Psycho-violence in New York City is down overall. Yes, it can wash up around the ankles if you step off the curb to wander, but you have to go looking.
Today, I sit and wait for something to happen in the bodega down the street from my apartment. I sit leaning on the newspaper rack that has a red Bic lighter tied to it with twine. People stumble in off the street and use it to spark up Marlboros and Backwoods and little parrot-colored pocket bubblers.
“When does it start?” I ask the cashier, Mohammad Antar. A 23-year-old man who looks about 17.
“Soon,” he says without looking up. He’s intensely focused on getting through a stack of lotto tickets, checking each one on the machine that supposedly plays a celebratory blast of horns when it scans a winner.
But it’s only silent now. The poor bastard who bought the tickets is waiting on the balls of his feet for those horns. Trumpets that will let him know he can finally quit his lousy job and go buy a yacht. Or a helicopter strapped with Hellfire missiles.
I don’t blame this man for putting his hope in luck. I’m here to gamble as well. Just differently.
Mohammad told me last week—when I was buying OE 40s to wind down after a long night of Seagram’s and blotter acid—that sometimes they hold cockfights out back. I’m here, because I lost my job at the dry cleaners over a month ago and I need to make rent. Apparently betting on roosters can be quite lucrative.
Ever since the cops busted the big ring here in Brooklyn, seizing over 3,000 birds, there hasn’t been much good action. I didn’t even know it was still going on. Back then, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had announced that his office’s Organized Crime Task Force would make sure no such thing ever happened again. But rents are high. People down here have to get creative.
The blood sport is widely practiced in both Beirut, where Mohammad is from, and Higüey, where the Dominicans who own a bodega across the street are from. The two have always been rivals. This is just one more way for them to try and humiliate each other. Today is the big showdown.
I check my pockets. I’ve brought my brass knuckles and Gerber knife just in case the frenzy of battle bubbles over and spectators start looking to gouge out eyes, or take trophies of noses and ears.
Suddenly, a cat—a bodega cat, which is a breed more like a guardian spirit to all bodegas than an actual feline—jumps down from a shelf and walks across the floor. The door is opening at just the right moment for the cat to casually strut out. Almost like it anticipated this happening using its psychic magic.
Arturo, has arrived.
The 38-year-old Dominican owner of the bodega across the street has wide pockmarked forehead and a tight crew cut. He’s got a cage under his arm with a rooster inside. A demon with a comb like a tumor.
“Are you ready?” he asks Mohammad.
Mohammad nods, comes around the counter, and locks the front door. Turns the sign over to “closed.”
We all walk towards the back, through a door, to find ourselves in an outdoor arena. A dirt floor is surrounded by a miniature gate that goes around in a circle. In the middle, a smaller circle is painted white. After about thirty minutes, there are twenty people sitting around smoking cigars and joints. Some are drinking. I’m drinking too.
All this is not something I’d usually go in for, this animal barbarism, but I can’t say I’m not a little excited. Maybe, like the poor bastard with the lotto tickets, I’m just dreaming I’ll never have to work a shit job again. I dream of month-long vacations. Expensive wine and fake tits. No more rules or regulations. No more shit.
I know that this ring, this place, is a world you only get to see when you step off the curb. A necessary place. Way down here in the thresher of hard real physical reality, where the endocrine lighting and the now-nowness peel back your eyes to really see. Here people aren’t yet stripped of everything horrible or good. We don’t get to see inside the expensive hospitals that treat no one. Or the empty vacation homes. We’ll never sit at long, long tables piled high with mountains of uneaten food.
Mohammad and the Dominicans get their roosters strapped up with spurs. They give the birds pep talks and sanitaria blessings. Then, they pick them up and step into the ring.
When roosters start fighting, it’s fast and loud. Razor blades on their spurs glint in the light. Slashing. You’d be surprised how much blood is in a rooster. Silver-red and oily. It’s hard not to throw up.
And just as I imagined, people are getting frenzied. Their eyes go mad with frenzy and they start spitting and hollering. I check my pockets again. Something is about to explode.
“You cheated!” a fat man sitting in the back yells out. I don’t know who at, or what about. “Mama guevo!”
He stands up and takes two meaty steps and punches Mohammad in the face. For a moment, a silence freezes time. When the moment is gone, everyone descends on each other.
People start ripping each other’s heads clean off. But it’s not enough. One of the women in the background leans over and turns up the radio which is playing Bikini Girls with Machine Guns by The Cramps. It’s the right song. People lean harder into their desires. They start cannibalizing. I get out my knife and my brass knuckles and dive into the writhing mass of pain. I see a man chewing another’s dick and ankles off. Two women in short tight dresses are practically butt naked, their dresses not staying in place in the course of their tumbling and hair-pulling. They kick up a cloud of chicken shit dust. Like those clouds with arms and legs in the cartoons. I look up. I see giant cyclopean beings looking back down at us. Each time their bedsheet-sized eyelids close, they blow wind at our faces. And on the wind, words. They scream, play for us! Kill! Mash yourselves into gravy. Mash yourselves down. Mash yourselves. You are nothing. You didn’t make it. America rejects you. You didn’t make enough money. You weren’t clever enough. Rotten are you, little fucks! So sink. Sink down into the worst places of the human soul. Make us winners.
As we all kill each other, living out our wildest violent fantasies, the bodega cat, the guardian, shakes her head. The roosters are dead. She takes their souls and leads them to God.
