The White and Black of it

My story takes its first puff in the charmingly seedy, Reno, Nevada, the biggest little city. The bulb lit, blinking arch reads just that, passing through downtown on Lake street. I often did, pass through, as after the long and grueling college classes at UNR I ambled my way downtown to the local coffee shop, Java Jungle. On that particular night at the open mic, I, an androgynous little man with cheese pizza cheeks, warm cookie eyes, a sharp jawline asked a seemingly inconspicuous man, dressed in black and confined to a wheelchair, for a cigarette.

He chewed on one, talc white down to the tip. Parliaments. He, with shiny powder blue eyes, lit way from his dark tan skin and smiled with long teeth, all too happily handed me one. Also, he pulled out a black business card, which he lit on fire with his cigarette. Surprised, I took the business card alive with flames and read the name, Ron F. Dream Merchant. I wagged the card cool to read further, it smelled of kerosene. The back of it read, ABILITY COUNSELLING AND DUI SCHOOL.

“Are you a damned man or woman anyway kid?” Ron asked, after hiring me to be his chauffeur.

“Man.” I had picked, so he replied,

“Well, suit yourself. It’s your life, kid.”

Ron was in his fifties and was so thin, I could see the outline of his bones through his skin. He had long, beautiful light brown hair. It made him look like a female professional. His hands were gnarled into the shapes of curls, and he had one leg. His loft apartment at Arlington Towers was completely wheelchair accessible, and he sometimes walked with crutches with the use of his prosthesis, which I would eventually be attaching to his peachy soft nub, as my duties amalgamated.

Major events of his life, I learned pretty quick. Things that might’ve scared others away. You see, Ron had a claim to fame. Playing bass on occasion for Alice Cooper, in his hometown of Los Angeles. At some point, something went wrong, and he found himself in Las Vegas, operating a full-fledged phone scam in a warehouse with his closest hair metal comrades. There were drugs involved, alcohol, methamphetamine and, everything under the sun. The crew would scam old rich ladies, one man for a million, under the guise of a Christian church calling for donations: Ron, hook, line, and sinking a southern pastor’s drawl.

The feds got involved. They found him in Massachusetts, in an Irish bar, faking a Boston accent. He liked to note, that he was staying at Trump Tower with his scam money. He spent five years in prison, and lost his first wife Melanie, whom he screamed her name, asleep at night. Then years after he was out, attended a California school for a bachelor’s in psychology, while he lost his leg to a late detected staph infection, which he thinks he contracted in prison from a dirty needle. He had married another in Reno, where he opened his DUI school as an addiction counselor. By the time I was working for him as a chauffeur, office assistant, home cleaner, and live-in helper, she was long gone.

He was a practicing counselor, after all, and so in time I had told him about an early childhood abuse which led to an early addiction of my own, at this he replied,

“By now you must be asking yourself, who is working against me? Is it God? Or the other guy…” He trailed off, and his voice spiraled, oscillations echoing inside, hitting the wall of my mind. The other guy. The other guy.

“My uncle’s trying to swoop in and steal my inheritance, once my mom dies. I’m going to have to play with the accounts.” He mentioned one night, playing chess in his loft, which I had previously fully cleaned after he had threw food around with his gnarled hands, ashing a whole pack of cigarettes all over the ground, and broke a glass table with a misfiring of his motorized wheelchair. The chessboard read white and black.

“She’s loaded.” He muttered, “Think about it, in the dream theater of your mind’s eye. Wearing Armani suits, flying to Paris. Where would you go, Anton? What would you do?” A cloud of smoke covered his face, and his voice rung, so charred and distinctive.

“I’d live in motels and write,” I replied.

“That’s not much of a plan, but it’s something. Do you want to be a decent chess player? You’ve got to learn to think ahead. You’ll see, that’s what life will require, too.”

Ron had two black cats, and a parrot named Trouble. In addition to my home cleaning and office administrative duties, I fed and watered the lot, administered medication to Ron, who spilled pills right and left, dropping little oblong greens wherever which he went. I constantly kneeled and picked up his trail. He paid me little, though it could prove to be a ‘round the clock job, especially in the summer months after I had departed from class. He was also strapped for cash, as an avid chain-smoking gambler at the local casinos, so, one week I found that two hundred dollars had been lifted from my account and sent to his. I was hurt, and so deserted him, even though he was my best friend. Some mentor, I thought.

That late summer, he called me in tears and anger, yelling at me with his rasp. He informed me that the parrot Trouble had been killed, had eaten one of his pills off from the floor that I hadn’t been there to clean. He told me he never wanted to see me again, however, a couple of months later offered me a hundred bucks to clean his floors. I gave in, and walked into an utter catastrophe of an apartment, with old pizza crusts thrown about and cigarettes littering not only the toilet but clogging every utility’s orifice, dirty water overflowing the sinks, and the bone-white floor assaulted with streaks of wheelchair mud. I was home. I had cleaned the loft in six hours and fell asleep with the water in the bathtub running, flooding the apartment, and causing a ceiling panel five floors down to disengage from water damage. In the same week, Ron and I learned that he was to be sent for a hospital stay, just as his apartment was condemned for the flooding, because his staph infection then recurred, threatening his spinal cord.

A call reached me from Ron’s mother. Her voice shook, incredibly old, teetering on the membrane of life.

“Anton, please get Ron’s cats from out of the pound!” She pleaded, and so I picked them up right away, as they were thrown out along with the rest of the man’s things, (and some of mine,) in the Arlington Towers condemnation. I took them to my parent's basement.

Ron was released from the hospital with strong antibiotics. He made his temporary home at The Silver Legacy, a fabulous casino and hotel in the heart of Reno. When I visited him there, he informed me that his mother had died and that he had a fifty percent chance of living or dying from the staph. He sent me out for a pack of cigarettes and after, we watched The Godfather on the hotel television. We smoked cigarettes together and took shots of whiskey, and he looked peaceful as he breathed slowly, sleeping in his chair. I lifted him into bed.

It was a week after I hadn’t heard from him that I assumed he had died, I called the Silver Legacy and the front desk answered, ambiguously, that he had "been relocated.” I never saw his body, and I never went to his funeral. He didn’t have any family left to arrange one. I didn’t even know if he had really died or had simply jolted off in his motorized chair.

Weeks later, I wandered into Arlington Towers, to see if they could give me any information on where they had dumped my things. The woman at the front desk said they were long gone, although she handed me a padded envelope with what felt to be a small book inside. Said it was left for me some time ago. I opened it there in the lobby, a hardbound, black leather book. Written on the first page was Ron’s gnarled chicken scratch, peering hard at it I read,

Here’s your new pin, kid. This will teach you to leave your social around! Happy writing. Love, The Dream Merchant.

I had never seen four zeros in my account before; tears crumbled from my eyes at the imagery of Ron, chicken typing his way through the security questions of my bank account on his old black box computer. Sometimes I have dreams, that he is cackling over me while I sleep, blowing smoke into my face. One time, I saw a motorized chair, with a bed of long brown hair in the distance, careering forth. I chased him down a narrow ally, however, he was too far away, and I quickly lost him in the grey city light.