Alex the fry cook asked me if I wanted to score some meth, and I ignored him and after our shift I caught the bus, which, at one point, pulled over for a man who fished in the pockets of his filthy, baggy jeans. The driver at last told him she needed to get going, so he stepped backwards off the bus and bolted up the street. At the next stop, I pulled my head off the window, surprised to see the man sliding coins in the fare box. With the fingers of one hand threaded into a belt loop, he plopped into a seat facing sideways and turned to me—we were the only people riding—and said, “Nice night for a jog.” I sat up and noticed through the windshield the sea of hazy red lights, the stars in a galaxy in which we worked and lived and fucked and will, supposedly, one day die.
We rode past my stop at 30th and El Cajon, where a week earlier I had found Alex on the bench in the shelter flicking a lighter, the half-flames barking at his cold pipe. I pulled out mine and held the flame to the bulbous end, and Alex raised his eyes to mine in Holy Communion.
“Want to drink?” he asked eventually.
“Payday’s Friday,” I said.
“I have an idea,” he told me.
“First time?” I said.
“I know,” he said, “where we can get beer.”
“So what?”
“For free,” he insisted.
“You mean you want to steal it.”
“All I need is a distraction.”
The place Alex knew was Sam’s, the bodega by my apartment. It’s run by a balding Chaldean man who I visited after every one of my shifts, until last week. He stocked my chew, just for me, and sold beer cheap. Checking out one day, I thought I heard him say, “Girlfriend?” Yes, this is for her, I told him, and Sam grabbed his gut and howled, as if he moved from Iraq just to hear that joke. Before I left, Sam insisted I take home a pack of hot dog buns sitting on the counter that someone must have either returned or forgotten.
“For you,” he said. “Take.” He gripped the buns with both hands and smiled so hard his face looked like a crumpled-up hamburger wrapper. Another time, Sam caught me daydreaming at the liquor bottles behind him.
“What you like?” he said.
I told him I was just looking, then he reached for a dusty bottle of peach-flavored vodka.
“You want?” he said.
I pointed instead to a whiskey, the only one in the tequila section. He grabbed and inspected it.
“For you,” he finally decided. “Five dollar.” He set the bottle on the counter like how they do it at the pawn shop.
“Five dollars?” I said.
“Five dollar,” Sam said.
“This bottle,” I said, “is five dollars?”
“No, no. Five dollar—off.”
He spun the bottle around so I could see the price tag and I howled, as if Sam told a joke. “Next time,” I said, raising my full hands. I’d cooked dinner at work after clocking out, and the bottom of the greasy paper sack was about to give. My usual six pack I had to cradle like an infant or else the beers would escape their plastic collars.
Preparing for our crime, I had told Alex what would happen when I entered the store, what Sam’s and my routine was, and Alex said “okay” in hurried, repeated bursts. He took off the lid of a public trash can and tried throwing up in it. The glow of the streetlights glistened on his spittle, and if I were small enough, like an ant, and positioned well enough, like inside his goatee, then I could have seen the world refracted back to me. Tall and slender palm trees would have curved. The dry gutters collecting the fallen fronds would have looked wet. Nothing would have changed about the houses: just stucco and stucco and stucco and roofs made of red tile. With his t-shirt, Alex wiped that world off his bony face. Passing us was a dogwalker, who engaged with the post-sunset world as one engages a coal mine. Suit up, complete the task, and return to the surface.
Sam’s was one-half of a one-story commercial building, and Alex waited in front of the plate-glass window of the other business, a laundromat. I went into Sam’s, the door chimed, he greeted me, and I made a left after the door, around the endcap brimming with bags of chips. I squeezed in the aisle between the non-alcoholic beverages and the hygiene products, the larger bottles of detergent lined up on the floor. I reached the beer coolers in the back, opened one of the doors, and Sam yelled a question or a joke. I yelled back that I couldn’t find my usual. Sam scrambled from his stool, lifted the counter’s hatch, and walked over. The chime sounded. Alex, donning his beloved black sunglasses, the ones he had long ago taken from the restaurant’s lost and found, ripped open the refrigerator door next to me and tucked a thirty under one arm and then gripped two more.
“Help!” Sam hollered. I was blocking him from Alex with the open fridge door, and Sam never would have caught Alex at the other end of the aisle. “Stop eem!” Sam said, as Alex, like an overworked bellman, rushed for the door in a half-crouch.
By the time Sam got out to the street, with me behind him playing dumb, the only trace of Alex was the thirty that had exploded open when he dropped it. Beer cans were still rolling down the ramp of a driveway and rocking back and forth between pebbles in the dry, dry gutter. Sam rubbed his face with both hands, then he looked at me. “Can you believe people?” The chime marked his return to his post.
At the grill the following week, I thought: of all the planets that ever were, that are, and that ever will be they put me on this one, at this time, to wield a metal spatula. I also remembered that Sam kept a photo of his family on the liquor shelf behind him. The picture was faded and curled around a thumbtack, but you could still see the smiling people in it.
“Is that your family?” I had asked on one of my first visits.
He named and described the relation of all seven people in the photo, but I caught only the man on the right flank embracing a younger, thinner Sam.
“My brother,” Sam said. “He came first and bought store.”
“Are they all here?” I said.
“Some,” Sam said. “Cash or card?”
The guy in the jeans on the bus said nothing else as we inched towards Mission Valley, though he nodded at me when I got off at the mall. I didn’t know what size the photograph was, so I bought a few frames. At home, Kim asked me where I had been, but she stayed on the couch, her sunken eyes on the television. I walked past her to the galley kitchen and rested the frames on the small square counter between the stove and the fridge. I grabbed a beer—Alex had left one of the thirties at the gate to our apartment complex—and I tried leaning over her and kissing her hello, but she made a face and stiff-armed me.
“You stink.”’
“Long day.”
“Did you bring me dinner?”
“My manager cut me off,” I said, “and you haven’t eaten in days.”
“That’s my point.”
She came into the kitchen while I was bent down scrounging the fridge for ingredients. “What’s this?” she asked, tapping on the frames like they were piano keys. I told her don’t touch them, and she bearhugged me from behind. I righted myself, and she kissed the back of my neck, above the sagging cotton collar of my work shirt. Then, from under my armpits, she slipped a pipe in my mouth and made me whole again.
***
Brendan Dentino is a native of South Jersey, and he was once a U.S. naval officer, then a political staffer. He is now pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The American University of Paris. You can find his writing on Substack at outinleft.com.
Rejection Letters 