Gold oozes then hangs then overflows. Everything’s lit up behind Plexiglas here in the pawn shop. Gem Pawn, you sharp neon devil. Gem Pawn, you nice little spot. I hear these words like a jingle bouncing, red rubble ball over each syllable bouncing, helping me to follow along.
“What ya looking for?” the man behind the counter asks. His short curly hair is wet with gel. The gold seems to have crawled up and attached to him at various places—the eyes, the lobes, the molars. I can tell he’s coming down from a long night of coke.
“I need something special. Got caught pretty bad.” I look down through the display at a row of rings and watches and a miniature version of Kaneda’s motorcycle from Akira encrusted in rubies. I point to a necklace with an Italian horn pendant and ask, “What about that?”
The man wipes thick sweat from his forehead and looks too. “Oh, yea—that’s a good one. Some twitchy weirdo brought it in and said he’d be back for it. You know the kind.”
“I do,” I say watching his jaw try to eat itself. “So, it’s not for sale?”
“Didn’t say that.”
Outside it’s bitter cold, so I hold the box with the necklace tight inside my jacket pocket. Like this I weave through clouds of white ammonia bursting from manholes and gutters and from people’s heads. The stuff coming up from the heads specifically being soul-gas. The sky is bright gray with a layer of pink just behind that from all the leaking pollution.
At the corner of Pacific and Flatbush, right where you cross towards Barclays Center to get on the subway, a cab swings through the intersection and about takes out my kneecaps. It screeches to a halt and I slam my fist down on the hood.
I say, “Are you fucking kidding me?” I look into the driver’s eyes and bright white insanity looks right back. His eyes are so white they glow blue and in them I see a million fare runners being ground up under blue-hot tires. I back away slowly.
And that’s when, craning my neck—is that guy over there?—, I notice I’m being followed.
Peaking out from behind a halal food cart down the street is a skinny man wearing a sweatshirt with Bugs Bunny on the front, but this version of Bugs is tattooed and has a toothpick and is wearing sunglasses. I can also see the man’s Timberland boots are completely untied and the tongues are trying their best to lap up a greasy puddle below the curb. He leans and they reach. He ducks back away when he notices I’ve spotted him. Whatever. It’s too cold for all the freaks today.
Back at my apartment, I sit in the kitchen with a cup of coffee with splash of rum since it’s all I have. My girlfriend will be back soon and she’ll be mad and I’m nervous. The box with the necklace rests on the table in front of me, sitting in the light like a small square bone.
A knock comes to the door and my back snaps straight and so does all my hair. I take a good breath and go to answer. I go over my apology. I pour my pirate coffee down the sink.
I know it’s her, but still, I look out the peephole from habit—my area of Flatbush has a lot of Jehovah’s Witnesses roaming around, so it’s better to be safe. This guy? I ask myself when I see it’s the skinny man from before standing there. Did he follow me all the way? The peephole distorts him and he’s got a giant head and seagull legs. I can easily see now that someone did a pretty good job on his face because it’s dripping from the brow and the cheek and his top lip is a fat purple nightcrawler.
“Hello,” I say. “Can I help you?”
“I’m sorry for comin’ here, man,” he says. His voice is high and nasally. “But I need that necklace ya just bought at the pawn. I need it. They’re gonna fuckin’ kill me, man.” He’s got a heavy Queens accent and he sounds scared, just how certain Queens types do anytime they have to leave their five street radius, their universe.
“So you have been following me.”
He runs his hand through his beetle shell of hair and bounces around like he’s in a rush. He twitches and I know just who this guy is now. “Look, I jus’ told you,” he says. “I’m sorry an I can pay you for it later an all, but I only pawned it before because I had this sure thing. An the thing didn’t pan out only because of some crazy freak shit, man, and so, I at least need the necklace so I can give these guys somethin’.”
“That’s not my problem,” I say bluffing since I can’t really be fighting with a twitchy freak when my girl who still hates my guts for catching me with Salome, gets here. “But if I let you in, you promise not to act crazy?”
He lights up. “Yea, man. I promise! Just open up an I’ll explain an I’ll pay whatever—I just need to give them this to hold them off. Because after this last mark tonight,”—he wipes his hands together like an addict imitating what they think real gangsters do,—“I’m good. Money. This is a guarantee, bro.”
I let him inside and we sit at the kitchen. He tells me a long winding story that finally ends at the fact that he’s just a cold, dead loser. A gambling addict without the divine light. I don’t want to—and can’t really—give him the necklace since it’s my only distraction for my girlfriend later, but then he let’s me know who he owes. A name I wouldn’t have expected slips out his purple slit of a mouth. Barbara Corcoran. As an upstanding professional journalist, I decide I have to follow and see where exactly this story is going.
First, we drink the rest of the rum. He throws in some pills he says they use on dogs to get them to stay awake for races. We do it all and I get to work.
“So tell me what you know,” I say trying to light my cigarette. I’m twitchy now too.
He explains, almost like he’s rehearsed it, that “the Corcoran bitch” has been buying up every pawnshop in the city. Says she knows the financial market is going to collapse and that gold is going to be the only good thing left. Their business model is shifting accordingly. Corcoran purposefully puts people in homes they can’t afford—nothing really new. The twist is, instead of normal relators, they get juiced up maniacs and wrap them in suits to take Dave and Nancy to see their two bedroom one bath apartment on the Upper East Side. Then, after Dave develops alcoholism—Daves do have the highest likelihood—and loses his job and misses the mortgage payments, it’s a ten-pound fist that slams on the door and tells him to cough up. And when he can’t, Dave looks at Nancy’s gold heirloom tennis bracelet and takes it to the pawn shop. The one Corcoran owns. They own most. They have a direct flow this way.
“Are you sure those pills are still good?” I ask looking at my hand like it’s a small deep sea creature. I don’t know if I’m hearing him right. Does any of this even make sense? I ask myself taking a drag of my cigarette, a butt.
We gather supplies and then head to Antonio’s Pizzeria down the street from Gem Pawn. He tells me it’s best to talk keep talking 
there and I think, whatever, that’s fine.
Outside the window, the sodium-vapor lamps turn everything orange. It looks like the surface of a similar planet but in an alternate dimension. Planet NYC. Planet Plasam. Cell phone repair planet. Coughing mud. Planet of the cigarette night. The one with wet newspaper sticking to all the sewer grates like hungry ribs. The churro cart planet. Planet Junky. A big orange ball with amphetamine suits rushing to silver towers under which saintly homeless pass out cards with pictures of the Dalai Lama. A planet with the brightest dirt. The clotted planet of rats. The beauty and the shit and it’s all one big clot. That’s what it looks like. Looks like…
I know for certain now I’m in the middle of a terrible and jagged trip. The pills were much more than simple dog Adderall. They’re something cooked up in a horrible damp lab somewhere, maybe the Pacific North West. Cooked up by hippies. Analogous to burundanga. I know all this, but I can’t hold on to the stinging, helpful paranoia letting me know. I start feeling too good and forget why my girlfriend needs the necklace in the first place. I forget that burundanga can be used to make a dog suggestible and that man is too a dog in some ways. I start to think everything sounds pretty reasonable, or at least nice. The twitchy freak starts talking again.
“The whole city, man. It’s ‘bout to collapse. Those Corcoran people who control the gold are gonna be like that guy with the hockey mask from Mad Max. Warlords when it all hits. That’s why we need to hold onto to what we got.” He says the last part like it’s my Manchurian trigger.
“That all sounds crazy, right? Isn’t that last part Bon Jovi?” It’s just us there in the restaurant in the plywood booth, a blinking star of halogen filled with dust and spider webs above. Two uneaten slices on the table each have two paper plates tucked under them and I don’t want to eat. I just want to listen.
He keeps going. Maybe he never stopped. “Yea man, people don’t know what we know—me and you. You and me, we see things.”
“Yea. I see things all the time. You hear that?”
“Like love and death and shit. Fucking galaxies exploding under our fingernails. There’s so much people aren’t awake for. You ever heard about this guy, some scientist named Andrei Linde?” All the sudden it seems like his accent got up and walked off. The bruise on his cheek sort of seems like make up, now that I look. Oh well. Sparks are filling up in my head and it feels good.
I tilt my head to let some out. “I really think I hear something. Wait, what’s your favorite band?”
“This guy was like some genius man. And this one guy I used to know was really into him. So get this, I was coming back home from this one party and I had some shit on me. The cops are out looking for a guy who apparently looks just like me. So they pull up and woop-woop and then I’m scared so I’m running. I’m high you know?”
“Yea, I know.”
“So this fucking loser, I mean total loser cop, he’s got my arm and I’m like ‘dude if you push any harder I’m gonna puke.’”
“Man, they always push. I had this teacher, what was her name? Mrs. G, or something, that would always push like that and never knew when to let up.”
“And he is yelling some shit trying to look hard and then he yanks me and I come up and puke right on him. Fucking bam, man! Right on him. His partner is laughing and the cop drops his hold and then I’m free. I’m running down the street and, yea. Just imagine what would have happened in the other universe?”
“I love this place. Really good pizza.”
After loops of this, I hand him the necklace to go and pawn it down the street for some real gold—the necklace is a fake, he’s explained to me somewhere in there. Apparently he’s been doing this scam all week. I can join in with him and he won’t fuck me over and we’ll just follow the next guy who buys the necklace and do it all over again until we’re rich. We’ll both be barracudas. I think it sounds like a sure thing.
