This excerpt picks up from the last one. I’m now referring
to Razor as Neal, which is his given name. He’s caught off guard by Sandy’s
implication that he wants to do more than just give Neal money and let him take
off wherever he wants to go. Neal speaks first:
After last week’s excerpt, there’s a discussion about
Sandy’s offer to set Neal up in training as a roadie with the rock band Sandy
is part of. They also discuss living arrangements for Neal and one more very
important detail that Neal’s not happy about but agrees to. The pair arrive at
the enormous mansion Sandy and his band live in; Sandy explains that before the
band hit it big, they couldn’t afford to live separately and the band’s sound
grew out of the guys spending so much time together, so they kept the living
arrangement. Sandy pulls his car into the huge garage, puts his arms on top of
the steering wheel and drops his head onto them. He speaks first:
Sandy and Neal enter the mansion through a rear door, which
leads them into a kitchen easily twice as big as any Neal has ever seen.
Set-up: Sandy has brought Neal
back to the mansion the band shares. The rest of the band is not home. Sandy
falls asleep and Neal roams through the rooms. He finds a room full of musical
instruments. He wanders around the room, reflecting on the last several hours.
This section has been
significantly condensed to fit the 8 sentence limit.
Part I’m skipping: Neal meets the
rest of Sandy’s band. It doesn’t go well when Sandy says he invited Neal to
live in the band’s mansion—Neal’s scruffy and dirty, speaks slurred English
with an accent, and has admitted he’s on the run from a street gang who are not
afraid to kill. Things get pretty heated, in fact …
(Marie is Sandy’s sister)
Eric made the same come on!
gesture with his hands that Coyote had, and growled “Let’s see what you’ve
got.”
Brian dashed over, pushed Eric back, and shouted “Cut it out!”
Fuck it, nothing would get settled if they couldn’t fight.
“What’s the problem here?” Lennie asked as he came back into the room.
“Sandy’s charity project thought
he was Bruce Lee,” Eric said.
If they were gonna be like that, there was just one answer . . . Neal
yanked himself out of Sandy’s grasp and slipped out the switchblade from his
back pocket. “Never mind.” He swiped the blade across his own throat.
Marie
screamed.
As it turns out, Neal only scratched himself though he did need a
bandage. So now his clothes look like they’d been at the bottom of
a dumpster, his hair looks like he stepped on a live wire, his expression at
any given moment could sour milk, his tattoos add a creepy touch, and his throat is bandaged. Conversation
with the band is still tense.
Eric crossed his arms as Neal stalked over to him and said, “I learn to
stay alive in the ’hood. I fuck up there and I’m dead -- you fuck up here, you
still alive. For learning, I watch you. You afraid ’cause you a lousy teacher?”
“And people say I’ve got an attitude.” Eric pointed at Neal and leaned
toward him. “You want to work with our road techs, fine, but you will not touch any of my guitars, my
pedals, my cables, or anything else of mine -- if you do, you’re dead meat. Is
that clear?”
“We can’t even touch his shit,” Brian said, “so now he’s treating you
like everybody else.”
After Neal’s dramatic gesture, the
band decides to go along with letting him live in the mansion. Sandy and Len
take Neal to a clothing retailer for some new threads; there’s a bit of a scene
when a teenaged fan recognizes the band members, but today’s excerpt concerns
Neal’s reaction to getting new stuff. He’s spent the last 8 years with a street
gang and had no place of his own to live in; the only new stuff he’s gotten has
been stolen and he hasn’t thought of those things as truly his.
At the store, he tries on some
clothes and is surprised when the mirror shows him how different (and, he
thinks, better) he looks.
About the mention of his skin color:
he’s part Latino, not African-American. That’s clear in the full story but in
these excerpts, it might get confusing.
We continue in Neal’s POV:
But the pale shirt made his dark eyes and hair, and especially his
skin, so obvious. Thanks to his mother’s family his skin was lighter than most
of his friends, though that was all he could thank her for; still, there wasn’t
any sense in making himself stand out.
He pulled off the shirt and put on a brown one with black stripes;
yeah, that was better. He couldn’t remember the last time he wore anything but
the same t-shirt and baggy pants everybody in MF wore.
He smiled, then stuffed his baggie into the back pocket of his new
jeans.
On the way back to the store entrance, people turned to watch him and
his new friends. He slowed down. These people’s eyes were interested, not
scared or pissed. So this must be what it was like to be normal.
I’m skipping several paragraphs
where Sandy takes Neal to a suite of rooms in the mansion that he can use now
that he’s going to live there. Faced with the imminent prospect of starting
rehab, Neal tries to tell Sandy that he can’t do it. There’s some back and
forth about that.
Neal slides the baggie out of his
back pocket and holds it behind his back. Sandy notices:
[This excerpt has been modified to
fit your screen--er, the 8sunday format J]
“Hey—you’ve got something, haven’t you? Let’s have it, all of it.”
Neal backed away but Sandy marched over to him. “I want whatever you’re
holding, now—there is zero tolerance in this house.”
Neal kept it crunched in his hand as he said with a dry throat, “If I
give it up, gimme one more day before I go in.”
“It’s better to go today, I don’t want you hitting withdrawal here.”
Neal looked at the baggie and turned it over…it was all the stuff he
had in the world…he hadn’t even brought any weed with him.
Sandy snatched it, strode toward the hall, and said over his shoulder,
“This is getting flushed and you’re going to rehab first thing in the morning.”
There
went good stuff and good money; damn Anglo.
This snippet takes place in the same
scene as last week’s snippet. Sandy speaks first:
“Did you mean it when you said you killed fourteen people?”
Neal grinned and said, “No, but it scares Anglos a lot.”
Sandy shifted his weight, looked around the room, cleared his throat,
and asked quietly, “Have you killed anybody?”
“You tol’ me to leave all that in my past, so don’t ask.”
Funny Anglo, he looked like he stopped breathing. Neal asked, “The band ain’t got AKs or nine
mils in the house, right?”
“If you mean guns, of course not.”
“Then you’re all safe,” Neal said with another grin.
Skipping ahead a little. For this
excerpt, Neal and Lennie have gone out for a while and return to the band’s
mansion after nightfall. They come into the room Sandy’s been watching TV in.
Sandy is the first speaker here, and the snippet is in his POV.
“Neal, you look pissed, what’s up?”
“Saw a car behind us a couple times. Don’t
trust it.” Neal started toward the picture window.
Before he got there, a series of rapid
cracks sounded from outside, almost like a sped-up roll on a snare drum but at
a lower pitch.
The entire window exploded and Neal hit the
floor with hands covering his head.
Glass flew everywhere.
Last week, a drive-by shooting
resulted in a picture window being blown out. Nobody was hurt but Lennie, band
manager as well as keyboard player, is pretty angry. He leaves the room to
answer the phone, knowing it’s the security company, then—
(Coyote is the gang’s leader)
Len leaned in from the doorway and pointed at Neal. “You said we were
safe in the hills, how the hell did they find you?”
Neal rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Coyote got Sandy’s wallet.
He musta seen the address.”
“Are you serious?” Len looked about to hit the roof. “Neither of you
jerks thought of that?”
“Judging
is easy from a distance,” Sandy said. “If you’d been in the middle of all that
shit, you might not have been able to think straight either."
=====> These excerpts continue here.
#
Street Glass is my novel-in-progress. My tagline: Underprivileged 18-yr-old
Latino leaves street gang and befriends white, over-privileged musicians.
