yustyoking

 

            A tall, thin girl by the side of the road, long blond hair, a cute face, black slacks, a white down windbreaker, a black plastic garbage bag full of clothes at her feet. A blustery, cold day in January, she stands like a fashion model, her left leg arched forward provocatively. Naturally, I stop. I get out of the car and ask, “Is your ride coming?”

            “What’s it to you?”

            She looks like a suburban stray, but speaks with a hillbilly twang, not at all what I expected.

            “I can’t just leave you here, it’s cold.”

            She thinks about that awhile. “My boyfriend’s coming to get me.”

            “Good! As long as he comes.”

            A smile plays around the corners of her mouth. “You do this often? Stop and talk to strangers?”

            “Most strangers don’t look like you,” I confess. “You’re… stunning.”

            “Whatever.”

            “Have you called your boyfriend on his cellphone?”

            She gawks. “My boyfriend drives a pickup. He doesn’t have a cellphone.”

            “Oh, I’m sorry.”

            A radiant smile breaks out on her face. “Hey, mister, you got a cigarette?”

            “I quit. Awhile back.”

            “Huh? Why’d you quit?”

            “Burning up big bucks.”

            “Ha! That was dumb.”

            “Well…”

            “If you hadn’t quit, you could offer me a cigarette, jerko.”

            Looking into her lovely blue eyes, I say, “Yeah. I goofed. I… I’m sorry.”

            “Where is he? Do you own that car you’re driving?”

            “Yeah, that’s my car.”

            “Come on! It’s cold. I’m tired of waiting. Grab my stuff, wouldja?” she chirps, pivoting elegantly on one leg and marching off to my car. I grab her black plastic trashbag— which is unexpectedly heavy— and follow.

            “What’s in here, bricks?” I joke.

            “Why? What’s it your business?” she asks. She pops open the passenger side door and hops in my car.

            Plopping her bag on the back seat, I get in behind the wheel. “Where to, madam?” I ask in a cheeky chauffeur’s voice.

            “Hey, mister, just drive! I’ll tell you when I see a convenience store.”

            “What’s your name?”

            “Huh?” she grunts languidly, kind of floating in her seat. “Madeleine, but everyone calls me Maddie.”

            I drive. Stop light, stop light, gas station.

            “Oh, there’s a convenience store.”

            “Where?”

            “Right there!”

            “Oh. Right.” I pull into the parking lot.

            “Hey, mister,” she asks with a kind of stoner cluelessness, “do you ever do methamphetamine?”

            “What? No. Of course not!”

            “Huh? Shit, I do it all the time!” she assures me, leaning over the front seat, rummaging in her black plastic bag. First she brings forth a brown leather purse with a shoulder strap, very shiny, almost new. Then she dives back into the sack and pulls out a Glock 22 and points it at me. “Gimme the keys to your car.”

            “Cripes!” I swear.

            “Gimme the keys to your car! Look, Mr. Whoosis, I’m about to rob this convenience store. I got a gun. See?”

            “Oh, I see the gun, alright.”

            “What’s your problem? Give me the goddam keys to your goddam car. Get out an’ walk away. This here’s none of your goddam business. Let me do my thing and I’ll leave your car someplace public and, like, sometime soon you’ll get it back. Someplace in the tri-state area.”

            “What the hell is the tri-state area?” I dumbly ask.

            “Delmarva. Delaware-Maryland-Virginia. Now give me the goddam keys,” she rants, becoming hysterical.

            I feel like I’m locked in a closet with a rabid dog. I do the old movie trick and put my hand over the muzzle of the gun. I fully expect her to blow my hand off.

            “Take your hand away!” she howls.

            Quickly pushing the gun aside, I say very quietly, “No can do. I can give you money, Maddie! Money, money, money, as much as is in that convenience store. Why do a robbery when you can get the money handed to you on a silver platter, no crime committed?”

            “What are you, J. D. Rockefeller?”

            “Naw, but, yes, I’ve got some cash stashed.”

            “Where?”

            “In the bank.”

            “Get outta the car. We’re going into this store and gettin’ cash now !”

            “An ATM— “

            “Now! “

            I pocket my car keys. We get out of the car, walk across the lot and enter the store. The entire front window is neon signs, “Checks Cashed,” “Cold Drinks,” “Beer & Wine,” “Open 24 Hours.” It’s 5:30 p.m., just getting dark.

            “Yes, can I help you?” asks the Indian woman behind the counter. She’s dressed in a red and gold sari, a red caste mark on her forehead.

            But Maddie already has the gun pointed, her arms outstretched, all but touching the woman on the nose with it. “Just… give… us… all… your… money!” she recites.

            Frowning, the woman looks at me. “Aren’t you ashamed?” she asks. “We work hard. We have very small profit margins— “

            “Give me the money! “ screams Maddie.

            “She’s doped up!” I hastily explain. “You can’t reason with her. Methamphetamine.”

            “This is a very stupid thing,” says the woman resignedly, ringing up the register, removing bills from each slot in turn and extending the greenbacks to Maddie.

            “Take them! “ Maddie hollers.

            Not wanting the Indian woman to get hurt, I take the bills.

            “Do you want the coins?” asks the Indian.

            “What?” asks Maddie.

            “The coins. Quarters, half dollars, nickels, dimes, pennies.”

            “What about them?”

            “Do you want them?”

            “No, I don’t want them!” Maddie fumes, turning to me. “Take a cold drink.”

            “What?” I ask dumbly.

            “The sign out front says Cold Drinks. Get us a cold drink!”

            “Jesus Christ! What?! A Snapple? Grapefruit tonic? Coke Zero? Maddie! There must be a hundred beverages in here… Bottled water!”

            “Take that there!” she seethes, pointing with the gun at a cardboard case of bottled water. When she swings the gun violently back at the cashier, I fully expect a tragedy.

            None of us move. Somewhere in aisle three, I vaguely sense a customer, but whoever it is, they never show themselves.

            I grab the case of bottled water and say, “Okay, let’s go!”

            I open the door clumsily and back out. I stand on the concrete apron waiting for her. “Maddie, let’s just go!”

            She stands as if paralyzed, arms straight ahead, hands spasmodically clutching the gun in firing position.

            I re-enter the store.

            “Help me!” she screams. “I’m stuck!”

            I put the water on the floor, leave the dollar bills on top, approach from the side and gently raise Maddie’s arms so the gun is pointing at the ceiling.

            “You probably don’t even have bullets,” mutters the Indian cashier.

            “YOU BITCH!”

            “Please, don’t say a word,” I beg them, just managing to unpry Maddie’s right hand from the gun.

            “Okay,” Maddie sighs, seemingly back to normal, the gun in her left hand. Bringing it down to shoulder level, she gunbutts the Indian woman, who collapses on the floor. “Come on!” Maddie shouts, hightailing it out of there. 

            Feeling like an idiot, I grab the loose bills and the bottled water and follow her outside.

            “Quick! Into your car! Let’s go! Let’s go!” Maddie shouts.

            I mean, she still has the Glock.

            I pop open the back door, dump water and money, slam the door, hop in the front and… struggle to get my car keys out of my pants pocket.

            Watching me squirm, Maddie begins laughing hysterically.

            Eventually, I get us on the road. Maddie has me drive us to an apartment house in Virginia. “Shit!” she laments, “I forgot to get cigarettes!” I turn in at the parking area and pull up, the car idling in the middle of the lot. Maddie starts to get out of the car.

            “Just like that?” I ask. “Without a second thought?”

            “Why? Ya wanna do a Bonnie and Clyde? Now he wants a major crime spree! You think robbing people is a turn-on?”

            “Hey! I’m not the one robbing people.”

            “I need money,” she complains. “Nobody’ll hire me! I’m from the Ozarks and don’t have any skills.”

            “I wondered about the accent…”

            “Yeah, well, fuck you, mister!”

            “It’s Kevin.”

            “Oh, sure. Fuck you, Mr. Kevin. Leave me alone! “ she demands, hanging onto the open door. Interestingly, she just sits there, swinging the door back and forth. She doesn’t exit the vehicle.

            “Listen, Maddie…”

            “My boyfriend’s upstairs in an apartment on the second floor. If he knew I’d even spoken one word to you, he’d scalp us both! No foolin’. If you’re not gonna throw me outta yer car, I’d suggest we drive the hell outta here quick as the devil, mister.”

            Her car door hanging open, I hit the gas and spin the wheel left. Centrifugal force brings the door slamming shut. Maddie sits and sulks. “We better go to a motel,” she suggests.

            “Nah, that’s how you bring the police down on you like a ton of bricks. Do a robbery and check into a motel.”

            “So what are we gonna do?” she asks with that same stoner cluelessness.

            “We’ll drive to Maryland and park the car in a shopping center where I have my business. It’s a derelict shopping center. We can bed down in my office.”

            “Is that what you wanna do with me, Mr. Kevin? Bed down?”

            “Why do you think I picked you up?” I ask as she pulls the Glock from beneath her windbreaker and shoves the tip of the barrel against my neck.

            “Give me three good reasons I shouldn’t pull the trigger!” she drawls absent-mindedly.

            “Number one, I’m on your side, Maddie. Number two, I think I’m in love with you— “

            Frowning, she rests the gun resignedly in her lap.

            “Number three, I’m an accomplice. It’s my car, my license plate. I’m in this thing as deeply as you are.”

            “Pull over!”

            This doesn’t sound good, but I pull over. Not on the main drag, but at the first residential street we come to. Is she going to blow my brains out, dump my body and drive off in my car? She’s a meth head. The experts say their behavior is extremely unpredictable and their level of violence limitless.

            “C’mere,” she insists, the gun in her lap, reaching for me with both hands. She clasps my face and we kiss, long, drawn-out kisses, sucking air. She squirms in her seat, one hand drifting down to grab my swollen crotch. “You love  me,” she contends wonderingly. “You really love me!”

            “Yeah… yes, I do!”

            “That’s so… lame!” she laughs. “That’s so fucking lame! I rob a convenience store and you’re, like, totally turned on. Joey’ll die when he hears about this!”

            We kiss some more.

            “Pull down your pants.”

            “Put away your gun.”

            “Fuck you, mister,” she grouses, shoving the pistol back into the waistband of her slacks.

            I unbuckle myself, unzip and pull down my pants.

            “What’s that?”

            “Part of a sock. Keeps the nether regions warm and absorbs leaks.”

            “What leaks?”

            “Sometimes my dick leaks.”

            “Boo hoo hoo, poor man!” she jeers, tugging at my cock mercilessly.

            “We’d enjoy this more in the office,” I croak.

            “Why? I’m enjoying it now.”

            Fuck!

            We go back to heavy petting.

            “If I just kind of lean back on the seat here,” she asks, “will you drive us to this office of yours? I can’t sleep. Meth keeps you wired. But I’m tired. Or am I gonna wake up an’ find myself staring into a patrolman’s flashlight?”

            “I don’t think we’re going to see any patrolmen or their flashlights,” I reason, “but we’d better get a move on.”

            I take us to my office off Rockville Pike. The building is dark, although it wouldn’t matter if Boopsie and Jacqueline were there. Coworkers, we respect one another’s eccentricities. I all but carry Maddie into the building. I return to the car, which isn’t exactly hidden, but parked in the shadows along the side wall. I get her purse and the trashbag full of her worldly possessions. When I get to the office and turn on the desk lamp, she is curled in a corner of the room, seated on the carpet, both arms out stiff, pointing her gun squarely at my head.

            “What are we doing here?!” she demands icily.

            “Hopefully,” I admit, “we’re going to screw the daylights out of each other.”

            “Oh, yeah!” she yelps, throwing the gun against the desk. “Let’s make love!”

            Laughing, I pick up the Glock and lay it on the desk, go to the street windows and close the blinds, and return to find the spectrally white and creamy body of a 22-year-old female blond meth head who has just peeled off all her clothes. I follow suit.

            “Fuck me,” she chortles uncontrollably.

            “Truer words, rarely spoken.”

            …

            When I’m deep inside her, she groans, ”I wanted you because you’re so convenient.”

            I do her again.

            I sleep, in my clothes, her hand gripping my aching cock. She doesn’t sleep, of course, but she leans against me, resting, drooling spittle. At one point, she gets up, goes to the bathroom and does her thing. Groggily, I look up and see the yellow light outlining the bathroom door. I hear the water running. As I  drift off to sleep, I am rudely shaken awake.

            “I wanna go to Joey,” she says.

            “Sure, I’ll drive you.”

            I take her to the apartment house across the river in Virginia. After two minutes in the car, she’s like a zombie, staring silently out the windshield, her hands spasmodically writhing in her lap.

           “Can I turn on the radio?” I ask.

            “No noise! “ she screams.

             “Okay. Okay, Maddie. Okay,” I whisper soothingly.

              It doesn’t help. She’s almost jumping out of her skin by the time we arrive.

              “Hey! Thanks!” she says, brusquely grabbing her purse, the plastic bag and the dollar bills off the back seat, the Glock once again a conspicuous bulge beneath the hem of her jacket.

               That’s it, my escapade in crime. I watch as she flounces away at 3 o’clock in the morning to the barely lit entrance of a shabby, yellow domicile. I can only imagine what a desperate series of misadventures their lives must consist of.

               I drive home and go to bed. It’s cold enough to freeze a yak’s ass. The police awaken me at 11 a.m. the next morning, ringing the front doorbell. They’ve traced my license plate. Barechested, I invite the two of them in. “Let me go put on a shirt,” I suggest. I offer coffee. They decline. I heat a cup in the microwave and sit down with them at the dining room table to address their questions.

               “Your car was used last night in a robbery,” Lt. McKay enunciates clearly, glancing between his notepad and my face. “At first we thought it was a case of a stolen vehicle. You know. Not you in the car. Then— and here’s the bitch, here’s the kicker— we interview the proprietress and screen the surveillance video. That’s some footage. Who’s the dame?”

               “He means,” Detective Holt interjects, “who is the woman holding the gun? We’ve seen her on video several times before, but she continues to elude us.”

               So I give them a short explanation, meet woman, held at gunpoint, forced to participate in robbery.

               “It’s a carjacking,” declares Lt. McKay stolidly.

               “She did try to steal your car… and you resisted? And that’s when she made you enter the store? At gunpoint? Is that your story?” ask Detective Holt.

              “At gunpoint. When I wouldn’t give her the keys to my car. Yes.”

               They’re not even playing Good Cop / Bad Cop. They just seem intent on getting the narrative down pat.

               “What happened then?” asks the detective, while the lieutenant scribbles furiously on his notepad.

                I tell them about driving her to Virginia.

               “And that’s where you left her?”

               “Yup!”

              “Could you find this place again? That’s like, the clincher,” McKay  tells me. “Accomplice to armed robbery, driving the getaway car. Or, more likely, innocent victim forced at gunpoint to assist an armed felon.”

             “It’s not like you want to protect the lady or anything, right?” asks Detective Holt.

             “Gentlemen, let me get my shoes, my jacket, hat and gloves. Then we’ll take a ride across the river.”

              The two policemen exchange looks.

              “Okay,” McKay agrees.

               I never wrote down the address, but, yes, with only one wrong turn, I got us there. I mean, I’d already driven there twice. They kept me caged in the back of the cruiser while they called for backup. Eventually, Virginia law enforcement pulled stealthily into the parking lot and conferred with the Maryland police officers.

               Maddie and Joey looked appropriately disheveled and miserable as the cops led them from the building. I felt bad, but it was them or me, and whatever happened to me, nothing was going to get them off the hook. My going down would serve no purpose whatsoever.

              That was two years ago. I’m writing about it now because I just visited Maddie at The Montgomery Project, a halfway house. She is out on parole and looks as ridiculously angelic as always, ex-con or no. Creamy skin, long blond hair, perky blue eyes, plucked eyebrows, rosebud mouth, round dimpled chin, pert little breasts and those long, long legs. Until she smiles. Her teeth! The rotting stumps of a zombie apocalypse.  And she continues to have the distracted air of someone not  entirely in the room. Ouch!

              Since employment is such a big deal for those out on parole, I’ve hooked her up with a concert promoter who has her doing costumes, make-up and stage hand work, but he makes sure she stays out of his bed and he doesn’t let her get anywhere near the cashbox.

             So far, it’s working.

*