Take-Out Read online

  The kid finally gives it a rest when the father produces a black behemoth of a camera that costs more than probably everything I own. The kid grips his arms around my waist and smiles, like the threat of violence doesn’t hang between us. I’m wondering where they’re from when the father counts down in Czech—“jeden, dva, tři”—so that answers that.

  I don’t actually speak Czech, but you work in Times Square for a few weeks, dressed as a knock-off cartoon character, accepting tips for photos, you pick up some things by osmosis. Hell, you live in New York City your whole life, you’re doing something wrong if you can’t say “cheers” in at least six languages.

  After the father is done taking his photos and has returned the camera to his side, like a gun back in the holster, there’s a brief moment of awkwardness, where he assumes our transaction has ended but he’s not sure what to do next. I tap the red pouch hanging from my waist that has “TIPS” embroidered in white stitching.

  There’s a brief flash of recognition, and his hand twitches toward the bulge of his wallet. Then he shrugs, says, “Nemluvím anglicky.”

  “I do not speak English.”

  Another term you get used to in this gig.

  There’s a giant neon clock blinking over his shoulder. I’ve been at this three hours, and have less than fifty dollars to show for it. Friday nights, when the square is so packed with tourists the air is thick with the humidity of perspiration, I usually pull double that.

  I’m about to take a step forward—one step forward being sufficient to scare most tourists into acquiescence—when I see a cop eyeing me like we broke up on bad terms. So I bow and nod my head, although the father probably can’t see me nod inside the costume, and he grabs his kid and his wife and disappears into the teeming mass.

  We have a détente with the cops. We can accept tips, but we can’t charge for photos. Charge a tourist, then you’re a business, then you get cited, and if you mouth off they take you to booking and your costume “disappears” sometime before you work your way through the system.

  It happened to a guy who dressed as Superman. He didn’t call himself that, he called himself Superguy. He also called the cops Nazi Death Pigs, which highlights the importance of diplomacy when dealing with the police.

  I toe the line. This is not the job I dreamed about as a kid—I wanted to own a restaurant—but you do what you have to. America is the land of opportunity until you make a mistake. Then you can get fucked. I’ve leveled a forest with all the resumes I’ve sent out. The problem is I like to be honest, so I put down that I served time on a drug charge.

  It’s not even like it was real drugs. Pot isn’t dangerous unless you’re a bag of chips. But the cops treated me like they busted Pablo Escobar, and it seems there’s not an employer in this town that’ll look past my status as an ex-con.

  The costume thing was supposed to be temporary. But the more I do it, the more it feels like this is my only option.

  Exhale. No need getting worked up inside this thing. It’ll just raise the temperature and make it more uncomfortable. I could use a smoke though, so I leave my spot outside the M&M store and head for a vacant side street. It ruins the illusion if the kids see you with your mask off, sucking down unfiltered cigarettes.

  Anyway, it’s not like the square is promising tonight.

  Christ, this place. It used to be great if you wanted a handy, or some blow, or a sucking chest wound. Now there’s an M&M store. Back in the days of David Dinkins and Death Wish, it was like there was no way this place could get any worse. And in a way, that was true. The pendulum swung as far as it could, and it hit the end of its arc when Giuliani showed up with his militarized police force.

  Now look where we are. Seizure-inducing lights and chain restaurants and Broadway shows based on Disney movies. Tourists staring into the sky, eyes glazed over and faces slack, like they’ve got heroin needles jammed in their arms.

  I say these things like complaining is going to fix it.

  I hit the corner, head toward the dark. Drunken couples stumble out of the way, point and laugh, yell things at me, but I tune them out, intent on getting to a quiet alcove where I can take off the damned head of this costume.

  And when I do, it is sweet bliss. My skin is so wet it’s shiny and the cool night air caresses me like I haven’t been touched in a long time.

  I’m halfway through my cigarette when the shadow in the doorway grows deeper. I look up and find two silhouettes outlined in the street lamps. One of the silhouettes says hello, like he knows me.

  The two of them step in the light. Billy and Richie. Two market-price thugs, and the last two people I want to see right now. Richie smiles, his hair slicked back, his eyes twinkling like he’s trying to sell me something that’s broken. Billy lingers behind him, just like he always does.

  Richie says, “We’ve been looking for you. Heard about the new gig.” He taps the Almo head with the tip of his boot.

  I shake my head, wave him away. “I’m on parole. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances.”

  Richie puts his hands up in a “calm down” gesture. Says, “It’s just an idea. Hear me out?”

  I tell him, “Dude, no. Please, kindly piss off.”

  He exhales. “Look, nobody hanging out in Times Square dressed like a muppet is doing it because they’ve made good decisions. I’ve got a proposition that’ll make you an extra couple of bucks. Low impact, low risk.”

  I’m about to tell him to piss off again, when I remember the rent is due in two days and I’m still three hundred short. I do not expect to make that much between now and then. I know I’m making a mistake but I ask for the details.

  He says, “You sling a little while you’re doing the muppet thing. And it’s perfect…”

  I cut him off. “Have you ever been to Times Square?”

  He inclines his head, looking at me like I’m a sphinx.

  I tell him, “Let me rephrase. Have you ever gone to Times Square and seen the army of cops? Half the police force is there. You know why that is? Because all this city cares about is protecting the tourists so they come here and spend their money. You want me to sell drugs in the place where the majority of this city’s cops hang out. Seems pretty dumb.”

  Richie puts his hand on my shoulder, bunches up a wad of red felt in his fist. “You make it sound like you’re going to be doling shit out in the wide open. I thought this through. Well, Billy thought it through. Billy, tell him the idea.”

  Billy clears his throat. “Well, think about it. We tell someone they buy from Elmo…”

  I interrupt. “Almo.”

  He pauses. “Almo, whatever. We have them look for the… Almo. They come, take a photo with you, right? When their arm is wrapped around you for the picture, you’ve got like a sleeve or something with the coke. You hand it to them inside the costume, and then they slip the payment in your tip bag. At the end of each shift we split the pot, thirty percent to you, the rest to us.”

  “Bullshit thirty. I’m taking all the risk.”

  Richie says, “You’re not getting the product. You’re not transporting it. You’re not getting the customers. You’re not doing anything but standing there. So it’s twenty, or we go talk to the asshole dressed like SpongeBob.”

  “He calls himself SpongeTodd.”

  “Whatever. Fuck that guy. We’re being nice, trying to give you first shot at this. You don’t want it, it goes to someone else.”

  I take a deep breath. “Where would I get it?”

  “You know the ice cream truck on 43rd, a little off Seventh?”

  “I don’t know, yeah? I don’t really notice the ice cream trucks. They’re everywhere.”

  “That’s the point,” Richie says with a smile. “You go up and ask for a vanilla sundae with extra marshmallow and two scoops of peanuts. You get what you need.”

  “Wait, wait…an ice cream truck? Really?”

  “Most ice cream trucks are drug fronts,” Billy says.

  “The
things you learn…” I flick my now-dead cigarette to the curb. Reflect on what my life has become. Finally, I tell them, “Let me sleep on it.”

  Richie puts up his hands up in a “sure thing” gesture. Says, “That all I ask. Call me. Number’s the same.”

  I watch them disappear around the corner, then put the Almo head back on, trudge to my spot, their offer trailing behind me like a desperate stripper.

  Money is good. I like money. Coke is not so good. Nor is getting caught with it. When I turn the corner, back into the searing light of the square, there’s a bunch of cartoon characters standing around in a circle, while a cop wrestles with a pile of black and red felt. I jog over and find Mickey Mouse’s crack-addicted brother lying on the ground in a fetal position. One cop is holding what looks like a gun in his hand, but then I see the wires and realize it’s a Taser. Another cop is trying to take the mouse’s head off but it’s stuck.

  Next to me is giant, bulbous Hello Kitty. It leans toward me and a male voice with a Mexican accent spills out of the mouthpiece. “Some family wouldn’t tip so he pushed the kid. Kid hit the ground. Everyone lost their shit.”

  The cop gives up trying to get the head off, and they pull him to his feet, drag him off. I push through the crowd of people taking video on their phones, head back to my position. Within minutes the cops box me in against a light pole, wanting to know the guy’s name, where he lives.

  I tell them, “It’s not like we’re in a union or something.”

  One of the cops, the same one who was eyeing me earlier, he presses his baton into my side. “Got ourselves a comedian here, Officer Ruiz.”

  The other cop, presumably Officer Ruiz, says, “I bet you’re all a bunch of sickos. Get your jollies feeling up kids or something, right? You keep it straight, sicko, or we’ll bust you down.”

  I nod, resist the temptation to do anything else but that. And I have a lot of temptations.

  After an hour, and four dollars in tips, and the tourists avoiding me like I have hepatitis—which, with this costume, maybe?—I pack it in and head home.

  And when I get there, I find the icing on tonight’s cake: a note attached to my door, saying my rent is going up fifty bucks a month.

  ALL TOLD, IT’S not a bad system. I go to the ice cream truck. Between the bald tires and the menu pictures mostly scraped off, there’s rarely a line. I order the sundae, as described by Richie, from a man whose heavy brow and bushy beard make him look like he moonlights as something that hides under beds to terrorize children. With an uncomfortable wink he serves me a big sloppy sundae in a plastic clamshell with marshmallow and crushed peanuts, and I find a quiet alcove to eat it, and at the bottom find a plastic bag, which is stuffed with even smaller bags, which are stuffed with coke.

  At least I get some ice cream out of this, along with the thrill of wondering whether the bag is intact, or if my ice cream is now loaded up with cocaine.

  Then I make my way to my post, where I am now one of the most popular characters on the block. Mostly it’s drunken kids stumbling up to me, their friends holding up iPhones, looking around nervously for cops, ready to take pictures.

  Tonight is no different. The kid who has his arm around me looks like he wants to grow up to be a professional college student. He grips my shoulder and leans in close and says into my mouth, “I’ll take one, please.” I can smell the beer through the mesh.

  He’s using his right hand, not his left like he’s supposed to. I poke at him until he realizes his mistake. Then he finds the hole I made in the costume. His hand reaches in—there is something so disturbingly sexual about this—and I slip a baggie of coke into his hand, leaving the empty arm of the Almo costume to hang in the air like a noose. It actually probably looks nothing like a noose, but that’s just what it feels like.

  We pose for the photos, his friend snapping away, sweating, looking around for the cops. The guy posing for the photo turns his body toward me to shield himself from view, shows me three twenty dollar bills, and shoves them in my tip bag. And then they’re gone.

  Things have been tense with the cops—between Mickey Mouse last week, and then last night, Roger Rabbit went haywire. He was running in circles, screaming anti-Semitic comments, before charging at random people. Three cops to bring him down. I’m thinking PCP, but the guy who dresses as Spider-Man thinks it was meth. We have a pool going.

  So, anyway, the cops are on edge but they think we’ve all got mental problems, and don’t like coming near us. As long as I don’t punch any kids—not always the easiest impulse to ignore but I do my best—it means they give us a wide berth. And I get to hide in plain sight.

  There’s a tap on my shoulder and my heart skips. I turn and find Marvin the Martian. Except his costume is such a bad knock-off, the colors wrong and the head too small, so he looks like Marvin the Martian’s older, socially-inept bother. Flanking him is a Disney princess. I don’t know which one exactly, but given the sunken eyes and stringy blonde hair, I’d say it’s whichever Disney princess made the most mistakes in life.

  Marvin leans toward me and mumbles something I can’t make out.

  I put my hand up to my ear—or to Almo’s ear—to indicate I can’t hear him. He adjusts his headpiece, says, “You have to stop.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He says, “We control the coke game here.”

  “Dude, I’m just taking photos with people.”

  The princess says, “You must think we’re kidding.”

  She holds up her sequined clutch, looks around to make sure there’s no one watching us, and pulls out something black and plastic that looks like a comb. She presses a gloved finger to the side and a blade flicks out.

  Purely on instinct I throw my arm out to block it, and for once the padding comes through—the knife barely grazes me, instead flies from her hand and skids across the ground.

  She looks at it, looks at me, shrugs, and plants her foot in the back of my knee.

  It hurts. I go down, the suit not doing a great job of cushioning the fall. Nor does it help when they start kicking me. The princess, driving the sharp tip of a ruby red slipper into my stomach, is yelling, “You can’t fucking sling here, motherfucker.”

  When there’s a lull in the kicking, I look up and see that there’s a kid watching us, his face flushed red. In one hand is an ice cream cone, in the other is the princess’ switchblade. Through a veil of tears he asks, “Why are they hurting Elmo, Mommy?”

  The mother plucks the blade from the kid’s hand, her mouth opening and closing like she wants to speak, or puke, but can’t figure out which. She drops the blade to the ground and runs away so fast she leaves a sandal behind.

  A cavalcade of cops is headed in our direction from across the square. And I’ve still got eight bags of coke on me. I consider swallowing them but I’m not sure if it’s enough to kill me, and anyway, I don’t even know if I can reach them, because Marvin and the princess are back to kicking me into submission.

  The pain builds to crescendo. The cops crash into us like a wave, and as I’m rolled across the sidewalk, I see glimpses of the tourists huddled around us, taking videos, snapping pictures, pointing, documenting the story they’ll carry with them for the rest of their lives, or at least for one good status update on Facebook.

  And I can’t help but laugh, even though it makes my ribs hurt.

  The thing about pendulums is, eventually they swing back the other way. It doesn’t matter how many lights you add, how many cops you enroll, how hard you scrape at the scum—this is and always will be Times Square.

  Esteban’s stomach twists like he’s going over that first dip on the Cyclone. Everything floating in the moment before gravity takes over. Except they’re not floating. Gravity pushes him into the seat as they fall forward into the dark, barreling across I-87, the gray asphalt black and the lush green treeline black. Even the inside of the car black, save the edges highlighted neon blue by the glow of the dash displays.

&nb
sp; 3:07 a.m. 55 mph. Gas almost halfway between F and E.

  Esteban grips the wheel so hard the joints in his hands ache.

  “How much longer?” he asks.

  Brad mumbles, whirring like an old computer. After a few seconds he says, “Given the speed and time elapsed, the next exit should be in two miles. Prepare to move left. Carefully.”

  “Yeah. Carefully. Thanks.”

  “It’s just that it’s very dark.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “How could you not notice?”

  Esteban shakes his head, reaches for the turn signal. He pulls his hand back without flipping the lever, and reminds himself: no lights. He drifts, squinting at the dark, finds a green exit sign and a branch off their current path. He wishes he could risk the headlights, get his bearings, but Brad will have a fit, so he eases off the gas and coasts to the end of the exit, arriving at a T-junction.

  “Right,” Brad says. “Keep going until I say.”

  Esteban turns down the road. It looks like he’s driving into the mouth of a cave. He takes it slow enough to be safe but fast enough to outrace the apprehension. The silence in the car is like an echo, constantly reminding him it’s there.

  He runs through topics of conversation in his head. Something to fill that silence. Most guys can kill an afternoon talking about shitty cafeteria food or shittier hacks. Six months together in a cell, three months of planning and prep, two hours of crawling through the guts of the Dannemora, and they’d never talked about anything but the gig. It didn’t feel so odd until now.

  Brad, the guy who sat in the corner, plain as an unpainted wall. Tiny bird body swimming in his dark green prison issues, big wet eyes staring off like he was watching a movie no one else could see. Everyone wondering how he ended up there, because no one knew. Not even the hacks.

  That’s it.

  “So tell me, hermano,” Esteban says. “How’d you end up in Danny?”

  Brad doesn’t move. He keeps on not moving. Esteban wonders if he heard the question. He’s about to repeat it when Brad says, “Slow, slow. Coming up on a left.”