Okay folks, particularly ER who has asked, here is the rest and first end to the "Mugging Love" piece. By first end, I mean that this isn't exactly where I thought I was heading... I had a Solid Other Ending, already written, but this is where the piece is now, and I have to make a decision and if this is right, go back and whack out quite a bit of stuff. If this is Right. I don't know...

Here's where we left off last time: "That is, Jose Luis got pissed off and decided that it was time to re-align this County's ethical and financial status quo."

**********Here's where I've gone from there:

And so, that’s what he and Errol had been doing. It started off easier than might be expected.

One day, when Errol and Jose Luis were walking in the closest thing to a Ferndale park (a harvested field), Jose Luis offered Errol a cigarette. Errol had been waiting for this opportunity his whole life. Not the cigarette, he had smoked before, but the moment: the way rain was still dripping off leaves nearby, and the humid cool felt like something flowing away; Jose Luis, sharp and lined, his face creased with something outside of Ferndale; the birds scuttling and flying from under skin. Bobbing in his curled Mariner’s hat and his muddied brown boots, Errol dragged off the proffered and prodigal cigarette like a man who had just stumbled out of the desert after years of communing with nature and honing monkhood. Errol needed that cigarette, perhaps not the smoke, but certainly the semiotic message it sent out into the world: here was a boy who wasn’t alone, searching for the action, any longer. Here was a boy who had already seen that there was nothing here, and thus, through wisdom and insight, was running someplace else fast. Actually, it was cute that this is what a cigarette with Jose Luis meant to our Errol.

Considering Errol’s background, he should have known better. Both of his parents smoked, and sometimes smoked with folks who were also sharp and lined with the life they found when they opened their eyes. And although you could never say anything other than “they meant well” about Errol’s parents, these fine intentions were as specks of chopped cilantro in a very oily salad dressing. Sometimes people are just that way; they want to give their children everything, they want fabulous jobs and real estate, they want to work very very hard and still have time to read to their children at night, but secretly, deep deep down where everyone can see it, they have absolutely no idea how to go about it. They’re completely clueless about how life should be lived, how to pay the bills, how to get a job in the first place. In other words, they were raised middle class.

And so, for Errol’s parents, and everyone affiliated with Errol’s parents, cigarettes were commonly used, but never read in the same way that Errol read them. Maybe he simply read them backwards. Because his parents’ crew all knew, although never acknowledged, that cigarettes were simply a fence erected against the ferocity of decisions they didn’t want to face. Perhaps the glow on the end of the stick blinded them enough that they didn’t need to look at everything full on—the virtual equivalent of looking at Medusa by watching her shadow, or of looking at God through a burning bush.

And that cigarette, that single one, was the start of some greatness for Errol and Jose Luis, because as Jose Luis watched Errol swilling down the smoke, something settled gentle in his chest. Settled and burned. A ferocious protection of the cruel innocence Errol was, and maybe always would be.

They walked in that field at half-light of evening, the rain dripping, soggy worms done screaming at the sky and now lying flaccid and half-drowned in small culverts of mud, and Errol was telling Jose Luis the story of something. Something. What it was, Jose Luis didn’t know. He was instead listening to the tones in Errol. The tone of genuine. The tone of cigarette inhalation. He interrupted the story, whatever it was.

“Why do you suppose we’re here?”

If Errol expected something to come of the cigarette, it wasn’t a question of life’s meaning. The question of life’s meaning was not something that interested Errol particularly, as it was a question he had come to associate with his grandmother’s Baptist church, where everyone wore pressed clothes and expected soggy dripping evenings to be nonexistent or blessed by the Lord. Errol was sixteen at the time, and felt that church was Satan’s own punishment for his followers. If he were completely to be completely honest with his buddy, Errol would have answered right away: video games; being abducted by aliens and growing into the universe’s greatest hero via capacity to target through digital screens; sneaking cigarettes from his mother’s pack and heading out to the roof where, if he peeked carefully over the single-storied eave, he could see into the window of the married nextdoor neighbor two houses over; and smelling fresh donuts. Instead, he dissembled.

“I dunno.”

Jose Luis was not to be put off. “Seriously.”

“Eat. Sleep. Do shit.” He paused, “Yeah, I think we’re here to do shit.” The answer surprised even Errol, who did not know he was going to say it, but decided to go with the ideas once they had spun their way out of him. He did. Yes, he thought, a good answer. Action. Motion. Flying the coop.

“Do what?”

“Stuff. I mean, does it need a plan or something?”

Jose Luis thought this was a very good question. “To plan or not to plan” seemed to be the most profound question, a quandary that got to the quick of a person’s interaction with time, the ability to eat omelets in the morning, and whether or not to commit to any particular relationship with anyone. You could plan to be friends for life, to be close to your family, to react well and truly in any given situation, or you could go, move forward in a helpless, but honest motion that surrendered in good faith to chance and dynamic. So, Jose Luis decided to probe Errol for the extent to which he was willing to devote himself to engaging entropy.

“So, you have no plan?”

“Well, um.” Errol reflected, “Maybe we’re supposed to do good. Is that what you mean?”

Jose Luis felt a flash of energetic anger that traveled up his legs, through his bowels and flushed his face bright red. The reason for this physical reaction was probably linked to the amount of time Jose Luis had been spending holed up in his room, not playing with any of his toys, but instead lying silently on his bed and waiting for a new ache in his body to subside. An indefinable ache. An ache that had come to dominate his head, spin neurons around and around endlessly, waiting for rescue, waiting for his head to clear up, waiting for something in the world to change, but suddenly realizing that nothing would unless he exerted a new control over everything and assundry. And so he was angry with Errol’s obvious deception, but just as quickly as he felt like punching Errol, he realized how befuddled and confused he had probably made the poor Ferndale boy, and so instead, took the cigarette back and puffed a few seconds before tossing the butt off into the damp weeds of the slough they were nearing and then passing in silence.

“Do you really think that the plan,” he finally continued, “The Plan, is really for us to do good?”

“I dunno, you got anything better?”

In fact, Jose Luis did. He had a distinct “plan” (as was previously mentioned). His plan was actually quite developed and ran unarticulated—for the time being—something like such: Let’s fuck shit up. Let’s take on the boredom, the sheer routine of this place, going to work, griping, flirting, banking, not noticing, whining, gossiping, typing. Let’s steal and rape and pillage, like the inner Vikings we are. Let’s not pay attention to the rules other people have written. The rules that have caused playgrounds to topple for safety, children to sit at home instead of working towards some great and glorious end, and mommies to overuse antibiotic soap. Let’s not care anymore. Let’s put on dark clothes, pull hoods up over our heads, and lurk in dark alleys. Let’s smell the scent of the garbage and tossed babies overflowing from the huge green dumpsters as we squat down low and watch the streetlight entering into our alley from off the near empty streets of Bville, our almost-cousin and the closest thing to a city within a fifteen-minute drive. Let’s wait until some hapless young man, or old fellow, walks by from a nearby Place of Business and let’s walk up to him and ask pleasantly, and then demand, that he right the wrongs of the universe and hand over his wallet, from which we will take our undue earnings and make off like photons into the vacuum. Once there, we will spend the money on stupid things that we really don’t want. We won’t be Robin Hoods and turn over our money to the poor and wretched because we are not actually young, well-intentioned, but misguided fellows. We will be exactly what we are and the world will not fall apart because of it. And when you think about it, those suits will thank us. Any man or woman or kid we rip off, we punch and hit and steal from, will thank us. They’ll thank us from the bottom of their heart because we changed things. We broke into this huge circle and cycle that none of us can put our finger on, and we changed things. Even if they brood for hours in the night about the $50 they lost, they will secretly be loving the fact that they are brooding because their pain will feel like Something, and they probably haven’t had Something in their lives for awhile.

So, what Jose Luis’s plan was, as he soon put to Errol, was to go into town and jack some fellow’s wallet.

Errol’s reaction was to be startled. This was a new Jose Luis he was seeing, and not the boy who had grown up ten blocks away. Errol had no access to the underlying thought patterns of his friend, and so was forced to interpret the proposition his own way, which was: this was something to do, and damn if he wasn’t bored. And so the night was a good one, a first, and the two country kids walked long in dark silence, enjoying more cigarettes while the pointless harvest moon popped up huge like a snapped brown yo-yo against the backdrop of more and more furrows of soil, some of which occasionally rose higher than Errol’s boots and coated his jeans and shirt with a damp discomfort he could only revel in.

***
Errol and Jose Luis finally gave up the search for alcohol after spending a solid hour lurking about Ted’s Gas and Grub down on Holly where it met up with F Street. This store was as likely a place to encounter booze as was around, being strategically placed at the two-block radial center of five such attractions: (NW) the harbor where all the fishermen came in off their boats with fish entrails on their jeans; (SE) the biggest church homeless shelter where one could stay without too much commitment to righting wanton ways; (NE) the town’s most aloof Adult Video Store + special toys; (SW) the one-day Labor Temp Agency where if you passed the written entry test, you had the dubious privilege of working at the local fish processing factory or becoming a construction site grub; (S) downtown where drugs were always available near Pump It and Pat’s Diner. Yet, in spite of the wealth of potential marks, the corner store was unexpectedly quiet and starting to close up. Since Jose Luis’s inhaled mojo was starting to wear off, and Errol’s thoughts were actually reverting back to the video arcade, they picked themselves off the concrete, and agreed it was time to make the walk to an associate’s digs, where they thought they were more likely to have luck with the whole issue.

The walk really wasn’t too far, but was nevertheless elongated by silence as they prowled inland. Errol never would have acknowledged this, but space was already growing between him and Jose Luis, who had found the planned anarchy everything he thought it might be, but was just starting to acknowledge that maybe he’d been hoping to find things a little more surprising. And this looming desire grew fatter, even started bulging, between him and Errol, so that moments that previously felt like comfortable silence now seemed like uncomfortable silence. So their steps grew quicker and their movements grew swaggier, and each of them jumped up and down off the mighty passing sidewalks under their feet.

They both sighed in relief when they found themselves at Carton’s, where all the lights were on in the garage apartment that Carton had managed to fill up with broken bicycle tires, stumped-out tips, cigarette smoke, drums, soft lighting and drying-up house plants. They made their way to the door and didn’t bother knocking, because Carton—who was at one point a local college student—believed that knocking was a signifier of capitalism at its worst. He said it indicated the compartmentalization of atomic worker units into home-like citadels of alienation. So instead, they opened the door and ran up the stairs to the apartment, jumping over a dejected and seemingly near-dead cat along the way. At the top of the stairs, they looked around for Carton, who was bound to be there since the lights were on.

Unfortunately they found him necking on the couch with two girls, one of whom Jose Luis recognized but wished he didn’t. Errol was already trying to make a getaway when Jose Luis caught his sleeve and waved over at the three copulaters, who had instantly noticed their presence, stopped necking and started staring. Finally Carton jumped up, knocking the two girls off of him, and ran over to Jose Luis and Errol.

“Hey guys! Haven’t seen you in awhile! Great times!” After which he giggled, stopped in his tracks, and wiped his arm across his profusely sweating brow. “Although… No, never mind.”

“Um,” said Errol.

“If you want, we can leave, man. Looks like you’re having an evening,” said Jose Luis.

“No, no, no, no….don’t worry! Take a seat. Do you want some…” here Carton paused and looked around the apartment, didn’t see what he was looking for, shook his head and then continued, “…something?”

Even Jose Luis felt like squirming, because behind the oblivious Carton, the two girls were exchanging looks that could only be interpreted as Extreme Annoyance. And Jose Luis knew that at least one of these two was not a girl with whom one wanted to fuck. In fact, one of the girls scared him.

Malaysia, the girl of fear, was a local poet bisexual who Jose Luis and Errol had met a Monday-night poetry reading, where the boys occasionally sat and sneered at all the young plebes trying to make verbal music. Malaysia, who carried herself like a bull-dyke with excess of testosterone and mighty shoulders, but who also happened to look suspiciously like Kirsten Dunst, was sitting in the balcony next to them, and after Jose Luis said something like “Ah, look at the beaver turning to stone,” Malaysia had turned around, leaned in, and whispered in a shaking voice, “Isn’t it so much easier to shit on everything…?”

To which, Jose Luis replied, “Emptying one’s bowels is a necessary and pleasant task.”

After shaking for a few more seconds, Malaysia stood up and said, “You’re about to get your ass kicked by a girl.”

And while Jose Luis was still in thought over her initial comment, wondering if a more appropriate response on her part would have been to point out that locale for bowel release was a key part of the issue, Malaysia unexpectedly jumped the two feet between them and decked Jose Luis across the face with a crack that stopped the Beaver down below in his tracks. Everybody peered up at the balcony where Jose Luis was rubbing his eye and Errol was leaning back in his seat, trying to get desperately further from the dyke who had hurt his beloved.

But really, that’s not how it went. Instead, Malaysia had simply called them assholes, picked up her stuff and moved to the other side of the balcony. But Jose Luis had felt the brush of implied what-could-have and every time he ran into her, which was more frequently than either wanted, he felt the disappointment afresh.
So here was that same disappointment looking at them like she would rather have joined a Republican salsa fiesta than run into them again. She rolled her eyes and looked back over at the other girl, who had both long legs and lipstick, and was entirely desirable. Jose Luis noticed two things at once: (a) he was a fly, and (b) Malaysia seemed far more interested in Playboy-Bunny than their high-flying friend Carton; whatever it was that he had interrupted—two sparks separated by rubber, or something else—he didn’t really want to get involved. But looking at Errol, Jose Luis realized he was the only one who didn’t want a piece of whatever was going down, and so sat with a crash on a stained cushion.

“Beer, Carton,” he said. “I do believe that beer is what we’re hunting for.”

Errol looked grateful for the intervention and also sat down, although more daintily into a table seat. Carton bobbed his head,

“Good news. I’ve got Pilsner and Pilsner,” and he ran off into the kitchen as Errol started thumbing an empty pack of cigarette while occasionally glancing over at Bunny and Malaysia, who had already sidled closer together in the way of girls who don’t want to be interrupted. Both sat looking stony-faced at the boys, with their hands just barely touching in a slow game of finger-foreplay. Jose Luis grinned. Errol blushed and started picking at his facial scabs. Jose Luis started to feel irritated.

Finally, Carton came back with the requested beers—two large bottles of Pilsner—and plopped down across from Jose Luis with his back pressed up to the couch where the girls seemed to only grudgingly separate their two sets of legs to make room for him.

“Man,” he said, “What a night.” He looked up at the girls as if expecting affirmation. Another mutual look exchanged.

“Yeah sure, Carton” was Malaysia’s reply, “so do you want to put on some Morrison or something? Maybe you should turn on your computer’s screen-saver?”

In spite of himself, Jose Luis smirked.

Errol, seeing the opportunity, leaned in and asked, “Yeah, you got that Hungry Goat record yet, ‘cause I’ve been wanting to incorporate some rattle into my solo.” After this, he looked over at his Jose Luis for affirmation. Yes, he wanted him to say, rattle is definitely what the album needs.

Instead, Jose Luis sorted through a pile of aged Trivia Pursuit cards. Errol sighed, and turned back to Carton, who stood up in excitement over the defamiliarizing potential of rattle, grabbed Errol, and dragged him over to a fallen stack of CD’s, where they started thumbing through the opened sleeves of different punk bands. Over the next five minutes, Carton occasionally exclaimed loudly and thumped his speakers, gesticulated at some great and vast design, while Jose Luis settled back and listened to the faint hum of words such as: mechanization, video, act of sedation, crisis, structure, etc. He felt certain he wasn’t the only one in the room who felt the room muggy, filling up thick. The windows started fogging and the stairwell cat came into the room and started pressing itself into a plastic baggy, licking the remains of something that had opened and spilled in the passage from supermarket to fridge. Occasionally, Jose Luis opened his left eye and looked at the two girls who seemed to give up restraint after three minutes. He could just hear them whisper:

“Do you know them?”
“Yeah, just local kids from Ferndale.”

Jose Luis felt an odd sensation—not anger, really, but a bedraggled sense of submission.

“Why’d Carton…? Didn’t they see…?”
“Sheeeet, girl, have you ever seen a boy more scared than C?” Malaysia asked. “He was just waiting for them to walk in. Probably why he bans knocking.”
“Then why’d he invite us?”
“…mentally jack off to one of his new Chapbooks…”

Jose Luis opened his eyes and drained his beer, and then leaned over to Malaysia.

“Look who’s shitting now,” he said loudly before standing up and going into the kitchen for more beer.

Behind him, Malaysia laughed and said loudly, “At least the Beaver was trying.”

In the kitchen, Jose Luis settled against the counter and listened to the new music echoing through the white haze as the smell of imbibing got loud. He could just see Errol crouched down near the speakers through the kitchen doorframe. After his second beer, he almost couldn’t stop himself from breaking the bottle. He watched as the muscles in his arm shook. And in the noise—the places he’d been in the last year. The squeamish cock-ups and near-empty wallets they’d taken. The brutal fury in the face of a man who told them the world would suck them dry. The startle in the face of a kerchiefed woman. And usually, so much easier than might be thought; the only line to cross the one in the head, and everything after that… a super frolic. Finding dark clothes at Yeagers, a hood to cover his smalltown features. Looking at his classmates, and finding them further and further away. Finding it all further away. His arm muscles shook. He wanted to break the bottle, hear it crash and splinter.

“But, the point…?” he whispered.

Instead, he grabbed another beer and went out into the living room where Bunny and Malaysia were now making out and Carton was sprawled across the floor on his back, looking intently at the ceiling. Jose Luis went over to Errol.

“Either we could hang here, watch the girls and feel swell, or we could go rustle something up.”

Errol, who was quite enjoying the fecundity of scent and thinking about asking Carton if he had any new video games, was instantly depressed by the look on Jose Luis’s face. He wasn’t going to stick around, that much was clear.

***
Outside, the evening was hugely dark. And lit. Lit by the stars, lit by the streetlights of all the houses around the college. Errol could hear a party down the street, large by the sound of the music, the sound of boys hollering off the decks. The sound of alcohol sloshing out of cups. Errol thought maybe they should see if they could crash in.

“What you want to do?” he asked.

“Nothing.” Jose Luis had his hands in the jean pockets. His boy scouts shirt draped over his shoulders which were quite hunched up to his ears. Errol couldn’t quite read what was happening. Did he miss something? He went over it in his head, the girls, Carton, the music, and could find nothing to explain Jose Luis’s expression.

“Okay,” he said. “Do you want to go to that party?”

Jose Luis was quiet.

“Maybe towards?”
“Sure.”

And so they walked towards the party, sifting through the thin alleyway between Carton’s and the noise, but Jose Luis was curving around, tapping his hands against the walls, rattling the dumpsters they passed. At one point he stopped and picked up the bare bones of a thrown-out chair and lifted it above his head. Put it down again. Errol watched quietly and thought about aliens.

As they got closer to the noise, two boys erupted out of walkway, one after the other, the second throwing a football at the other’s head. Errol and Jose Luis paused and watched as the two vaulted over a fence, the first looking quickly back, just quickly enough for the boys to see this was no game, and then the two disappeared around a corner. “You… you…” Errol could just hear one shout as they passed away into the distance.

Jose Luis laughed. Laughed and then started to pick up his pace.

In the distance they could see the outline of a couple walking down the alleyway towards them, more kids on a Saturday, making their way through the evening in search. The shadows seemed to eat them in the distance, but as they got closer, Errol could see two girls, one who looked like Bunny, desirable Bunny, with her arm draped friendly around the other girl’s shoulder. Jose Luis walked faster and Errol hitched to catch up. As they got closer, Jose Luis positioned himself in front of the girls, not off to the side, and Errol could sense them re-arranging themselves, heading closer to the side to move around. But Jose Luis kept swerving to be in front of them, and suddenly he was unavoidable and they paused five feet off from him as he stood, wavering but not drunk in front of them. A fist tightened under the stars, the quarter sliver moon that had crept up startling from the side of a streetpost.

“What do you have?” Errol could hear Jose Luis whisper, and then repeat louder, his shoulder’s broadening, as he fake lunged at the girls. “What do you have?”

Errol inched closer to Jose Luis, put his hand out to Jose Luis’s shoulder, and was shrugged off.

“Hey, man,” Errol whispered, “you don’t have your mask on. Let’s just go.”

The girls stood in silently in the alleyway and then the girl who resembled Bunny took her arm off from around her friend’s shoulder. Her friend seemed smaller there, dark haired and as she watched, her hand made up to her eye, and wiped a trace of mascara away from her lashes.

“Not too much, guy,” she finally said, moving to her pockets and digging out a tiny dark spot. “But you can have it, if that’s what you want.”

Errol could hear the sound of a zipper unzipping, of a rustle of cash.

“That what you want?” her friend asked suddenly. Errol was startled to hear the hard line in her voice. The sound he narrated at the end of his favorite game. You have failed your mission, but I guess you tried.

“Yes.” Jose Luis reached out, pulled the offering out of the girl’s hand. “But you too.”

“Sure,” said the Bunny-girl. “Whatever you want. Isn’t that what you’re waiting to hear, you little prick?”

“Yes,” said Jose Luis. He waited, the money put into his pocket and his arm extended again. The other one a fisted completion of the moon.

The girl sighed then, and tossed her purse at Jose Luis’s feet. “C’mon K, let’s get you home.” And she put her arm back around her friend; the two of them turned a quarter turn and walked down a house path away from the alley.

The two boys stood on the concrete.

Then Errol paced two steps over and stood facing his friend. Jose Luis looked back at him, his face blank. Studying. Errol knew he was waiting for him.
Errol took out a cigarette and thought about it. A beer, he thought, I need a beer. Once thought, the idea seemed perfect. The exclamation point. Something. He bent down and picked up the girl’s purse, opened it quickly and started looking through it, searching for a little cash to put on the keg over at the party: a cellphone, lipstick, a tiny bottle of mace, a couple of folded up napkins with writing on them, a wallet. He opened the wallet and found bills inside. Enough bills.

“Let’s go make music,” he said to Jose Luis.
“Give it back,” Jose Luis said.
“What?”

Jose Luis reached out and snatched the purse out of Errol’s hands. Wrested it away without even a tug, and slowly redid the zipper. He looked up at Errol, opened his eyes, his dark semi-Columbian eyes. And felt a protective affection for the cruel innocence Errol was, and maybe always would be. Jose Luis turned, and ran off. Ran off down the same sidewalk path the girls took.

Errol stood and stared after him, something about this town and his skin pitter-patter and flying.