The Soup and Sorrow Digest

Who's Bob?

While Emilio was sliding over Andrew’s first shots of vodka, he was thinking about staking his claim on Celina Street once and for all. Miguel was mulling his five worrisome years of friendship with Ricardo. Andrew was thinking how good and great it is to be called a tadpole by drinking buddies.  Neither of them thought of the condemned house, or the bathroom in the master bedroom, or that behind its mirror cabinet was the perfect drop box to leave packages.  Twice now, Ricardo had gone to pick things up and found the drop box perfectly empty.

Ricardo hopped on the bus headed in the northward direction of Felipe’s house.  He kicked madly against the chair railing and glared over the rolls of light in the clouds.  Nerves drove him like spikes, splintered like fractals into more spikes and spikes. Nada. Nothing. Twice now. Was the box compromised? Maybe the Renacuajo Andrew knew about it?  Or was Julio stiffing Carlos? That thought effervesced spastic caustic bubbles of dread. La mierda, I’d be caught in the thick of it.

Confronting Julio was not part of his job description. He was supposed to be the fa*** who fucked a white boy in the high school lot, not another foaming hoodlum fighting over the trinkets of territory, or drugs, or community, or over the short steep road to riches. This situation could send him to the prison of no return. He could end up like Tony Montana polka-dotted with bullets over a velvet rug. What would Jésus say? Mami? Papi?

Consulting Carlos was out of the question.  He left arrangements to Felipe to organize. Carlos enforced a system in which actions could never be linked to him. He never talked business with Ricardo.  He talked about crazy parties in Bel Air. Or threatened him to keep Elena safe from the Night Stalker. Or complained about rich people thinking he was their bitch just because they exchanged money for vice. Or how one could be the Henry Ford of Cocaine with the new product of crack, bringing illicit morphine to the cost level of the common man. Bragging? Yes. Boasting? Yes.  Business? Nope. 

Or maybe the worry was just one big woof of nada?  Ricardo splayed himself on the chair and told himself to keep cool and chuck the concern off to Felipe.

The bus turned right, his body swayed left into the rusty chrome ledge of the window. Round and round his mind turned on a Mobius strip of counterfactuals. Faux Renaissance facades slid past his window view, and high arrays of windows interrupted by regular pilasters. A sense of the dark and the deep elongated with the concrete cliffs. Turns and more turns later, the route opened up to wide views of sun and sky, and the squat bungalow that would be Felipe’s house.

The front door was ajar. Ricardo peered into the dusty musky sentiments of the house. There was a back profile of a hatted fellow living large on the couch. What's he doing here? The fellow would be Robert Cartwright, aka Bob. Gleaning fortitude from a laugh track cascading from the living room, Ricardo shut the door firmly and ventured inside.

The décor glittered entirely of the baroque kind: walls splattered with paintings, medallions, figurines, gewgaws trundled a la carte from the Fashion District. And there was Robert sniffling and snorting on the rococo couch gilded with el cheapo gold paint.

Ricardo called him Señor Pedo Bob, Carlos called him friend of friends. The sallow, pot-bellied man was a gateway to smashing parties in Hollywood.  And did this man love numbers green, linear, exponential, positive derivative; they supplied him with the elegant myriad hats that graced his balding head. So what was the man, now scratching his large ears in concentrated effort, doing in Felipe’s house?