It's Not My Cult! Page 2

  She studied me.

  I paused, sensing a foot or other tender part of me in some spring-loaded steel trap. Marcy didn’t just ask things without knowing the answers. Maybe she did in class, but that’s just something I’ll have to take on faith like the belief that cats don’t walk on their hind legs when I’m not looking.

  “It means you can do what you want with what’s yours.”

  “Very good. So a sovereign nation can decide what to do with its resources. Now is that true of everything it has?”

  “Marcy. Look. Is this-okay, true. Yes, it’s true.”

  “Now that’s true whether we’re talking about gold or oil or bananas, right?” She looked at me closely after saying this as if one of these words should’ve jarred loose an avalanche of guilt. I didn’t take her gold or oil. So that left-?

  “Wait. Is this because I ate a banana muffin yesterday?”

  “Anthony, those were STUDY muffins.”

  Raymond

  We sat around the corner from Anthony Dosek’s, staring through the van’s windshield. No rush to do this work, especially now that Virgil was in on it. I was about to ask him if he remembered the location of that strip club we passed earlier, when he spoke first.

  “Okay, I understand the decision. We kill Dosek later, but I just, well, how did you come to that?”

  “In or out, Virgil.”

  “In, but why. It’s not a lot to ask from someone I’m working with, is it? I don’t need faith, but I want a reason.”

  I exhaled.

  “I’m going to tell you, but then I don’t want to talk about it for hours. I wanted that, I’d get married.”

  “I thought I heard you were married once.”

  “Which fucking story do you want? My marriage to the ex-pole dancer or the one where we don’t kill a guy yet.”

  “Why we’re doing this.”

  “Okay. So. I had that sniper rifle in my hands. I could’ve put two-three rounds through him like this was Dealey Plaza in 1963 or like my second tour of Iraq; I could’ve dropped the rifle on the van floor and we could’ve driven back to the compound high-fiving each other all the way. But then I looked in the rearview mirror.”

  “You saw a cop? A witness?”

  “Both of those have remedies, this was worse. There was this young kid at that electronics superstore’s entrance. I don’t know why I kept looking, but I did, and he’s standing there in his blue polo and khaki pants with a huge box, the kind big screen TVs or other expensive things come in. Anyway, this box is on a trolley and then this rich asshole pulls up in front of the store and the kid has to put it in this flashy car. And he’s sweating, adjusting his grip, moving every which way to get this box loaded. The kid probably can’t afford what’s in that box. Finally, he’s done. And the asshole just kind of smiles at this kid, gets into his car. No tip. Just jets off to his nice house to fuck his wife or throw diamonds into the trash disposal while the kid’s there looking glum one long moment before he rolls the trolley back into the store.”

  “And you think this is us, that kid.”

  “This was the universe talking, it felt like. Here we are in the city to do a job where we get no extra pay, but we get all the extra risk.”

  “My grandfather hated just two kinds of people: shirkers and Reds. You sound like one or the other.”

  “I’m not dumb enough to believe in Zot or in Communism, and as far as a shirker, are you stupid? What do we have here after everything’s done? Do we have a 401K? Health insurance? We work for Carsewell, not Coca-Cola or Microsoft. The best of it at the end of the day if we do this, is a pat on the head like that kid outside that store. You or I get injured, think Carsewell will care or cry while he undresses another sexy young convert?”

  “Um…”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Anthony

  “Marcy, you put my couch into the alley because I ate a banana muffin?” I had to say it aloud to her because my brain was having a hard time digesting this. But I guess, after all, brains are bad at digestion.

  “I made only enough for my study group and you took one and it caused problems.”

  “Really?”

  Then she just kind of rested on her heels and folded her arms while leaning against a granite counter in the kitchen.

  While she did that, I contemplated that a study group who focused on political science couldn’t find a way to overcome a crisis over a scarcity of muffins.

  Raymond

  “I’m just saying, Virgil, let’s turn this to our advantage. We have an expense account. The job doesn’t have to be done today. We’re not retiring from this line of work, so let’s enjoy ourselves while we can. I’m not the only one who saw a strip club by the interstate.”

  We sat in the van around the corner from Anthony Dosek’s house, just talking. Virgil nodded, spoke at last.

  “Well, like you say, we aren’t a Fortune 500 company.”

  “No, we aren’t. We do violence on behalf of a sham religion and live in a compound, which I’m sorry, Virgil, IS a lot like living like one of those Reds your grandfather hated so much.”

  “I’d ask you to make it sound a little better,” Virgil said, looking out his window, “but it’s all true.”

  “You see? So let’s hit a steakhouse and a strip club, or find a strip club that serves steaks or a steakhouse with stripper waitresses.”

  “Hey. What’s that in the alley?” And here Virgil pointed out his window.

  Anthony

  Marcy looked at me a long time before at last saying, “I accept your apology.”

  I exhaled.

  She shook my hand, which I hadn’t expected. Her palm was so dry it might’ve been made of papier-mâché.

  “I want to say I’m glad we finally talked.” She flapped her hands, now tossing her hair and the ends bounced as if she were in a shampoo commercial. “You know, you were right earlier when you said that we didn’t.”

  I nodded at her words.

  While I was glad to make peace with Marcy after several months of bruised quiet between us, what I really wanted was to bring my couch in before bed bugs or harvester ants found it.

  I made a smile at Marcy, trying to be pleasant, reading off the directions in my head: lift both corners of the mouth at the same time.

  “What’s wrong with your face?” She broke off her compliments or whatever she was saying.

  “Nothing. Um. Can, uh, we get my couch out of the alley? It looked like it might rain when I was out earlier.”

  “Really? I didn’t see rain in the forecast.”

  And thankfully she couldn’t find her phone to check the weather. I mean, was she really going to take the word of some internet weatherman over that of her husband’s unemployed cousin? I mean, if anything, I had the time to notice.

  So we went to the alley to retrieve my couch, but that’s when I choked like an asthmatic.

  Marcy tried to cheer me up.

  “I’ll give you an extra pillow. I just bought new guest pillows and you’ll like them.”

  I nodded, looking both ways down the sunlit alley as if my couch had just wandered off in its chili-pepper splendor.

  Raymond

  I waited for Virgil in the van while he went inside a hardware superstore to buy a lock. I told myself that giving him this wasn’t anything. After that, we went looking for a storage facility, found one, then I let him go into the office to rent a unit for his white elephant whatever.

  “Let’s see that,” I said when he came back to the vehicle with a rental agreement. “Good. Just a month. But here’s something: why?”

  “I wanted it.”

  “Really?” I’d helped him load it in the van just to keep my hands busy. Plus, it seemed to make him happy.

  “You want me to tell you why, I bet,” he said and he looked so pleased and like he was warming up to an explanation.

  I cut him off.

&nb
sp; “I don’t do deep discussions with people if I can help it.”

  That shut him up.

  Except for:

  “Wow, I can’t believe you’re divorced.”

  After we drove down several rows of identical storage lockers, we stopped in front of ours and then unloaded and locked up that eyesore of a couch.

  “Telling you now,” I said, sliding behind the steering wheel, “we are not taking that with us when we leave.”

  “We won’t.”

  I shook my head and we drove off looking for the strip club, which Virgil helped me find. As we parked, got out and were walking to the entrance of Bare Ask Dancing, I had to turn to Virgil and say something. “We’re away from the compound. Off the leash and you chose to rent a unit to store an ugly couch. You know,” I chuckled, “a man’s only as big as his desires.”

  “But we’re the ones entering a strip club in the middle of the day.”

  I waited for him to say something else, shook my head when he didn’t and paid the cover to a girl in a fake fur two-piece because I was tired of weighing the mysteries of mediocrity.

  CHAPTER 2:

  Blood and Pastries

  Anthony

  This soiled litter box a few feet from my bedroll had to be a dream. I don’t mean the wish-upon-a-star kind. I just mean there’s no way I could be awake and that this could be my life. But if this was a dream, I’d always thought that smells, and certainly not nostril-wrecking reeks, didn’t exist in dreams. So was this real? To test reality, I pinched myself.

  “Ouch. Okay, so this is my life.”

  In response came a meow, a feline shut-the-fuck-up.

  “What do you want, Livingstone?” I asked the tortoiseshell cat as he padded up to an already full box of litter.

  A moment later, the stench worsened, sleep became impossible and I rose to start the day. I put up my bedroll which Marcy had, kindly, allowed me to keep in the cat’s area. Instead of the living room where I WAS, now in this basement, I had all these amenities within reach. Besides a litter box, if I ever had an urge to use a scratching post, well, here it was.

  To date, I had not used box or post.

  An hour later at Tenth Street Coffee, I waited for Spike to pour my wake-me-up. Pot of Arabica in one hand, coffee cup in the other, he talked to me.

  “So. Last week? Your friend from Fish Hut? Jen?”

  “Yeah?” I wondered what he wanted.

  “Never mind. Sore topic. Hey. What was that all about anyway, what she said? Third Coming of Zot?”

  I didn’t feel like explaining a sham religion I created one summer when I was bored, or how people busted out by the financial crisis had come to take me seriously. Or at least they did until I was declared an apostate and exiled.

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  “I bet. I’ve never created a religion. Is it like having pretend friends and enemies, one grants you wishes and the other eats your lunch?”

  “I said it’s complicated.”

  “Hey. This time of the morning, the go-getters are gone and I’m stuck with retirees and people working on a seventh draft of a pirate novel. I know, I’ve read a few. So can you, you know, tell me a little? It’ll pass the time.”

  “It passes anyway.” I sighed. “Look, I’m not against religion in general, just my attempt at it. Can I have coffee?”

  “It makes you feel better to share your life,” he said, giving me a smile like a kid wanting a cookie.

  “I don’t see how. Look. Past is past. You were probably something else too before you started working here.”

  “Well, I used to be a barista at Popeye’s Coffee and before that, I was a barista at Bottle-cap Coffee and before that I made drinks for my drunken mother after my father left her. She used to say I was as bad at mixing drinks as my father was at some things. Probably landscaping. The homeowner’s association was always on his ass. So anyway. Who is Zot?”

  “I can get coffee somewhere else,” I said.

  “We’re three blocks from your house.”

  “You think I’ll trade my privacy for the convenience?”

  “I’ll throw in a blueberry scone.”

  “A scone. Wow.”

  “I don’t have much to bargain with, Tony.”

  “You want me to put my life on the table for us to talk about. That’s worth just a scone.”

  “Blueberry.” He said it like it was a password.

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s blueberry. They’re the best kind.”

  I sighed, then I started to talk.

  Raymond

  I pounded on Virgil’s motel door because Carsewell had called early with a job. Our rooms on the second floor of the Flamingo Motor Court overlooked a parking lot and someone down below was honking, just really leaning on the horn. So it should’ve woken Virgil from his eyesore couch dreams. I mean, right? I slapped Virgil’s door, looked over my shoulder past the parking lot at the back of a roast beef sandwich place.

  Okay, so the view here really sucked.

  Not really deluxe digs, but compared to the compound this was a palace with all free cable TV, and loud sex after bar-close in the room next door that a lonely man could stand.

  “Cock-a-doodle-doo, get the fuck up!” I yelled.

  That car horn annoyed me now, made me turn to put a hand on the steel railing and loom over it. I know what I look like and I expected the honker would quit. He did. Some paunchy guy in a satiny jacket, mustache and sunglasses from someone else’s long ago. A youngster. I hate nostalgia, but especially this kind; where the person was too young to have experienced Disco or tailfins on cars or something. It’s like being late to a party you weren’t even invited to. And now, seeing me, he squinched down in his seat, gave an embarrassed little wave.

  “Get your own bad fashion,” I muttered.

  A door opened down the way on this floor and two women dressed in some equivalent of neon signs advertising SEX FOR MONEY, walked out laughing. They slowed down to appraise me in passing. Whores and nostalgia; neither did anything for me although in the past I have shamefully indulged in both.

  Their voices cut at me.

  “You’re going door-to-door for it, guy like you?”

  “You’ll never get business that way. You have to grab a corner, then defend it. Or get you an agent.”

  They said that, giggling, then they both bubbled their way down the winding stairs and into the Pontiac Firebird. The driver gave me another wave he probably thought was apologetic for his girls’ sass.

  “Let’s get waffles!” one of the prostitutes shouted.

  The kid shrugged up at me as if saying: what can you do?

  Anthony

  After slapping a lid on a life-story sandwich that Spike had extorted from me in exchange for pouring my coffee and a pastry, I rested on my heels, waiting for caffeine.

  “That is just amazing,” Spike said. “Maybe you can give me some tips on how to do something like that.”

  “Like what? Lead on desperate people with false hopes because I’m too stupid to notice this isn’t a game to them like it was for me? I wouldn’t do that. Not again anyway.”

  “No, I mean, just something. Some days, like, crossing the street is impossible. I feel like I was born late, that all the opportunities for doing great things are gone.”

  “Are they? Sure you’re looking? Boredom fuels bad choices. Don’t get bored, that’s my advice.”

  “Good point.” He poured my coffee at last.

  “Forgetting something?” I eyed the bakery case.

  “Oh. Sorry. I sold the last blueberry scone.”

  “How? I’ve been standing here the whole time.”

  “I’d already sold it. I forgot. I’m working on getting details right because details are where my life runs off the rails. Paying bills. Following recipes. Traffic lights.”

  “You make me tell you my life story and you promise a blu
eberry scone you don’t even have?” I groaned. “Never mind, just give me another flavor.”

  He reached under the bakery case, messed around a bit, then he put a plate down in front of me.

  “What is that?” I pointed at a misshapen piece of dough.

  “Bear claw. We’re out of scones.”

  Raymond

  When Virgil finally came to the door, I pushed him aside to use his toilet, came back out and he was sitting on the bed rubbing his eyes, his hair looking like a tumbleweed with a lot of mileage on it.

  “We’ve got work,” I told him.

  “I love the strip club,” Virgil said, scratching his ribs through his soiled white t-shirt, “but, boy, it sure leaves a mark on you the next day.”

  “We’ve got work,” I repeated, letting my stare make the meaning explicit.

  “Oh, you mean-”

  “I’ll be in the van. You didn’t know I was knocking early, now you do; don’t make me fucking wait. And wear something you don’t mind staining and throwing away.”

  Anthony

  “I should go see her at work?” I asked Spike, sipping on my coffee, thinking how that bear claw sat in my gut like an inanimate object; a doorknob, a baseball. I liked the other pastries they sold here, why this one sucked I couldn’t say.

  “Why not?” he answered.

  “It’s forward, don’t you think?”

  “You ever get anything by hinting? Anyway, didn’t you used to lead your followers?”

  “Those people were looking for answers and I was playing with forces I didn’t understand. I didn’t think it hurt anybody. Now I know better. But how do I fix it with Jen?”

  “Call her.”

  “I don’t have her number. I talk to her, it has to be at her job in front of her coworkers.”

  “Well, it’s up to you. Hey, you want another bear claw? I came in early and they let me make them.”

  “They did?” My lower intestine moaned.