Revenge of the Rocket Gang

As Told by Hess, the Big Human

Innercityville, any of them, doesn’t matter

one

The group had no center until Golly arrived. G. Golly from Memphis. You can smirk all you want, but this dude could have been named Penelope and he would have been no less imposing. He wasn’t especially big or like, muscular. Nothing like that. He didn’t own a gun either. He didn’t like to waste time, and that was really all any of us were doing before he got here.

A word about that.

The biggest time wasters are the guys who have no ticker tape inside their heads. Nothing telling them which way to lay their bets or invest their hours. They put things off, let them slide or fall behind the bureau. They don’t care or want to know, or they just can’t make up their fucking minds.

Golly came into our lives like a firefighter with his hose, blasting that shit at high pressure. The grime of indecision and apathy sluiced clean away. After all, what had we ever been? A group of no-account, between-job bullshit artists, tagging trains and underpasses, jacking cars, working for a Domane chop shop. Dumb shit like that because we were dumb shits. Too-old-to-be Mama’s basement dwellers. Adreno freaks with no education to speak of. And as the saying goes, the guy who doesn’t read has no advantage over the one who can’t. Me and Tom were the only two not that guy, just born in the wrong place.

George Golly had something to say about all this, and it wasn’t very nice. He was only five years older than us, but he’d already done a lot with himself. Tight-lipped about his holdings, but he claimed he had his own business in Memphis, which he left running like a clock. Guys he trusted took care of the day-to-day. Freed him up to do as he pleased. Could have sat around on his ass, watching movies and smoking bronk with his female associates or whatever, but that wasn’t George. He was the kind that always had to have a project—which is one thing we lacked. Well, to hear him tell it, we were lacking in so many other ways, I wondered why he even bothered with us.

This got me thinking that Golly had come to town for a specific reason. Sure enough, he had a plan, and he needed a crew of locals—where we came in. He sat us down in the yard and picked me first, ‘as is’, he said. I figured it was my bulk. I see over a lot of heads and have hard, hard bones, not to mention what all covers those big boys.

“You’re a regular Colossus,” he said, grinning. Then he squinted at me.

“Your blankety, blinking face tells me you have no idea what I’m talking about. Let me enlighten you.”

Then he explained about a god named Helios, and a city called Rhodes back in the ancient world.

“I’m one of the seven wonders, huh? Well, I like that. Hess the big human is a fucking colossus.” I turned to the others and stretched out my arms like a circus ringmaster. “You got that?”

They jeered.

“More like a colossal butthead,” said Jamie, who always had to go and ruin things.

He would have stolen my thunder if he could, but he had no means to do that, so this was same as always with him: a mouthful of sour grapes. I knew saying all that would piss him off. He really was dense as a rock, but so much so, that he wasn’t even aware of the full extent of it. Poor fucker. His twin, Monty, was the smart one. More handsome too. I wondered what kind of epic Greek battles they must have fought inside their mother’s belly. Unreal. Jamie wasn’t a bad guy, just scrawny and hurting—beat from birth. He was sulking.

“The man here is giving you something to think about besides your dipshit life. Have some respect.”

That was Tom, the intellectual among us because he had a giant comic book collection, manga and that. Quite the authority. He liked Berserk and Chainsaw Man, but chances are, he had The History of The Ancient World in comic book form. Maybe even one about the Boston Tea Party or Paul Bunyan. His curiosity was weirdly healthy.

“Let’s change the subject,” said Golly. “Tell me about the Carmens.”

“You know about them already?” asked Jamie.

That would be Carmen Pérez and Carmen Maldonado, the two cousins, and our enemies. I was a bit impressed with George’s ability to suss out the seat of power here so fast. We had had our clashes with them. It all started because no one listened to Wilt anymore. When he lost his heavyweight OG title, we lost our center of gravity. The Carmens ran rings around us, and more since the rumble that dethroned Wilt, but for the record, it had nothing to do with the put-out eye. They controlled everything within a ten-mile radius. Their racket was simple, time-honored, cliché even, but sweet: living off the clubs they shook down, but just the clubs. They left most of the other businesses alone, although there were a few that had special arrangements with them, not that there was much all else to plunder.

Our town suffered from what politicians call urban blight. There were retail stores on the avenue, sad, lame things. We had boarded-up houses on just about every street. The Carmens had taken over the cracker factory building, a huge, crumbling fortress for them and theirs. Moldering when they found it, condemned or tied up in liens from the city, the building had been sitting there for decades. They’d come in with sledgehammers. It was guarded and well organized because Carmen Pérez saw to all that. Her dad had been in the “La Revolución”, and he taught her not to tolerate bullshit. Her rules could be draconian, but the gang obeyed because the return was so fat. The police preferred it that way too because the Carmens brought their own kind of law and order to the neighborhood, which actually wasn’t so different from the real thing. In effect, they were better at the job than the police could ever be. Carmen Maldonado had taken all the punks in the district and hammered them into something useful. Petty crime was way down, and nothing moved in or out of their fiefdom that the Carmens didn’t know about, approve of, or profit from.

I explained all this to George.

“They’re untouchable,” I concluded. “And they don’t particularly like that we’re breathing the same air as them.”

“That’s what they want you to believe, Hess. That they’re impregnable. Doesn’t matter; they want to run the street, let them. That’s not going to be our jam. They won’t prey on us.”

He paused to let that sink in.

“What is, then?” asked Monty.

George finished the last of his coin-op coffee and lit a cigarette.

“A cultural center.”

Braying and sniggering.

“What the fuck is that?” said Jaime, looking around at the others for reactions.

“You’re doing what now?”said Monty.

“You heard right,” said G. Golly. “This is the most devastated town I’ve ever seen. I mean, for its size, there is fucking nothing here. You have that awful strip and all those dinky stores, but no theater, no auditorium, no library. There isn’t even a school.”

“Last one got closed eight years ago. We all went to the one two towns over,” said Tom.

“What the fuck is a ‘cultural center’?” demanded Jaime.

I noted the hostility in his voice and smiled at the irony, because of those present, it was exactly a guy like Jaime who most needed some culture.

“Well, it could mean a lot of things, truth be told, but I gotta start with what all I got. Right now, Maisie. She’s in—and there’s a Senegalese guy, Mamadou Mbaye, a musician I met when Maisie was working in Reno. He plays his people’s drumming music, and that’s a hell of a thing. I can tell you right now.”

Surprise was an understatement for what sat thick on our faces. Tom looked like someone had just announced his winning ticket.

“I’ll be taking it up with Jilly Maddox, a painter who lives out in the Tennessee hills, Dix the cowboy poet, Robert Merran, the photographer—people I know, good people.”

“Your dime, I take it?” I didn’t peg George for a grifter, but I had to ask, anyway.

“Yeah, I have the funds earmarked for this. My aim is to set it up and then go on to the next city or town, next set of opportunities, like Johnny Appleseeds.”

No one knew who that was.

“And where’s it gonna be?” asked Wilt.

“You know the old Hollis Building? The headquarters of the defunct Hollis Printing Company?”

“Yeah, like a lot of old factories around here, it’s abandoned,” I said.

“Haunted, I heard,” said Monty.

George got off the hood of a Ford Bronco, looking for somewhere better to sit. Wilt shoved over on the bench.

“I leased it for twelve months with an option to buy. A lot can happen in a year. The center has to prove itself by then. How’s that sound to you all? Will you give it a go?”

“That’s a seven-story building,” I said. “What exactly are we talking about?”

“Seven arts, seven floors.”

He looked around and saw nothing but incomprehension, so he spelled it out for us: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry and literature, dance, and cinema. Tom almost fell off his chair.

“Maisie Callahan studied cooking at Lay Cordon ‘Blue’, if you can believe it. That’s a fancy goddamn cooking school in Paris, and I don’t mean Paris, Arkansas. She doubles as a bona fide agriculturist because she grows her own product, so she’ll set up a community garden. The Hollis actually has a pretty big kitchen in the back on the ground floor. It’s the cafeteria where the employees used to eat.”

“We’re going to learn to cook? Now you’re just fucking with us,” laughed Monty.

“The point is, with Maisie, you people are going to learn about food made out of actual food. Hell, we even talked about turning that cantina into a restaurant, because you’ll need to support the center once I’m out of the picture. You’ll need a name for it too. That’s for you all to figure out. And this is work I'm proposing. Everyone’s getting salaries.”

We just stood there, waiting for him to shout ‘April Fools’ or some other punchline. It was like being asked if we would like to go dance with penguins in Antarctica. My quick survey of the guys’s faces yelled ‘batshit’.

George stood there, waiting for any reaction at all. “Tell me why it won’t work.” He was looking at each of us with the laser-eye thing.

“We ain’t saying it can’t. It’s just a lot to take in,” said Wilt.

“Well, that’s some noncommittal horseshit. You can’t give me anything better than that? Tell me why it won’t work!”

No one had anything to say.

“You guys got anything better to do?”

Heads shook.

“You’d stay the year?” asked Wilt.

“I’ll stay the year.”

“And here I thought you were going to propose a casino or some such.”

Me, Big Hess, I didn’t see this coming either.

❈

A word from G. Golly:

A story like this one takes its time in the telling, so don’t you fine people go nowhere. We’re here every Wednesday. And if you enjoyed this first part of it, make the little lady happy and give it a like. Don’t be like my cheapskate Uncle Dave.

Part Two drops Wednesday 18 June