GTO

by John McMahon

…My father taught me all I needed to know about killing at ten when he shot my mother in the side of the head and then sat down and finished his J and B like it was nothing personal. He was Westie muscle and my mother cleaned houses and turned tricks on the side out of our three room railroad apartment. My brother told me some of her regular tricks even showed at the wake, I don’t remember. Since then it’s been him and me.
… From all I ever heard about prison, you got locked up and you fought or fucked your time out, then you got released and went on with life. Now they let you out only to do more time in half way houses and re-immersion programs that set you up with a job and a schedule and therapy groups and visits from your parole officer. It’s another kind of prison with a different vocabulary.
… My first day in the big brownstone that had been separated into so many shared rooms and common spaces and offices, they hand me an address on Washington Street where I need to go for job orientation, working for Hasids in some kind of warehouse. The half-way house is in one of the cleaned up sections of north Brooklyn; Murray Hill or Fort Greene, I’m not sure. Most of the brownstones and brick faces have been restored so now the dilapidated, sagging, boarded up and burnt out places that were the norm punctuate the streets like violators from an ugly past. Volvos and Subaru sport wagons sit at the curbs in front of each tidy strip of grass. When I hear the rumble of old Detroit behind me I know my brother had come.
… A ’67 starlight black GTO with the original Rally II wheels, center console shift and the limited option HO ram power engine. It’s the car I’ve always wanted. Some other newly sprung con might think it was a coming out gift in return for doing two with out saying a fucking word when that’s all they wanted from me, but my brother isn’t like that.
… It barely slows enough for me to open the door and get both legs in when Shane drops the accelerator and the heavy door crashes shut, the car leaping forward in a smooth powerful motion. We continue down Washington towards Flushing Avenue. The muscle car moves seamlessly through slower traffic, never needing to speed, as if its pedigree is its pass.
… We sit in silence with only the hollow sucking of the engine and the traffic noise to fill the sonic void. Twenty hours into my parole and I’ve already violated, sitting with my ex-con brother, so I open the window a couple of inches and slip my docket out. The folder hits the street, streaming parchment-thin pieces of official paper work onto the wind where they flap against bumpers and stick to tires, spreading the word.
… We stop at a light still hovering at orange, horns blaring behind us. Shane scans the rearview for any sign of disrespect. He never speeds up for a light – never ran for a train or a bus when we were kids, never hurried himself. The interior of the car is immaculate, the dash worked to a dull shine, the chrome gauges and toggles blaze even in the thin over cast light of November. I look him over from the corner of my eye; his arms, shoulders and chest are bigger than when I went away, veins stand out pulsing in his neck. It’s not gym muscle, it’s not sculpted, it’s not meant to impress.
… “I heard you did your time real good,” he says, never looking away from the intersection.
… “Surprised you knew I was out.”
… “You gonna bitch about it? That’s the way shit worked out. What, you wanted me to come up there and hold your hand?”
… Guys I knew at Elmira Correctional had people bringing them cigarettes, candy, books – all kinds of currency. Italian guy from Staten Island who shot a couple of black kids stealing cars in his neighborhood used to get blow jobs at the far end of the baseball field through the fence from hookers sent by friends. “Just didn’t think you’d know.”
… The light changes and the car sits up as we pass quickly through the intersection. Maybe it’s my sense of stillness from two years of captivity but it seems like a tremendous, unnatural kind of acceleration. We stop again after blocks of silence. Hungry?” Shane asks.
… “I could eat.”
… “Good.” We’re skirting Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood that I had a regular pick up in ten years before, Dean Street, from a Chinese framing factory. A key of brown a week and I shit myself every time I drove back with it, but I knew the area had been changing. Now white kids are everywhere – on skateboards, plugged into iPods, oblivious to what this place used to mean or how mean this place used to be.
… We pull up to a café with a faux Asian name and double park in front. Inside young people are eating bowls of rice and vegetables; it all looks wholesome but it’s not what I had in mind. Not the food I had been aching for while in the joint, but I doubt we’re here for the food. I get in line and look at the menu chalked above the counter while Shane walks through to the innards of the place.
… I order satay, which is just meat on a stick coated in peanut butter sauce, and stand by the door looking over the fine-looking diners leafing through magazines. Places like these remind that only the ugliest society has to offer gets locked up. Just as my satay comes Shane walks straight out the door behind me. I post up at the counter and wait a second, but no one’s coming out of the kitchen. Besides, I’m not strapped so I follow, pulling the hunks of meat off the bamboo spears with my teeth, and toss the sticks in the gutter. No one eats in Shane’s cars.
… Traveling along Myrtle Avenue I notice fresh nicks in the flesh across his knuckles and a heavy smear of blood on his wrist. I used to like to use brass knuckles and iron mikes, even those big silly looking hip hop four finger rings for pick ups. They hurt like hell, of course, but for some reason the metal and weight terrorized more than the pain; people don’t like getting hit with things. Shane doesn’t believe in this, likes to keep it all natural.
… “You wanna go to a bar or a whore house?” Shane asks at the next light. I like to drink, but after twenty-two months of nothing but pruno it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, besides I have something else on my mind. “Josie won’t be around till tonight so if you wanna get laid I got a whore house I can take you to, you can get drunk there too.” Shane answers, reading my mind.
… “What you mean Josie ain’t around, where the fuck is she?”
… A ripple of tension travels from his neck all the way to his wrist in little knots of convulsed muscle as he pulls the car across three lanes of heavy traffic to the curb without hesitating. He kills the engine and looks at me for the first time.
… “Couple things you need to know. First, Josie’s working, I couldn’t just let her ass starve while you were killing time up there. Second, there’s a lot of new people around, some of them are from Far Rockaway, some of them are the English brothers. You gonna be able to hold your shit or not?”
… “I got no beef.” I say it too fast, the half blink and shallow intake of breath while he reads my face shows he doesn’t believe me. We aren’t the kind of people who let by-gones be, but Shane isn’t the kind of brother to let kinship get in the way of business either.
… All of the English brothers are fucked up, their sisters are fucked up, their parents were fucked up. I don’t know any of their cousins or children but rest assured they are fucked up. How there are so many brothers makes me believe they aren’t all exactly siblings but some in-bred clan of halfs and steps interconnected by a web of junky white trash mothers and half-smart drunken fathers that run a thirty year time span. I don’t know them all, I don’t even hate most of them but as sure I’m sitting in my brother’s ill-gotten, mint fucking muscle car, I’m gonna kill Tower England.
… It was as much the English brothers as my own brother that got me sent up. It was just as much Josie’s ghetto ethics as my own dumb Westie pride that had me locked up. For two years I puzzled over these seemingly different elements only to find out that they were one, all working together. How the fight with Tower that was started by Josie’s mouth and ended with Shane handing me a black jack just as the cops arrived weren’t just simple ingredients in an unfortunate two to five for assault with a deadly weapon. It’s turning out to be a pretty good day.
…
… “Let’s go to this whore house then.”
… We’re probing each other eye to eye, a hard thing to do with any one, a test of will that nearly crushes me for the couple of seconds it lasts with Shane. He nods and keys the engine to life and lights up the tires without topping the speed limit we pull back into the flow of trucks heading towards Maspeth. “OK… lets party,” he says, devoid of any emotion.
… Josie along with everyone else never visited me upstate. Everybody else didn’t matter, but I thought since she was the reason I was wearing orange all day long and showering with twelve other men once a week she might make the trip. Josie was the closest thing I have ever had to a girlfriend, we fucked all the time and I had a key to her apartment, which to me seemed serious. We never made any kind of agreement but I rarely fucked anyone else and never when I was sober, but that didn’t change her.
… Josie’s a six foot tall Dominican sex fiend, built like a marble shit house, who started dancing in cages at fourteen, a hopeless flirt who drinks like a storybook Mick and dresses like a half priced Cuban hooker, which is how this shit with Tower got started two years ago.
…
… Whorehouse is kind of a grand description for where we end up. It’s just a basement Korean table massage joint with a miniature bar shoved in behind the fish bowl full of sickly looking Asian women, knitting and staring at phones, waiting for their next trick, but it’ll do.
… I have three vodkas on the rocks right in a row, bang bang bang; and they burn nice and cold all the way through. I pick a tallish, thin-looking woman by the number hanging around her neck, who wobbles out from behind the glass of the viewing room like she’s a little drunk. More likely she’s a little tweaked which would be how Shane knows this place and why he disappeared as soon as we were buzzed through the door. Once we’re in the room she tries dumbly to suck my dick but I actually want the massage, the shower, the whole bit.
… I work it out while banging her skinny ass from behind, hands full of lank black hair and her quietly grunting out the allotted time. Shane always thought I needed to do time, didn’t trust any one who hadn’t gone through the system, hadn’t been tested by interrogation beatings, real threats of rape, pain and death behind bars and the grinding boredom of living within the system. But I had never got caught, never even been taken in for questioning. Until the night he put a cudgel in my hand with two uniforms looking on, I didn’t have a sheet at all.
…
… It’s gray dusk as Shane runs the car through the empty, pitted streets amongst the never ending warehouses that are the bleak landscape of Maspeth. The pavement is cleaved and hacked by millions of tons of truck freight each day and we’re shook and jostled on the GTO’s stiff suspension. In the dying light I can see him checking me with side glances but my face is blank, my mind is at rest, all decisions have been made.
… The warehouse is an old wood framed wreck right on the edge of the New Town Creek, one of the most polluted bodies of water in America that sidles through industrial Queens with a legendary underwater gas fire, burning unseen for thirty years.
… In front under the sodium white lights are three work cars. Average every day sedans with dents and cracked windshields that don’t attract attention. Tucked into a dark corner of the parking lot the shadow of a Camaro Berlenitta sits idling. The sun-bright flame of a butane lighter shows two silhouetted heads against the smoked glass. Shane pulls the GTO in next to it, kills the engine and we get out simultaneously with the passengers of the Camaro. We all four head towards the warehouse. Shane and I are silent but the England brothers never stop clacking on.
… They are as they will always be, as all the English brothers are. Both wear unlaced work boots with tight acid wash jeans tucked into the tops. Black rock concert t-shirts and open leather jackets. The whole lot of them, all ten or however many brothers there are, like a residual scum of mid-eighties metal culture. Tower still flips his long tangled hair over his shoulders with both hands; the younger Billy has his braided in a rat’s tail to one side.
… Inside the warehouse there are cars and motorcycle parts scattered around a battered fork lift, and the walls are lined with empty pallet racks – it’s not much of a front. The England boys give up their guns to a couple of guys just inside the door I don’t know. No one makes any sign of recognizing me, but neither do the English brothers bother to pretend that nothing’s happened. No words are exchanged.
… We climb to a catwalk that leads to a small office perched over one side of the open space below. I can hear the girls inside, their loud Bronx spanglish slurred, Josie and her friend Rosa. The door is open and both of them are sitting in swivel desk chairs, spinning around the middle of the office like children. A quart of rum lies on its side in a puddle on the floor and Josie is calling Rosa every kind of puta there is.
… They’re dressed in mini shorts and mini tops that hug their Caribbean figures, showing the high backs of thongs and deep cleavage. Both are covered in a latticework of coded tattoos; names and crosses celebrating the birth and death of their neighbors and family.
… Shane slams the door, rattling the entire rickety structure, and walks by the two, stepping over the spilled rum. The English brothers stay to either side of the door behind me looking like a bad cover band.
… “They’re fucking drunk,” Tower states idiotically.
… Shane sits on the edge of an old metal desk stacked with bills and orders in neat piles across the top. “Tell me you have my drugs out already; tell me you haven’t been drinking that shit with my forty grand in your stomachs.”
… Josie finally sees me, looks at Tower and then at me again, and slurs drunkenly “Hey, poppy.”
… “Shut the fuck up, you stupid spic,” Tower yells at her.
… I whip around and take a half step toward him. “I told you once, you fucking redneck cocksucker, don’t talk to her like that.”
… Tower separates himself from the door. “Two years aint made you no smarter.”
… As if time changes things.
… “This time no cop’s coming to save your ass.”
… He’s a big sloppy goon with some aging jail muscle and the nasty disposition of an ill bred hillbilly. Maybe I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing then, but I just had an education.
… Shane lays a pistol fitted with a long silencer across his thigh. “Shut up, both of you. Tower, step the fuck back.”
… He looks at the girls again. Rosa has gotten up like she’s stepping for Billy, Josie and Tower are trading looks. I see how it is. “Where are my drugs?” Shane asks again.
… Rosa giggles. “They coming, damn! I can’t take that laxative shit, man, it fucking cramps me up. Rum does it nice though. Just wait, it’s coming.”
… I step to my right as Josie sort of weaves in the space between me and Shane. “What’s up, girl? You got no sugar for me?” I call to her.
… She glances quickly at Tower again, then, jiggling her tits, steps into the low upper cut I throw from my hip. I feel it sink deep into her gut, compressing her diaphragm. The shocked look on her face turns to fear almost instantly as her eyes roll back in her head and she doubles over choking. White foamy vomit spills from her mouth in clots, and she drops to her knees convulsing on the floor.
… I go for the gun on Shane’s leg while everyone is immobilized by shock, but he’s quick and kicks me in the knee as I snatch it from his hand. I’m down and up, and while Billy fumbles with the door handle in panic I put four tiny-sounding holes in Tower’s chest mid stride.
… Rosa is screaming in my ear and then the knife jams into my shoulder. I check her in the side of the head with the butt of the gun and take a couple of shots at Billy, who’s staring dumbly at his brother, putting him to the floor before Shane has me from behind, cutting the blood off to my brain with a choke hold, driving the knife deeper.
… He’s behind me, cutting off my air, pushing my head down into my chest, and my legs splay out in front as we drop to the floor with him riding my back. The more I try and shift the deeper his hold sets in. I know I’m going under. Everything’s going dark when I see the toe of his boot in the corner of my eye. I flip my wrist still holding the gun, pull the trigger. A plank of flooring gouges just short.
… “Quit that shit, motherfucker,” Shane yells.
… As he shifts his weight higher up on my back and the lights go out in my eyes, I pull the trigger blindly twice more and don’t even really hear him holler as he lets go.
… I don’t know what to call the sound Shane is making, not a scream, not a groan, nothing so human as that. I wait until the pounding in my head settles and I can see clearly before I turn with the gun at point. Shane pays no attention to me, he’s staring at his lower leg where the bullet hit him square in the shin. Bits of his tibia are stuck into the floor where the bullet exited, and blood and what might be marrow well out of the hole in his Carharts.
… I think he’s in shock. I get up slowly, the knife burning just over my scapula. Rosas’ crawling across the floor to where Billy is silently bleeding.
… “Where you goin’, Rosy?” She stops crawling and just lies still on the floor, her face hidden between outstretched arms. “We still need to get those drugs out your tummy.”
… She’s sobbing quietly. I put the gun in my belt and reach over my shoulder and with one terrifying yank pull out the knife. The pain rips through the adrenaline high but its all one in the same now. I take the couple of steps so that I’m standing just over her and nudge her with the edge of my boot.
… “I’m gonna go and take a peek inside Josie and see what’s left.” Rolling her head over with the flat of my foot and dangling the knife, glazed with blood, over her trembling face. “You can do yours the old fashioned way, right here. But get a move on. Don’t be shy, girl, I been up in that ass more than once.”
… She doesn’t respond. I reach down and fishhook her mouth with my index finger and pop her head against the floor. “I’m getting that dope, Rosy, one way or this way.” And sketch a trail of my blood across her face with the point of the knife.
… Shane has slid himself to the edge of the desk, his pupils like two huge drops of ink nearly obliterating the iris and he’s hyperventilating, but he’s still thinking. I drag Josie by the hair out the slick of junk vomit, looking her over, wondering where the condoms would have gotten to in her digestive tract by now.
… “Well, man, we got us into some kind of shit now, don’t we?” I say to Shane as I gingerly slice open Josie’s lower abdomen. “Bet you kind of wish you hadn’t picked me up this morning, huh?”
… Her insides are a gray, green tangle that I can’t make heads nor tails of. I give up just short of being sick myself and turn to my brother again. “Shane, you got something to tell me, that’s going to keep me from killing you? You got something for me?”
… Shane is looking up at me from the floor with a determination that’s hard to define. Keeping himself in check, sorting out all of the possibilities, a master of control even now, facing a room full of death. In clipped words he answers, banging the bottom drawer of his desk with his elbow.
… “In there, cash. I need an ambulance.” He meets my eye as level as ever. “You disappear, nobody knows shit.”
… “How’s it coming there, Rosy?” I call over to her, she’s squeezed her shorts down to her knees and is squatting on her six inch heels, pointing the big double tear drop of her ass at me, but she’s crying so hard now I can’t see how she can be concentrating.
… “Nah, too late for disappearing now, ain’t it?” I slide the desk drawer open and look down at two neat banded piles of hundreds that almost reach the top. Forget the dope, this’ll do.
… “Go ahead and hoist ‘em up, girl” I tell Rosa, grabbing Tower by his shivering arm and dragging him to one of the swivel chairs. “And give Billy there a hand getting to this chair.”
… Shane’s done the right thing, pulled off his belt and made a tourniquet for his leg, which is going to look very peculiar in a minute. Rosa’s kneeling at Billy’s side working her hand up down his chest like she’s playing with his blood.
… “Jesus, girl.” I throw her aside and grab handfuls of his jacket.
… He comes easier than Tower. Sat in chairs side by side the English boys, mostly dead, look down at Shane, as I screw the silencer off his gun. The money’s all tucked inside my shirt. Rosa’s perched wobbling silently just in front of the door. Shane’s looking beyond the brothers at me as I aim the gun between the chairs. This is all there is left to do now.
… “It’s just the way shit’s going down.” I say to the three of them and squeeze off four point blank, drop the gun onto Billy’s lap and use Rosy as a battering ram on the door at a full speed.
… We hit the catwalk in a cascade of broken glass and splintered wood. The two thugs that were guarding the door are already running up the stairs, summoned by the gun shots.
… “It’s Billy,” I yell. “He’s got a gun.”
… I get up and sprint the narrow aisle covered in blood, leaving Rosa in a heap on the floor. I run between the two who are already firing a cloud of smoke into the little room and keep on until I hit the GTO and race that fucker out into the dark night.

####

Living on the banks of the River Kwai a bullet’s shot from Burma, J. McMahon lives a life of strange adventure and stagnation with his racing buffalo and bath tub toddy, writing when he can and racing his ancient cafe bike when he can’t.