CHAPTER 1

 

Whoever invented algebra should be burning in hell.

            Fifteen-year-old Jack Holbrook was thinking this as he was being excruciatingly bored by Mr. Dobyns’s droning lecture on iterating functions. Jack got the distinct impression that Dobyns was actually passionate about what he was attempting to describe, like an adrenaline-fueled singer in a performance before screaming fans. But Jack also guessed that a majority of the captive audience here in eighth-hour Algebra I were not in a cheering temper and appeared that way: weary, bored looks at the teacher who pointed periodically at the numerical gibberish scribbled with messy, white chalk on the slate surface of the antiquated blackboard. Oh, there were three or four of the class—the brainiacs—who were held on every word, trusting that knowing this blather would actually advance them financially in some sort of high-tech career and just perhaps spiritually, when all else in their dreary, monotonous lives failed them. Yeah, right. Whatever the nerdy fuckers wanted to believe was fine with him. 

            What Jack really had on his mind now was the meeting he would have after school with Project Pimp. That wasn’t his real name, of course, but it didn’t matter to Jack what his real name was, even though he knew. All that counted was that this white boy with a black gansta-rap nickname (bestowed upon him by peers who were joking about what they would call themselves if they were rappers) had the goods to make all the problems of life fade away, at least for a little while. And Jack was once again in need of escape from the bleak reality into which he had been born. However, what was so exciting, what held such promise on this particular day in late May, was the means of escape. Project Pimp had promised a new avenue, one just recently conceived by the chemical gods who were in reality devils of human flesh and bone who ignored the detriment they contributed to the consumers of their reprehensible product.

            After what seemed a drawn-out wait, the bell signaling the end of class and the school day rang like the arrival of a cool breeze in July. Jack wasted no time getting out of his seat with his godforsaken textbook and notebook in hand and heading towards the door amidst the flock of fellow students, not a one of them he considered friends or even liked acquaintances. Though the thought was enticing, he didn’t push or shove his way through the throng, not wanting Dobyns to see him being unduly physical and earning a delay in his plans because of a stern talking-to from the motherfucker. His patience paid off, with Jack attaining the entrance unscathed and proceeding out to his locker just some thirty feet down the hall and to the left, the mass of young humanity still surrounding him like a thick cloud of uninvited insects.

            Once his learning materials were within his locker and the door closed and locked (not that he cared if anyone took the time to steal what was inside), Jack made quick haste out of the school building. His destination, the Falcon City Housing Project, was nineteen blocks north of the high school, which was on the southwestern edge of the city. That was Project Pimp’s business territory as well as his home, and all business was transacted there, unless he had a tip from one of his confederates that the cops were nearby scouting the neighborhood. Project Pimp was certainly a lowlife, but he wasn’t stupid. He made sure to have his spies, a group of his impoverished and societal rabble neighbors, always on the lookout when a deal was about to go down, and those spies were rewarded with free samples of chemical narcotics, small ones albeit. His was a moneymaking operation and a smart dealer couldn’t go around just giving away the merchandise for nothing, not even for the much-needed help. He would also bestow a little money upon his amateur intelligence agents from his deals, but even after that, they still played in the poverty-stricken league, the confines of the housing project their home field. However, Pimp couldn’t give them too much cash, because he had to give his distributor his cut of the profit from any sale he made. And the distributor wasn’t a patient man if payment was overdue. He would become a very angry man. And that wouldn’t be a good thing.

            In the school’s parking lot, Jack found one of his few friends waiting for him, leaning against the driver’s door of his very used red 2000 Chevy Cavalier. They had arranged to meet after school so he could drive Jack to the project. Jack had told him that he had been invited to play some pickup basketball with some of the guys after school, which was only a part of the whole truth, and since he didn’t have a car and wasn’t even old enough yet to get his license, could he maybe hitch a ride? Doug Martin was one of the few who actually wanted to hang out with Jack, and a four-mile drive uptown was the least he could do. Doug saw Jack approach the car. “Ready, Jack?”

            “Let’s do it.” They both got in and were able to pull out ahead of most of the withdrawing vehicles, which included the institutional yellow school buses, Jack’s normal mode of transportation home had he been headed that way today. They drove onto Sixth Avenue on their way into the western residential part of the city.

            Minutes of stop-and-start driving through the numerous intersections and traffic under a perfect blue spring afternoon sky finally led them to their destination, where Doug pulled onto the edge of the sidewalk at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Simpson Street.

            “Thanks, Doug,” Jack said as he got out of the car. “I owe you one.”

            “No problem, Jack. I’ll be back in an hour and a half to drive you back home. Have fun. Show ’em who’s king of the court.”

            Jack smiled. “Yeah, I’ll do that. See ya.”

            “Catch you later.” Jack shut the passenger door as Doug geared into drive and pulled out.

            Jack had found himself in the poorest section of the city, where the authorities had chosen to place the Falcon City Housing Project. It consisted of four two-story red brick buildings on each corner of the square, twenty apartments in each. Parking spaces surrounded three sides of the edifices save the back, with mostly older model cars taking up the berths marked vertically in yellow-painted stripes. In the middle of the square were four concrete basketball courts with chain-link fencing around them. Some of the netting had worn from the hoops and there was obviously no hurry in replacing them, since Jack recalled that they had been in that condition for months. Also in states of neglect were the fence (ripped and rusty), the surface of the courts (chipped and cracked), and the buildings themselves (crumbling brick and unsightly grime in numerous spots). Either there was no money for repairs or the housing authority had the money and was using it for something else that had nothing to do with the welfare of its needy tenants. Jack, being the deep cynic that he was, guessed the latter.

           He walked behind two of the buildings and around one of the basketball courts to the court on the upper left side of the square, where Project Pimp and four other young men were killing time shooting hoops and talking to one another. Jack walked through the opening in the fence. Pimp, in a Kobe Bryant Lakers jersey and Air Jordans, saw him and motioned him over.

            “Right on time, Jack.”

            “Yeah. What’s shakin’?”

            “Same old shit.” Pimp glanced at the design on Jack’s black T-shirt and pointed at it. “Love the Ramones, too, man. Hey, let’s go somewhere and talk in private for a few.” He turned around to look at the others. “Chill out for a few, guys, and we’ll be right back. Me and Jack got some stuff to talk about. And keep an eye out on things.”

            Jack and Pimp walked back through the fence and over to a Dumpster near the parking lot of the northwest building. They made sure that they were screened from any prying eyes or from street traffic. “Got the cash?” Pimp asked Jack.

            “Yeah.” He foraged through the right pocket of his blue jeans and pulled out six Franklins, a Jackson, and a Lincoln—stolen over the last three days from both his mother’s purse and his daddy’s wallet, each of them bulging obscenely with cash. While Jack was extricating his pilfered money, Pimp pulled out from the left pocket of his yellow knee-length shorts a rubber glove and slipped it over his right hand. “Got to be careful not to get my fingerprints on the merchandise,” he explained to Jack. Then with the latex-protected hand, he reached into the right pocket of his shorts and took out a small used plastic medicine bottle, its pharmacy label completely peeled off. He handed Jack the bottle as he received the eight bills from his customer, took off the glove, and stuck it back into his pocket.

            “You sure this shit is any good?” asked Jack, checking out the pills inside the bottle without opening it.

            “Hey, I only sell the good stuff, Jack. And I’ve been assured that this stuff is the best yet.”

            “What’s it called again?”

            “Asian Haze. It’s this new shit made in Singapore or someplace like that. It’s been tested and everything. It’s just come out on the streets and I can tell you right now, it’s going to take this fucking country by storm. This is going to make crack look like fucking Kool-Aid.”

            “But this is a pill, just like you’d get from the doctor.”

            “Yeah, that’s the great thing about it. Usually, heroin taken by mouth would only have the same effect as morphine would. But whoever the geniuses were that cooked this up, they figured out a way to make a pill that would give you the same type of heroin high as anything that you would snort or shoot-up. No nasty needle marks, no fucked-up sinuses. Just give it thirty minutes after you take it to start working. This is going to be a fucking revolution and the fucking cops’ worst nightmare. So don’t worry yourself and enjoy, my friend. Now, let’s play some hoops.”

            Each pocketed their stash and went back to the court. They played for over an hour, Pimp’s team eventually besting Jack’s, but a close contest full of great moves and shots and hard fouls that you couldn’t get away with in an organized game. Sweaty and exhaling heavily, they decided to stop play. Jack said good-bye to the others and pulled Pimp over for a brief word.

            “Hey, thanks again, man. I really needed this shit big time.”

            “No problem. Your parents must still be a major-league pain in the ass.”

            Jack chuckled. “Yeah. We ain’t exactly the fuckin’ Huxtables.”

            “Hey, someday things will be cool. Just take a pill and drift into happiness, at least for a little while.”

            “Thanks, Pimp. See ya.”

            “Anytime, Jack. You ever need anything, let me know.”

            They knocked closed fists and Jack walked to the corner where he had been let off earlier to wait for his return ride. He didn’t have to wait long, as Doug drove up and pulled next to the sidewalk. “Ready?” he asked Jack.

            “Let’s go.”

            “I picked us some cheeseburgers from Dairy Queen. I was hungry and figured that you’d be, too.” Doug passed the bag over to Jack. “Get you a couple out of the bag and you can eat them on the way home. There’s a Dr. Pepper there in the beverage holder that’s yours, too. And don’t worry about paying me back. The food’s on me.”

            “Thanks, bud. I appreciate the thought. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since breakfast. The school’s food is probably worse than airplane food.” Jack made this assumption despite the fact that he had never been on board an airplane to sample their cuisine. Doug drove four blocks west and then five south to reach Jack’s house on Second Avenue while Jack gorged down his two loaded double cheeseburgers, finishing the last one just as they reached the house. Jack saw that both of his parents’ cars were gone and smiled. He knew that his mother was most likely at the mall and his dad was still probably at work and wouldn’t be back for another hour or two. He thanked Doug for the ride, got out of the car with his near-empty soda cup, crossed the recently mowed front lawn, and unlocked the front door with the spare key hidden beneath one of the six flowerpots on the porch.

            He walked through the neat living room to the clean kitchen and snatched a cold can of his dad’s Budweiser out of the refrigerator. He finished the rest of the Dr. Pepper and threw the cup into the wastebasket. He then went upstairs to his bedroom, locking the door behind him. His room was adorned with posters of post-Nirvana era rock bands, some with higher decibel levels and angst than musical talent, and of scantily clad girls with that come-on-and-fuck-me look in their lovely eyes. The bedroom was not as tidy as the rest of the house, simply because having it in that condition was one of the many ways he could figuratively give the finger to his mom and dad, a rejection of the order they always demanded of themselves and more so of their son. A son who, despite their best efforts and intentions, had made the conscious decision to defy them, to be a punk, to be, in his father’s own words, “an ungrateful asshole.” Well, better to be an ungrateful asshole, Jack thought, than to be a couple of middle-class snobs who wanted to mold their only child into their unhealthy vision of what their offspring should be. Realizing that their will was not to be, they now extended to their failure of a teenage son scorn or utter indifference, seeing that all hope of shaping their once beloved son into a fine man was gone. They had thrown in the towel on their efforts and just tried to tolerate him as long as they humanly could before either his voluntarily leaving or their kicking his sorry ass out for good.

            Jack had come to the point where he honestly didn’t care what his parents thought, because he knew that whatever he did, good or bad, it wouldn’t make a difference to them. He was a lost cause. So he decided not to even try to please them; in fact, he would do just the opposite. He’d piss them off as much as he could. And included in that plan were the drugs.

            He had been using for nearly a year and his sole dealer had been Project Pimp. Pimp had dropped out of school (something Jack fantasized about every day as much as he did girls) a few months ago, nearly eighteen and making as much headway through school as Danny DeVito trying to push a boulder uphill. But before departing, he had met and befriended Jack. They had discovered in each other a kindred spirit, but spirits already beaten down by life’s realities even before adulthood arrived. Spirits who had grown disgusted and angry at the unfairness of the world, seeing others making it through life and many of those in their opinion not deserving of their fortune. But Pimp had something that Jack thought could make him feel at least a little better for a little while at a time. Pimp was into dealing to put some cash in his wallet and so far had not been caught and would do his best to keep certain that stayed the case. Pimp was observant, like any good dealer, and saw Jack’s misery and asked him if he could help. And when Jack asked how in the hell could he help and when Pimp told him, Jack couldn’t help but to smile and say yes.

            Jack had started on grass, then had drifted to cocaine, then crack. It did soothe things, but also made him addicted. When the money from odd jobs (which usually didn’t last long) and from the grudging allowance from his parents wasn’t enough, Jack began to steal from his parents, just a little at a time; both were pretty well off and probably wouldn’t catch on as quickly as they might have they been poorer in the pocketbook. But even if they did, he had grown to the point where he didn’t give a shit. And when Pimp told him about the new stuff he had received just a few days ago and how expensive it would be, Jack didn’t think twice about risking taking even more financially than he ever had dared from his parents in stealth.

            Now, sitting on the bed, his stereo blaring, Jack took out the pill bottle, opened the childproof cap, and poured the contents into his hand. Five blue capsule-shaped pills, spawned somewhere in Asia, that would give him the best high ever. They had better, for a hundred and twenty-five dollars a pill. The pills themselves were nearly three-fourths of an inch long and wide and a fourth of an inch thick. He grabbed the Budweiser on the bedside table, popped the top, and stuck one of the pills in his mouth and swallowed it with a sizable drink of the cold beer. He decided spur-of-the-moment that he was in the mood for an extra-special high, so he popped another pill and repeated the process. He dumped the three remaining pills back in the bottle, resealed the bottle, put the bottle on the table, and stretched himself out on the bed to allow the thirty minutes to pass before the pills started to produce their magic.

            He lay back with his hands linked behind his head of black wavy shoulder-length hair overdue for a cut, listening to the hard rock music played by young and incredibly lucky guys filled with indignant lyrics to match Jack’s mood blasting from his stereo system. Jack began fantasizing about doing something big, something that would make him the talk of fucking Falcon City, maybe the whole fucking state of New York, maybe the whole fucking country! He had seen all the news reports about those kids in other parts of the country who were in the same psychological state that he was, pissed at the world, and who had decided to do some hunting in the hallways and classrooms of their cursed schools to get a lot of shit out of their damaged systems. Yeah, he could do that, too. There were a lot of fuckers at Falcon City High who deserved a bullet or two, or maybe more. The brainiacs who hadn’t gotten laid and maybe never would, the football and basketball players who looked down on everyone else not as physically gifted or popular as they, Jack included. The pretty cheerleaders who motivated their team and fans on the field and fucked frequently off it. Girls who also looked down on people like him, girls who he would screw without even having to give it much thought, but who would probably cringe at the thought of having his mouth on them, his penis inside them. And those goddamn teachers! Oh, how he would love to blast a bullet through Mike Dobyns’s head, making that brain packed with pointless mathematical equations nothing but a bloody, gooey, unusable mess. Yeah, here’s an iterating function for you, motherfucker! Jack lay there in his bed and smiled at the thought of screaming and dying kids and teachers. Be very, very quiet. It’s student and teacher season. Heh, heh, heh, heh, he thought, giving a twisted meaning to Elmer Fudd’s famous catch phrase.

            Jack continued lying in bed with his eyes closed, absorbing the music. Before he knew it, he started feeling different. His mouth suddenly became dry and his eyes felt heavy. The music became fainter and fainter until Jack lost consciousness.

 

            Choking to death on the regurgitation of the two double cheeseburgers seemed like a disconnected dream as long as his brain continued to function. Soon, all his organs ceased.