almost as much as I did you, so I let my appearance go to shit and screamed when I needed to scream. Screaming makes you feel better.” She leaned in close to whisper in his ear: “But it doesn’t really change anything.”
Blinking back tears, Fenderson became vaguely aware that the room around them was awash in black-and- white comic book art, taped to a huge drawing board and pinned in overlapping layers to the surface of every wall. With flickering candlelight his only guide, straining his neck as he was to see anything beyond the mattress to which he was tied, it was hard for Fenderson to be sure, but none of the drawings in the room looked anything like the one Alcott had shown him earlier. This artwork was crude and listless, devoid of all the power the page he’d seen at the cafe exhibited.
Alcott followed his gaze. “Angry, isn’t it? That’s what everyone always says about my stuff. Aside from that it’s not very good. I’m a better inker than an illustrator. They say I’ve got a real talent for inking.” She pulled some rubber gloves onto her hands and rolled a tea cart over to the bed near Fenderson’s head where he could get a good look at the macabre collection of sex toys—oversized, heavily studded dildos, mostly—that was arranged upon it.
“The page I showed you at the El Cortez, by the way? That really was Jack Kirby,” Alcott said. “I bought it at the Con just before I ran into you.”
And with that, she picked up one of the phalluses—a giant chrome number lined all around with sharp little barbs—and proceeded to show Ken Fenderson a whole new perspective on the crime most commonly referred to as “date rape.”
Fenderson was never heard from again. Nobody cared enough about him to really notice he was gone. Alcott took her own life shortly thereafter.
I bought the four pages of art you see here from her sister, who inherited her meager possessions and told me the story I’ve just shared with you to explain my otherwise inexplicable fascination with them. She said her sister mixed something into the ink she used that gives the artwork that strange, ethereal glow. She didn’t say what that something was, but her inference was pretty clear. I don’t know if I believe any part of her story or not.
Someday, either I myself or a future buyer—you, maybe?—will have a DNA test run to find out for sure what these pages are really worth.
THE NATIONAL CITY REPARATION SOCIETY
BY LUIS ALBERTO URREA
It wasn’t like Junior Garcia only hung with white people now. But he didn’t see much Raza, he’d be the first to admit. Not socially. That’s why you leave home, right? Shake off the dark.
As soon as he picked up the clamoring cell phone, he had that old traditional homecoming feeling: why’d I answer this? He didn’t recognize the number—some old So Cal digits. He stared at the screen as if it would offer him further clues.
When he answered, an accented voice said: “Hey, bitch.”
“Excuse me?”
“Said: Hey. Bitch. You deaf, homes?”
“You must have the wrong number,” Junior said, about to click off.
“Junior!” the guy shouted. He used the old, hectoring fakebeaner accent the vatos had affected when mocking him in school: Yoo-nyurr! “I bet you got some emo shit for a ringtone. Right? Like ‘The Black Parade,’ some shit like that.” The guy laughed.
“I’ve been talking to you for, like, almost a whole minute, and you already insulted me. I don’t even know who you are.” His ringtone was Nine Inch Nails, thank you very much. Emo? Shit. “I’m out,
He clicked off and pulled on his Pumas. Got his jog on along the beach. It was one of those rare sunny days, and everybody was out, looking in their Lycra and spandex like a vast, roving fruit salad. He tucked the celly in his shorts pocket. Who’s the bitch now? he wanted to know.
His nemesis caught him again as he was cooling off, jogging in place beside a picnic table, breathing through his nose, pouring good clean sweat down his back—he could feel it tickling the backs of his legs.
“You again?” Junior said.
“It’s me. Damn!”
“Me, who?”
“Chango!”
Junior wiped his face with the little white towel he had wrapped around his neck. “I should have known.”
“That’s what I’m sayin’.”
“Fucking Chango.”
“Right?”
Junior could hear him smoking—he still must like those cheap-ass Domino ciggies from TJ. They crackled like burning brush when the guy inhaled. “Why you calling me, Chango?”
“What—a homeboy can’t check on his li’l peewee once in a while? I like to make sure my boyz is okay.”
“I haven’t talked to you in ten years,” Junior said. He sat on the table and lay back and watched the undersides of gulls as they hung up there like kites.
“So?” said Chango. “You think you’re better than us now, college boy?”
