Teddie Goldenberg 4391 words
Deuce opened the door to the bar and pulled it shut quickly behind him. He pulled off his gloves, his hat, his balaclava, his glove liners, unwound his scarf, unzipped his outer coat, swung his messenger bag around with a twitch of his shoulder, and stuffed all the loose gear in his bag. His hands felt like there was too much blood in them – about to explode – so he flexed them while his eyes adjusted to the darkened room.
“You gotta tip the dancer for a stamp,” said a warmly-dressed girl by the door. She was behind a little table with a rubber stamper, jerking her thumb down the length of the bar counter. At the end, on a little peninsula, was a bronze pole and a young woman in a flimsy summer dress. Around her was a crush of bike messengers, with their winter gear half-off, rubbing their hands together like the stripper was a campfire.
“Deuce!” someone shouted. He went over to them, an odd assortment of messengers from Chicago, all there for the annual “Stupor-Bowl” race – thirteen bar stops, thirteen shots of whiskey, all done in the below-freezing, snow-entrenched streets of Minneapolis on Superbowl weekend. Deuce had visited six bars so far and had six shots of whiskey, but this was the first and only one that was also a strip joint. It was also the first strip joint he’d been in, ever.
“My little petunia!” Swampy, as always, was the grand patriarch of the group, lording over the scene with his large, red nose, coke-bottle glasses, and two handfuls of alcohol. Swampy’s massive beer-gut nearly pushed Deuce back a step. “How many stops you do?”
“This is my seventh. How about you guys?”
“Son, this is gonna be my one and only stop.” He chuckled, displaying a grill of irregular or missing teeth, some of them the color of cigarette ash. Swampy was twice the age of most of the guys in the small crowd around them, though Deuce, being twenty-eight, was older than a typical rookie. He was also more serious about racing, and did not affect the dirty aesthetic that the others did. Wolfman had deep lines etched in his dark brown skin and a scraggly, gray beard. Hollowpoint had a bullet-shaped head, due to a conical haircut – the symmetry offset by one shaved eyebrow. Rags was a freckled white girl with asymmetrical dreadlocks. Destro was a short Filipino guy sporting a fu-manchu mustache / goatee combo and three gold teeth. And the other person Deuce knew there was Poopchute – a stocky guy in his thirties, a bit shorter than Deuce, his head shaved so the balding pattern was barely noticeable, and a thick handlebar mustache that drooped to his jawline. There were other messengers there that Deuce didn’t know as well – just faces he knew to nod at when they passed each other at work.
“I need to tip the girl,” Deuce explained. Swampy let him by, and Deuce pushed through to the platform. He saw clear high-heels and painted toenails, then dug out a dollar, and slid it onto the counter. He looked up for a second, thinking it would be rude not to, and the girl met eyes with him.
“Hey, what’s up?” he said, as casually as possible.
“How you doin’?” she said, just as casual, and smiled. She was wearing a pinkish summer dress, too short for even a small girl. Deuce decided that she looked atypically Midwestern: medium length blond hair, a large bosom, round hips, and no definition in her arms. Unlike her yuppie counterparts, she knew how to dance. Like a black girl, he thought – moving her hips in a circular motion (not just side to side), her upper torso moving independently in different directions, while her arms held the pole closely like it was protecting her.
“She likes you,” Poopchute said.
“Riiiight. She likes dollar bills.”
“Yeah, looks that way.” Poopchute twitched his mustache at the bartender. “You get your shot yet?”
“I was about to.”
“You want to split this place?”
“Yeah, I actually want to do this race.”
“Cool man. Can I ride with you?”
“Of course.”
“Cool, let’s do a shot, then.”
Poopchute led Deuce over to a clear section of bar. The bartender gave them two generous pours of whiskey – three fingers’ worth, it looked. Poopchute said, “Here’s to the wind that blows, the ship that goes, and the lass that loves a sailor,” and they swallowed the whiskey. Deuce got his race manifest stamped, and after a couple minutes of putting warm things back on their hands and heads, they launched out the door.
The wrestled their bikes out of the snowbank and the other bikes piled on top of theirs, and started down the street. They both rode fixed-gear bikes with thin tires, which sliced right through the snow to the asphalt, but somehow six shots of whiskey made it a lot easier to balance.
“That was the first time I’ve ever been in a strip joint,” said Poopchute.
“Really?”
“Yeah, does that surprise you?”
“Kinda, but that was my first time, too.” Deuce looked at Poopchute, who was concentrating on the street in front of them. In his winter gear, he was nearly identical to all the other messengers, but Deuce saw back to Poopchute at various messenger parties, getting belligerent with girls, or playing the slapping game until someone’s nose started bleeding. Of all the rowdy, self-destructive bike couriers he knew, he’d think that Poopchute would be one to frequent strip joints.
“I don’t like seeing women treated like that,” added Poopchute, as if he sensed Deuce’s curiosity.
“I dunno, I think they like it.”
“They convince themselves they like it, which makes it worse. I just don’t like how it’s, you know, part of society or whatever.”
“Yeah.” Deuce was too out of breath to add more.
“At least it’s the only strip joint in the race.”
“How many more stops do you need?”
“Six.”
“Me too.”
“We only have a hour left in the race.”
“Yeah, I might hit one more before I just head for the finish.”
“Yeah.”
They kept their pace, no sounds but the constant soft rasp of snow against their tires, or large, crunchy snowflakes hitting the material of their jackets. It was a comforting thing, being in the middle of a city but hearing no street noise; no buses, taxis honking, pedestrians talking, or the rumble of the L train – which reminded Deuce that he was in Minneapolis, not Chicago.
“What are you going to do when you quit?” asked Poopchute.
“What do you mean?”
“What’s your plan to get out of messengering.”
“I dunno. I’ve done three winters so far.”
Poopchute slowed his pace and Deuce slowed to match him.
“C’mon. You can’t do this shit forever. You have to have an exit plan.”
“I dunno. My band wants to tour in the summer.”
“Your band? Yeah, good luck making a living off of that.”
“How about you, Mike?” Deuce preferred using real names – but also, he wasn’t sure if Poopchute actually liked his own nickname.
“I’m gonna sell art. Still trying, anyway.”
“How long have you been messengering?”
“Seven years. I think.”
“Shit.”
Poopchute leaned forward, locked his right leg, and skidded to a stop. Deuce skidded, sliding left a bit, then circled back to Poopchute, who was looking around the wide avenue.
“Where is this?”
“I don’t know.”
The street they were on was at least five lanes wide, and the buildings seemed old and low. Theater marquees jutted from some fronts and beyond that it was just gray. A pickup truck slushed by them, its wipers squeaking madly. It went around a corner and then they only heard the strange sound of snowfall, which came from everywhere at once
“Hey,” someone shouted – a female voice; someone on the sidewalk.
“What’s up?” Poopchute responded, loud and challenging.
“You guys want to see something cool?”
“Yeah!” Poopchute yelled, before Deuce could object. They locked to parking meters and approached a girl in a huge parka holding open a door. The door was next to a large, elaborate theater entrance and led directly to stairs going up. She led them inside and soon their cleated shoes were clacking up the wooden staircase.
“You guys doing the race?”
“Yeah,” they answered.
“You’re not planning on winning are you?”
“Fuck winning,” said Poopchute. “I’m just in it for the whiskey.”
“Where are we going?” asked Deuce.
“You guys are into bikes, right?”
“Yeah,” they both answered.
The dark stairway was of old wood, but there was no smell. Deuce expected a wood smell, like the staircase to his grandmother’s attic. When he was 11, his grannie had led him up to the attic in a staircase nearly identical to the one he was in at the moment, her rump rising on each stair in front of him. Inside, the dormer windows let in plenty of light, but she hit a switch and he saw that it was immaculate and finished entirely in dark wood, albeit cramped from the high arch of the roof. She pointed to a desk at one end.
“Harold used to come up here to write.”
Putting her glasses on, she consulted a shelf of leather-bound tomes. Deuce settled into the couch, intuiting a picture-show. His grandmother selected a volume and settled in next to him, too close but he was too polite to move away. She wasn’t fat like his other grandmother, and he’d seen her in a jogging suit earlier in the day. She flipped through the pages of black-and-white pictures.
“There’s Harold, when he was… twenty-three.” The picture was of someone in shorts and a jersey, leaning against a bike and smoking a cigarette. The man he supposed was his grandfather (Deuce did not notice the family resemblance until his late teens) wore something peculiar on his head. He pointed and asked.
“That’s a helmet. It was made of leather and stuffed with cotton. Not very safe.” His grandmother went through nearly the entire album, recounting races that happened before Deuce’s father was born, mentioning famous racer’s names that Deuce’s grandfather stood by, names Deuce wished he could remember now, so he might mention them to other cycling fanatics, that his grandfather had beaten so-and-so in 1930-something.
Deuce realized the memory was sparked by the girl asking them if they were into bikes, something along the lines of what his grandmother had said, more than a decade ago. This reverie of his grandmother was cut off suddenly by one of the wet stairs hitting him in the forehead – more correctly, he hit the stair with his head, when his wet biking cleat slipped. It was sudden, and confusing, but Deuce was back on his feet almost immediately.
“You okay?” asked Poopchute.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Deuce felt his forehead, which was now wet, hot, and running over his hands. It was too dark to see, but there must have been some sharp bit of metal or wood that cut his brow open. “Shit, I’m bleeding,” he said.
“Come upstairs,” said the mystery girl. “I got a first aid kit.” Her keys jangled and light came into the stairwell. Poopchute looked at Deuce in the new light and made a face.
“What?”
Poopchute shook his head. “You’re bleeding pretty bad.”
“Come inside,” the girl insisted.
Blood pattered on the landing despite Deuce’s best efforts to cover the wound with his glove. The apartment was half apartment and half bike workshop. There was a tall-bike leaning against one wall – a giant bike made from one frame welded atop another – and immediately Deuce categorized the girl; she belonged to that sub-sub-culture of the bicycling subculture, known as freak-bikers. He could tell now by her clothing: underneath her heavy, dirty parka her clothes were atypically gutter-punk style, patched-together brown, black, and green; modified to be amenable to bicycling; and she had two piercings through her lower lip, one through the bridge of her nose, and an uncountable number of earrings. Her hair was black with colored streaks, fashionably messy, and Deuce had no doubt that she thought herself the coolest, most individualistic person in the Midwest, just like all the other girls that occupied that same sub-sub-culture.
“Thanks,” he said. “Is there something I can drip my blood into?”
“Go in there, and lean over the sink,” she told him.
While Deuce stared in the sink holding a rag to his head, Poopchute had a conversation with the girl, whose name was Kitty, or so she claimed. When the conversation stalled, Poopchute asked to look at the wound.
“You’re gonna need stiches,” he announced. “It’s pretty deep.”
“Damnit. So much for the race.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ve got a suture kit,” said Kitty.
“Okay,” said Poopchute. He put his hand on Deuce’s shoulder. “Sit down on the toilet.”
“What? Wait a second-”
“Don’t worry about it, I’ve done it before.”
“How about I just go to the hospital?” Deuce looked at Kitty and Poopchute, who rolled their eyes in unison.
“You have insurance?” asked Kitty.
“No.”
“Then you better sit down on the toilet and hold still,” said Poopchute. Deuce did so, not quite believing Poopchute was serious, and watched as his acquaintance threaded a long, curved needle, then moved it through the flame of a lighter. Kitty patted his forehead with an alcohol-soaked gauze pad, which might have hurt more if he’d been sober.
“Okay, just hold still.”
Poopchute put one hand on the side of Deuce’s face, his fingers spread out in a firm grip. His amateur-surgeon’s hand went above Deuce’s field of vision, so Deuce watched Kitty, whose face was rapt with curiosity. He grinned at her.
The sensation of the needle passing through his brow was kind of like a sharp prick, followed by tugging, then more pricking and tugging. Poopchute was done stitching in five minutes, and then tied the ends of the black nylon together, which hurt the most.
“So you’re done?”
“That’s it. When it grows back together, get someone to cut the stitches out.” Poopchute ran the sink, rinsed off the needle, and returned it to the small plastic case Kitty supplied.
“That was pretty rad,” said Kitty. “Were you like a paramedic or something?”
“No.”
Kitty took the suture kit – which resembled a patch kit for bike tires, Deuce thought, and served roughly the same purpose – and zipped it into a hip-pack that he hadn’t noticed on her before.
“You care a suture kit with you all the time?” Deuce asked.
“Sure, it’s good for patching clothes.” She pointed out a few patches on her black pants that were held on by black nylon threads. It made sense to Deuce; freak-bikers, like their gutter-punk cousins, were into D.I.Y.: Do-It-Yourself, as in DIY bike-building, DIY clothing, and apparently, DIY home surgery. He wondered what her and her friends would do if one of them developed appendicitis or an abscessed tooth. The bathroom they were in was clean, but the show-fliers and photos of punk kids drinking 40’s adorning the walls didn’t make it resemble an operating room, either.
Kitty played nurse with a wet towel, dabbing away dried chunks of blood from Deuce’s face. She finished, looking pleased at the result, and seemed to remember something.
“Oh yeah, I still want to show you guys something.”
She took them into the living room / bike workshop and showed them some weird bike welded from various pieces of other bikes, with tiny wheels and a plush leather seat big enough to recline in. Since Deuce and Poopchute had both seen plenty of chopper bikes before, they pretended to be impressed, and said they had to get back to the race. She said she’d see them at the after-party. They took their time getting down the stairs.
“You want to hit any more of the bar stops?” asked Poopchute.
“I don’t know – whadda you wanna to do?”
“Just get this over with.”
Deuce agreed. They got back on their bikes. The last stop was a bar with a stage area for bands, and because there were already fifty or so bikes locked up on every street sign, parking meter, or streetlamp near it, it took them a while to find a good place to lock up.
“I think I like this town,” said Poopchute.
“Why’s that?”
“I dunno, it seems like there’s a lot of nice girls here.”
“It must be all this snow,” said Deuce. “Maybe if people get stuck indoors with each other, all the time, they have to figure out how to get along.”
“Maybe that’s it.”
Together they trudged the half-block to the bar which was also the finish line. The muffled sound of rowdiness cleared up and amplified when they opened the door, and they plunged in. There were two guys behind a folding table with a pile of sodden, crumpled, torn, and dirtied race manifests, cautiously examining each one, lest it spontaneously disintegrate. They held each one up close to their faces, straining to determine the authenticity of the rubber stamps, which were in many cases reduced to vague, colored smears.
“Is this the ballot committee?” Deuce said, waving his near-pristine manifest at them. One hand reached out and received it. The time was scribbled down and Deuce could only wait like everyone else for the results. Fortunately, they were at a bar, and Deuce wound his way through the crowd to find Poopchute, already gripping a pair of beers.
“Here’s to the wind-”
“You already did that one,” Deuce interrupted.
“I did? I dunno, I’m wasted.”
“Let’s just do this: skål!”
“Skål? What’s that mean?”
“I dunno, it’s what Norwegians do. Like ‘cheers’ or something.”
“Good enough.” They clinked their mugs together.
The evening turned to night, and the bar closed. Deuce and Poopchute followed the hundred-some pack of bikers to a crusty-looking loft space, probably where the organizers of the race lived. The music there was louder, the beer was free, and everyone was twice as drunk. Somewhere around two in the morning the final tally was made and the music was stopped to announce the race winners. Deuce didn’t feel like paying attention, but somewhere in the long ceremony, among the prizes for D.F.L, second or first female, and third fixie, he heard his name.
“First out-of-towner goes to… DEUCE!” Deuce came forward, through cheering and screaming, and the guy MC’ing handed him a large stone carved with the image of a bicycle. Grinning, he held it over his head. There were a lot of confused looks around the room, so the MC explained, “every time we come down to Chicago for a race, we steal something so we can give it back as a prize. We stole this from The Handlebar, which is where all the messengers in Chicago took us last time.” This caused more cheering and hooting, and Deuce went back into the crowd with his twenty-pound prize. Swampy, Bobcat, Wolfman, and some of the other Chicago crew crowded around it, making cracks, then got back to their drinking. Deuce stowed it in his bag.
Poopchute was one of the first people to pass out. He’d found a blank piece of wall to lean on, with his messenger bag as a backrest, and passed out with a half-full bottle of beer gripped firmly in his hand. Deuce didn’t want to go out that way – there was too much possibility for someone to fuck with him. Someone was already approaching Poopchute with a roll of duct tape, and some guilty aspect made Deuce look away, just before Poopchute woke up and punched the nearest person to him, starting a mini-brawl.
The party was thinning out, and the few choice spaces in the loft had been staked out – the actual loft bed was claimed by three girls; the two couches had two apiece, with their legs and feet overlapping; and the floor wasn’t merely dirty, but filthy, like the muddy floor of a barn. The few dozen bikes leaning against one wall, dripping gray slush, formed a long, soot-colored puddle that everyone had tread all over the wooden floor. He didn’t want to stay there.
It was something he thought of too late – the other Chicagoans, apparently, either had prior arrangements or managed to finagle their way to crash-pads. So Deuce wandered from one chatting group to another, and somehow Kitty found him.
“Hey, are you trying to run away from me?”
“No,” Deuce said. He couldn’t help but stare at her in confusion. “I’m just making the rounds-”
“That’s cool.” She was gifted with a triangular jawline and a gigantic smile to match it. If only she wasn’t so skinny and eager…
“Yeah, I think I lost my carpool.”
“Oh, you lost your friends? Where’re you staying tonight?”
“I dunno.” No, I can’t, he thought. Anyone but her. Anyone.
“You dunno? That’s weird.” She laughed, and Deuce would forever describe her laugh as a witch’s cackle.
“Yeah, they just ditched me here, I guess.” He did his sheepish look, which was normally sarcastic. Now he was actually being sheepish.
“You can stay at my place. You remember how to get there?”
“No,” he said.
“Well, when you want to leave we can ride together.”
“Okay,” said Deuce. He didn’t know why he agreed. Even though something about her nose seemed a bit off, her cute smile was getting to him. He thought her nose was like a sharp plow, ready to cut furrows in frozen Minnesota soil. He just wasn’t used to noses like that.
Soon Deuce was following her through a dark snowstorm, down side streets and through blind corners. None of the hazy geometric shapes that appeared in the swirling white on black looked familiar – a strange city, he reminded himself. Just follow her. She was on a beat-up track back Frankensteined from ten-year-old parts, but she ducked and skidded ahead of him expertly, perhaps the weight of her old bike frame giving her better control through the snow, now six pristine inches atop the asphalt. His goggles kept fogging up, and he swallowed his pride to yell at her to wait up several times. She always danced just at the edge of total darkness, the streetlights glinting green off the back of her parka. Still the flakes – no, chunks of snow – kept hitting him in the face, each particle large enough to be a snowball on its own, making him blink, and blink again.
When he finished blinking and flinching, in some intersection between far-spaced suburban-looking houses, atop miniature hills walled with geometric hedges, he didn’t see Kitty. He stopped moving, put his feet down, and all he heard was the thick blanketing of snow upon snow. To stand there long enough would mean being completely encased in snow, so Deuce got back on the pedals and rode slowly through the intersection.
Normally, his sense of direction was flawless. No matter where he would be in the city, something would tip him off to the Cartesian coordinates or heading – numbers going up on houses, street names, or just landmarks. Minneapolis was a strange town, and the route he was on back to Kitty’s flat above the theater was even stranger. The numbers on the houses meant nothing, nor did the north-south / east-west designations on the road signs. He had no map – the race manifest had a map on the back, but he turned that in when he finished the race. He was at an intersection of identical, white-covered roads that trailed off into blackness, with vague, rectangular echoes of window in the periphery.
It was then that Deuce felt that shock of panic. The snow was falling so fast, even without wind, that he imagined curling up in a snowdrift, and being found the next day, solid and blue, surrounded by clucking Minnesotans – “darn poor fella,” they’d say, “don’t ya know ya can’t sleep in the snow?” But more realistically, it might get so deep he couldn’t ride, and it was already hard to ride in it. The intersection was cut with softened tracks, from cars or perhaps other bikes, though it was in the middle of a side-street grid, locked in some residential area with no landmarks, and no guide in sight. And he was carrying a twenty-pound stone carving on his back.
So he just rode straight ahead, pushing hard against the snow, a new wave of adrenaline surging, possibly his eighth or ninth wind of the day, and the buildings came back from their retreat, forming vertical walls around him, and finally a wide street.
It seemed familiar – theater marquees and retro-styled lampposts, stretching to his left and right. He picked left, and rode, changed his mind five minutes later and rode the other way. He saw the theater marquee where he first ran into Kitty, so many eons ago, and she was waiting there beside her bike, straining to see him through the snowfall. He dismounted, slogged up to her and caught his breath, illustrated by large puffs in the space between them. There was still no wind, the snow coming vertically and noisily, already accumulating on Kitty’s head and shoulders.
“I was so worried about you!”
“I couldn’t keep up,” he said.
“You’re probably just really tired,” said Kitty. “Let’s get inside.”
“Yes, please.”
They slung their bikes on their shoulders and entered the black staircase. He wondered how many drinks he’d had that day, and perhaps his growing attraction for Kitty wasn’t just the alcohol talking, but each step reminded him of the extra twenty pounds on his back, and how exhausting the ride had been. Deuce took his time following her, mindful of slippery stairs and whatever Kitty might have planned, and how he might dodge any activity which might delay the opportunity to sleep, which was the only thing he really wanted anymore.
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I think you have a start here, but there are a lot of things that go unanswered and leave the reader hanging. First, if you want to publish, you’ll have to clean up all the spell/useage issues. There weren’t that many, but there were a few glaringly obvious ones.
Use of Grill for teeth bugged me. Yack!
The reader needs more orientation in the begining. Take the time to seat us in the who, what, when kinda thang.
Early on I didn’t get the stamp thing when you intro’d it at the strip joint.
Give the reader some background on your characters. They’re a bit flat, but they have interesting names. I don’t think that all of them should have such odd ball names unless that’s the culture. then you have to create that culture for the reader so we know about it too.
Is Swampy a gay guy? He seemed like a big, fat, maternal, messenger-Queen—was this your intent?
In dialogue clarify who’s talking and don’t drop the action. Show us what they’re doing as they talk.
I really didn’t “get” that they were drunk. I knew they were because I could infer it from them going around and taking shots, but I think it needs to be shown more explicitly.
I was curious about the last bar scene: so some of the folks just pass out at the bar and stay there all night? And they have their bikes with them wherever they go?
I know my ratings seem really low, but it’s because I don’t see this as a finished piece and it needs to be polished and finished up before you publish it or even show it to anyone to publish. I do think it’s got potential. Definitely work on it and get other people to read it. Feedback is valuable in this craft because, as you know, you can see what you see, but you have to show it to the reader. That’s the fun of it…and the frustration! I hope this helps!I’d like to see what you ultimately do with it and how it changes/grows.
First of all let me say, Poopchute is one of the greatest names I’ve ever heard of, I got quite a laugh out of that :) “You care a suture kit with you all the time?” – it should be carry not care… When Kitty shows them the Chopper bike, elaborate a little more on what the bike looks like. I wanna know the colors it has & things so I get a better picture in my mind. You might want to add a little info like, just what it took to piece the bike together, I mean, it seems like the bike was sort of a big deal to Kitty, so make it sound that way. This story kept me wanting more from beginning to end! I REALLY want to know more about what happens with Kitty and Deuce..as far as the title…hmmm…maybe spice it up a little more. Your story deserves a much..”zestier” title considering it’s written very well. Just take some time and think on it for awhile and it will come to you. Please, PLEASE let me know if you’re going to add more to this I really think you have something great here and I would love to read more! Thanks for sharing. :)
This was a good story just as it is. You had a solid plot. Your characters, Deuce, Mike and Kitty along with the supporting cast was very likable and realistic. You told of where Mike got his start in the messaging business. Even had humor ie. the possible duct taping after being passed out. The only thing That didn’t quite fit for me was the title. But I’m not sure what you could change it to. Maybe Grandpa’s Legacy? I just don’t know. Overall good job.
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