I’m just your ordinary run of the mill fucker. At least I’m not the fucktard of this story, hahaha.
Yeah I’ve been around the block, but no block that you wouldn’t think I’ve been around. I’m only in it for myself and if being your friend means I’ll get something out of it than you can bet I’ll be right there holding your hand and wiping your tears while you cry, you can take that however you want. It’s true though, who harbors and nurtures relationships they don’t get anything from? In this world you have to take and only give if you’re getting back something bigger.
I’m telling you this now because it’s essential for you to understand who I am before I tell you about Gerry. These thoughts run through my head everyday. It’s how I justify who I am and how I go about surviving. There’s something underneath it all that gives me the need to justify though and I’ve pushed that something of myself back so far that I don’t even know what it is anymore.
And than there’s Tima. I guess you could say he’s my sidekick, like as if we were super heroes or something. Tima lives like an animal, on pure instinct and immediate need.
Tima is very precise.
I’m standing here telling myself who I am and trying not to look suspicious and Tima’s over there performing grand theft auto like he’s a surgeon.
He pulls a coat hanger out of his jacket, it’s untwisted and bent into an L shape with a small hook on the long end. He presses his sweaty palms against the glass of the passenger side window and works it around, applying pressure until the window shifts down into the door just a bit.
“Keep em’ open man,” he says to me. “Don’t let Gerry wander off either.”
Gerry, he hasn’t been around for that long, for the longest time it’d been just me and Tima living off each other, taking and taking, and only giving so we could take again. Then we found him, scrounging in a dumpster in the back of a McDonalds, clearly drugged up. Tima’s instincts flared up and he quickly realized Gerry’s potential. Gerry hardly responded to us. In fact I don’t think he even really saw us. I remember thinking he must be blind, the way he looked right through me. He didn’t run when we approached him, he didn’t twitch, he didn’t shake, he hardly moved. Tima held me off as he watched Gerry look over his shoulder and just go right back to digging in the dumpster. He should have run from us, we were predators and he was extremely vulnerable.
This guys got commodity written all over him.” Tima was so sure he already had Gerry on a leash.
It’s true, Tima can read people, it hardly took him five seconds to size up Gerry and he was right. Though he was missing out on one small little truth. Gerry has a brain on him, even if his neurons aren’t firing quite right.
Gerry was sitting on the curb dunking his feet, shoes and all, into the stream of water that gathered in the gutter. I watched him from back on the sidewalk as Tima pushed the coat hanger into the car and down the inside of the window. He was always doing that, messing himself up in someway and it didn’t seem to make him uncomfortable at all. Gerry followed us like a hungry puppy and we fed him, knowing his company would pay up eventually.
It would have been easy to just smash the window with a bat. A smashed window would make the three of us look awfully suspicious though. We had to be clean and careful if we planned on getting away with this car.
Tima hooked the lock and it popped up. He pulled the door open.
“Oh yeah! That’s right.,” he said. “Love you baby,” He said as he scooted into the car and patted the dash. Tima bent down under the driver’s side seat and yanked off a panel under the steering column. A mess of wires fell out onto the floor.
I was getting nervous now. This was taking way too long. Three cars had already passed by; luckily, I didn’t think they could make out what we were doing.
A few days ago we’d walked down this street tripping all over the place. Tima kept screaming about how light was burning out his eyeballs. Straight through the socket and down to the brain in a spiral of hot flame bound on inflicting justice. It was the most poetic, honest thing I’d ever heard him say. That’s when we saw this car rotting here in the street, it hadn’t moved since than.
After that Tima ran out of cash and we decided it was time to get out of town. We had to get out quick. Before people found out we didn’t have money anymore.
The car fired up and Tima hooted victory.
“Get in!” he yelled. “Lets get the fuck out of here.”
I grabbed Gerry off the curb and nudged him into the back seat. The kid was so slow he could hardly speak coherently, he couldn’t hold his hand still enough to form letters, and he couldn’t even read. Tima kept him around as a safety precaution. A sort of decoy I guess, and now it was time for him to pay up.
Just than a cop car came creeping down the street with its headlights turned off.
“Fuck.” Tima whispered as he glared at it through the rear view mirror. “Thought he could creep up on us from behind.” Tima looked over at me where I sat frozen in my seat. “Get going!”
We both bolted out of that car and ran. Our legs pumping as fast as they could. Tima grabbed my sleeve and pulled me behind a building. I smacked right into the brick as I swung around the corner. I wanted to go back, but Tima was gripping my sleeve like an animal. I pulled back on my sleeve and kept Tima from continuing to run off. The cop had gotten out of his car and was yelling at Gerry to get out. I could see how he rocked in his seat nervously, staring straight ahead and muttering to himself as the cop shone his flash light in through the window. He’d grab him, and cuff him, and Gerry wouldn’t make a sound. Hopefully he’d be able to see through him as easily as we could and know that Gerry was just a tool. What common sense did he have though? That cop probably lived like Gerry did, doing what people told him to do and only to survive.
Alice Shindelar 2004