The sun wearily peeled off the horizon's tight grip as it crept upon Route 40 during its habitual rise above the infinite sprawl of strewn metal and concrete deities some called city.
Anachronistic train tracks clanged like loud hammers rudely crisscrossing socioeconomic and cultural borders like thick coagulating blood traversing the veins of some terrestrial body begrudgingly awakened from its slumber.
Pillz could see the slight drops of mist outside his tall windows that served as his entry point to the gleaming downtown of skyscrapers and golden-hued, electroplated steeples. He could see the faint reflection of himself in the window.
He looked younger than he should.
His life was a war. Or was his war life?
Pillz smiled egotistically, amazed that he still possessed the frame of some raw powerful athlete. Twenty years went in a blink. Twenty years ago, he was a B-Boy—a term the hip-hop proletariat identified by before the corporate takeover of hip-hop. B-Boy wuz before real hip-hop slowly tapped out to the brutal commercial takedown, replete with collateral industries of quasi-scientific over-analysis of one myopic slice of Black culture.
Twenty years ago, Pillz was a B-Boy and a hoop-god, infallible to gravity with the ability to dunk a basketball in the contorted faces of many a challenger seeking to earn a rep by dismantling his.
That was then, and then was always good.
But then wasn't now, even though at times he felt like he was again back then—when endorphins saturated his being. Still, then was just always a thought away, when he was that dude.
Returning to the now, Pillz ditched his memories like a pair of old kicks tossed onto the street wire. He stared into the sky and smiled like the city was his.
Mornings and late night were the only times he could steal those elusive, brutally honest moments of mental Tai Chi before the noise of the outside world ushered in his new list of "gotta-dos."
Inescapable as body odor, his gotta-dos had morphed into majestic pyramids of collection notices and overdraft fees mercilessly competing with his joneses to do better than yesterday.
Pillz measured his self-worth by the "got-dones." His got-dones were the only currency that mattered, and as always, his gotta-dos were messing wit his got-dones. Sweating 'em like some hacking overzealous defender trying to stop him from getting to the rim. Pillz knew how to get a tight defender up off him, how to break them ankles, cross 'em over to get the room he needed to score. No one could stop him from getting to the rim. He knew what to do and how to do it, he just needed motivation . . . Coffee, thought Pillz. Italian? ... Nah, Ethiopian.
Morning intervals of past hoop dreams transitioned into nothingness.
Nothingness rudely shattered by the vibrating noise from his phone symbiotically atop his copy of Gerald Massey's Lectures. According to Massey, the early church left out helluva lot of information about who Jesus was.
Pillz wondered if Dan Brown with all his DaVinci shit had ever read Massey or Alvin Boyd Kuhn. He knew Brown read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and Messianic Legacy 'cause he read both of them back in '94 himself. Hollywood was a mutha, Pillz laughed to himself as he picked up the phone to figure out who the hell be calling him this early.
Maybe it was Jesus?
The caller I.D. read WT, but he knew he didn't know anyone named WT.
WT? Maybe that's short for what the ... Pillz laughed to himself as he decided to answer the phone anyway.
"Yeah," said Pillz, all the while hoping not to end his four-year streak of successfully ignoring the pitiful attempts of debt collectors to confirm he existed. Maybe they were closing in on him? Maybe he was gonna have to move off the grid quicker than he thought.
Alaska?
All the fresh salmon you could catch ... Nah. Plus, now they got gangs in Alaska. It's too damn cold to gangbang in Alaska. Gangs must be like "Yeah, kid, when I see you this summer, it's on! In six months when them icicles drop, watch ya back, fool."
Now, that would be just my luck—survive B'more and instead of catching salmon, catch a bullet. And it probably won't even be a gangbanger—just some trigger-happy Republican with bad eyesight thinking I'm a Black Russian. Okay, ixnay Alaska.
"I'm trying to reach Pillz."
"Who you?"
"I'm WT."
"Yeah ... what up," mumbled Pillz.
"I got your number from a chick in my yoga class, Tina. She said you had the good shit."
"Yeah," smiled Pillz. "Oh, you talking 'bout double-jointed Tina with the bad eye?" Pillz stopped suddenly. "What shit you talking 'bout?"
"Well, I got some serious pain going on, and Tina said you could help."
"OK. Maybe I can help you . . . maybe not, "said Pillz cryptically.
WT paused for a second, and Pillz could almost hear him thinking through the phone. Pillz glanced up, just in time to see a pigeon land on his window and grin, like kid you got too many gotta-dos to turn down cash.
The bird just sat there chilling.
Pillz stared at the bird like this won't Occupy Wall Street, you had to get buzzed into this building. Wall Street, Occupy, Left or Right didn't matter none to him—they all had they hustle, and he had his.
For bretheren like Pillz, it was like people who played the lottery, worrying 'bout the Dow Jones averages.
Shit, at least with the lottery, poor people had an actual chance to win. Pillz had a multitude of clients, and they politics wuz they own problem.
He sold to the Occupy and Wall Street execs in the same transaction, and a few of his Goldman Sachs clients invited him into an offshore hedge fund managed via an MP3 player and a private-invitation-only social media site. By the time the government realized he'd joined the secret society of alchemical masters manufacturing money out of thin air, he'd have already cleared 'bout $2 billion. If the Feds catch me, I'll just ask the other Feds who bailed out my clients to bail me out—heard they got Bernanke on speed dial.
The pigeon looked at Pillz like he heard his thoughts and like it wasn't no normal pigeon but more like some winged sage. An animal angel whose job it was to warn cats by shitting on 'em, before they slipped up and did something like buying that just-before-closing, last batch of shrimp-fried rice from that red-bricked Chinese restaurant that operated on the occupied side of a semi-abandoned row house.
This shit was weird enough to be on the new show about ancient animal aliens.
Pillz looked at the pigeon and saw he was wearing a pair of Jordan Melos.
Damn, didn't know they came that small.
Note to self, grimaced Pillz. Never buy that last batch of shrimp fried rice at closing time.
"So, you gonna tell me what you got?" said WT breaking up Pillz's unplanned meander into the sordid world of friends with feathers.
"I need to see if it is worth my while to head your way. You off 40, right?" said WT.
"I don't put my biz out there like that, kid—this is Bal'more. You could be wearing a wire," said Pillz. "Tell you what, meet me at Lexington and Eutaw around 11, and I think I can help you."
An hour flipped into two as Pillz threw on his black hoodie and made his way across the city toward Lexington Market. It was a blustery day with the sun peeking out between dark clouds that shifted back and forth across the sky.
The wind blew with an unusual aggressiveness.
Pillz swore he saw tumbleweed blow down the street. He had never seen it so empty. The only thing open was the dollar store. It was even emptier outside than the day the First Lady unexpectedly showed up to buy some cheap snacks for the White House.
I think it was the First Lady, Pillz mused. Or maybe it was Oprah, 'cause they wouldn't open the door?
He looked up only to see what had to be WT walking towards him with a major limp.
WT was about 6'4" with a limp that made him 6' even. He struggled up the block, grimacing, eyes squinting against the wind as it slapped him in his face. He was in pain; Pillz could see that. He could also see that kid looked like a narc.
Nah, retail security guard, concluded Pillz.
"What up . . . Pillz," said Pillz introducing himself with a closed-fist pound to WT.
WT smiled sparingly and instead of pounding Pillz with a return closed fist nervously tried to shake his fist.
Pillz stared over WT's shoulder and then glanced in the cardinal directions to make sure was clear.
"OK, you got the ends?"
"Yeah," remarked WT, "you got the product?"
"I do, but I need to see some ends," said Pillz.
"Yeah, I understand," said WT as he slid the tightly folded cash over to Pillz's outstretched palm. "I just don't wanna get ripped off. Everybody in B'more got a hustle, it seems."
"You right about that," smiled Pillz, "but vicking somebody ain't mine. We good," said Pillz as his eyes scoured the perimeter. "Just walk over a few steps to your left and look down underneath that empty brown bag bottle of gin and we good," he whispered.
A helicopter zoomed overhead across the skyline, recklessly doing figure eights over the top of the seniors building, scaring the shit out of old people.
Without hesitation, WT walked looking down, saw the empty brown bag bottle of gin, and picked it up. He peeked inside and saw about an ounce of the good stuff wrapped up in a sandwich baggie.
He looked up eager to signal to Pillz he was good, but by the time he turned around Pillz was ghost. All WT saw was intersecting concrete blocks that led to nowhere. He scanned the other direction and saw some old tumbleweed floating down Eutaw.
He knew what the tumbleweed meant: He had until sundown to get the hell out of Dodge. Either that, or it was Sunday and Lexington Market was closed.
The sun peeked through the weaving clouds for a quick cameo as WT slid his pocket knife out from his front pocket and cut a small slit into the baggie. He lifted a hit of the powder and rubbed a small taste on his tongue.
His eyes rolled back in delight and he could feel the pain leaving his body almost instantly. WT tucked the product into his hoody pocket and started trekking up the street back home.
He smiled to himself, thinking, Damn, this is the purest glucosamine-chondroitin on the streets of B'More.
He wasn't proud of the fact that he had a habit and had to deal with all types of strangers to get his fix on, but he was a stone health junkie and he wasn't apologizing for that.
It was like that, and that's the way it is.
