work but that's what this place is for.




Ricky’s parents were dead. At 17, still with the soft face of a child he was suddenly alone in the east side apartment they had all lived in. A room with one light bulb and two beds. A room where the sink saw only cold water and thumb sized cock-roaches, along the narrow baseboards crawled insects that resembled creeping eyebrows. Ricky removed a perpetually damp pillow from the broken window and allowed the smells of the street to come in. His parents were dead but if it had not been raining so solidly, if that streetlamp had not burned out, if the cabby had not pulled a double shift, if visibility had not been so bad, if they had never left the sun in the first place, he and his family would be together. Now here he was alone in a cramped room above a busy street.
He looked at the shelves of engineering books his father had brought from home. At the nearly complete computer his father was building for him on the kitchen table. The sewing machine his mother ‘rented’ from Mr Leslie so she could earn the cost of a silk bra by attaching the straps to hundreds of units six days a week. All useless now. All for nothing. Why was it always so cold here? Ricky stuffed the pillow back into the missing corner of the window and cast himself back to a warmer time. Back to a time when copper skinned children filled the streets. A time when Ricky’s biggest worry was keeping the ball out of his own goal. A place where parrots roost in the trees like birthday balloons and fly overhead, trailing tails like streamers.
He looked again at the books, the unfinished computer, the sewing machine. There was a quiet knock at the door. A woman a little younger than his mother in white leather boots and behind her the landlord in slippers. They told Ricky he couldn't’t stay. He was a minor. He couldn't’t pay the rent. The woman explained that she might be able to find him a new place to stay by the end of the month. He signed a few forms and she left. The landlord came in and ran himself a glass of water. On the way out he collected the computer from the table. “be gone by the end of the week kid. I got people waitin’ on this place.” What does a 17 year old kid do? Pawning the sewing machine got him $150 and the bus station was just around the corner.

“Anything to declare?” The customs agent didn’t look up from her terminal. ‘Yeah’ said Ricky, and she glanced up to meet his eye. “That country” motioning over his shoulder, “is a shit and i’m glad to be home.’

Through two days, the bus continued south between low mounded mountains like piles of sugar poured out from gods cupped hand, and into town down streets lined with buildings decorated like birthday cakes. “End of the line. Everybody off.” The inviting porticos and tree lined streets had given way to bricked in windows. If this street were a dog, all these sleeping dogs would be fleas. It wasn’t home as he remembered it but that had been ten years ago. Ten years of barely treading water. Ricky had no idea where home was supposed to be.
After a few nights of being rousted out of the bus shelter Ricky chanced upon a place to sleep. An old chimney standing guard over a collapsed factory. The rain would have to fall straight down from the sky to soak him under his cardboard sheets.
These streets were so much like the one he had just left. Nobody helped out. Everyone helped themselves. In time Ricky learned to help himself to whatever he could find. Tossed food from behind the Lucky Wok. Clothes from a backyard laundry line. Once a car with the keys still in the ignition. Of course if someone spotted you going through their trash, wearing their t-shirt or a pair of sneakers they liked, driving a car you obviously didn’t own, they felt free to take things from you, along with a little retribution. That included the police.


Imagine you’re a cop stationed out of the 5th precinct. You show up for work on a Tuesday morning not yet in uniform. You pour yourself a cup of coffee from a table that faces an interrogation room. The blinds on the room are only partly drawn. The coffee is a black jolt and you are rummaging for a stray sugar pack when you realize there are people in the interrogation room. The coffee is to hot to drink and there is no sugar to be had but you can see through the cracked blinds into that room. You are a cop. A peace officer. Against the far wall sits a young male, 5’7” 165lbs, brown hair, in an oversize t-shirt. His pants are around his ankles. Another boy stands facing a corner, naked but for a dirty pair of jockey shorts. The view shifts as one of your fellow officers leans against the blinds. He looks from one boy to the other. Your coffee has cooled and the blinds snap shut. What would you do?



Back on the street Ricky had made a friend. A friendship forged in fire with the integrity of ash. His friend had a job and now Ricky had a job too. Their job was to go to the faded pink building on First, the one with three bricked up windows and the fourth barred, and get a package from the one eyed man. Then the two boys would make their way up the slanting streets to the house of cats. A labyrinth like part of town where the crooked streets have no name. The boys could always tell when they were near their destination. The regular barking of dogs would come echoing down the streets along with the odd gunshot, sometimes followed by the yelp and whimper of a dog. Sometimes followed by nothing.
The house of cats was blue. Faded blue like a stained sky parged with clouds and split by lightning bolt cracks. The small courtyard was fenced with wrought iron from a finer time and the spaces between the bars were shaded in with layers of chicken wire to contain the cats. A neighborhood full of cats in one courtyard. One eared cats scanning the sky intently for birds. Cats that fought in the corners obscured by dust. On the window sill near the door sat a single cat idylly combing out its tail with its tongue. When the boys got to the house they would make a noise, any noise really except the bark of a dog, and a face would appear in the window behind the cat. When the man came down to the gate they would pass the package over the fence and he would pass them a smaller one back. No communication was shared except the purr of the cats as they wound round the mans feet. The boys would head back to the one eyed man in silence.

Those on the edge of society live their lives in suspicious shadow. Always an eye out for the cops who look out for themselves first. Always an ear open to the curb side barber who knew everybody’s business. Always stay clear of the one eyed mans brother. A man who didn’t like to live on the edge and wasn’t satisfied with his piece of the pie.

Ricky was paid nearly as much for his delivery job as his father had made sweeping up in the subway tunnels. His father who’s grave was now in another country next to his mothers if they had a grave at all. Ricky looked high up the colum of sooty bricks to the square of night sky that hung above him. Maybe he had been rash. This was certainly not the home he remembered, the home he had dreamed. If he saved his money, if he hid his money, if he could manage to hold onto his money, he could move on.
Weeks passed and the boys continued their deliveries. They steered clear of the cops, that one from the interrogation room and another one. The other boys on the street eyed them enviously when they entered the pink house. Ricky was always on edge but never so much as when they entered that house. The man with one eye was pure business. Sitting at the table working the scale or tieing the string round the package to be delivered, he always paid full attention to what he was doing. His brother on the other hand stood shifty in the bathroom doorway, his eyes, as glossy as his red leather jacket, were locked on the package in his brothers hands. The one eyed man would toss them the package along with the word go and he would be back at the scales. The brother on the other hand would stare the boys down, sometimes reaching out to slap them in the back of the head as they passed. “Make it quick” he’d hiss under his breath.
It was a scorching day but being back on the street was a relief after the pressure cooker of the pink house. Before entering the maze of alleys and weed filled courtyards that lead to the house of the cats, the boys decided to stop for ice-cream. There was a woman who sold bars from her front porch and they were going to live it up for a change. Squatting at the curb, stuffing his money back into his shoe, Ricky looked down the street they had just come up. A flash of shiny red leather disappeared into a doorway. The brother had decided he could collect scraps from the family table or he could go out and get his piece of the pie.
Ricky dropped his ice cream and scooped up the package running. His friend, thinking he was being double crossed ran after him. The brother, feeling invincible and knowing the maze as well as anyone sprinted after them. The three were launched up the hill on crumbling concrete stairs. Sometimes more scrabbling through loose gravel than climbing. Clutching at fallen fences and rusted hand rails. Ricky was quick but he was nearly losing his shoe and was sacrificing a lot of agility to try to keep his untied shoe on and his change intact. He rounded a corner , turned an ankle, and crashed into a dry ditch bottom. His friend was right behind him, landing at the bottom with his knee on Ricky's chest. “what the hell are you doing” the boy said wild eyed. Ricky was flailing through the collected trash trying to regain is feet. ‘He’s after us’ he gasped and then screamed out in pain as he wrenched his ankle from under the boys weight. “Who! Who’s after us Ricky?” but he got no answer. Just Ricky’s unblinking eyes looking through him toward the sky.
“Hold it there you little shits” The boy spun on his haunches and saw the brother looking down in red silouette. He took off his jacket and draped it over a post at the top of the bank. Ricky shifted his attention to the package as it lay just out of reach. The string was broken like a dry piece of choke weed and the wrapper was torn brown leaves. Inside he could see bundles of paper. Paper as green as garden grass. The brother wiped the sweat from his face with his shirt front and looked down at the broken package. His piece of the pie. The boy followed the brothers gaze down to the package and acted quick, scooping up the bundle of freedom and ducking down a concrete culvert. With his bad ankle Ricky could only watch him go.
The brother still had options though and in a blink he was in the ditch bottom. He gave Ricky a kick in the ribs with the promise of return and hunched his way down the tunnel. Ricky watched him go too, at first blocking out the light from the far end of the pipe and slowly disappearing into it. An indistinct humanoid shape nearing the far end of the tunnel. Then Ricky saw a shadow in the shape of a grid fall across the exit. He saw the brother reduced to an unmoving foundation to the piece of iron fence his friend had thrown down. Ricky knew his friend couldn't come back for him through the tunnel. Not with the dead brother there and not with an arm load of cash. And what could Ricky do? First thing was to get safely back to the chimney and collect his savings.



Imagine you are a cop on your way home from a double shift. You see a boy hobbling down the street carrying a red leather jacket. Something seems out of place and you pull over although you are now off duty. The boy looks familiar. He gives you a sob story about how he’s in big trouble. How he got this job to deliver the jacket across town and it has to be there before dark. He tells you his father will beat him if he’s not home before dark. He’s limping badly. He’s the same age you were when you joined the service. Imagine you offer him a ride and he sits silently in the passenger seat. You round a corner and he motions toward his house with a chest freezer on the front porch. The sun has disappeared behind the rooftops. You offer to complete his delivery for him and return with the payment in the morning. You are the police. Despite appearances sometimes you are the good guy. The boy tells you where the jacket has to go. The pink house of the one eyed man. You know it’s a bad house but you also know how important a few buck can be to a kid. A few bucks you can’t spare. Imagine you pull up in front of the pink house just as the street lights are flickering on. You know it’s a bad house but you are still in uniform. You’re comforted by it’s pressed blue. You knock on the door and a voice calls you in. It thinks you are the boy. Imagine you push open the door and your hard healed steeps echo down the hallway. You follow the sound to the end where a light burns just around the corner. You walk with the jacket held out in front of you. Just make the exchange, pick up the kids money and get home. As you round the corner into the light you see the one eyed man at the kitchen table. Imagine he has a hand gun pointed at your head. He looks down and sees his brothers jacket in your hands, knuckles white with tension. He fires the gun hitting you in the shoulder and spinning you back around the corner. Black shadow is pooling in the lines between the tile. You hear the kitchen chair fall as it is pushed away from the table. Your firearm is in the glove box of your car. What would you do?

[Lorno]

I was confused over the questions asked through-out "what would you do" hmm interesting idea but they just seem to end there with no elaboration then the story goes back to the child’s story. Too many clichés. Too many big words, unclear narrator. Good metaphors they painted a great picture. I suggest developing the breaks in the story where it switches characters to allow for the question to be answered; too much freedom is given in interpreting those question and answers. But I could be talking out of my ass here I write poetry and have a lowly BA in eng lit.
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All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind~Aristotle~