Spare Change By Libby Cudmore

Normally I’m good to bums.  I don’t have a lot to give and I’m barely staying off the streets myself, but some people aren’t as lucky as me.  So what if they spend my spare change on booze or crack, who am I to judge?  If it’s what gets them through the day, fine.  We’ve all got our vices.

The real scourge of this city are these hipster fucks.  They slum it for the vacation between semesters at NYU or Pratt or Columbia, like it’s all a joke to them.  I’m on my way to an appointment on St. Marks and I pass a crusty lounging on the steps of Sing-Sing Karaoke.  He’s got a guitar and a dog and a whiteboard that reads in purple marker, “2 cool 4 werk, spare a buck for pizza?” He’s got on shiny red patent-leather Doc Martens.  If he’s so fucking hungry, maybe he shouldn’t have spent his last $150 on shoes.

The little fuck looks at me and grins.  He’s got a cigarette in his hand, but his teeth are still pimp-sneaker white.  I roll my eyes and keep walking.

If you’re pretty enough and know when to open and shut your mouth, you can make a decent living as an escort—not a junked-out streetwalker, but the kind of girl listed in the Manhattan yellow pages.  It was sell myself or bag groceries.  One of the women I work with offered me a spot in her weekend burlesque troupe, but burlesque is for girls who want to piss off their daddies.  You have to know where your dad is in order to piss him off.

I was afraid I’d end up blowing a bunch of rich cockwads, but the majority of my clients were anonymous middle-managers who all claimed their wives didn’t understand them.  That’s what it’s like today, I get on all fours and he does me doggie style so he can keep watching MSNBC.  Nothing turns me on like Keith Oberman.  I collect my fee and book my john for the same time next week and once outside I wipe jizz off the first payphone I see and call Dean.  He says he’ll take the next train out of New Haven.

Dean and I have been pals since high school; he and his AP Government classmates were spectators in court on the day I got sent to juvi.  He looked me up and sent letters and came to visit once a month.  At first I thought he was just some choir boy looking for a bad girl to upset his mother, but it turned out that we had one major thing in common—shitty home lives.  I was suburban angst, he grew up white trash.  His parents did meth together, mine drank separately.  All that aside, we were complete opposites.  He was drama club, salutatorian, Eagle Scouts.  I was AP lit, choir and I punched the prom queen.  He took off for Yale after graduation.  I hitched to NYC when I got my GED.

I’m jealous that he can repress his darkness.  He’s jealous that I can let mine out.  Dean’s the only person in the world I trust.  He says the same about me.

Two hours later I’m standing at the information booth at Grand Central Station, chewing a sesame bagel and watching for Dean.  His train is ten minutes late, but he arrives, looking great.   He’s been working out, he’s ditched the Morrissey glasses for contact lenses and he’s wearing this grey tee-shirt that brings out his big blue eyes.  I’ve sucked a lot of dick, but never Dean’s.  I’ve never wanted a cock in my mouth so badly.

Dean’s tired.   Classes are a bitch.  His dad called up asking for money to bail his mom out of jail.  His girlfriend fucked his roommate and the constant stress that all his rich friends will find out that he’s not one of them is giving him an ulcer.  I couldn’t have picked a better time.

We hop on the 6 and head back down to Astor.  By now St. Marks is crawling with college types, all looking to buy hash pipes and holey vintage tee-shirts and bootleg DVDS.  Strains of white-boy reggae echo out of Sing-Sing.  I recognize the dog with a dreadlocked girl, but our boy has moved to the steps of Search and Destroy.  Now his sign reads, “I WANT SOME FUCKING FOOD, FUCKERS!”

Dean keeps walking.  I stop.  “Hey,” I say, shoving my hands in the pocket of my leopard-print jacket.  “You ever been to Crif Dogs?  They got this great bar down there, come on, cutie, I’ll buy.”

He lights a cigarette.  “Just give me a dollar, I’ll buy my own fuckin’ hot dog.”

“No way man, c’mon, let’s hang out.  You’ve been sitting here all day, let’s go have some fun.”

He examines me through the smoke he exhales.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I recognize you.  Yeah, fuck this place, let’s go have some fun.”  He hands his sign off to another lowlife a studded leather jacket and follows me down the steps.  “See you cocksuckers later,” he tosses back to his posse.

We walk two blocks before Dean jumps us.  He grabs him from behind and I shove him into the alleyway.  Dean stuffs a bread wrapper into his mouth and smashes his head against the brick.  “You think you’re tough?” he snarls.  “You want to live on the streets?  This is the streets, pal!”  He kicks him in the stomach and the bloody bread wrapper ejects onto the pavement.  The kid pukes on Dean’s boots and that gets him another kick in the chest.  “Your parents ever beat you?  You ever go hungry?  This isn’t fucking performance art!  This is real!  This is the gutter, you dumb fuck!  Huh?  How do you like it?  Still having fun?”

I’ve never seen Dean go off like this.  It’s almost erotic, years of pent-up frustration and rage all spilling out.  I knew he couldn’t hide his darkness forever.  I’m glad I’m here to witness it.

The kid is blubbering, crying, begging for his life.  He doesn’t have anything to worry about.  We’re not going to kill him, no, there’s no justice in that.  Rehabilitation doesn’t work if you’re not around to see the next sunrise.  Tomorrow he’ll wake up in his comfy bed and think twice about how he’s going to spend his afternoon.

“Get his pants,” I say.  “Empty his pockets.”

Dean fishes out his monogrammed wallet and smacks him in the face a couple times with the chain.  He’s got a hundred bucks in panhandled ones and a fifty dollar bill from his own funds.  I take his ATM card and a set of car keys on a Bob Marley keychain.  “Where’s it parked?” I ask.

“The lot on 74th street, between West End and Riverside,” he groans, clutching his stomach.  Dean was nice enough to let him sit up against the side of the building, but not so nice that he doesn’t kick him one more time to get him to cough up a pin number.

I let him keep his credit cards, his driver’s license and that stupid keychain.  None of them do me any good.  Too bad he wears a size 11, Dean’s a 13 and those are really nice boots.  I used four sidewalk ATMs to drain three thousand of Daddy’s money from his account.  Here’s hoping his pin number gets stolen. We get the car, hock it to a chop shop in Jersey and hole up overnight in a hotsheet motel.  I blow him.  He eats my pussy.  We sleep, we fuck, we sleep another hour, we fuck again, we shower and take off in a blue ’83 four-door we got for $600.

Fuck New York.  Fuck New Haven.  We’ll head west.  I’ve got a grandmother in Tulsa that sends me $20 a month wrapped up in invitations to come visit sometime.  She’ll like that I’ve got a boy scout in tow.  We’ll start over.  Spare change buys a lot in Oklahoma.

I am a regular contributor to a Twist of Noir and Hardboiled magazine, and my work has appeared in recent issues of Pulp Pusher, a Twist of Noir, Eastern Standard Crime, Thrillers, Killers ‘n’ Chillers (Bullet Award, August 2009) PowderBurnFlash, Thrilling Detective, and the Flash Fiction Offensive.  Additional publications include Xenith, Inertia, Battered Suitcase, the Southern Women’s Review, Shaking Like a Mountain, Pop Matters, Big Pulp, Red Fez and the forthcoming anthology Quantum Genre on the Planet of the Arts (the latter two with Matthew Quinn Martin).  I am an MFA candidate with the Stonecoast Pop Fiction program at the University of Southern Maine.