CHAPTER 9
LIKE ALL GREAT plans, the Great Plan required an initial down payment. Cars, even junk cars, weren’t free. Neither, for that matter, were Tasers and ski masks. The money was to be acquired by Doug, who would be selling pills. When he heard this, Doug reminded Mitch and Kevin that pill-selling could be quite a profitable enterprise and that the original plan had been for Doug to keep all the money, as he was taking all the risk. Therefore, the pill-selling money was technically his and should be repaid upon receipt of the huge bags of bills. As Mitch and Kevin figured Doug’s total input would be in the neighborhood of five hundred dollars, and the take from the robbery would be in excess of a million, they put up no argument. Doug didn’t seem to understand that when they were splitting up a million dollars these distinctions wouldn’t matter so much. So they surrendered the point and agreed that Doug would first take out his five hundred, and then they would split up the million.
But Doug began having trouble right away. He had put word out that he had pills the day Kevin had told him of them, but still, six days later, no phone calls. Even the cooks from the restaurant, who used to come in hungover every morning and loudly proclaim a wish for pain pills, had not called. Perhaps they had prioritized their expenses and found that, after being laid off, there simply wasn’t enough money around to pay for a pain-pill addiction. Doug decided he needed to find a richer clientele.
He called Mitch’s cell phone. “Dude, we gotta go to a fancy club or something,” he said when Mitch answered.
“Why?” Mitch was walking Ramone, keeping a close eye out for the police. He had been cheered to see that they didn’t seem to be around.
“I need to get rid of these pills. Man, we can make hundreds of dollars a night and really get this thing moving.”
“I’m not going to a club, man. Those places suck. They closed all the clubs in Wilton anyway.”
“We might have to go someplace else. Out of town.”
Mitch rolled his eyes, imagining Doug coming up with this idea as a convoluted way to get him to drive for an hour to see one of those shitty bands he liked so much. “Dude, just talk to some people around here. I’m not going to a club. No way.”
Holding the phone to his ear with a raised shoulder while watching a muted TV, Doug could hear Mitch rolling his eyes. Mitch didn’t get bands like Left Outlet and Portishead, and Doug secretly thought it was because Mitch was insensitive, even deaf to some of the world’s more obvious vibes. He rolled his eyes in turn and wondered about Mitch’s value system, whereby it was OK to Taser a seventy-year-old man but in no way was it OK to visit a dance club.
“Dude, I’ve asked, like, everyone I know. Nobody can afford pills.”
“All right then,” said Mitch, adopting his commando persona. “But we’re gonna have to sell
“I can’t sell
“Are you sure we’ll be able to sell them at a nightclub?”
“Better bet than around here.”
“All right, man. I’ll put it on my credit card.” They said goodbye, and it began to snow as Mitch walked Ramone back to the house. Dammit, the last thing he wanted was to run up more debt, especially at a freakin’ dance club. Nobody but Guidos and losers with gold chains around their necks went to those places, bathed in cologne and perfume, reciting hackneyed pickup lines to each other. Mitch hadn’t been out to a bar for any reason other than to watch a Steelers game in years, and the last time he had been to a dance club he had felt like he was watching a Discovery Channel nature special on mating rituals. Doug, he knew, was a music lover and wasn’t opposed to dancing, and he had the vague feeling that Doug was just trying to get a financed night out of the house. Fine, if that was how he wanted to play it, Mitch would make him drink water at the bar. While he sipped martinis, which he didn’t even like. Yeah, he’d see how Doug liked that.
Then it occurred to him that he had been walking all over Westlake for half an hour and had not seen a single police car, and he suddenly knew that this thing, if done right, was going to net them some serious cash. Hell, maybe Doug really did need to go to a club to sell those damned pills. When it came to the retail of contraband materials, he seemed to know what he was doing. And he was one of the team. Mitch decided that Doug could have a martini too.
THE NEAREST CLUB that was worth going to was all the way down near Pittsburgh, an hour’s drive away over winding country roads and then a brief stretch of interstate. Mitch noticed the roads getting wider as they got closer to the city and he had a sudden urge to stay, to find work here, to never go back. As he merged onto Interstate 79, he saw the same endless rows of buildings and parking lots and fences that you found in any Pennsylvania town, but here they had an air of victory about them, as if they had triumphed over the landscape. In Wilton, it seemed like nature was always fighting back, and winning. Raised in Queens, Mitch always had the feeling that the endless walls of trees which lined the roads outside Wilton were plotting to retake the town, to evict the environmentally irresponsible inhabitants and grow back over the land that they had been cleared from by the original developers of the town. Here, though, in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, it was obvious that the trees had given up.
“It’s ugly,” Doug said, looking at the night landscape, a sprawling view of strip malls and carpet outlets illuminated by the yellow glare of streetlights. Mitch had been thinking just the opposite. It pulsed with energy, figuratively and literally. Wires and transformers and relay boxes and traffic lights and cell phone towers, every one of them representing a job, a person needed to maintain it, an opportunity. There were
“After we get the money, let’s move to Pittsburgh,” Mitch said.
“No way, man,” said Doug, and even as he was saying the words, Mitch became aware of a gulf between them and knew that this, more than anything, was the reason they would likely one day stop being friends. Doug had grown up in Wilton and liked the familiarity, and even though he frequently spoke of leaving, Mitch often noticed he had no real interest in the rest of the world, or even the rest of the country. He would travel to another city to see a Phish show, but not to see the city itself. He would talk of relocating to places like Aspen or Monterrey or any place with cliffs and girls in bikinis that he saw on the Travel Channel, sometimes with great enthusiasm. But the enthusiasm would quickly fizzle, and then he would hunker down and stare out the window at the warm glow of the metal-refinishing plant. It was an issue they had discussed only in the most superficial way, but it represented a difference between them that was beyond compromise.
“Tree-fucking hippie,” said Mitch.
“Sorry, I don’t like soot and trash and grime,” said Doug, referring to big cities, apparently unaware that he was also giving a fairly accurate description of Wilton.
He must look around Wilton with rose-colored glasses, Mitch thought. To Doug, it was home sweet home, but the thought of going back there empty-handed tonight gave Mitch a stab of anxiety.
To quell it, he asked, “You really think we can sell a box of pills to strangers?”
“There’s no telling,” said Doug, not providing the words of comfort Mitch was looking for. “Selling anything is a crapshoot.”
“But you think there’s a possibility?”
“Of course, man. I wouldn’t have suggested this if there wasn’t a possibility.”
Mitch nodded. Doug had what Mitch considered a rare social gift, a genuine enthusiasm for meeting people. When they went to parties or concerts, Doug would often disappear with random people he met and be found hours later, having had soul-searching conversations with strangers which he would claim had enlightened him somehow. And before Kevin had been busted, Doug had managed to par-lay this openness with strangers into a thousand-dollar-a-week business. Since it had been so long since Mitch had seen Doug using his gifts, he had forgotten there was a creature with insight and energy inside the stoned blob of protoplasm who now spent his days on the couch, a remote control in hand.
The club was exactly the kind of place Mitch dreaded: a neon-lit, garish, New York City-wannabe dance club, where the creme de la creme of Pittsburgh ’s northern suburbs could buy eight-dollar drinks and spend the evening pretending they were Eurotrash. Mitch groaned as he pulled into the parking lot and saw two Italian men in silk shirts opened to the navel going in the front door.
“Aw, come one, man. This is the best place you could think of? Look at those guys. I don’t wanna go in there.”
“We’re here to sell pills, right?”
“Yeah, but…” Mitch sputtered. “This is Guidoville. Isn’t there, like, a country bar or something around here?”
“Since when do you like country music?”
Mitch groaned again and banged his head on the steering wheel. Doug knew how he felt about dance clubs; they had discussed it a number of times and never reached agreement. Dance clubs were supposed to facilitate meeting women, but for Mitch they did just the opposite. He was good at conversation and bad at dancing, and the loud music in the clubs robbed him of his weapon. These clubs, he felt, gave the advantage to dumb people who couldn’t carry on a conversation about anything except shopping but who looked good gyrating.
“Man, you just gotta chill out,” Doug said. “We’ll have a good time.”
“This is a sacrifice,” Mitch said. “I’m sacrificing here. I’m taking one for the team.”
As he parked, two women in tight miniskirts and high heels walked past the car. Mitch watched, open-mouthed, as they went in the door, suddenly aware of how long it had been since he had seen a real, live, attractive woman in the flesh. He
