“It’s only twenty dollars?” We are getting a massage in a Korean parlor. This is four blocks from New Orleans Central Business District. This is after the bad news of Cadillacs and hand jobs. This is trouble.

Trouble is Potr won’t remember. He won’t take a moment to reflect how the wonderment of orgasm may be the only opportunity to be nearer to God. He won’t feel guilt-free. He’ll only remember the shame. Guilty until proven guilty of lesser crimes. He’s the whipping boy of the modern woman, completely prepared to accept defeat.

Sometimes I envy him. How the women are magnetically drawn to his coy shyness. How they revel in making his pale skin blush to the tint of raw steak. I’ve paid for the Happy Ending tonight. He asked, and I nodded. Every once in a while, everybody deserves to feel adored. Lusted. Desired.

Desire isn’t his wife tonight. Desire is two guys out on the town free of baggage and purses, free of someone else’s shit. Tonight is the night we meet up with Jan for a bender to end all benders. Life shouldn’t be a story about the times in between drunks or highs, but it is.

Jan lumbers in wearing a flannel shirt, the front pocket loaded with Camel cigarettes and a pen.

“Hey you big goof-troop, put that pen away! How obvious you wanna be? The ladies ain’t giving you no damn number.” Sometimes, I have to keep the kids in check. Even here, the illusions confuse us.

“Well, Michael, I ain’t here for no ladies. I’m here for strippers. And strippers got beepers. They give you the number and a code. By the end of the night, if you’re the one she wants, she’ll return your page.” He motions for another round of drinks.

“Oh, so that’s how it is? You’re a regular pimped-out Cassanova, huh Jan?”

“Now we’re talking! What’s this sorry sack of shit’s problem?” Jan slapped Potr on the back, forcing the sharp crack of teeth against a rum and coke tumbler. “Oh sorry, Potr. Your tooth ok?”

“Fuck my teeth, you spilled some ah-my drink!”

“Back off little man, I ordered you another.”

“That ain’t this one…” Potr swings away from the conversation and slips a dollar bill under the g-string of a curly-haired & freckled dancer. She wears a cop outfit. Or what passes for one if the cop was sexy, slutty, and interesting. Or, if strippers were to lack common decency, care, and understanding. Or, if the world was upside down.

Some days, it is.

Tonight, the three of us have mail to deliver. After we are liquored up, after some early morning breakfast, we are going to plant bills in mailboxes at the post office-- Jan’s place of business. He has keys and the alarm code, and we have a two hour window of opportunity.

The trick to our grift is to send invoices to large businesses, one month prior. No more than fifty bucks a pop, the usual cutoff before accounting requires a purchase order. These fake invoices sit around on some underpaid clerk’s desk. She’s unsure about them. Calls to various department heads lead nowhere. So the bills just sit there.

Then, about a month later, we send the bill. For technical consultancy. For parts. For repairs. The same clerk gets the bill, and processes it for payment. What does she care? We are banking on apathy. Something I’ll take to the bank any day. The larger the company, the easier the grift. Between the three of us, we've pulled in over 5 grand this year. Not bad for spending money.

“I’m thinking about going home early tonight. Today’s been a drag.” Potr speaks out of the side of his mouth, his visage locked on target, the woman’s gyrations of lycra and what lies beneath.

Everything ends.

Her panties. Our fantasies. Tomorrow. Everything ends. Jan climbs up on the stage and dances with the girl. Not five seconds pass before a bouncer chases him off, then jumps off the stage, landing square in front of Jan. With one punch, Jan is on the floor, his upper lip pierced by his own tooth.

He doesn’t stay down long. The floor gives him easier access to his boots, and a pair of brass knuckles. “Hitchhiker insurance,” he calls them.

He calls the bouncer’s right eyebrow with the insurance. We hear his skin rip open up, the sound of wrangling raw chicken quarters. We are out.

The night waits.

We pull up to our house, and make a cursory visual sweep of the area. Jeff Davis and Canal Street is sketchy. Somewhere the throaty sound of a saxophone warbles. Here, clichés come to life; here, in the city that time forgot, this background noise accompanies tugboat horns, sirens, and light rain on aluminum siding.

My weight against the front door pushes it ajar without a key.

“Potr, did you lock up when we left?” My hand waves them down, commanding near-silence.

“Yeah, what’s up?” His whisper sounds loud as bullfrogs in City Park’s boggy ponds.

I point inside, motioning to the door lock.

Fear and trepidation slow time down. Anticipation grows with each step into the foyer. My hand clasps the axe handle hidden behind an aging and rickety coat rack. Black electrical tape on the handle relays electricity back to me. My forehead is on fire. A pebble in my left boot grows troublesome.

Nothing.

“All clear. Let’s see if anything got jacked.” The boys follow me in, sheepishly.

“Motherfucker!” Potr shrills.

“What is it little girl? Somebody get your Barbies?” Jan puts his right hand to his lip, his left loaded & armed with brass knuckles.

“No, but the damn liquor is gone. All of it. Even the Chartreuse. What kind of sick bastard steals somebody’s liquor?” Potr rummages through the kitchen.

“P, didn’t you steal that stuff last new year at the Royal Sonesta Hotel?” Jan’s memory is his downfall.

“That’s different. Taking from the rich is acceptable. Ever hear of Robin Hood?”

I have to add, “That’s right Jan, not like you don’t live off the fat of the rich swine, you fucking mailman, you.”

A low scraping comes from the rear bedroom, the last section of this shotgun home. A scrape of metal along wooden floors.

“Maybe it’s a ghost,” Potr whispers, his head stuck in the refrigerator, foraging for cold beers.

I once spent three days over Mardi Gras weekend in the CBD drunk tank. All I craved was a solitary cold beer. When I sat on top of a mountain on the island Luzon in the Philippines, perched inside a wind-sheltered shrine to the Sino-Philippino truce after World War II, all I desired was one cold beer. Right now, the axe handle singing the body electric in my grip, all I can taste is beer from the strip club. And it’s sour.

“Maybe not. The guns locked up?”

“Yeah, let’s take this slowly, okay Em?”

“No. Let’s not.” Then, loudly “Get your ass out here, bitch! We know you’re there! NOW!”

Sometimes, you get what you want. Sometimes, you get what you don’t want. Sometimes, the guy who broke in isn’t a knife-wielding drug-crazy. Sometimes he’s just an old black guy, head shaking with the onset of Parkinson’s. And you shake your head in smaller gyrations, in some sort of mimicking hypnotic trance.