NEW EXPERIENCES
It was a dark night in the city I lived. The lighthouse lighted up, people were walking by on the boardwalk behind me, and the sound of the waves was taking my attention away from everything that wasn’t about lighting my cigarrette. That was happening until someone decided to distract me.
“Why don’t you have some fun on your resting day?” Carmen asked.
“Because I decided to indulge a pregnant girl’s whim and had to go to take care of her on the beach” I replied.
Carmen was one of the few friends I made in the school the boys of the band transferred me. She was the very first person that got close to me without making me feel excluded and we were friends even after high school until not a long time ago, she had a boyfriend who got her pregnant but he didn’t want to take over his responsibility, so he left her. Later, an unknown person gathered some friends to get his legs broken with a baseball bat and they left him in a hospital until now. Well, that day I committed myself to pool his earnings to finance some of the Carmen’s expenses.
“I didn’t make you come,” she replied. “Besides, we’re on the beach Ariel, is it too much to ask you to have a little fun?”
“I guess no, but anyways I don’t think flitting around the beach’d be healthy for whatever you have inside.”
“C’mon, Ariel.”
My telephone rang and I answered the call immediately.
I chucked a towel on Camen’s face and she gazed at me.
“Dry yourself, I’ll take you home.”
“But it’s not even 10 o’clock.” she complained.
“I’ll make it up another day. I just forgot I had something to do.”
She finally sighed and started to dry herself before getting on my motorcycle.
I was riding a chopper, a Kawasaki Vulcan 900 to be more specific. To be quite honest, I was friendlier and more considerate to my chopper than to myself.
I took Carmen to the building where her appartment was located and before going, I handed her some money to help her pay her rent.
You’re all surely asking where the money was coming from to afford a good motorcycle, to pay for my expenses and above all, to help Carmen. Well, the reason of how my life turned into shit was there.
I rode to the parking lot behind Belladona─the bar where I worked. To find a friend of mine in the bar, we all call them “cholesterol” because he was a fatty, miserable ball.
“Did you lose the way or what the mother fucker happened? We arranged to be here at halft past nine, not ten o’clock.” he complained.
“I had a delay,” I replied a little bit shyly. “Start the engine to go”.
Cholesterol gazed at me for a moment and got off his motorbike.
“Come here Ariel, don’t be desesperate” he exclaimed, so I obeyed. “Listen boy, the band’ll kill me if I let you die in your first job, so take this.”
Cholesterol took out a gun Safari 13 which was hidden inside his jeans. He handed it to me and I gazed at him a little bit surprised for what had happened because I’d already seen many members of the band carrying guns, but I’d never carried out one.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“In case you’ll need it boy, it’s yours. Considerate it a gift for your first job”.
Finally, cholesterol started the engine of his motorbike and led me to the working site.
It’s strange you know. I’d done many small jobs in my life like selling stolen items or finding sellers for the boys in the bar, but nothing like what it was coming. The journey was unusally exhausting, but I had a gut feeling that my stomach couldn’t actually describe well like uncertainty in the shape of a brazen void which make me breathe heavily and wrong.
Finally, we arrived to the dock where some unknown guys were waiting for us.
“Are you the coyotes?” the biggest man asked.
“That’s right,” cholesterol answered.
Both men looked at them mutually and after that, they got on a small boat on which they took out two pairs of backpacks. I took one pair; I tied one up to my backseat and strapped another to me.
“What’s inside the backpacks?” I asked cholesterol.
“Drugs,” he replied. “Let’s call them pixie dust, ok?”
Finally, cholesterol took out a bag with several money rolls and handed them to those men. I felt relief that everything went right, or at least, I believed that.
An off-putting noise made all of us turn around and then, we caught sight of a guy watching us.
That guy raced and we all went after him. He ended up cornering himself in a storehouse where we trapped him.
He tried to escape in the main entrance but the fear and presurre made me tackle him and left him on the floor.
“Good one, boy” cholesterol said.
“What the fuck buddy! What do we do now?” I slured in panick. “this shit is wrong, old man”.
“We know what we’ll do boy,” cholesterol said calming me down. “Just watch and learn.”
I was paralized watching the terrified man lying on the floor and without any warning, cholesterol took out his gun and fired him to the temple.
I could never forget that moment. I felt how my blood was running all the way to my face when listening the triggering of the gun just to recover myself when several drops of that dense liquid splashed all over my face. I wanted to throw anything up but I couldn’t do it, so I did nothing but seeing the lying lifeless corpse.
“Shit Carlos,” it was the only thing that could come out of my mouth in that moment, and I said to myself.
The rest of the story honestly it’s blurring to me because I was in shock and felt in the limbo.
Those men took the corpse to throw it away into the open sea while cholesterol and I carred out the drogs to the bar.
Once we were in the bar, everything was behind. We left the package and as though nothing’d happened, cholesterol handed me a wand of bills as payment.
I went home ─a small single appartment with a dinning table for two, the bed above the wardrobe, a living room, a washer machine next to the bathroom and a kitchen.
I came in and left the gun next to my bed. I sat down on the couch and turned on the TV. Finally, I bursted in tears after all. I walked way down the kitchen weeping and took out a bottle of tequila from the cupboard and then, I just drank and wept until I couldn’t more. I drank and weptuntil I fell asleep.