Hyena by Jude Angelini

Knickerbocker and Troutman. The block reminded me of seventies New York in the movies, with the people on the stoops and the girls in their little shorts popping bubble gum talking to the guys hanging out the window.
    Cars drove by with their Puerto Rican flags and loud music. They had Puerto Rican flags everywhere, on theporches, on the roofs, all over. I saw a motherfucker walking down the street with a flag tied around his neck like a cape, on a Wednesday.
    I’m laughing with Chris, saying they might as well have been white flags, it’s over for ’em. Cuz if I’m in your neighborhood coming for specialty cocktails and a twenty-dollar burger, you might as well give up.
    The white people are coming, and where we go, death and destruction follow. Death, destruction, and carrot-apple-ginger juice. I give ’em five or ten more years and then it’s a wrap for Bushwick as we know it.
    After a few hours we head home, the gypsy cab drops Chris off and I go up to Midtown for a couple more drinks.
    It’s damn near three, I’m heading back to Chris’s. The streets are empty, just me and the garbage trucks. I see couples staggering out of the bars together, hand in hand. All these couples out here, what do they got that I don’t got?
    The cabbie’s gunning it down 5th Ave. We pass the whore house I used to go to when I lived out here. I feel that ping in my chest. I almost tell him to stop, let me out, but I don’t. We drive on by.
    I tell myself, I don’t need that in my life. The cramped room, fucking some Korean whore laid out on a towel. She’s fake moaning her way through it, stinking up the joint with her kimchi breath – trying to get me to cum fast. Don’t worry sweetheart, I will. I don’t last long with hookers, and when I’m cumming, I look in their eyes and hope they smile. They never do.

karma chameleon
    I WAS WITH ROSS THE other day. He tells me it turns out Karma Patel, the billionaire heiress, Harvard grad, cancer patient he hooked me up with a few months back, ended up being a little teenager named Lauren.
    I figured as much. I knew she was lying the minute Ross told me that in the year knowing her through Facebook, he had never actually met her. And when I pressed her to meet, something always came up.
    But I figured all of this out days—and many phone conversations—after our first introduction. I had been speaking to her like she was a dear friend of one of my oldest friends, honestly and candidly.
    Ross had cosigned for a bullshit girl.
    We turned Hardy Boys, Ross and I, trying to crack the case. But every lie we caught her in would turn into a bigger, more elaborate lie.
    “Oh you’re gonna be here at six?”
    Five o’clock she’s in a car wreck.
    “Where?”
    “Santa Monica.”
    “The street or the city?”
    “Both.”
    “Where by?”
    “Can’t remember, the brain cancer pills cloud the memory.”
    “That’s awful. Which hospital you at? I’m coming to see you.”
    “Just got out, heading home.”
    “That’s even better, I’ll check on you there.”
    “No you can’t, chemo in the morning.”
    “Great, I’ll take you and hold your hand the whole time through. Okay?”
    “Okay.”
    Five in the morning, emergency brain surgery.
    And so on.
    Why would a normal person take time out of their busy life to entertain this obvious bullshit? Well, in Ross’s case he had a year’s worth of correspondence put into this and he wanted some answers. Me, I’m not normal, I’m abnormal, I’m a fucking nut. I do weird shit. I was mad I got duped, I felt my trust had been violated, and I just wanted to catch her in the act. Call her out, ask her why.
    I wanted to be like, “Exhibit A, people do not get metal plates put in their head from brain cancer! Exhibit B, there were no said Karma Patels brought into any hospital in Los Angeles on said date! Exhibit C, the land deed to 662 MarylandDrive is under the name of Bob Jones and not to any Patell!!! I got just one question for you,