FREELANCER

by Bill Mesce, Jr.

Hell is other people.

                                                                   No Exit

                                                                   Sartre

Passaic, New Jersey – March, 1983

Wild Willie was a reedy little guy, young, maybe same age as Smackey Jack and Cat Monano, but it was hard to tell. Before he went in the can, he was living mainly on booze and narcotics which is a diet that’ll age a person fast. His hair went in six different directions no matter what he did with a brush and comb.  He was a little wall-eyed, too. You looked him in one big, blue, red-rimmed eye, and the other one was looking off somewhere else. That always made it hard for Terry to talk to him, and even harder for Terry to trust him. Terry swore sometimes that while he was talking at one eye, Wild Willie was just pretending to look back; that fried mind of his was really wandering off through that other eye.

Smackey Jack and Cat Monano brought Wild Willie in. Terry didn’t know where they found him. They just started talking up this guy to B.B. Smack and Cat were very impressed with how nuts Wild Willie was.

“You gotta see this fuckin’ guy,” Smackey Jack said, telling the story.  “We’re down The Tunnel,” which is a go-go bar way down on Routes 1 & 9.  Smack and Cat liked it because there was a dancer there took her top off when she had too much to drink. 

“There’s not’in’ inna place but bikers,” Smackey Jack said. “Willie’s a bit tanked, so he go to me, he say, ‘I gotta get some air.’  I go out wit’ him, we split a joint, we’re just walkin’ ’roun’ a bar, gettin’ a li’l air, we’re a li’l fucked up, we don’ even see this guy, we bump inna him, some big biker guy out back takin’ a leak. We jus’ bump inna guy. Oops, righ’? This guy, Willie, he don’ t’in’ twice BOOM, he clocks a guy wit’ his beer bottle BOOM! Yi, madre! I look at him like this -- ” and Smackey Jack did a vaudeville version of a double take “ – ’n’ he jus’ look at me ’n’ he say, ‘He bump inna me.’ Tha’s all; ‘He bump inna me.’ I look at a guy, the biker guy, he’s onna groun’, I don’ even know he’s dead or not, jus’ ’cause ‘He bump inna me.’”

B.B. asked Terry to go with Smackey Jack and Cat Monano one night to check the guy out. Terry didn’t want to go. This Wild Willie guy sounded like trouble, and even with that aside, he sure as hell didn’t want to spend a night with Smackey Jack and Cat Monano. But B.B. wanted Willie checked out.

So, Terry was stuck going with Smackey and Cat to meet Willie at The Luna Lounge down in Woodbridge. When Terry asked them why they had to go all the way the hell to Woodbridge, they told him it was because The Luna had something called “shufflepuck.” Wild Willie had just discovered shufflepuck and now he was a big shufflepuck freak which meant Smack and Cat were now big shufflepuck freaks.

“You never play shufflepuck?” they screamed at Terry like they and everybody else in the world had been playing shufflepuck since dinosaur days. 

Smack drove them down to Woodbridge in his Trans Am because he knew the way to The Luna. What Terry found out at The Luna was shufflepuck was a table-top version of shuffleboard. The table was narrow and long, twelve feet, and the board was smooth, polished wood like a bowling alley, and the wood part was surrounded on all sides by a gutter. There was a triangular shuffleboard score grid at either end of the table. Teams stood at each end of the long table and slid small, heavy pucks toward the other end. The pucks slid like they were on ice. It took a lot of touch to slide the puck straight and with just enough oomph to land somewhere in the scoring grid without sliding past into the gutter.

The three of them walked into the bar and Smackey Jack yelled out, “Oye!  There’s my man!”

Cat Monano shouted out, “Hey, amigo, que tal?”

Wild Willie ignored them.  He was concentrating.  He was bent over his end of the shufflepuck alley, or lane, or whatever the hell they called it. In one hand he had a drink and his cigarette, and the other was sliding a puck back and forth like that somehow aimed it.

“Shh,” Smack said to Terry.

“He concentratin’,” Cat Monano said.

Except that Wild Willie wasn’t sliding his puck back and forth slowly and deliberately like somebody trying to line up his shot. He was sliding it back and forth so fast Terry thought he’d rub through the shufflepuck table. Wild Willie shot, shoving his puck down the lane so hard it zipped over the scoring grid, past the end of the lane, over the gutter and off into some dark corner of the bar. Wild Willie thought this was so funny he fell over on his face on the shufflepuck table and laughed his little girl’s laugh into the polished wood.

Oh, brother, Terry thought.

“Hey, Willie, Willie-boy, we got somebody here you wanna meet,” Smackey Jack said.

Wild Willie picked his face off the wood and it was covered with the powder they sprinkled on the shufflepuck table to help the pucks slide.

When Smackey Jack and Cat Monano told Willie Terry was “B.B.’s guy,” Willie started acting like he and Terry were friends from way back.

Terry was trying to figure out which red-rimmed, booze-bleary eye of Wild Willie’s to look at. Terry saw those pupils were practically microscopic and he knew Wild Willie had been doing more than tossing back drinks that night.

“Look, Terry,” Wild Willie went on, “I’m a fuckin’ thief. The-end, ok? I steal for a livin’, ok? I mean, I’m not like these guys, like your boss, for instance, I mean, God bless ’im, he’s got that bar, a legit business, blah blah blah, fine, B.B.’s awright, everybody talks good ’bout him -- ”

The words were coming out of Willie’s mouth so fast Terry had to listen hard to put spaces between them to make sense out of them. Wild Willie was talking so fast he was forgetting to swallow, and he kept making bubbles across his mouth when he talked. This guy probably eats speed like other people eat Tic-Tacs, Terry thought.

Terry never remembered the conversation too well after that because they had this tradition at The Luna. Anybody new to the bar could be treated to a drink called a Lunar Rocket by anybody else in the bar. And the person that got that drink had to drink it. People at The Luna liked buying Rockets for people because they thought it was funny as hell how fucked up people got on Rockets. Wild Willie made it public knowledge that Terry was new to the bar, and then Lunar Rockets started flying Terry’s way. As the booze and the good feelings flowed, Willie started buying Smackey Jack and Cat Monano Lunar Rockets, and then Smack and Cat started buying Willie and Terry Lunar Rockets.

Terry didn’t know what was in a Lunar Rocket, not exactly, but every time the bartender made one, he’d set a tall hurricane glass filled with ice on the bar, then he’d set up nine shot glasses of different kinds of liquor next to it. All nine shots were poured into the hurricane glass and that was a Lunar Rocket.

Terry’s second Lunar Rocket was going down while Wild Willie was telling Terry that all he wanted to be in life was a good thief, and then there was a third and Terry had a dim recollection of shufflepucks sailing off across the barroom and having to pay somebody for something that got broken, and then there was another Lunar Rocket and that was the last thing Terry remembered about the night.

Except flashes of something he wasn’t sure was a dream or not. Bits:  Smackey Jack’s Trans Am flying along right next to a white concrete road barrier, the 305 roaring, Terry’s teeth going on end from the fingernails-on-a-blackboard sound of steel on concrete, sparks shooting past his window, somebody in the car laughing like this was the funniest goddamned thing.

Terry came to in the back seat of Smack’s Trans Am. It was a good thing he was short and so was Wild Willie because Willie was passed out in the back seat next to him, and the back seat of the Trans Am wasn’t very roomy.

Smack was passed out behind the wheel, and Cat Monano was passed out in the passenger seat with his head out the window.

Terry didn’t feel too good. His head was killing him, and his stomach felt like grenades were going off in it. He untangled himself from Wild Willie and pushed against the back of the front seat. Cat Monano’s body slumped forward, and his head bounced off the windowsill, but he still didn’t move. Terry got the door open and slid out and found himself on his face in some grass iced over with frozen dew. The door swung closed behind him and the noise it made when it closed didn’t wake the other three still flopped out in the car. Terry saw that down the side of the door, beneath where Cat Monano’s head had been hanging, were thick streaks of puke.

He also saw that those flashes he’d had while he was more-or-less passed out that might’ve been a dream might not have been completely in his head. The right side of Smackey’s Trans Am looked like somebody had pulled a plow blade across it. Paint was scraped off and the metal was dimpled and creased from one bumper to the other.

It was still dark enough that streetlights on the nearby road were still on.  There was no sign of the sun yet, but it wasn’t night anymore. Terry couldn’t see any landmarks or signs and didn’t have a clue where they were: just some generic strip of small highway out in some generic nowhere that was grass, trees, and nothing else.

The Trans Am’s headlights were still on which made Terry guess the engine wasn’t turned off, just stalled. There were tire tracks along the grass weaving this way and that which told him this hadn’t been a smooth pull-off. 

“Oh, Christ,” Terry said and dropped down on his ass, then did some puking himself. 

Wild Willie was standing over him.

“Fuck these guys,” he said, nodding at Smack and Cat still passed out in the car. “We’re not far. C’mon.”

He helped Terry to his feet. Terry didn’t know what they weren’t supposed to be far from because they walked for an hour until they found a 24-hour Getty station, with Terry taking a pause to take a leak and two more time-outs to puke again.

After the first time Terry puked, Wild Willie held out some pills.

“They aspirin?” Terry asked.

Wild Willie said no, Terry waved them away, and Willie downed them.  They must’ve been some kind of upper because not long after, Wild Willie was wired and yapping again. Terry didn’t pay Willie much mind; he was concentrating on not passing out and/or puking again, and how mighty fucking cold the morning was. 

Willie called a cab from the Getty station, and when the cab came for them, Willie and Terry crawled into the back seat. Before Terry passed out again, he remembered Willie asking him if he had any money to pay the cabbie.

Terry was woken up by the squawk of a huge, green parrot perched on the back of the mildewy-smelling sofa where he was crashed. Terry opened his eyes and grabbed the sides of his throbbing head which had not been helped by the screaming parrot. The parrot waddled along the back of the sofa and cocked its head to get a better look at Terry with one big, starey eye, then squawked again.  Terry noticed the worn felt upholstery along the back of the sofa was streaked with old, dried bird shit.

That made him sit bolt upright because he was afraid the parrot might’ve dropped a load on him while he’d been out. It hadn’t. There was a note stuck in the front of his shirt. Wild Willie had left him a message on the back of a delivery slip from Domino’s. Wild Willie’s script was surprisingly smooth, almost feminine:  Catch u later.

The parrot was nosing over by Terry again. Terry balled up the note and whipped it at the bird. From behind the room’s walls he could hear rap music, TV voices speaking Spanish, an argument.

Terry swung his legs to the floor and checked out Wild Willie’s place. He shivered; the apartment was cold. The sofa was old, the felt covering splitting here and there and worn away completely around the edges of the arms. There was a Barco Lounger across the room in the same shape, right down to the streaks of bird shit. There was a rug worn down to the backing in places, stained, and practically hidden under a coating of pizza boxes, aluminum and Styrofoam take-out food containers, Chinese food cartons, Styrofoam cups, beer bottles, liquor bottles, and clothes. Mixing in with the mildewy smell of the sofa and stink of bird shit was the smell of rotting food and smelly socks. And from somewhere came the smell – a heavy smell, heavy enough that the way he was feeling it made him nauseous – of fried chicken.

There was an ancient twelve-inch portable TV with aluminum foil hanging from its antenna tucked in a corner with its power cord loosely coiled around its bottom. Evidently replacing it on the floor against the wall facing the Barco Lounger was a nineteen-inch number, brand new. Six of its brothers were still in their shipping crates stacked against another wall.

Something was poking Terry from under the sofa cushion. He reached under and pulled out a 9 mm automatic. “Of course,” he said and slid the pistol back under the cushion.

He got to his feet, a bit unsteady, stood leaning against the sofa until his legs felt better.

The parrot started whistling. It knew the first eight notes of the music from The Bridge on the River Kwai, “The Colonel Bogey March.” That’s all it seemed to know; it kept whistling those same eight notes over and over until Terry took a swing at the bird.

Somebody started banging on the other side of one of the apartment’s walls.  “I’m gonna have ’at fuckin’ bird for lunch you don’t shut ’im up!”

The parrot flapped out of Terry’s reach, flapped its way to the floor, then waddled off through a curtained doorway deeper into the apartment, still whistling.  Judging by this one room, Terry wasn’t eager to follow the bird and see what the rest of the Wild Willie Crapatorium looked like.

There was a three-sided bay window with holed shades pulled closed. In the bay was a small Christmas tree still in its stand. Since this was March, the only thing left of the tree was a skeleton of brittle brown branches – all the more pathetic-looking with strings of Christmas lights and cheap ornaments still on them – and a blanket of dried-out brown needles in a neat circle on the floor under the tree.

Terry sidled past the Christmas tree, pulled one of the shades. The shade snapped up and the sun hit Terry’s eyes like lasers. For a minute he was blind.  When he got his sight back, he saw he was on the third floor of a sad-looking walk-up in a row of sad-looking walk-ups. The street outside was familiar enough, not because he knew where he was, but he’d seen enough streets like it:  run-down walk-ups, strips of bare earth along the sidewalks where there had been grass twenty years ago, litter in the curb and overflowing the basket at the corner, people hanging out on stoops, on fire escapes, too many of them with not a whole lot to do. He could see down to the corner where there was a big Kentucky Fried Chicken place accounting for the fried chicken smell.

Terry was the only white guy as far as he could see.

“I don’t believe this fuckin’ guy,” Terry said out loud to himself. His answer was the parrot whistling “The Colonel Bogey March,” more banging on the walls and the same screaming voice swearing to Christ he was going to take that fucking bird down to the KFC and toss him in the grease.

Terry told B.B. as much about that night as he could remember and wound up with, “You ask me, that guy’s a few fries short of a Happy Meal.”

Still, B.B. wanted Wild Willie where he could use him if he needed him, but he didn’t want him on the crew. If he had some work for Smackey Jack and/or Cat Monano, he’d tell them they could sub it out if they wanted, take somebody from outside with them. “You wanna take that Looney Tune Willie, that’s ok,” he’d say, and that’s how he kept Wild Willie around but at a distance.

Willie, Smackey Jack, and Cat Monano had gone down to Seaside to horse around on the boardwalk. They hit a couple of bars and got themselves pretty fucked up. They wound up in no shape to look for a motel room for the night. At the peak of the season – this was July – it was pretty doubtful they could’ve found one anyway, so they spent the night on the beach, sleeping under the boardwalk.

The sun woke them up earlier than they wanted to wake up. They were hungover, their hair and clothes were full of sand, they were itchy from some kind of bug bites. They crawled out from under the boardwalk and started walking the streets looking for a place to get coffee. The more they walked, the crabbier, sicker, and itchier they got because it was so early nothing was open. That’s when they bumped into The Rich Kid.

“You just know ’at li’l fucker didn’ buy those wheels!” Smackey Jack said in The Roma later when he was telling the story to Tiny Terry. He was talking about the jacked-up Chevy Blazer The Rich Kid was driving.

“Fuckin’ rich kid drivin’ ’roun’ on Daddy’s money,” Cat Monano said.

“’N’ he’s got these monster speakers pracally blowin’ out his windows he got ’em crank’ so high -- ”

“So, you know Willie,” Cat Monano said.

“I know Willie,” Terry said.

“Willie go, he say, he go, ‘Hey, Chief, you wanna turn it down a bit?’  ’N’ Li’l Mr. Got-Rocks, he go – tell ’em what he did, Smack.”

“He give Willie the finger.”

“Oh-oh,” Terry said.

“You know that was a mistake, tu sabes?” Cat Monano howled.

“You know Willie,” Smack howled.

“I know Willie,” Terry said, shaking his head.

What happened was Wild Willie pulled out the 9 mm automatic that had poked Terry awake that time he’d been stranded in Willie’s apartment. Willie put one slug through the front windshield of the Blazer to scare the shit out of The Rich Kid behind the wheel, then emptied the clip through the Blazer’s grill into the radiator.

Even before Willie had finished killing the Blazer, Smackey Jack and Cat Monano had lit out. After Willie had emptied his piece, he looked around and saw he was alone. He wasn’t feeling very well, still pretty hungover (hell, he was still a bit drunk), so he walked – didn’t run, didn’t even walk fast, just strolled – to where Smack had parked his Trans Am the night before. Since Smack had disappeared and his keys with him, Willie stretched out on the hood of the car. The metal was warm from the morning sun, and the windshield made a nice backrest. Sacked out there, very comfy and sleepy and warm under the sun and still a bit buzzed, Willie passed out in less than a minute. That’s where the Seaside cops found him fifteen minutes later, still passed out, the empty 9 in his belt, and a gram of coke in his pocket.

Cat Monano, who went down to visit Willie in the Ocean County lock-up, said, when he asked Willie why he didn’t just try to cop a plea, Willie said, “Why should I make it easy for ’em?” Cat Monano repeated this with a certain tone of admiration.

“Only t’in’ he give a shit ’bout,” Cat Monano told them, “who gonna take care a his goddamn bird.”

"Freelancer" is one of a series of short stories (some short, some long shorts, three of which have made it into final rounds of writing competitions) Bill Mesce, Jr. has published over the last couple of years, based around a fictional "crew" working in New Jersey's dying factory towns in the early 1980s. The stories, in large part, were inspired by tales of local shady characters he heard while growing up in the region.