It Was an Accumulation of Things

he last gasp of sunlight slanted in angles through the boards that kept the dilapidated roof from collapsing right on top of the shabby little squatter’s house on the corner of Somerset and A in the Philly’s so-called Badlands.
In the only somewhat livable space in the entire place, the kitchen, three candles flickered around a smorgasbord of food that was today’s garbage: a half-eaten tuna sandwich picked out of a trash can on Kensington Avenue by Brian LaBovick and five double cheeseburgers fished out after an hour of sorting through bags of scraps by Brenda Hall from the McDonalds on the corner of Lehigh Avenue and Second Street. Her hair sported little pieces of chewed up garbage, undoubtedly from her nose dive through the abyss that is a McDonalds dumpster.
“You hit gold today, bren, gold. I tell you you should spend more time in the dumpster and less time trolling the streets for that less hearty meal that gets you five bucks.”
“Funny, sweetie, cause I could swear on my mother’s grave there ain’t any complaints when it puts a little something in that little thing you like to suck on,” she said, grinning.
“I have a plan, honey. I think it will clear up a lot of the problems.”
The two met right in front of the house as Brian watched his friend being whisked off in a Police Bronco a year ago. He didn’t know what they caught him doing and he really didn’t care. What he did care about was the $50 of rocks his friend was supposed to buy while he completed his morning ritual of heating up a spoon full of that tasty, brown liquid that got him through the day.
Brian hunched over while sitting on a piece of cobblestone staring down the street at a steel bridge and nodding out. The cobblestone had long outlived its meaning. It was a total anachronism for the neighborhood where Burrito trucks and the occasional smell of decomposing bodies wrapped in carpets and thrown into empty lots were the norm. The section of the city had seen better times, like Brian.
Once a successful stock broker, his life took a nosedive along with his shares of Arthur Anderson. Then he got sick, lymphoma. He beat it but not before he caught his wife beating off another man in his bed when he came back from his weekly shot of Procrit. Yes, you could say he had seen hard times, but that was nothing compared to the unrelenting cycle of hell he found himself in as days passed without meaning for the most part and his only thought revolved around his next fix.
On the day they met, Brenda sat down next to him and asked “why so glum, you’re mission fail?” he just looked at her and said “You know, you’re really pretty. Let’s make out.” It wasn’t the best pick-up line, but those are the ones that work sometimes—straightforward ones. And they made out. Then they went back to her place, the shabby little squatter’s den that he was sitting in front of, the one he would come to know so well.
“So what’s the plan.”
“Well, we steal a car and ride up to Eighth and Percy. You know, where they sell wet.”
“What the fuck do you want wet for?”
“I don’t. But, I found this funny money today and it looks really real so we could just put a five on top of it ask for two bundles and then high tail it down to Allegheny and then zig zag so they can’t catch us.”
“Again what are you going to do with two bundles? We don’t even have a fridge to store it in. It goes bad if it ain’t kept cold.”
“We sell it. We could get like $500 for it from some 17-year-old suburban type, ya know.”
“No, I don’t. It sounds dangerous. They’d shoot us. And we’re doing just fine.”
“They won’t shoot us. Don’t you want to get out of here. We could go somewhere. California. Boston. Seattle. Anywhere.”
“You’d shoot the money and you know it. And I’d smoke it.”
“We could leave, we could leave this behind.”
“Sweetie we both know it’s not going to happen, money or no money.”
Before Brian had met Brenda and after his life went to the ninth stage of hell, he slept under bridges and in alleys. He’d found an empty trailer that was used for some construction project that never happened and used it as his toilet. The trailer sat in an empty lot, unprotected from the searing heat of the sun in summer. Most of the row houses along this section of Clearfield Street near A Street had boarded up windows and doors. An old slaughterhouse stood in all its former majesty two blocks away from the trailer. That’s the thing about Kensington, much like parts of West Philly, you can find traces of a much richer past when the streets were freshly paved and children played half-ball against the buildings. That time is gone.
The smell of the daily bowel movements finally caused Brian to seek grayer concrete above Cambria Street. That and the fact that he smashed open the head of a drug dealer on the corner of A Street in an ambush at four o’clock in the morning while the dealer was taking a leak in an alley. He should’ve killed him because now they were itching to replace the glass dick in Brian’s mouth with a Glock.
He never told Brenda what he did and this little plan Brian hatched up was the first intimation Brenda had that Brian could be something other than sweet—that he could be brutal. She thought he was just throwing ideas out there at first, but everyday for the next two weeks he would go over at least once a day how they would do it. He even made her take a walk down to Percy Street to finalize their getaway plan. It was then that she realized this was more than some half-assed scheme he read about in some fake brochure called “Welcome To fantasyland.” Because, to her, that’s exactly what this was, a fantasy, and a very deadly one at that.
“We can’t do this Brian. We can’t. We’ll get fucking killed. I heard all those corners over there have snipers and RPGs and sentries with cellphones that monitor police movements and shit.”
“That’s all hokie. Nah. They’re not a fucking military; they’re scumbag drug dealers. They’ll get what they deserve.”
“Please, sweetie. For me. For me. Don’t do this. We can’t.”
The rain from the summer storm turned from a drip from the rooftop to a full on waterfall. If you looked around the place, since the sun escaped from the black clouds, you could see little rainbows popping up in corners and crevices and the way the water fell in several different areas and the movement of the light transformed a place that was almost unbearable to something resembling a weird piece of art: abstract and ugly but with just enough coloring and beauty as to make it almost pretty. Almost.
“Is this what you want? A house with a million holes. A roof that doesn’t work. Candles? Smelly clothes. And that glance people always give us when we walk by—the one filled with that volatile mixture of contempt and pity. I can’t take it. Don’t you want to leave?”
“Leave? You think I enjoy sucking off skeevy old men and perverts? You think that makes me fucking happy? To be a fucking whore? You’ve known me for a year, what the fuck do you think? But do I want to die in a gutter on the corner of Eighth and Percy? No.”
“It’ll be fine. Fine, I tell you.”
“Please, I love you. We can’t do this. We can’t”
That was the first time he heard her say that. He didn’t even know that she was capable and it was a phrase he hadn’t heard in a very long time. It’s funny how life works out by not working out.
“I love you, too. I love you too. And that’s why we have to do this. It’s now or never.”
When Brenda awoke next morning on a rug they found in a dumpster, dead body not included, she was a hugging a pillow that Brian had placed next to her as he creeped out of bed. If couldn’t hold him, she’d wake up.
She knew he was up to no good. She threw a half-full bottle of Mountain Dew across the room and cried. She was still young. Her mousy brown hair, even though it hadn’t been washed in a week, climbed down her back sticking to her like a child to his mother—it had a dirty pretty quality about it. A punk rock quality.
And that’s what she was and that’s how she ended up here. She ran away from home in Newtown at the age of 17 with her musician boyfriend. They wanted to be free and he wanted to rock out but have the thrill of telling people he used to be a vagrant when he finally hit it big. The problem was they started using. First a little bit of blow. Then a little bit of dope. Then a lot of rocks when the blow didn’t work anymore and finally even more dope to make that shitty crack hangover go away. She had been a little overweight, but the stemfast diet helped her shed that extra bit of weight on her hips.
But the boyfriend left and went back to his parents. Her parents would no longer have her until she repented to God and went to church every Sunday and that was something she didn’t like doing. She became stuck like a 17-year-old single mother. But she didn’t even have someone who loved her; she only had dope. Until Brian that is. She didn’t even care about living before him. Of course, neither did Brian. Nothing brings two people together like misery. They constantly talked about kicking the habit. But it was always tomorrow. But that day was now today.
Brian pulled up in a beat up old Buick. He looked like the kid who discovered he just got what he wanted for Christmas after peeking through the secret spot moms always hide the presents.
For Brenda, this was no present but a one way ticket to death, not California.
“Please. Let’s just leave then. No robbery. Please. I love you”
She couldn’t stop saying those words once she let them escape from her lips. And she meant it. It wasn’t one of those tricks a person says to a lover to get them to do something only to regret they said it in the morning when the person actually loves back; it was real.
“I’ll just go myself.”
“Please.”
“I’ll be back, I promise.”
He sped off and Brenda collapsed on the cobblestone curb, sobbing. Then crying. Then full on bawling. Her thoughts raced. She though about how when he handed the money and swatted the bundles out of their hands. She though about how some sniper on a rooftop would aim his crosshairs right on his forehead and splatter his brains all over the Buick with one quick shot. Or worse, they could pull him out and beat him and torture him before slitting his throat. Maybe they’d just pop in the head right there and roll his body into a carpet and deposit right in front of their dilapidated squatter’s house in some sick display of revenge. Though that seemed far fetched since they couldn’t know where he lived since he lived nowhere.
She already felt like a widow and she wasn’t even married. Her despair turned quickly to anger and then back again. Funny thing about love is how it’s endless forgiveness and how it has a way of consuming you—especially when you think that person is gone, forever.
Hours passed and she didn’t move. He’s dead, she thought. And how would she even know? She didn’t own a TV—hell, she didn’t have electricity. That amenity was a mere illusion from time past. From a life where she wasn’t sitting on a curb wondering if the man she just professed her love to was lying face down in a gutter full of blood.
“Hey, there cutie,” Brian whispered as he tapped her on the shoulder, flashing $500.
“You fucking asshole. You fucking asshole. How could you do it. They’ll be after us. They’ll find us. This is life not some fucking action movie for 15-year-old pubescent boys.”
“What you talking bout, mama?”
“And you’re so fucking glib after you just did—that.”
“I didn’t do it. I pulled up. Took the money out. Scouted them. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about the picture of you, alone—that and my dead body rolled up in some rug.”
“Then how?” she pointed to the money.
“I sold them the car instead and then told them a joke about how I really came to rob them. The got a fuckin' kick out that one.”
“So where to and when’d you start thinking of this anyhoo?”
“We can go anywhere that’s not here. We’ll just spin a bottle on a map and hop on a Greyhound. Start our lives together. Oh, and I started thinking about it when I that one board fell off the roof and hit you on the head. That and the looks from people. And those fucking candles. I guess, you could say this: It was an accumulation of things,” Brian said.