J.J. Alo
CH. 3 - CURTIS
Curtis woke abruptly from the chiding sound of his pager. He sat up, quickly glanced in bewilderment at his surroundings, and noticed he was in the cab of his truck. After a few moments, the disorientation subsided when realizing he must’ve fallen asleep during what was supposed to be a quick cigarette break. He huffed at the message on the Skytel pager, which read: NEED YOU TO CALL ME. AMY. After reluctantly returning a call on a beat-up, four-year-old Nokia cell phone—one kept in the glove box for emergencies—he started up his old Dodge Ram pickup and hauled out of the parking lot of the Mondo-Mart Superstore, inordinately irritated.
Home was the last place he wanted to be, especially with how behind he was with work. And the news he just received didn’t help the situation. Now fighting exhaustion, beating his hands on the wheel, cursing, was the only reaction he could muster as he threw the stick shift into third, stomped on the gas, and headed toward I-93. Before the highway on-ramp, he pulled off at a service station for gas and a large coffee. It was six a.m.
The radio, set to AM, on low, dribbled news from its speakers…
“…much has changed in the last twenty hours here on the coast, and this impending storm just keeps increasing in severity for all of Essex, Middlesex, Suffolk, and Plymouth County. Very quickly, meteorologists went from Topical Depression to Tropical Storm, and they’re predicting—”
Curtis, headache returning, shut it off.
Silence.
The conversation he had a few nights earlier with his co-worker Miguel started to playback in his head. Drifting. Adrenalin and caffeine were the only things keeping his eyes open.
“Yo, man, I don’t know how the fuck you do it, yo.” Miguel snickered.
“Yeah, what’s that?” Curtis grunted as he pulled a handful of cable through dense sheetrock.
“You, man.” Miguel finished lifting the screws on his side of the wall with the electric screwdriver, tossing it unconcernedly into a tool bag.
“You don’t know how I do me?” Curtis stated rhetorically, continuing to pull, sweat dripping from his head. He looked back to the large, round analog clock above the stock room door and sighed deeply. It was quarter after four in the morning, more than half way through the shift and they were nowhere near close to finishing the room. He could have sworn the red needle of the second hand was working at double speed.
“Yeah, this fucking job. Away from your family for weeks at a time, man. I miss my babies, bro. This shit is torture. My girlie and my three beautiful little princesses back home, this shit is just too far away. I did a job in Vermont, like four months ago, somethin’ like that, and I never thought I was gonna see them again, man.” Miquel went on from the other side of the wall.
Curtis continued to pull wire.
“I really don’t live that far away. A couple hours’ drive.”
“Oh yeah, you over by them big ass Indian casinos, right” Miguel finished by imitating the infamous jingle from the casino commercial. “Meet—me—at—Foxwoods!”
“Yeah, near there—Norwich. And home is not exactly a good time right now anyway. Me and the wife are kinda separated.” Curtis said reluctantly.
“I’ve been there once...”
“Wife?”
“Casino. Me and my three cousins took, you know, one of those ‘weekend getaways,’ right? It was New Year’s Eve when we got there, and you know, we were all kinds of fucked up. We split a twelve-pack of Heiny on the way down, smoked a couple joints, and did a few bumps—cuz my cousins can’t go nowhere without a brick of llello—and that’s even before we entered the place…”
Ugh, Christ, here we go.
“My cousins are crazy gamblers, too, yo. They will bet on anything—like, who can finish shotgunning a beer first—who’s got the bigger dick… They’re into some weird shit, too—they looove them some Ferret Bingo.”
“Ferret—bingo?”
“Yeah, man. You stick a ferret in, like, a giant box with this built-in maze, right, and a bunch’a numbered exits, and you bet on which tunnel it’ll take to get out. It’s crazy—I once won a hundred and fifty bucks on that shit. But anyway, my cousins will even place bets on people at the fuckin’ tables who’re placing bets! How ridiculous is that!? They place stupid-ass wages in the off-track betting area and then spend hours losing all their money playing Texas Hold’em. They think their chances are better not playing against the house, right, but then they fuckin’ go ‘all in’ on a pair of deuces.” Miguel shook his head, laughing. “Roulette is my thing, yo—you know, I like a game of chance—reminds me of life. Which also reminds me, I fuckin’ lost every bet I made. The goddamn ball kept landing on GREEN—I didn’t even know that was a real option! So much for fifty/fifty, am I right?”
Curtis rolled his eyes. All he wanted to do was tell Miguel to shut the fuck up, but he was torn; they really needed to hustle, however, it was really the only human interaction he would have in a given day, and the solitariness of his hotel room was starting to wear on him. Two weeks, two weeks, two weeks, two weeks, uggh…
“So anyway, this fucking place is packed, right, like INSANE busy. Every club was sold out, which was fine anyway, cuz tickets were like, fifty bucks just to get in, and we lost everything on the floor. So, we walked around sulkin’ like couple putas’, ‘til we came across this wide-open club, called Mist, right in the middle of the gaming room floor! It was crazy; there was the gaming tables, you know—Black Jack and Roulette—and then a huge oval bar, and then a fucking lit-up dance floor. There was a DJ booth with two dudes spinnin’ and a bunch of little cabanas and shit set up around the perimeter that you could reserve and get bottle service at. It was fucking wild—free admission and everything! The honeys were crawling all over this place in stilettos and these tight, shiny dresses and shit, struttin’ around, glitter on their faces, teasin’ everybody.” Miguel said enthusiastically. “Yo, you know why they call that place Mist?”
“I don’t,” Curtis said indifferently.
“Cuz randomly, mist will shoot down from the ceiling onto the dance floor all around you! It’s crazy, right? You can get nasty on the dancefloor, and they can’t see you through dense fog! So many honeys, bro—so many…” Miguel muttered as he heaved a slab of sheetrock out of his way, exposing the skeletal structure inside. After unspooling the remainder of fiber optic cable, he began to run the length of it over his stocky shoulders. At only 5’8” and noticeably out of shape with a potbelly poking through a way-to-tight blue flannel button-down, he was surprisingly strong for his size. At least, Curtis thought so.
There was an entire minute of awkward silence.
“Damn, man, I feel bad for you. Hope you’ at least gettin’ it up here!” Miguel smiled, fishing in the cable.
“I’m not getting it anywhere,” Curtis said with an uneasiness.
“Shit, man, you’re gone for weeks at a time. I’m surprised you’re not cleaning up. I would, yo.”
“When? In the middle of the afternoon? Try to pick up girls at the coffee shop? Or the mall? Besides, I’m not interested.” Curtis, now realizing where this was going. “Didn’t I see you talking to some high school girls in the music department right before work? Is that why you get here early?”
“It’s not like that, yo! They just wanted to know what I thought of that new Britney Spears joint, but I try to tell them I’m more of a Jessica Simpson kinda guy, right? You know, they both got that southern belle thing going, but yo, Britney’s got the whole, ‘girl from the trailer park’ thing right, and I’m not into that! And Simpson’s more than wholesome, ‘bring her home to mom’ type—plus she got those massive globos, you know what I’m sayin’?”
“No.”
“Besides, my girl would fucking kill me—she catch me talking to some chicken-head broads,” Miguel said as if he had been in this situation before. “You ever date Spanish chicks, man?
Curtis shook his head.
“Spanish girl catch you cheating, yo, they will castrate you. They won’t even ask questions—no breakup—no divorce, man. They just cut yo’ pinga right off! They don’t fuck around, yo.” Miguel chuckled to himself with a smile that radiated across his bloated, scruffy face.
Another minute of silence.
“What the fuck does ‘kinda separated’ mean anyway?”
“I don’t know, man. Separate bedrooms, I guess. We don’t talk, and when we do, it’s always about the same shit—fucking money. There just never seems to be enough of it—Miguel, you feeding the cable or just watching me pull this shit?” Curtis grew more irritable.
“Yo, relax, man, daaamn—it’s coming, it’s coming…”
It was coming, alright. A cloud of smoke hit Curtis in the face causing him to cough. The smell was undeniably familiar, and it became abundantly clear he was the only one doing any actual work.
“Is that… Are you smoking a fucking joint?” Curtis said in complete disbelief.
“Na, yo. But I am smoking this fatty boom batty blunt I rolled in the shitter after dinner. My God, yo, that candy pizza give you diarrhea, too? Miguel wafted the smoke from his view of Curtis through the wall hole.
“No,” Curtis curtly said.
“Damn, you gotta lead-lined stomach. I can’t do that shit no more. Any large pizza that cost you six bucks can’t be good. Yo, you gotta hit this shit, man. I scored it off this fuckin’ Goth kid who works over in electronics! Them weird, Goth, country, emo dudes get the best shit, you know what I’m sayin’?” Miguel held the blunt, admiring his fine craftsmanship.
“NO. Last time I smoked your shit, I had an anxiety attack and thought my heart was going to explode. I couldn’t sleep worth o’ shit; ended up walking around the hotel all day, paranoid.” Curtis recalled, slightly amused.
“Yeah, my cousin gave me that shit and neglected to tell me he laced it with formaldehyde.”
Curtis stopped pulling. “Embalming fluid?”
“Yeah, yo,” Miguel said nonchalantly.
“What? Wait, what the fuck—seriously!?” Curtis, shocked.
“Don’t worry, yo, it ain’t gonna hurt you! You’ll be well preserved, man.” Miguel smiled.
“You should quit smoking that shit.” Curtis, now miffed. Trying not to blow his lid, Curtis took a deep breath and walked out of the stock room toward the four recently installed self-check-out machines around the corner to work on the pending software upgrade. Miguel, oblivious to this attempt to end the conversation, followed. A laptop had been set up, connected to new technology—a touch screen terminal machine, and Curtis jumped right in to finish configuring the point-of-sale system.
“Wow, yo, this shit blows my fucking mind! Who taught you to do this?” Miguel watched, impressed as Curtis played inside the system with ease. “You look like you could do this shit in your sleep, bro.”
“I could if I slept… I was being trained on this kind of stuff right before I left my last company.”
“Hey, how long you been on this job for?”
“Been on the job as long as you—six weeks.”
“Na, man, how long you been working on these store data upgrade jobs?”
“Uhh, I don’t know, like eighteen months or so. Why?” Curtis asked as he pulled a pack of Marlboro 27s from his utility tool belt.
“Cause this job sucks, man. A nine-to-five job don’t interest you? You know, like, normal people? I know you’re licensed and shit, and you got the experience.”
“This shit’s the same no matter which shift it is,” He said, cigarette hanging from his lips. “It pays cash, and there’s no one around to answer to. I used to enjoy the atmosphere and silence.”
“Awww, you son of a bitch, yo! Miguel laughed.
Curtis smiled and lit his smoke.