Martini SimplicityWally JonesFictionI’m a nineteen-year-old white guy from Big City USA standing at a mall, scanning the parking lot for a car to steal. In high school, I would walk down the lot until I found an unlocked car door. Now I’m enrolled in Brian’s life, stealing cars because that’s the assignment. The assignments earn me enough money for the week. Maybe even for the month. Since he’s paying me, the car I steal needs to fit his requirements and I can’t just steal the first unlocked car I see. It needs to be sporty, capable of holding four, potentially five, people comfortably. That takes two-doors like Mustangs and Camaros out of the equation. I always thought a Camaro was an Indian term for “war bird,” but I looked it up and it turns out to mean nothing more than a sports car. I had a really small saw in the cargo pocket of my pants. Why? You’ll find out later. Brian can’t have a car that stands out either. Nothing with chrome wheels or diesel-sounding mufflers. Why does he want this car? To what purpose? In Brian we trust. I puffed on my cigarette and looked at my watch. Two o’clock on the dot. I don’t remember ever looking at my watch and seeing it on the hour. Brian asked me to do this because I knew how. In high school, it was an addiction. It was outsmarting a system designed to stop me. I loved doing it. When doing something you love, it feels like your veins are pumping blind mellow and you get breathless like you just drank some sharp coffee. Your eyeballs focus but look in every direction at once. And when you get finished, you’re satisfied like a blueberry muffin, or a massage that still feels good minutes afterwards. I took one final drag and threw the cigarette at two people kissing about five hundred yards away. The breeze washed away the smoke as I scanned the parking lot. Most cars were either over done with mods, or to family-orientedly slow. I saw a Corvette and really wanted it, but those are much easier to catch than say, a Honda, which blends in with everything. Everyone has a Honda. It’s the All-American Car. To a lot of people, not owning a designer car means you’re not normal and a lot of us can’t handle that. There’s a lot of pride in a man’s car. If you hurt the car, you hurt the man. There is only one thing worse than hurting his car and that is taking his girl. The desire to preserve the species is the strongest survival trait in a male. All other traits are just means to support this end. Self-preservation, hunger, the desire to reproduce; they all exist to continue the family line. A death in the family is one thing, but losing your companion is the bottom. That’s why finding my ex fiancée sleeping with my best friend made me want to dine on a shotgun cocktail and paint the walls red. Camaraderie is the other strong male feeling. It all went down the shitter the night I found out. Then he sold his food stamps to pay for his crack and she broke up with him. Now she’s dating a guy with a BMW. The sweet taste of vindication melts to ashes in my mouth. My current girlfriend was asleep on Brian’s love seat with vitamin X. I’ve been seeing her long enough to get tired, but strangely, feel the same as when we started going out. The girl makes me happy. She doesn’t know I’m still stealing cars. She told me she’d fuck me if I stopped. I told her I wasn’t going to but we had sex anyway. I found the perfect car: a black Acura. New and sleek, fast and it doesn’t stand out. Whoever bought it was not buying it to define himself. I always wondered what car would define me as a person. I stole a mustang when I was sixteen. That was fun, but it wasn’t right. I always wanted a Tiburon, but they only come with four cylinders. I kick myself, because having a car define you is like those people who pay hundreds of dollars for a set of clothes. I had a friend who never wore his own clothes. I kept telling him he wasn’t Bill Abercrombie or James Fitch, so he should stop wearing shirts that made people think he was. I paced towards the car. It sat in the middle of a large sea of cars, shadowed by one of those SUVs that get a mile to the gallon. This town has a lot of SUVs for a place that never gets snow. Constant rich expressionism makes me want to move to Bosnia where people don’t shit on their self-worth. Where survival is more important than art. With the surrounding carscape, no one would notice me fumbling with the door. When you know what you’re doing, people assume you’re supposed to be doing it. Some friends and I once rolled a Coke machine out of an office building and the security guards waved to us on the way out. I passed a car with a band’s bumper sticker, which depicted a man holding puppet cords. I once had a friend named Pinocchio. They called him that because his habit gave him a cocaine nose job. He was arrested because his fingerprints were on file. His parents were to drugged up to pay bail so we did. In one of the lucky twists of fate, just before he was sentenced to life, he died from a drive-by body piercing. The courts scheduled a judge to tell him he was going to prison. What’s the use? That’s like throwing someone into a fake gas chamber to laugh at their expression. My real father told me that life had endless possibilities. I believed him until I found out Judges are paid to judge my life with his personal philosophy. But only the dreamers know why life should not be confined to a jail cell by rules that other people establish. I close my eyes to kill the sun. My life is a Formula 1 caught in neutral. Full of speed, yet sitting behind a red light that refuses to change. The day I put myself into cruise control with Brian at the wheel, everything began to remind me of something else. The way poetry reminds you of experiences you’ve had. Before that, everything was fiction; the way books make you experience something new. While walking towards the Acura, I saw a mother pushing a stroller towards the mall and it reminded me of the first time I saw my baby brother. I gazed through my shark-cage sunglasses glasses as they strolled by me. As they passed, the baby pointed at me and giggled with toothless wonder. He kicked around like he wanted me to hold him. For about two seconds, he reminded me that even I could be forgiven. And since then, I’ve been trying to remember that feeling. The scariest time in my life: Burning a confederate flag while looking into the eyes of a southern man. To the world, the flag represents racism, but to that man, it represented personal history. He never advocated slavery yet his roots were in the south, so the flag represented him. The flag should never have been taken from him. But I’ll burn that flag every chance I get. I’m a nineteen-year-old northern boy everyone calls, “Go Home.” There’s a chess tactic call the “Panziano Defense” in which a bishop moves across the bored from afar and attacks the undefended pawn. That was me sliding up to the unsuspecting Acura. I’m a nineteen-year-old Bishop. I peered into the car. It was locked, with The Club strapped to the wheel. The Club is a metal beam that locks the steering wheel. This car had all the expensive theft deterrents, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t have a jimmy to pick the lock like I usually do. I don’t think you can do that to the new Acuras anyway. I found a small ball-nosed hammer in my friend’s workbench and I used to shatter a small section of the window. Glass breaks at a surprisingly low threshold if you hit it in the right place. Especially thin glass on a flat plain with a lot of surface space, like a car window. Brian didn’t want a car with a broken window, but he’d have to settle. The door was opened in seconds. I sat on a carpet of broken glass and analyzed the steering wheel. The Club works really well in deterring the average joy-riding teen. In fact, it has probably turned away thousands of car thieves. What it fails to stop, are boys with saws. I bought the saw from a hardware store for a couple bucks. The smallest one they had. In five seconds, I had cut through the steering wheel. I bent the wheel and rotated The Club until it fell from the gap I made. I tossed the still-locked Club into the back seat and proceeded to pry off the steering cover. The plastic breaks easy if you get the right grasp. Eventually, one of the plates snapped giving me just enough room to expose a street of wires. I pinched out several wires and shaved them against the saw. Red and green make go and the car roared to life. Usually steering wheels lock with no key. But not this car. That’s why the owner was using The Club. I peered from behind my shark-cage sunglasses at all the suburbia mothers walking to their SUVs, getting ready to do exciting suburb-mother things. I’m a nineteen-year-old expedition swimmer. I dropped the car into reverse and backed into the driveway. I heard the gears grind and I winced. Then I remembered it wasn’t my car and suddenly didn’t care anymore. The best thing about stolen cars is not having to worry about maintenance. I’m a nineteen-year-old mechanic who never has to work. I paused long enough to look at my watch. Still two o’clock. Funny that happened twice in one day. I smiled with dark rubber satisfaction and breathed the relaxed breeze. I shoved it into first gear and headed towards the street. In thirty minutes, Brian will give me money so I can feed my family. If I can avoid getting pulled over, or getting into an accident until then, I will live forever. I lived forever once. It was back in high school when I went to the beach with some friends. In the late afternoon, the sun was about to go down, and my friends went up the boardwalk while I stayed to enjoy the weather. All the families had gone home and the romantic beach-walkers were starting to come out. The breeze rolled in with that salty smell of tired satisfaction. There were only four people in a yelling distance. Me, a couple walking hand-in-hand in the surf, and a boy about 11 years old intently watching a hermit crab. The site of this boy stopped me. In the vastness of the beach, the boy chose to focus on a small hermit crab. The sheer simplicity of it made me think and for a second, I knew something about myself. The boy was watching the miracle of a crab scurrying towards the water. How much did it matter to the great cosmos of things if the crab got to the water? Not much. But to that crab, the world depended on it. Something so trivial meant the difference between life and death. Then I realized I couldn’t shape continents or change lunar orbits. I realized how small I really was, but understood how vital the crab’s efforts were. The feeling only lasted a second, but for that second, I lived forever. |