Freddy starts to hover two feet to the right of wherever Blue is looking. He finds excuses to keep Pink talking, trying to unstick his own tongue.
"You okay, kid?" Blue asks, vaguely amused.
Mouth flapping like a fish, Freddy reaches blindly for the right ideas, the right thing to say. He no longer notices the smell of shit creeping through the walls from the street outside and the cold is a minor concern in the long run, even when he's Californian born and supposed to be adapting.
The front door clicks open and Brown starts swearing up a storm as he scrapes his shoes on the doormat.
Freddy closes his mouth and shakes his head.
-----------
Of course it all comes crashing down. No story of a down and our kid making his own way in the Big Apple would be complete without the part where everything goes wrong. In the after school specials, this is the part where everyone realises how wrong they were to deviate from the path set down for them and they proceed to move back home or take up a new sort of pastime that doesn't require them to risk their liberty in any given cross with the police.
In real life, everything just goes to shit. Freddy lets his feet track him through New York without thought once he's done for the day, the crisp sun of January morphing into freezing showers as February gears them up for Spring. He has a raincoat now, a proper anorak thick enough to make bending his arms difficult and when he puts up puddles in his boots he barely notices the streaks of water they leave up his jeans. Away from sixty fourth street, he can breathe a little easier. The air in the rest of the city has started to smell clean, even when the smog has settled thick overhead.
But he has to come back round to his shit soaked street, which bubbles with sewage when the rain gets too heavy and which the city council have been sending workers to deal with only sporadically. Brown has screamed and cried to the landlord half a dozen times and it changes nothing. Why would it? The guy has no control over where the money goes, and who gets paid.
The first thing Freddy notices is that the water is high enough that he's going to have to skip around full blown turds in the street to get back home. The second thing he notices is the smoke. Fire is common enough here, the smell sometimes trickling down from the Bronx when the folk trying to wash away their homes and start fresh with the insurance money get particularly overzealous. He assumes it's a restaurant, going up in flames at the behest of the ovens out back, but the closer he gets the more he feels lead tightening in his veins.
Freddy takes the last corner at a run, rounding onto sixty forth street and feeling the heat prickle at his skin immediately.
There are fire engines and police cars, practically the whole neighbourhood standing out on the street to watch or leaning out of their windows in morbid fascination. The people standing directly in front of the building, huddled up next to the emergency services like it might morph into a giant umbrella and save them from the rain, have come running from their homes, screaming for their lives, their things, their grandparents to be saved.
He thinks he catches the stocky outline of Blue, and the thin, reedy distress of Pink in the crowds. Freddy doesn't have to work hard to stop Brown though, screaming bloody murder about legitimate business practices and how that's his fucking livelihood going up in flames so why the fuck is he being arrested? Why the fuck is he being arrested when he knows the guy who came by to burn the place down. Vic fucking Vega. They're looking for Vic Vega.
And an officer snaps back that no one involved in the running of Wacko Comics wants to cross their path, that they know what tricks Brown's types use to try and escape custody and they ain't buying it.
This is what happens when you run to the police. Freddy takes one last look at the gutted corpse of Wacko Comics, wrapped in the fire with the windows popped out from the heat. He looks up to the third floor window where all his spare clothes and the money he'd been saving and the comics he'd collected and the unsent letter to his parents will be getting smoked out, soon to add themselves to the bonfire. He has no idea if Brown left his name, or some version of his name, on any official documents but he doesn't want to wait around to find out. There are twenty dollars in his pocket and at least the clothes he's wearing are warm.
Freddy turns tail, leaves the stinking wreck of sixty fourth street behind him and sets out, all alone. He's started over once before, he can pull himself up again.
The rain cascades off the lip of his anorak. His feet are dry, but Freddy is suddenly very much aware of how much of his body is resolutely sodden.
-----------------------
He can't stay out in the rain for long, this shit is ridiculous. Freddy bundles himself into a diner a few blocks down and works his way through a burger and a coke before deciding that he's not far enough away from the scene of the crime. Maybe the cops are looking for him. Him, specifically, Freddy Newandyke. His father's digging a grave as he thinks it, just too start rolling. He pays up, careful not to think too hard about the percentage of his funds he's just sunk into something that cannot hold his weight.
If he were looking for him, the last place he'd expect to see himself is downtown. Freddy doesn't have the cash to go hopping in cabs, so he walks fast, with his head retracted, turtlelike and anxious, to avoid being recognised whenever a cop car rolls by.
There are a lot of cop cars rolling by. With their sirens blaring, lighting up the streets in a confusing mismatch of blue and red that makes it hard to see where one person ends and the next begins. Freddy hugs the wall of buildings as far as he can, trying to keep the rain off his back. It doesn't really work, but it's better than doing nothing.
Even in the rain, girls gather on street corners to flag down passing Johns. It suits some of them, Freddy thinks, the bleeding makeup and straggly hair giving the best looking of the bunch an air of tragic debauchery that he can understand wanting to take to bed. He's thought about it, thought real long and hard, but somewhere between ninety eighth street and here he gets stuck.
He needs to talk to girls, he needs to talk to people his own age. He needs some fucking friends. His heart is positively howling in his ears and every time he asks himself the all important question of where the fuck he's supposed to sleep tonight he feels the rain turn to ice around him.
It's still early enough on the year that the rain could turn to ice around him if he doesn't play things carefully. New York City never sleeps, but few places are truly twenty four hours. He needs somewhere warm and dry where they won't bother him.
The back of a bar - too young. Diners and restaurants only let you stay as long as you're paying. The cinemas. dirty or otherwise, kick you out at the end of the feature.
He could go to Ruddy's, and hope the guy remembers him and doesn't have any kind of inclination to hand him over to the cops. That's a pretty big if though.
Or Larry. If he could go to Larry, this shit might be easy. But he doesn't have a phone number or an address, he's just gotten lucky running into him so many times in this big old city.
Freddy's got the door to a diner on forty second street open when he starts kicking himself for being an idiot. He doesn't need Larry's address or his number, he knows where the guy works.
The sky has been thick with winter dark for so long, Freddy has no concept of what time it is. His bones say its late but they've been walking in the rain since he quit work that afternoon, so whaddathey know? He takes the fifteen blocks between him and the cab company at a half run, dodging the flocks of people moving in the opposite direction and the slow gaggles of tourists who always seem to know exactly how to space themselves to block the sidewalk. With his luck, he half expects the place to have shut down, moved on and vanished without a trace in the months since he's last been by, but it's there, a faint glow coming from the open garage door.
Freddy barrels through the door and down the ramp to reception. Joe looks up, confused and concerned, reaching for the knife he keeps in his boot. He's not recognised, not like this.
"Joe!" Freddy calls out to him, waving his arms to show he's coming empty handed and pulling down his hood. "Joe, it's me!"
It takes a second, but he gets there. "Freddy?" Joe frowns, slowly settling back from his knife. "Jeez, what are you doing here?"
"I've had a...it's complicated." Freddy runs a hand over his face and gets met with a shock of cold water. His blood is still high, but from the run and the excitement of having figured his shit out. "Is Larry on tonight?"
"Sure. Why?"
"I gotta talk to him. You know where he is?"
"Ain't got a fucking clue. He's been real quiet tonight, but you know how it is in the rain." Joe replies.
Freddy does know. In the rain, journeys that could be taken on foot require taxis, and they never stop coming. Very little reason for a driver to call in on a night like tonight.
"When's he due back in?"
Joe checks his watch. "About three hours."
"You mind if I hang around till then?"
"In here?" Joe twists his mouth.
"C'mon, man." Freddy gestures to his sodden coat. "God's pissing it down out there."
Joe hesitates, then sits forward and starts up in a conspiratorial tone. "What's going on, Freddy? Forreal? Don't you got a home to go to."
There's nothing he can say to that that's gonna have him coming off as the good guy. Freddy sidesteps the question and sets his jaw. "Please, Joe. I just really gotta talk to Larry."
Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 12/?
"You okay, kid?" Blue asks, vaguely amused.
Mouth flapping like a fish, Freddy reaches blindly for the right ideas, the right thing to say. He no longer notices the smell of shit creeping through the walls from the street outside and the cold is a minor concern in the long run, even when he's Californian born and supposed to be adapting.
The front door clicks open and Brown starts swearing up a storm as he scrapes his shoes on the doormat.
Freddy closes his mouth and shakes his head.
-----------
Of course it all comes crashing down. No story of a down and our kid making his own way in the Big Apple would be complete without the part where everything goes wrong. In the after school specials, this is the part where everyone realises how wrong they were to deviate from the path set down for them and they proceed to move back home or take up a new sort of pastime that doesn't require them to risk their liberty in any given cross with the police.
In real life, everything just goes to shit. Freddy lets his feet track him through New York without thought once he's done for the day, the crisp sun of January morphing into freezing showers as February gears them up for Spring. He has a raincoat now, a proper anorak thick enough to make bending his arms difficult and when he puts up puddles in his boots he barely notices the streaks of water they leave up his jeans. Away from sixty fourth street, he can breathe a little easier. The air in the rest of the city has started to smell clean, even when the smog has settled thick overhead.
But he has to come back round to his shit soaked street, which bubbles with sewage when the rain gets too heavy and which the city council have been sending workers to deal with only sporadically. Brown has screamed and cried to the landlord half a dozen times and it changes nothing. Why would it? The guy has no control over where the money goes, and who gets paid.
The first thing Freddy notices is that the water is high enough that he's going to have to skip around full blown turds in the street to get back home. The second thing he notices is the smoke. Fire is common enough here, the smell sometimes trickling down from the Bronx when the folk trying to wash away their homes and start fresh with the insurance money get particularly overzealous. He assumes it's a restaurant, going up in flames at the behest of the ovens out back, but the closer he gets the more he feels lead tightening in his veins.
Freddy takes the last corner at a run, rounding onto sixty forth street and feeling the heat prickle at his skin immediately.
There are fire engines and police cars, practically the whole neighbourhood standing out on the street to watch or leaning out of their windows in morbid fascination. The people standing directly in front of the building, huddled up next to the emergency services like it might morph into a giant umbrella and save them from the rain, have come running from their homes, screaming for their lives, their things, their grandparents to be saved.
He thinks he catches the stocky outline of Blue, and the thin, reedy distress of Pink in the crowds. Freddy doesn't have to work hard to stop Brown though, screaming bloody murder about legitimate business practices and how that's his fucking livelihood going up in flames so why the fuck is he being arrested? Why the fuck is he being arrested when he knows the guy who came by to burn the place down. Vic fucking Vega. They're looking for Vic Vega.
And an officer snaps back that no one involved in the running of Wacko Comics wants to cross their path, that they know what tricks Brown's types use to try and escape custody and they ain't buying it.
This is what happens when you run to the police. Freddy takes one last look at the gutted corpse of Wacko Comics, wrapped in the fire with the windows popped out from the heat. He looks up to the third floor window where all his spare clothes and the money he'd been saving and the comics he'd collected and the unsent letter to his parents will be getting smoked out, soon to add themselves to the bonfire. He has no idea if Brown left his name, or some version of his name, on any official documents but he doesn't want to wait around to find out. There are twenty dollars in his pocket and at least the clothes he's wearing are warm.
Freddy turns tail, leaves the stinking wreck of sixty fourth street behind him and sets out, all alone. He's started over once before, he can pull himself up again.
The rain cascades off the lip of his anorak. His feet are dry, but Freddy is suddenly very much aware of how much of his body is resolutely sodden.
-----------------------
He can't stay out in the rain for long, this shit is ridiculous. Freddy bundles himself into a diner a few blocks down and works his way through a burger and a coke before deciding that he's not far enough away from the scene of the crime. Maybe the cops are looking for him. Him, specifically, Freddy Newandyke. His father's digging a grave as he thinks it, just too start rolling. He pays up, careful not to think too hard about the percentage of his funds he's just sunk into something that cannot hold his weight.
If he were looking for him, the last place he'd expect to see himself is downtown. Freddy doesn't have the cash to go hopping in cabs, so he walks fast, with his head retracted, turtlelike and anxious, to avoid being recognised whenever a cop car rolls by.
There are a lot of cop cars rolling by. With their sirens blaring, lighting up the streets in a confusing mismatch of blue and red that makes it hard to see where one person ends and the next begins. Freddy hugs the wall of buildings as far as he can, trying to keep the rain off his back. It doesn't really work, but it's better than doing nothing.
Even in the rain, girls gather on street corners to flag down passing Johns. It suits some of them, Freddy thinks, the bleeding makeup and straggly hair giving the best looking of the bunch an air of tragic debauchery that he can understand wanting to take to bed. He's thought about it, thought real long and hard, but somewhere between ninety eighth street and here he gets stuck.
He needs to talk to girls, he needs to talk to people his own age. He needs some fucking friends. His heart is positively howling in his ears and every time he asks himself the all important question of where the fuck he's supposed to sleep tonight he feels the rain turn to ice around him.
It's still early enough on the year that the rain could turn to ice around him if he doesn't play things carefully. New York City never sleeps, but few places are truly twenty four hours. He needs somewhere warm and dry where they won't bother him.
The back of a bar - too young. Diners and restaurants only let you stay as long as you're paying. The cinemas. dirty or otherwise, kick you out at the end of the feature.
He could go to Ruddy's, and hope the guy remembers him and doesn't have any kind of inclination to hand him over to the cops. That's a pretty big if though.
Or Larry. If he could go to Larry, this shit might be easy. But he doesn't have a phone number or an address, he's just gotten lucky running into him so many times in this big old city.
Freddy's got the door to a diner on forty second street open when he starts kicking himself for being an idiot. He doesn't need Larry's address or his number, he knows where the guy works.
The sky has been thick with winter dark for so long, Freddy has no concept of what time it is. His bones say its late but they've been walking in the rain since he quit work that afternoon, so whaddathey know? He takes the fifteen blocks between him and the cab company at a half run, dodging the flocks of people moving in the opposite direction and the slow gaggles of tourists who always seem to know exactly how to space themselves to block the sidewalk. With his luck, he half expects the place to have shut down, moved on and vanished without a trace in the months since he's last been by, but it's there, a faint glow coming from the open garage door.
Freddy barrels through the door and down the ramp to reception. Joe looks up, confused and concerned, reaching for the knife he keeps in his boot. He's not recognised, not like this.
"Joe!" Freddy calls out to him, waving his arms to show he's coming empty handed and pulling down his hood. "Joe, it's me!"
It takes a second, but he gets there. "Freddy?" Joe frowns, slowly settling back from his knife. "Jeez, what are you doing here?"
"I've had a...it's complicated." Freddy runs a hand over his face and gets met with a shock of cold water. His blood is still high, but from the run and the excitement of having figured his shit out. "Is Larry on tonight?"
"Sure. Why?"
"I gotta talk to him. You know where he is?"
"Ain't got a fucking clue. He's been real quiet tonight, but you know how it is in the rain." Joe replies.
Freddy does know. In the rain, journeys that could be taken on foot require taxis, and they never stop coming. Very little reason for a driver to call in on a night like tonight.
"When's he due back in?"
Joe checks his watch. "About three hours."
"You mind if I hang around till then?"
"In here?" Joe twists his mouth.
"C'mon, man." Freddy gestures to his sodden coat. "God's pissing it down out there."
Joe hesitates, then sits forward and starts up in a conspiratorial tone. "What's going on, Freddy? Forreal? Don't you got a home to go to."
There's nothing he can say to that that's gonna have him coming off as the good guy. Freddy sidesteps the question and sets his jaw. "Please, Joe. I just really gotta talk to Larry."