Dodge Zelko
Foster got a slot machine to keep in his living room, one of those vintage Old Vegas models with metallic veneer and the words “Nevada Club” in a little light-up marquee above the rollers. He says he got it to help out a friend of his, Arlo, who has a gambling problem. Arlo will come over when he gets itchy and “fire blanks,” so to speak, or plug in quarter after quarter and crank, sometimes for hours on end, at the end of which, once he’s exhausted his inane desire to be broke, Foster will simply open the machine and give Arlo back his haul. That’s just the kind of guy Foster is, acting on his own set of Beatitudes.
For instance, when I come over tonight to swap for some acid, I can’t help but feel like I’m ripping the guy off. It’s a cold, wet walk from my place to his and there’s a foil-wrapped parcel of fudge in my hoodie pouch. The parcel is frozen, sort of exotic to the touch, like a piece of space-age hardware, and reminds me of those cubbies at the nature center when I was a kid where you’d blindly stick your hand in to touch a swatch of fur, an animal’s jawbone, or the coils of snakeskin that to me always felt like pork rinds. The fudge is effective, don’t get me wrong; it’ll make a trip to the corner store feel like a riverboat excursion to find Col. Kurtz. But it’s not acid. Foster is one of the few guys in the Midwest who can still get good acid, despite what a few dropouts I know in Madison will say to try and get me to drive two hours.
Foster’s totally useless German Shepherd greets me at the door. Augie’s meant to be a guard dog, but you can bribe him just by talking in a baby voice. He has markings over the eyes that make him look querulous, indecisive. Unceremoniously, Foster throws the fudge in the freezer, and I catch a glimpse, or I’m pretty sure I do, of an identical parcel I gave him eight months ago during our last swap. It appears untouched, just another fossil in the overcranked appliance, embedded in a deep stratum of snow next to a years-old stack of TV dinners. White fog billows out at us; however my face is so cold from the walk over that the cloud feels almost tepid.
Augie runs a few tight circles in the crowded kitchen, then into the living room, where I see Foster’s girlfriend, Sylvie, standing on the couch in her Ren & Stimpy socks, ostensibly trying to fix Foster’s antique clock, one of those black cat affairs with the twitching eyes and the pendulous tail. Foster said he’d had a clock just like that above his crib when he was a baby. The glowing sickle-cut eyes were his first memory and his first great fear.
Sylvie waves me in and says, “Hold this. Make yourself useful,” so I walk over and accept the black tail, like a little shepherd’s cane, and pretend it’s a hook as I pull my hand up into the sleeve of my jacket; then I taunt Augie for a while, stabbing at him with the hook, making vague pirate sounds, while he bounds around in excitement after a period of just looking confused.
“We gotta go fetch Arlo,” Foster says from the doorway, bony arms crossed in a white T that bears three identical floating heads of some racecar driver. All the heads gaze off in different directions.
“He’s at King David’s right now playing the fruit machines.”
“How do you know that?” I say.
“I got eyes and ears everywhere.”
“Ronnie texted him,” says Sylvie, who’s opened the clock and is squirting lubricant into all the tiny cogs and mechanisms. “I should’ve worn gloves,” she complains. Foster offers her some and she says, “Nah, I’m almost finished.”
“You really think that’ll do the trick?” I say. “I mean you think that’s all it is?”
“We’ll find out together, won’t we.” Sylvie focuses intently on her efforts with the oil.
I look back at Foster. The racecar driver on the right, his right, is wearing sunglasses, the one on the left a ballcap bearing the logo of a sponsor. It’s a familiar logo, somewhere between an ampersand and a pentagram, but I can’t think of what they make. Maybe they don’t make anything. Maybe they’re one of those rent seekers I used to rail against back when I gave a damn.
I try to pitch my voice carefully so I don’t sound like I’m whining. “If you guys remember, I live like a block from King David’s, so a heads up that that’s where we’re headed would’ve saved me some time.”
Foster shrugs. “I only just found out.”
Sylvie says, “Hand me that tail.”
To everyone’s surprise, but especially hers, the clock is fully functional, the eyes with their greenish uranium hue making an unnerving sweep of the room.
“Turn off the light,” I say.
Foster is right by the switch. Standing in the dark for a few seconds, we’re as quietly bewitched as three babies in adjacent cribs.
There’s a pool going at King David’s, Chantel the bartender tells us after a cold, wet reversal of my walk to Foster’s. On the way we all took a hit of acid and Sylvie told us about her brother, born-again after a drunk driving incident where he critically injured two teenagers. “Now he’s covered in tattoos,” she said. “Religious tattoos. A cross here. A sacred heart there. He’s worried he’ll slip up and forget about God. But with the tattoos, there’s much more at stake than just his faith. Something more tangible.”
“Basically it’s like this,” Chantel says, making me a black and tan, wearing a diadem inset with cubic zirconia for no particular reason other than her love of cosplay and loads and loads of blue eyeshadow. “There’s still a little bit of snowbank out back from where the plow piles it. And Arlo there started a pool where everyone bets when it’ll fully melt.”
When she says “Arlo there,” she nods at a couch across the bar where Arlo is seated with Foster and Sylvie, Sylvie perched on the armrest not for lack of room but because she, like me, feels weird about leaving home just to veg on a strange communal couch. At least a bar stool and a toilet seat you can wipe down. I bet if I were to walk over and kick one of those cushions it would throw up enough dust to drive the Joads out of Okieville.
I guess I look confused because Chantel reaches below the bar and shows me a clipboard. Written on a sheet of paper in various pen colors and in the hand of various bartenders is a double-column roster of names and dates. The dates range from tomorrow to three days ago to five weeks hence. Poor Arlo is riding on tomorrow.
“What are his chances?” I ask.
“Not good. You should go take a look at it. It’s still the size of my cat Mitzy. And this cold snap hasn’t helped any.”
Something is printed on the back of the paper. I can tell by the shadows leaking through. I flip it up to find a kitchen menu. Breaded mushrooms. Cheesy broccoli bites. Five-alarm nachos.
“That’s out-of-date,” Chantel informs me. “We’ve downsized considerably.” She slides me my bicolor beer. I find bartenders always roll their eyes when I order one of these but then can’t help displaying the finished product with a sense of pride. I do it for them, really.
On my way to the couch I pass one of the three fruit machines where Arlo was posted when we got here and where Foster promptly cajoled him from. A 3D woman in a red leotard whips a long scarlet banner around, saying something unintelligible in a snarky voice while a Ferris wheel blinks and spins behind her and a lion roars from a wagon cage. On the next screen over, a banana in boxing gloves beats the living shit out of a cluster of grapes. With every hit, a flurry of green dollar bills flies everywhere.
Mounted above the couch is a seven-foot sturgeon, lending a focal point, a certain feng shui, to the otherwise haphazard layout of tables and stools. I drag a stool over and sit near the couch and wait for the acid to kick in. I feel like the giant dead plasticized fish with its needle-point teeth and grinning dinosaur face will be the bellwether on that front.
Sylvie is talking about her brother’s tattoos again—she’s really stuck on them tonight—and to illustrate his perceived ignorance in these matters she mentions the Virgin Mary on his right calf, and how he’d simply blinked at her when she pointed out he wasn’t Catholic but, according to him, Reformed Baptist, and how his reply had been, “So what? She’s such a major player.”
Arlo, smiling in a big blue, black, and white bomber jacket for the Orlando Magic, its white patches faded down to the dark felting in a way that betrays fake leather and reminds me of the printer ink coming through the sign-up sheet, mentions he has a tattoo as well, a secret tattoo inside of him, actually a whole bevy of tattoos from when doctors found a rash of suspicious lesions in his colon.
He turns to me specifically, knowing Foster and Sylvie, both my seniors by a couple decades, have already had colonoscopies and are likely knowledgeable in what he’s about to say. “They mark the area, you see, with a little tattoo gun, so they can find it easier the next time around.”
“Like leaving bread crumbs,” Foster adds, sipping his plain yellow monochrome beer, staring at mine with a mix of curiosity and envy that borders on derision.
In fact, Foster has had some cancer cut out. Not from his colon but his intestines. “About the length of a quarter roll,” is how he put it, funnily enough. This was back when we first met. We’d both answered the same flyer hung up in Hudson’s Laundromat seeking housepainters. Neither of us were housepainters but we both needed money, and anyway it turned out to be for a good cause, not a crummy office building or a bank or anything like that but an old lady’s ranch house. The city was threatening to fine her if she didn’t beautify. It was part of a broader beautification effort: random flowerbeds and murals popping up everywhere, flashy china-blue signage telling people how to get to the city’s hotspots, e.g. the library and the courthouse. She showed us letterheaded injunctions citing local ordinance this-and-that. Her last name was something musical and many-syllabled and rawly Slavic, not hacked down by the likes of Ellis Island registrars.
Foster was ginger going up and down the ladder thanks to his surgery scar. At the end of the job, he took me aside and said contritely that he was letting the old lady keep his half of the pay. He said he was sorry, that he knew it put me in an awkward spot, that he wasn’t trying to shame me or puff himself up or anything, that she just reminded him too much of his mother, the way she hoarded bits and bobs in ice cream buckets and vacuumed her drapes religiously owing to the dander generated by a mynah bird, a majestic, well-tempered thing named after Barry Manilow. I remember hearing Foster out and feeling instantly like it was my idea. I remember saying, even believing, that I’d actually planned to do the same. Neither of us have seen the lady since, even though we promised to stay in touch.
Two guys enter King David’s and a draft riffles through the place, teasing the skin above my spine. One of them laughs and responds to the other’s jibe with, “I don’t know what your mama tells you, Cody, but you’re hopeless, a waste of good oxygen.” Halfway through the black and tan I have to pee. It’s the result of walking back and forth through the cold all night, clenching and shivering, working my bladder into a tight, worried knot. I get up and wonder if I don’t feel the first fluttery effects of acid. My sense of time is off kilter, but I remind myself that’s the case more often than not.
My friends look apostolic seated in a row, and the demonic fish hanging over them is all the more upsetting as a result. The head and tail curve slightly away from the mounting board, like it’s caught mid-wriggle, like it’ll animate and thrash itself free, and reflected in its candied hide, in the tilework of scales, are the circusy jewel tones of many a beer sign.
Arlo has a pouchy bottom lip with a shiny inner rim that gets shinier as he talks, and he’s quite talkative tonight, maybe to keep the subject off gambling. He gives off an odor of malted sweat. Foster, listening intently, cocks his jaw with the heel of his palm, grinding a pop from somewhere in his neck. Sylvie futzes with a pearl snap on her denim shirt. She’s the only one who looks up at me, and when she smiles it doesn’t seem to be aimed at me per se but at something I remind her of, something or someone she once thought would figure largely in her life. I see myself backlit by the circus neons, a totem for whatever anyone wants to project there, a human voodoo doll of sorts with hatpins sticking out of me like St. Sebastian’s arrows. Then I walk down a dark hall toward the sweet-smelling bathrooms.
At the end of the hall is a fire exit with a small, clouded porthole beaming blue beneath four suspended red letters. I put my nose to the glass and zero in at once on the meager snowbank Chantel was telling me about. I wage my own inner bet, guessing it has four more days of life in it. Then again, there are so many potential variables. Say it rains. That could wipe the thing out in hours. Say instead of using the urinal I walk out there and unleash my core-temperature stream all over the icy hummock, the one supposedly the size of Chantel’s cat, starting between the ears and working my way down its undulant back and looping around again, or zig-zagging like a perfect drizzle of icing on a streusel, or simply boring into a specific square inch like a laser boring into an unsightly mole. How many such visits would it take to clinch Arlo’s victory in the pool? How many more black and tans?
And say I got Foster in on it as well. I wouldn’t go as far as asking Sylvie—though she’d probably be game—but with Foster and Arlo and myself consolidating our natural store of antifreeze, we could easily melt that son-of-a-bitch by the time our heads were scrambled, by the time that gibbous moon orbited slowly in its socket and turned from white to yellow to a sickly uranium-green, and the stuff of neonatal nightmares levitated down to pay out our winnings and collect our debts.
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Dodge Zelko is a mailman and a Midwest lifer. When he’s not jamming bills in your box, he’s hard at work on his novel. His stuff has been in Hobart, HAD, ExPat, Maudlin House, and others.