SoMa Literary Review - Making Rent

Making Rent

By Joshua Citrak

I was standing on the porch with Boom and Trieste, the only people besides myself who actually lived at our place. We were passing a cigarette rolled with some shake I’d found in the bottom of a drawer and staring at Boom’s bed. He slept on the couch that got drug out there once we’d found a new one on a curb a few blocks over.

“At least the lice died over the winter,” Trieste said, instinctively itching her scalp where her hair was twisted in pigtails.

I toed at one of the stained cushions, an earwig wriggled out.

“Wait, gross…” she said. “Is that the queen?”

Boom said, “You can make fun of it all you want. It beats sleeping in there.” He pointed with the cigarette to our house. “It’s like a friggin’ bus station. People come and go… I don’t even know half of ‘em. Aren’t you afraid of getting mugged or raped or anything?”

“I’m afraid of lots of things,” I admitted.

“That’s why I sleep in the bathroom,” Trieste said. She was tall, tall as me, though I seldom looked her in the eye. I’d known her only a few months and that entire time I’d never seen her wear a bra. “Locks from the inside.”

“If I could get some cash together…” Boom’s voice trailed off. He made his money by being a third year freshman at Foothill Community College cutting beat bags and selling them to kids who didn’t know any better.

We were silent for a few minutes as the cigarette burned down to our fingertips; we’d rehashed this dozens of times before; none of us liked the circumstances of our home, but beggars can’t be choosers.

“Yeah? What do they say ‘bout hustlers?” Boom asked, coughing.

Just then, we heard the yelp of peeling out tires. It was the Brothers down the block. They were doing doughnuts in a used Buick with brand new chrome rims. While the sedan lassoed through the intersection, a massive sub woofer gave off a gut-numbing boom that cancelled all noise on the ones and threes. In the middle of the burnout, the passenger door suddenly flew open and one of them got out and did a quick dance move before hopping back in.

“Hey, hey, yo,” they shouted when they saw us. The road around them was tattooed with tangent curlicues. From underneath the car wafted some smoke, which smelled the way burnt peanuts taste. “We’re straight driftin’. Come down here and film our steez.”

One of them pointed at the video camera in his hand, hi fived the other in the driver’s seat. “We’re gonna put this sideshow shit up on YouTube.”

Trieste walked with Boom to the sidewalk, and then watched him go down the street alone. He was mumbling to himself over and over, “Well, it's Friday night, ain't a damn thing funny, bitch better have my money.”

Suddenly, from inside our house came the sound of shattering glass. The Texan with bad tattoos burst out of the door holding his hand, which was covered in blood. Three or four others followed laughing, saying,

“That’s seven years suck ass luck,” they pointed at the bleeder. “Like you got better.”

This was the kind of crap I’d been dealing with since Tomb moved out. Tomb was my friend, his name was still on the lease - so they can’t raise the rent, dude - he told me, but Tomb was never around because he had a girlfriend or a wife who had a kid by somebody else and the three of them were living together on the other side of town. No one knew the location and whenever anybody would ask Tomb would say,

“Ah, well… it’s pretty far from the bus line.”

As if only people with cars could hope to escape the problems of their own creation.

Tomb was a giving guy; he’d always be willing to open our home to friends or even friends of friends. Tomb’s girl put her foot down on that shit. So, since he’d been with her, Tomb developed the annoying habit of sending people needing a place to crash, for whatever reason, over to our place instead.

Like the three Texans who showed up the day after Tomb moved. They pulled up in a dusty hatchback and an old Honda motorcycle with no suitcases or anything. They were wearing shorts with combat boots and goatees and I didn’t like any of them right off the bat.

“Tomb said we could stay,” they told me.

The four of us stood around on the sidewalk as if we were waiting for a hacky sack to drop.

“Alright,” I said finally. “For how long?”

“A week,” one said.

“A month,” Bad Tattoos said.

Just to see San Francisco and to wait out an incident in Dallas that had left several people hospitalized. But, Bad Tattoos had a girlfriend, the other, a drug dealer who they couldn’t live without. Soon, they showed up with the girl’s brother who brought along a Vietnamese kid and word that charges were pending.

Fuck, wouldn’t you know it, gradually over months other people showed up like this; one, two, three at a time, with a backpack or a dog on a rope and nothing else, not even a lingering breeze from the vehicle that had deposited them here. Some demonstrated that they knew Tomb by mentioning him doing familiar things, others, it seemed, had a more tacit relationship and laid out their sleeping bags along the walls wherever they could find room.

“Suck ass this,” Bad Tattoos yelled, flicking his blood at the others who were standing near me on the porch.

“Hey,” I said, shielding myself. “What the fuck?”

They laughed and screamed and ran around the side of the house tearing unripe lemons from the tree and chucking them at each other.

“Don’t waste your breath saying anything to those assholes,” Trieste said. “It’s like talking to a broken record.”

Sometimes Tomb would drop by for like an hour, after work on a Thursday. He might have a beer, but if offered anything else he’d say,

“Jeeze, I’m gettin’ a pretty good contact high just standing here.”

Whipped. But, he had the responsibility of the lease, even if the house had taken on the feeling of an SRO hotel. So, nobody said shit to him except, “thanks” and “nice to see you”.

I followed Trieste inside. On the kitchen table was a pack of Basic’s. She fluffed up the smokes and put half of what was left in her purse. She offered me one from the pack.

“My eyes are up here,” she said, wiggling her finger to either side of her nose.

Just then, the Vietnamese kid came into the room.

“At the door there’s a Mexican in a hat and having a fucking huge belt buckle.”

“Tell him to go away,” I said.

“It won’t make a difference,” Trieste said. She looked worried. Her multi-pierced ears were gradients of deep red. “He doesn’t speak any English.”

She was talking about Tony, our landlord.

“It must be around the first of the month,” I agreed.

I went over to the bookshelf in the hallway; on it was a giant glass jar, the kind for storing deli pickles. There was a rule. If you came to the house, whether just to hang out, or to stay for a month, you had to throw in money so that the rent could always be paid. But, none of us who lived at the house had real jobs, though I did work the door of a local salsa and meringue club in Mountain View whenever they had live bands.

“Lemme see your ID. You’re not on the list. What’s that bulging in you jacket?” Stuff like that.

It was on the honor system and therefore most people didn’t pitch in shit. Some even took money from it and most months rent was very short.

That was probably what Tony wanted. For which month, though, it was hard to say.

I dumped the jar onto the floor. We began sifting through the money. The biggest denomination was a five-dollar bill.

“Shit,” Boom said, coming in through the back door. He was upset. “I personally put in like fifty some dollars, in twenties.”

“I’m not going to the door in my underwear again,” Trieste announced.

I stacked towers of quarters and pennies thinking about who I could convincingly blame.

In the front room five or six people who were remainders from a party we’d thrown two weeks ago had their feet on the furniture playing video games and taking bong hits from a multi-chambered contraption fashioned at Tap Plastics.

“Someone’s at the door,” they kept saying. “The door.”

I hit them up for money.

“We thought the jar was kinda like Free Parking,” they said.

I tried to think of a clever way to really insult them. Boom just hauled off and punched through the wall.

“Ok, I’ve got ten, no wait, seven bucks… here’s six and some change,” a guy set down the game controller and tugged out some worn bills.

“Somebody should call Tomb,” another said, which I took as a pretty poor joke; our phone had been turned off for the past six months.

One of them, however, was blonde and kind of cute.

“Hi,” I said to her. “Can you do us a big favor?”

Tony vowed he’d be back later, with the sheriff if we didn’t pay up who’d take us para encarcelar. The vibe around the house changed pretty fast. Even the people who had been sleeping off a week long meth binge had somehow caught wind of the crisis, of our dire need for money and had awoke to slip out the back and wrestle themselves over the fence.

Quickly, it was just the three of us.

Boom and I began going through the messenger bags and backpacks left laying around by who knows who and for who knew how long.

Mostly, I found a lot of worthless crap - clothes in dire need of two washings, cassette tapes of bands nobody had ever hear of, bottom corners of sandwich baggies melted closed with lighters and twisted in a knot containing a few unmarked pills or flesh colored powders - that I hefted high over my shoulders every which way.

“Find anything good?” I asked Boom.

In his hand were women’s frayed cotton panties. He waited until I pretended to look away to turn them inside out and peer into the crotch. Boom neatly folded up the underwear like a handkerchief and stuck it in his back pocket. “Evidence,” he muttered under his breath.

“Have you got anything?” Trieste asked.

“Nearly two hundred more dollars,” I announced, as if it were actually an amount that could free us of Tony’s wrath.

“Ugh,” she said. Trieste counted across the fingers on both her hands. “We still need… a lot.” Despite the bad news, she was smiling. “Check what I found.”

She produced a worn checkbook from a bank I’d never heard of. The name on the check said Tom Boyle and had an address from Watertown, New York.

“He is the lessee, anyway,” she smiled.

“Oh, shit. You are going to the door in your panties,” I said, exasperated. Tony was cash only. He didn’t believe in banks.

“Wait a sec,” Boom exclaimed. “Why don’t we wake up Stew Bones?”

God. In the excitement we had forgotten all about Stew. He lived in the attic, in a room with the entrance folded up and hidden in a closet. Stew also had a job - a welder or a HAVAC guy or something - and he probably had money.

I couldn’t remember the last time I saw him. He traveled a lot for work. When here, he was usually holed up in his room, the windows tin foiled and the door sealed with towels, blasting the Jesus and Mary Chain.

“It was either a few days back or maybe last week,” Trieste said as Boom went to the hall closet.

It was then that Tony pulled up. He drove a big black truck with Brahma Bull decals and a chrome roll bar ringed with enough lights to play a night game under.

Tony parked his Ford facing the wrong way on the street. With him got out three or four others, cousins, in-laws, I recognized a few who’d come over to mow our lawn when it got too tall. They fanned out and approached the house as if it was and animal they didn’t want to spook.

“Boom, man, don’t leave me hanging. Is Stew there?” Desperation strangled my voice.

Tony and his posse climbed the porch, eyeing things over, poking their work boots at the six or twelve half-crushed, mostly empty beer cans strewn about, discussing with a tinge of revulsion Boom’s ratty, rain stained bed.

Trieste put the check in my hand and slid the money into my front pocket.

“I think he’s sleeping,” Boom yelled back to me, banging on the trap door.

“Then come out here with me,” I said. “I’m not doing this alone.”

“Try the check,” Trieste said, wrapping an arm around my waist. “If Senor Antonio doesn’t take it give him the cash, but we’ll be six hundred short.” She pushed me gently to the door. It felt as if my stomach were full of Styrofoam peanuts and my arms were weights on the ends of rubber bands.

“Here it is,” I lied, stepping outside, waving the check. “All we owe.”

Tony snatched the check and flattened it with his brown weathered, calloused hand. A yellow stone set in a softly golden band glistened out of place on his ring finger. He stared at the check for a long time, as if he didn’t even know what it was. He handed it to his closest relative who also stared at it, unblinking, as if he expected it to be written in disappearing ink.

This went on forever - the Mexicans staring at me… over Tony’s shoulder at the check… at me. I became aware of the space between seconds, which were contained eternities, plunging to depths where time was afraid to exist. Then another second ticked away. Time faltered. My piteous thoughts collided in chain reactions of anxiety. I wish I had a good poker face... where was Boom with the money… or at least a dark pair of sunglasses.

“It’s good,” I croaked, nodding to the worthless paper. “Muy bueno.”

From down the block, rap music was being cranked up, a car started revving; the Brothers were at it again.

“See how close you can get without hitting any,” I heard one shout.

Inside, Boom and Stew Bones were arguing.

“I can’t give you what I don’t have,” Stew shouted.

Boom countered, “What about your job?”

“What job? The economy’s fucked.”

“I need that money!”

“Now ya’ll fucked too, baby.”

Tony held the check up against the sky, shaking his head. He said something in Spanish to the rest of them, who nodded, mute and surrounded me in a loose semi circle.

“Ok. Wait guys,” I said to them. “I’m not even on the lease.”

And then, the Brother’s Buick careened up the street in slalom turns so sharp that the front bumper looked as if it were furrowing the pavement. They were doing thirty, forty at least, tires squealing, narrowly missing the cars parked along either side of the block. But, Tony had parked his truck like he owned the street too, feet from the curb. The Buick hooked into the truck’s front quarter panel and tore down the length of the body like a roto-tiller. From the impact, the truck’s rear wheels hopped up onto the curb and crushed an azalea just in bloom. The Buick came to a skidding halt in the center of the street.

No one even exhaled for like half a second.

“Puta madre!”

“Motate, motherfucker!” came a shout from inside the Buick. The car jacked up on its rear and laid down twenty perfect feet of rubber, heading up the street and through the intersection.

Tony and his crew scrambled into action screaming curses, leaping off the porch, jumping the stairs, somersaulting into the truck every which way.

Tony jammed it into gear and tried pulling a u-y to head the way the Buick had gone, but the truck’s turning radius was too large for the street. Tony didn’t care, he jumped the opposite curb, onto a lawn and clipped the neighbor’s Cadillac parked in the driveway. He drug the Caddy ten yards before the bumper peeled off. Tony was gone up the street before chrome ceased rattling on the pavement.

Gradually, the wake of red-lined engines withered out of earshot until there was nothing, just me and enough air to let me catch my breath.

The screen door opened, Trieste was grabbing me, feeling up my arms and face.

“Are you ok?” she asked. “You’re shaking.”

“Where’s Boom?” I managed to ask. That asshole had hung me out to dry.

“He ran out the back when he heard the commotion.” She began laughing and shaking me. I looked her in the eyes; they were the color of the flame from a butane lighter. That hot.

“Holy fuck,” she continued, hugging me as I collapsed on the stairs.

I felt the bulge she’d put in my front pocket and began laughing too.

* * *

Within five minutes Trieste and I were hustling down California Ave. towards the train station. We had our bags strapped to our backs.

“Know any more Tomb’s?” she asked.

“I’ve got a friend in the Fillmore,” I told her. We were moving quickly, crossing California in the middle of the block. “I’m pretty sure he has a back room.”

Cars honked at us from either side, because they couldn’t escape- and we had our chance. From the south came the commuter train’s whistle; it was close. We still had more than a block to go.

“You can buy our tickets on the train,” she said, taking my hand, squeezing, leading me to a sprint. “Moneybags.”

The train pulled into the station as we did, baggage behind us and out of breath. We had just about made it.

Also by Joshua Citrak on SoMa Literary Review:

Torched Off & Just Because You Drive a Hybrid Doesn’t Mean You Aren’t a Fucking Asshole

Joshua Citrak produces Slouch Magazine, has trouble thinking of synonyms for "trying too hard," and does not live in NOPA.