Crusty Pete
Jul. 15th, 2009 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonCrusty Pete was tired of waiting. He had been leaning against the brick wall for what felt like forever now. There was no one else on the street besides him and it was seriously starting to freak him out. It was the middle of the day - ('But what day?' he asked himself without an answer ) - and he should at least have seen some foot traffic passing by. Maybe it wasn't day. The river of sky that flowed above the alley he occupied was overcast with a gray indifferent of time. Morning? Dusk? The strain of noon before a heavy storm? He couldn't tell. Huddling himself to reduce the shivering, he debated leaving when he caught from the corner of his eye a shadow flicker into the alley's opening.
"Hey Pete", the voice sounded distorted, as if being shouted from a great distance but yet arrived at the ear with the intimate breath of a whisper.
Crusty Pete felt a surge of heat run through his body, a warmth that seemed to emanate and seep from the blood to thaw the chill that had seized his heart. He turned around to face the stranger who stood before him. Skinny kid in a hoodie pulled up to cover his face in ink black shadows.
"I know you?" Crusty Pete snarled throwing up his arms with a gesture of open challenge.
"Yeah you do..." the stranger stepped closer, lowering his hood with a practiced flourish and allowing a sharp bastard's smile to emerge from the gloom, "...it's me. Remember!"
Crusty Pete just stares at him, the hostility draining into slack jawed bafflement. There was something about the way the stranger said 'remember' that sounded oddly compelling to him. It should've been a question but it wasn't. Then it began to soak into him with a trickle of thought -
Waking up to the phone ringing. A friend in need, familiar...but no one close. For the life of him he cannot remember his name. Something urgent is spoken. He is told to meet the 'friend' ASAP. An address is given, that he is made to repeat back three times before he is hung up on. Half-asleep he checks the caller ID off the phone: Adam Last.
"Shit, Adam!" Crusty Pete sneers dismissively, "You know how long you had me waiting here?"
"Do you?" Adam replies, lighting up a cigarette and making himself at home by taking a seat on an overturned garbage can too battered to be of any other use.
Pete blinks stupidly at Adam. He's got nothing for the question, but isn't real sure why that should be. Adam stares back with a sadness that easily conveys that he knows the answer.
"For-fuckin'-ever, asshole..." Pete spits defiantly at Adam's visible pity and starts pacing along the brick wall. He keeps trying to figure out how many hours (Days?) there are exactly in a 'for-fuckin'-ever'. Adam watches silently with a patience that just irritates him all the more. 'Just where did he meet this prick in the first place?' he asks himself and then goes to ask Adam that very same question but instead sighs, "... so whaddya wan' from me, anyway?"
"I need information, Pete. I need it bad, otherwise I wouldn't be here."
"Who'm I, fuckin'- 411 over here? What information?" Crusty Pete shakes his head in disbelief. He can't figure out why isn't he walking out of this alley right now and taking his ass on home? ('...and where would that be?' a little voice inside his head asks.
"It's something I can't... I can't do myself, Pete. I need you to find someone for me..."
"Who?" Crusty Pete cuts him off, feeling himself getting more pissed off by the minute.
"A dealer, Pete. Selling some bad shit out there. Goes by the name of 'Doctor Ellis Dee'..."
"Never heard of 'im!"
"You will." Adam says the words low, guilty, a confession as much as a promise.
"Th'hell you talkin' about..."
"Shhh... don't say a word! I want you to Stop pacing and close your eyes, Pete!" Adam commands with a terrible confidence.
Crusty Pete stops dead in his tracks and finds he cannot will himself to do otherwise.
Adam steps up to his 'friend' and with the ember end of his cigarette, begins to carve a sigil directly into his forehead. A trail of smoke wafts off the sizzling flesh into the air, reeking of scorched aerosol and the musk of drying sex. Pete knows there should be pain, he can feel the heat burning deep into him but without it's sting.
When Adam was finished he stepped back. He took a deep drag off the dwindled cigarette along with a word that he had created for just this occasion. He visualized the word - a fiery amalgamation of other words he slashed and crushed together. He let it flow through the nostrils as it mixed with the current of smoke, allowed it to balloon his lungs to full expansion, drain down the sternum to fill the flattened stomach, where it pooled in a whirling vortex at the base of his balls before drifting down into the concrete beneath his boots...
... and he shouted out the word with a blast of smoke right into Crusty Pete's face. A crash of thunderous vowels segueing into the shrieking drone of a giant insect drowned the entire alley until it seemed the walls around them would come crashing down.
Though there was no one around, Adam looks down the alley and mouths an apology before turning back to Pete. The symbol he carved along Pete's forehead was glowing now with a yellow-green luminescence.
"Hello!" Adam asked Pete.
No answer.
Adam stepped closer and knocked lightly three times against Pete's temple: "Anyone home?"
"I'm here, little gutter-mage!", Crusty Pete's lips broadcast a crackling voice that came from somewhere deeper than within himself. The effect sent Adam leaping back a foot involuntarily. Pete's eyes burst open. A foriegn intelligence blinks out, darting restlessly around the alley before focusing on Adam.
"What service would you have me render this time, Adam Last?" Crusty Pete's face distorts with a maniacal smile.
Adam shook off the urge to shiver. He had to focus hard past the fear. For some reason these conversations with the City never got any easier. Then remembering he didn't have long, he wasted no time getting to the point.
"I need a location, an address to be exact. I'm looking for another player in the 'Game', some cat calling himself 'Doctor Ellis Dee'. Can you find him?"
"But of course... and for nothing more than the usual price at that!", Pete droned looking up at the sky curiously at something beyond sight before returning his gaze to Adam.
Adam bit his lower lip and looked around, absently taking inventory of the emptied dime bags and used condoms that floated amongst the refuse.
"Is there something else you might want instead?" he mumbled to the City, rubbing his face with exhaustion and knowing the answer already.
"Plenty... but nothing that is within your power to grant... not yet at least." Pete tilts his head left to right with grinning calculation and continues, "You knew this one, didn't you?"
Adam's contemptuous silence only acts as confirmation.
"It doesn't matter. The price is still the same. What's it going to be then, Gutter-Mage?"
"Fine!" Adam mumbles unable to meet Pete's eyes or the power behind them.
"What's that? I can't hear you..."
"Quit fucking with me... I said 'fine', now the address damn it!"
"You would be wise to keep a civil tongue in your mouth, boy..."
"...and you'd be wise to remember our relationship is reciprocal. You need me and my kind as much as we need you. So one more time before I walk out of here... the address."
"Heh... you know for a second you sounded as if you almost believed that. But very well... 4125 Albert Pike Avenue, Apartment 3!"
Adam pulled a sharpie out of his pocket and quickly wrote the number down across the top of his hand.
"Now as for the matter of my price..."
***
Outside the alleyway Carlos the Chameleon's hand-picked maniac squad are waiting inside a flesh toned '78 Coupe deVille. Big Dan was at the wheel, stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder in the backseat was Bob the Eunuch, Phil Fuck and Never-Know. From their view they could easily see Adam sitting just inside the alleyway talking to what appeared to be the wall. Of the four only Skinhead Dan knew he was actually talking to the graffiti mural there, specifically the image of the gutter punk that stood there in front of a tag he could barely decipher as reading - 'CRUSTY*4*LIFE!'.
"Who's he talkin' to?" Never-Know ventures the question to anyone listening.
"Looks like Crusty Pete." Dan answered after debating visibly whether to do so or not.
"Crusty Pete the graffiti artist?" Never-Know asks after a moment's thought.
"No..." Dan sneers, drumming seven fingers along the wheel in annoyance, "... 'Crusty Pete the Accountant'"
"Alright, alright... I was jes askin'!" Never-Know shrugs and goes back to reading the comic book splayed open in his lap.
The four sit there quietly, occasionally spying Adam in the alley. At one point he gets up and carves something into the wall with the end of his cigarette. A few seconds follow when what sounds like a sonic-boom rumbles out of the alleyway.
Big Dan almost bolts out of the car. Seeing that the handful of people on the street are looking up rather than down the street he checks himself. He catches Adam hastily mouthing an apology to him and shakes his head in frustration.
"Kid'sss gonna have the law here if he keeps that up..." Phil Fuck sneers, scratching at the ghost bugs crawling under his skin, "... I'm tellin' ya, I don't know what Carlos sssee's in him..."
"Well it must be something..." Never-Know huffs, leaning out the window and shaking his head at the sight of Adam talking to himself in the alleyway, "... whaddya think, Bob?"
Bob the Eunuch remains statue still and submarine silent, with his well muscled arms folded across a chest that forces the other two in the back seat to scrunch against the opposing sides of the deVille.
"Thas exactly what I'm sayin'..." Never-Know nods sarcastically, then bunches his face in thought and leans over the seat towards Skinhead Dan.
"Hey, and correct me if I'm wrong here... but ain't Crusty Pete been dead, like I dunno, three years now?"
"Yep!" Bob the Eunuch answers flatly and the shock of hearing his voice visibly jolts Never-Know.
"Whaaa' th'fuck mannnn..." Phil Fuck whines, clawing the rash along the side of his long unwashed mohawk, "... what's some spook gonna tell us that a few hours of bustin' heads open won't answer?"
"Phil's gotta point there, Dan. While we're fuckin' around here, this 'Doc LSD' is out on the streets hustlin' bad magick to every college kid in the city..."
"Everyone just shut-up a second, okay. Carlos wants us to try it the Kid's way first and that's what we're gonna do. Anyone gotta problem with that..." Dan reaches into his puffy black bomber jacket and retrieves his cell phone, "... and they can call Carlos and tell him so."
Phil and Never-Know exchange knowing glances. Neither man says a word from there and bide their time watching the Chameleon's apprentice work out his deal with the wall.
Five minutes pass before Adam comes walking out of the alleyway, around the front of the car and slides himself into the front passenger seat. He sits there sullenly, lost in his own thoughts. Never-Know and Phil Fuck lean forward in anticipation. Big Dan stares ahead out the window waiting. When a minute passes in silence, he growls- "Well?"
Adam in reply makes a fist and without looking at Dan, holds it up between them. Dan reads the address scrawled across the hand and nods.
"Alright... I know where that is." he grinds the deVille into submission with a turn of the key and a stomp of the gas. The car revs up with a cough of the exhaust and before they pull out Dan looks over at Adam and adds - "You better be right about this, kid."
Adam looks over at the skinhead without a word, giving him a look both insulted and confrontational.
Dan ignores the stare, cutting off a taxi and pulling into the flow of traffic. Next stop 4125 Albert Pike Avenue.
Adam lights up a cigarette in open violation of Skinhead Dan's no-smoking-in-the-car rule. The Skin goes to say something, but instead lets it slide focusing on the drive. He takes a last look at the alley, the only one in the car who notices that Crusty Pete's mural - the last one in the city - was now nothing but black soot against the wall. Adam closes his eyes and leans back into his seat.
He reminds himself he had no choice. The City's Dreaming wanted the mural (along with the ghost that was attached to it). Few know that when a graffiti artist dies, a part of their 'spirit' (or Ku, or Ashkanic Record if you prefer) remains embedded within their work. In time they become places of great power to those that know... and can be used to access and communicate with the very subconscious of the city itself. Adam's deal meant that this paticular place of power would be forever closed to the 'art', absorbed into the vast memory of the City's Dreaming... and along with it the last piece of Crusty Pete's work left hanging in the secret gallery of streets and alleyways and abandoned buildings was gone.
As in 'for-fuckin'-ever' gone.
Adam pulls himself back into reality. He's got no time for the luxury of regret. He was rolling with the Maniac Squad now and their target was just a quick ride away. He didn't know what angle this Ellis Dee mother-fucker was working selling Enochian Watchtower Blotter. An invocation, maybe... or maybe just some schmuck that stumbled upon some serious magick by accident.
All he knew was that by the time they arrived it wouldn't matter. The son-of-a-bitch was as good as dead already.
***
To be continued...
From Part One: Enochian Acid and other distractions.
"Hey Pete", the voice sounded distorted, as if being shouted from a great distance but yet arrived at the ear with the intimate breath of a whisper.
Crusty Pete felt a surge of heat run through his body, a warmth that seemed to emanate and seep from the blood to thaw the chill that had seized his heart. He turned around to face the stranger who stood before him. Skinny kid in a hoodie pulled up to cover his face in ink black shadows.
"I know you?" Crusty Pete snarled throwing up his arms with a gesture of open challenge.
"Yeah you do..." the stranger stepped closer, lowering his hood with a practiced flourish and allowing a sharp bastard's smile to emerge from the gloom, "...it's me. Remember!"
Crusty Pete just stares at him, the hostility draining into slack jawed bafflement. There was something about the way the stranger said 'remember' that sounded oddly compelling to him. It should've been a question but it wasn't. Then it began to soak into him with a trickle of thought -
Waking up to the phone ringing. A friend in need, familiar...but no one close. For the life of him he cannot remember his name. Something urgent is spoken. He is told to meet the 'friend' ASAP. An address is given, that he is made to repeat back three times before he is hung up on. Half-asleep he checks the caller ID off the phone: Adam Last.
"Shit, Adam!" Crusty Pete sneers dismissively, "You know how long you had me waiting here?"
"Do you?" Adam replies, lighting up a cigarette and making himself at home by taking a seat on an overturned garbage can too battered to be of any other use.
Pete blinks stupidly at Adam. He's got nothing for the question, but isn't real sure why that should be. Adam stares back with a sadness that easily conveys that he knows the answer.
"For-fuckin'-ever, asshole..." Pete spits defiantly at Adam's visible pity and starts pacing along the brick wall. He keeps trying to figure out how many hours (Days?) there are exactly in a 'for-fuckin'-ever'. Adam watches silently with a patience that just irritates him all the more. 'Just where did he meet this prick in the first place?' he asks himself and then goes to ask Adam that very same question but instead sighs, "... so whaddya wan' from me, anyway?"
"I need information, Pete. I need it bad, otherwise I wouldn't be here."
"Who'm I, fuckin'- 411 over here? What information?" Crusty Pete shakes his head in disbelief. He can't figure out why isn't he walking out of this alley right now and taking his ass on home? ('...and where would that be?' a little voice inside his head asks.
"It's something I can't... I can't do myself, Pete. I need you to find someone for me..."
"Who?" Crusty Pete cuts him off, feeling himself getting more pissed off by the minute.
"A dealer, Pete. Selling some bad shit out there. Goes by the name of 'Doctor Ellis Dee'..."
"Never heard of 'im!"
"You will." Adam says the words low, guilty, a confession as much as a promise.
"Th'hell you talkin' about..."
"Shhh... don't say a word! I want you to Stop pacing and close your eyes, Pete!" Adam commands with a terrible confidence.
Crusty Pete stops dead in his tracks and finds he cannot will himself to do otherwise.
Adam steps up to his 'friend' and with the ember end of his cigarette, begins to carve a sigil directly into his forehead. A trail of smoke wafts off the sizzling flesh into the air, reeking of scorched aerosol and the musk of drying sex. Pete knows there should be pain, he can feel the heat burning deep into him but without it's sting.
When Adam was finished he stepped back. He took a deep drag off the dwindled cigarette along with a word that he had created for just this occasion. He visualized the word - a fiery amalgamation of other words he slashed and crushed together. He let it flow through the nostrils as it mixed with the current of smoke, allowed it to balloon his lungs to full expansion, drain down the sternum to fill the flattened stomach, where it pooled in a whirling vortex at the base of his balls before drifting down into the concrete beneath his boots...
... and he shouted out the word with a blast of smoke right into Crusty Pete's face. A crash of thunderous vowels segueing into the shrieking drone of a giant insect drowned the entire alley until it seemed the walls around them would come crashing down.
Though there was no one around, Adam looks down the alley and mouths an apology before turning back to Pete. The symbol he carved along Pete's forehead was glowing now with a yellow-green luminescence.
"Hello!" Adam asked Pete.
No answer.
Adam stepped closer and knocked lightly three times against Pete's temple: "Anyone home?"
"I'm here, little gutter-mage!", Crusty Pete's lips broadcast a crackling voice that came from somewhere deeper than within himself. The effect sent Adam leaping back a foot involuntarily. Pete's eyes burst open. A foriegn intelligence blinks out, darting restlessly around the alley before focusing on Adam.
"What service would you have me render this time, Adam Last?" Crusty Pete's face distorts with a maniacal smile.
Adam shook off the urge to shiver. He had to focus hard past the fear. For some reason these conversations with the City never got any easier. Then remembering he didn't have long, he wasted no time getting to the point.
"I need a location, an address to be exact. I'm looking for another player in the 'Game', some cat calling himself 'Doctor Ellis Dee'. Can you find him?"
"But of course... and for nothing more than the usual price at that!", Pete droned looking up at the sky curiously at something beyond sight before returning his gaze to Adam.
Adam bit his lower lip and looked around, absently taking inventory of the emptied dime bags and used condoms that floated amongst the refuse.
"Is there something else you might want instead?" he mumbled to the City, rubbing his face with exhaustion and knowing the answer already.
"Plenty... but nothing that is within your power to grant... not yet at least." Pete tilts his head left to right with grinning calculation and continues, "You knew this one, didn't you?"
Adam's contemptuous silence only acts as confirmation.
"It doesn't matter. The price is still the same. What's it going to be then, Gutter-Mage?"
"Fine!" Adam mumbles unable to meet Pete's eyes or the power behind them.
"What's that? I can't hear you..."
"Quit fucking with me... I said 'fine', now the address damn it!"
"You would be wise to keep a civil tongue in your mouth, boy..."
"...and you'd be wise to remember our relationship is reciprocal. You need me and my kind as much as we need you. So one more time before I walk out of here... the address."
"Heh... you know for a second you sounded as if you almost believed that. But very well... 4125 Albert Pike Avenue, Apartment 3!"
Adam pulled a sharpie out of his pocket and quickly wrote the number down across the top of his hand.
"Now as for the matter of my price..."
Outside the alleyway Carlos the Chameleon's hand-picked maniac squad are waiting inside a flesh toned '78 Coupe deVille. Big Dan was at the wheel, stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder in the backseat was Bob the Eunuch, Phil Fuck and Never-Know. From their view they could easily see Adam sitting just inside the alleyway talking to what appeared to be the wall. Of the four only Skinhead Dan knew he was actually talking to the graffiti mural there, specifically the image of the gutter punk that stood there in front of a tag he could barely decipher as reading - 'CRUSTY*4*LIFE!'.
"Who's he talkin' to?" Never-Know ventures the question to anyone listening.
"Looks like Crusty Pete." Dan answered after debating visibly whether to do so or not.
"Crusty Pete the graffiti artist?" Never-Know asks after a moment's thought.
"No..." Dan sneers, drumming seven fingers along the wheel in annoyance, "... 'Crusty Pete the Accountant'"
"Alright, alright... I was jes askin'!" Never-Know shrugs and goes back to reading the comic book splayed open in his lap.
The four sit there quietly, occasionally spying Adam in the alley. At one point he gets up and carves something into the wall with the end of his cigarette. A few seconds follow when what sounds like a sonic-boom rumbles out of the alleyway.
Big Dan almost bolts out of the car. Seeing that the handful of people on the street are looking up rather than down the street he checks himself. He catches Adam hastily mouthing an apology to him and shakes his head in frustration.
"Kid'sss gonna have the law here if he keeps that up..." Phil Fuck sneers, scratching at the ghost bugs crawling under his skin, "... I'm tellin' ya, I don't know what Carlos sssee's in him..."
"Well it must be something..." Never-Know huffs, leaning out the window and shaking his head at the sight of Adam talking to himself in the alleyway, "... whaddya think, Bob?"
Bob the Eunuch remains statue still and submarine silent, with his well muscled arms folded across a chest that forces the other two in the back seat to scrunch against the opposing sides of the deVille.
"Thas exactly what I'm sayin'..." Never-Know nods sarcastically, then bunches his face in thought and leans over the seat towards Skinhead Dan.
"Hey, and correct me if I'm wrong here... but ain't Crusty Pete been dead, like I dunno, three years now?"
"Yep!" Bob the Eunuch answers flatly and the shock of hearing his voice visibly jolts Never-Know.
"Whaaa' th'fuck mannnn..." Phil Fuck whines, clawing the rash along the side of his long unwashed mohawk, "... what's some spook gonna tell us that a few hours of bustin' heads open won't answer?"
"Phil's gotta point there, Dan. While we're fuckin' around here, this 'Doc LSD' is out on the streets hustlin' bad magick to every college kid in the city..."
"Everyone just shut-up a second, okay. Carlos wants us to try it the Kid's way first and that's what we're gonna do. Anyone gotta problem with that..." Dan reaches into his puffy black bomber jacket and retrieves his cell phone, "... and they can call Carlos and tell him so."
Phil and Never-Know exchange knowing glances. Neither man says a word from there and bide their time watching the Chameleon's apprentice work out his deal with the wall.
Five minutes pass before Adam comes walking out of the alleyway, around the front of the car and slides himself into the front passenger seat. He sits there sullenly, lost in his own thoughts. Never-Know and Phil Fuck lean forward in anticipation. Big Dan stares ahead out the window waiting. When a minute passes in silence, he growls- "Well?"
Adam in reply makes a fist and without looking at Dan, holds it up between them. Dan reads the address scrawled across the hand and nods.
"Alright... I know where that is." he grinds the deVille into submission with a turn of the key and a stomp of the gas. The car revs up with a cough of the exhaust and before they pull out Dan looks over at Adam and adds - "You better be right about this, kid."
Adam looks over at the skinhead without a word, giving him a look both insulted and confrontational.
Dan ignores the stare, cutting off a taxi and pulling into the flow of traffic. Next stop 4125 Albert Pike Avenue.
Adam lights up a cigarette in open violation of Skinhead Dan's no-smoking-in-the-car rule. The Skin goes to say something, but instead lets it slide focusing on the drive. He takes a last look at the alley, the only one in the car who notices that Crusty Pete's mural - the last one in the city - was now nothing but black soot against the wall. Adam closes his eyes and leans back into his seat.
He reminds himself he had no choice. The City's Dreaming wanted the mural (along with the ghost that was attached to it). Few know that when a graffiti artist dies, a part of their 'spirit' (or Ku, or Ashkanic Record if you prefer) remains embedded within their work. In time they become places of great power to those that know... and can be used to access and communicate with the very subconscious of the city itself. Adam's deal meant that this paticular place of power would be forever closed to the 'art', absorbed into the vast memory of the City's Dreaming... and along with it the last piece of Crusty Pete's work left hanging in the secret gallery of streets and alleyways and abandoned buildings was gone.
As in 'for-fuckin'-ever' gone.
Adam pulls himself back into reality. He's got no time for the luxury of regret. He was rolling with the Maniac Squad now and their target was just a quick ride away. He didn't know what angle this Ellis Dee mother-fucker was working selling Enochian Watchtower Blotter. An invocation, maybe... or maybe just some schmuck that stumbled upon some serious magick by accident.
All he knew was that by the time they arrived it wouldn't matter. The son-of-a-bitch was as good as dead already.
To be continued...
From Part One: Enochian Acid and other distractions.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2009-07-16 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-07-16 07:14 pm (UTC)As a kid I've always found something magical about cities and when I moved here to Atlanta my 'Adam Stories' just started popping up in my head - a kind of clumsy mix of gritty pulp noir, a love affair with urban environments and an unwavering fascination with the occult. One day I'll have to consolidate them all into one narrative. Again thanks for the feedback.