S&S5

‘Here’s the deal,’ Billy said, stopping the car abruptly at a traffic light. ‘I’ll do what I can - but I’m not making any promises! It’s pretty short - notice, already …The shipment arrives at the port, in Bechet 5:30am. By the time the guards on shift wake up, get dressed, unload, whatever the fuck, it’ll take at least another hour. You have to be there by 7:00am - you have plenty of time to get there, so don’t worry, it’s only 70 kilometers away from here to there, you can swing that in an hour if you don’t jerk off too much on the road. But no later than 7:00am, you got that? If that container sits for too long on our doorstep, those customs bastards at the gate might start to get nervous…And if they start poking their snots around our business there, we’re fucked! You, and I, and everyone else involved - you understand? And if that happens, you can say good-bye to all that money, and whatever peace and quiet you thought you had so far - because Tiny’s going to be up your ass in an instant, that’s if the cop don’t get to you first ….Most of them are in his pocket anyway, so one way or another.’

‘Green.’ David mentioned looking up at the changing traffic light. ‘What?’

‘Green, you moron - the light’s green, step on it!’

Billy quickly lifted his foot off the brake and started off aggressively.

David had carefully listened to all his instructions, occasionally casting his suspicious glances at Billy. His friend was driving very agitatedly. Sweating, scratching, and barely keeping it together. David couldn’t remember him ever being so scatter-brained - or maybe he hadn’t seen him in a long time and was only now starting to notice the details that he had gotten so used to, in the past, and no longer paid attention to.

‘What’s gotten into you all of a sudden? Huh?’ Billy asked out of nowhere. ‘I thought You said you didn’t want to get involved in all this shit? Finally fed up with doing grunt work for old Harris, huh? Huh? Com'mon, tell me, huh?’ Billy insisted, grinning at him with a certain malicious satisfaction on his face.

David, jaw clenched in frustration, was barely holding back from saying something he would definitely regret later. Yet, at the same time, he somehow felt that Billy was right. And in all the chaos of that dubious arrangement he was talking about so passionately, he somehow found and absurd sense of security; a confidence which he couldn’t understand, but one that made him feel more comfortable and in control than in any other conventional context that he had tried to resign himself to thus far.

‘Fuck ‘em!’ Billy said arrogantly. ‘Don’t waste your nerves on those shitheads. You’re with me now - everything is going to be okay, you’ll see!’

They stopped the car in front of a tall brick building, on the outskirts of the city. David exclaimed in surprise when he realized where they were. Until then, he had been abandoned many years before.

‘What, are you crazy?’ Billy responded, laughing heartily. Then he reached for the glove compartment and rummaged for a pack of cigarettes. He took one out and lit it, then threw the pack back where it came from. ‘It’s not abandoned - it’s the largest shoe factory in the district,’ he continued after drawing a long breath of smoke.

‘Tiny ain’t stupid,’ he said, blowing the smoke out. ‘He knew what he was doing. If the combo with Bucharest blows over, he’ll just sit his ass comfortably on the co-ops salary - fucking, what do you call it? Management - Consultant! Psht … No more police, no more problems… Just pay a couple of taxes a year and you get to sleep in peace at night. He’s not stupid….’

‘OK, I’m going in to talk to him,’ Billy said, after taking another long drag. ‘You wait here until I call you. It might be too late already, but we’ll see - I told you. Stay here and I’ll signal you from over there,’ he said, pointing to the metal door on the side, beyond the wire fence. Then he quickly got out of the car, threw the remainder of his cigarette on the ground, and ran off towards the main entrance of the building.

Inside the car, David waited impatiently. He felt the pressure of the time he’d lost until then and could not believe how foolish he had been to not accept Billy’s offer from the beginning. Everything seemed so well - organized, and Tiny - the loan shark - was starting to sound more like a calculated businessman, and not at all the violent and unpredictable thug that everyone whispered about in the obscure corners of the city. Just another guy who was merely willing to take one such occasional risks - and had the balls to go through it too.

He had struggled for so long to find a stable job when serious opportunities had always been right in front of him, he thought bitterly. And all that time he’d wasted on Harris’s construction site … That was even harder to accept - it would have been at least more worth it if he’d gotten paid for that week’s work; but that was no longer possible! And all because of some jackass, in a bar, who’d picked the wrong time and person to mess around with. All his time and efforts had been wasted in one drunken night, and now he risked, for a week of unpaid work, to lose his chance on Tiny’s lucrative transport business.

His fucking temper … he thought. It had always caused him trouble! That thin, short fuse of his was also what had made him refuse Billy’s request, in the first place; combined with a hypersensitive pride and guided by egotistical principles that now seemed so childish to him. Ambition and impulsiveness. And, even worse, hypocrisy!

In that very moment, he suddenly remembered his father and realized that these were also the same flaws that he despised in his old man, too. The very same defects and ticks that had driven him away from the old drunken bastard in the past couple of years. He looked in the rear - view mirror and studied his face closely for a few moments. He concluded right away that he was nothing like his father. And he never would be. He would be successful! He simply wouldn’t accept his failed state and rotten fate and would do everything in his power to ultimately gain everything he had ever lacked in his life - for him, and for his family.

He leaned back in the car’s leather seat, trying to relax. He stretched his legs out long, took a deep breath, and finally managed to calm himself down a bit. His internal burst of anger subsided. Maybe he was just envious… But how could he not be? He thought, looking around him in the enclosed universe of the foreign car in which his childhood friend had driven him.

Billy’s evident prosperity was even harder to digest, especially since he had initially been the most vehement in this passive crusade against the city’s crime - life. The dark, skinny boy from the block, with whom he had grown up and learned everything that’s good and bad about the childhood and teenage years.

All that time spent in the debilitating poverty of the city’s ghettos …Perpetual hunger and cold were states whose relative aspects they had begun to perceive, increasingly more painfully, as they grew up. As they moved away from behind the block, or from the school’s barred gates and began to extend their evening walks to other neighbourhoods and parks, or to other, more expensive, schoolyards - where children from wealthier neighbourhoods gathered. And even more so when they began to approach the city center - where, gradually emerging from the darkness of their unlit streets, coloured more by dogs and trash than by electrical lighting, their horizons suddenly took on a different shade. The city center was under doing to complete transformation at that time, offering a new perspective that, in their childhood, had gone almost unnoticed. But as they grew older, their observational spirit became increasingly more sensitive to these obnoxious landscape changes and they allowed themselves to be more easily overwhelmed by the urban and societal context now revealed by the two - kilometer walk, from their neighbourhood to the city’s brightly coloured center.

As they ventured deeper into the heart of the city, they felt increasingly out of place - dirtier and poorly dressed. The smells of smoke and sewage they were so accustomed to back home, were suddenly replaced downtown by the foreign and so appetizing fragrances of restaurants, and cafes, which seemed to spring up from the ground out of nowhere all of a sudden. Even in the era of the former political leadership, when theoretically nothing could be found anywhere, those new buildings seemingly rose from the ground up in an instant… and nobody ever seemed to question where the money for all those investments came from.

It was different experience for them - one which they relished with bitter resentment. They watched people having lavish dinners, through the large windows of the restaurants, for as long as they could at least - before some angry waiter would storm outside and shoo them arrogantly away. They allowed themselves to be intoxicated by the strong perfumes of the well - dressed women who passed them defiantly by, as if they were two invisible ghosts. Women that they were afraid at first to even look at directly, out of embarrassment - even though, once they had moved away from them, far enough not to be overheard, each of them would start describing their masculine prowess, typically in hypothetical, sexual circumstances in which they imagined themselves displaying with them.

As they aged, their needs of all kinds grew and the narrow, dirty universe in which they had lived up until then - and even more so after the harsh revelation that life could be so much better for a select few - germinated in young David a state of increasing frustration. He couldn’t come to terms at all with the unfair situation he was in: born and raised in a poor, ill - fated family that seemed to have somehow become so complacent in that state of chronic hunger and eternal poverty.

Everywhere he went, he was surrounded by friends and people who complained about the same old problems, some more or less than others, who resembled each other so much and bonded over the same fundamental characteristic they all seemed to share, that of continuously complaining, even though, given the opportunities to escape their situation - usually through hard, honest work - these were vehemently rejected. They were all united in their unanimous refusal to accept any kind of job or work opportunity, no matter how simple or common it was. Often, these opportunities seemed even to offend certain egos, being considered humiliating, according to some of their evaluations - their preferred alternative being, ultimately, unemployment, and a constant state of protest against a way of life that was, in the end, completely unavoidable.

Young David’s frustration was growing increasingly as he observed these trends. He had long ago realized that, no matter what, a job was a job. An extra income and a new chance to live, at least for a while, better than they had done so far. He didn’t understand why the rest couldn’t see things the same way. He would have preferred any day to work for a while, for a miserable salary, to break his back on a construction site, as Billy would have mocked, rather than to sit at home watching television, or waste time on the street, for free - and perhaps just waiting for a large bag of money to eventually fall into his lap, out of nowhere.

He could not remember ever rejecting an opportunity to make some extra money in recent years. Whether he had to work by the day in construction, or take an extra shift or two as a night watchman at the bread factory. He knew how to dig, how to harvest, how to guard, and even how to fight - if it came down to it. At his 19 years of age, he had accumulated more and varied work experience than all his acquaintances combined. And all this time, whether he was digging... Guarding or loading, or punching, he could only think about the lights and colours and smells that awaited him, on the opposite side of the city, which others had access to and he did not, for some reason or another.

It was unfair, it was frustrating, but he still aspired to them. And in the toughest moments, when he felt like giving up everything and leaving the demeaning job he was involved in at the time, the only thing that made him continue was the thought - or rather, the conviction - that money was the only way for him to be part of that rich and comfortable universe, which everyone around him could only dream of….

However, that last year had been very difficult. He looked daily into his always empty wallet and bitterly wondered where all the fruit of his endless labour had gone? And the hard work itself was less frustrating than the fact that, although he was the first among his friends to detach himself from the street corner, where they all spent night after night - cracking sunflower seeds, sharing cigarettes and drinking cheap beer - he seemed to be always in the same place he started. While, overnight it seemed, all his friends, who had never laid their hands upon a shovel, now had money and could afford more things than he would have ever dared to dream of, from going out in town, to buying cars, or even taking some more or less legal trips abroad - to foreign countries that normal people had no access to, from where they would always return with perfumes and clothes that he would not have even heard of otherwise, if he had not seen them first on them.

Some of those guys bragged about going on vacations, other showed off new clothes and, in some cases, even boasted a few extra kilograms to their physical build - which had until then been scrawny and twisted by the prolonged hunger they had always operated in (Weight gain being a clear sign of prosperity in those parts of the city, where the fabled beer belly was worn under tight T-shirts with more esteem than the beige belt around the waist. - MEDAL OF HONOUR)

Of course, he’d always known that there were alternative ways to make money in that city - which evidently explain the sudden boost in his friends’ financial gains, but until then it had not even crossed his mind to get involved in activities that could put his freedom at risk. He had, after all, a family that depended on him … His mother, younger siblings … He had learned to work. This was the most natural activity for him; his most organic instinct was to work, on a schedule, from morning to evening, sometimes even more, if anyone needed it - even though the bosses didn’t always pay him extra for the overtime. He was convinced that if he behaved like a reasonable, understanding, and submissive worker, then at some point his work would be rewarded, perhaps through a better job, maybe a permanent position, or at least an official, legal contract for a set period of time - so he could know for sure that, for at least a year, for example, he wouldn’t have to worry about his next source of income.

He firmly believed that all he had to do was to show up at work, every day, at the right time, or even a little earlier and work his butt off, and thus, the salary would continue to come in every month, guaranteed. This was what it all came down to for him, after all, he needed to know when and where his money was coming from; and that the money would consistently arrive in his wallet, every month, without failure.

This was, apparently, the result of a whole life lived in a constant state of insecurity, which he had observed all his life, both around him, among friends and neighbours, and even in his own family - with a father who suddenly lost his job and could never find anything else again (Not that he tried too hard to look afterwards) and a mother who only worked occasionally, when she managed to find something in the kitchen of a restaurant, or the crowded canteen on the University grounds.

No, such financial instability no longer provided him with the assurance he needed to live peacefully. He could no longer hope for more or better ways for living. That supreme opportunity, so long awaited, seemed never to come. He had worked for years for all the bosses in the city - there was no employer in that crummy old town who had not paid him for at least a day’s worth of activity, in the past year. But no one seemed to take him seriously, for long; mainly because of the reputation recently acquired by Billy, with whom everyone knew he was friends … No matter how much and how well he worked (at least he thought he was doing a good job…), nobody wanted to offer him a serious, long - term commitment, because of his connections to such ill reputed characters.

Billy slammed the metal door of the building in front and began to hurry towards the car.

‘Come on, I talked to Tiny!’ he shouted from outside, panting.

‘Come on back and talk to him. He wants to meet you!’

He eventually arrived at the car, caught his breath for a few moments. Then, with trebling hands, he reached back through the open window of the car, towards the glove compartment, and retrieved the last cigarette left in the pack.

‘Come on, move it - what are you waiting for?’ he shouted, after lightening it quickly. ‘And take off that sweater, eh? You look like Grandpa…’