CROWS

They’re here again. The light is creeping, and the cats are going bananas, and the cawing is loud, and I can’t sleep. They’re out on the powerlines, a black mass, a series of holes in space. The street is white with shit and—Fuck—they’re cawing again. What was I saying? About the street? The shit?

Jack says if you kill one and hang it up they won’t come back. That he and his brothers used to shoot them down and string them up across the gutters like Christmas lights. He said that I should string a couple up for the school kids to ogle and the parents to complain about on that phone app they use to report “suspicious characters” just looking for a street park so they don’t have to pay fifteen bucks an hour for the community college lot. A rate that, thanks to those same yuppie parents, is all the college can do to not be flattened by some mixed commercial/office building that sells eyeliner and craft ice cream on the first floor and undermines democratic values across the developing world on floors two through five. Jack says the crows were here before us and they’ll be here long after us, our bones buried beneath that same mixed commercial/office tower, our souls in line at the big Mendocino Farms in the sky. 

They’re still cawing. The cats are doing something at the window, likely shredding the curtains in a captivity induced mania that neither I nor they fully grasp. I pull my pillow over my head and consider calling him. It’s five AM. Walmart opens at six. We can get a coffee and the cooldown started on a twelve-gauge. We’ll have the lights up by Friday. Merry Christmas. Ho ho ho. 

I could do that if Jack wasn’t dead now. Not dead dead. Dead to me. He’s somewhere out there, but all that’s left of him here are the fragments, the hangover. One text. “Forever.” Somewhere out there he’s not dead to someone but that someone isn’t me. 

I don’t totally blame him after what happened. Everyone has a breaking point. People like him and I just find it sooner than most. To say the world left us behind makes it sound like it’s something that happened to us. It takes away our agency. We just stopped running, took a seat on the curb, and the world got ahead. 

We did try though. At least for a little bit. Jack got that good shot of that WWE starlet with the Pokémon card jammed up her nostril. And that other one. That quarterback’s brother. Jack caught it right as the kid’s knuckles connected with the guy’s cheekbone. That was a good shot. Kinetic. Loud. Evocative of that sordid something the viewers at home are chasing. When the QB’s brother dies of a heroin overdose, that’ll be the shot that defines his meager legacy. It’ll probably be worth more than the hundred bucks the TMZ handler venmoed us. 

I met Jack at a bar at a hotel after a screening for a Lifetime movie about Corgis at Christmas. I was there on the invite of a girl I met on the internet who had stood me up the previous night. “Let me make it up to you,” she said. She was the publicist for the movie. When I got there, she said hi, then that she had to handle something. I went to the bar. I met Jack. We started drinking. I saw her again, later, bleary, nose running, across the party. I let it lie. 

Jack and I got to talking with the bartender. She was new to the city. An artist. Or an aspiring artist she said, depending on whether you think the title is an attitude or premised on the actual exchange of cash for work. Jack said he was a photographer. I said I’m between things. Jack said, “Aren’t we all.” 

The bartender, Kara, kept serving and we kept drinking until Jack told a woman who turned out to be the corgi’s handler’s assistant to fuck herself and Kara got fired and we got kicked out. We hauled across town to a bar Jack knew where we huffed down an eight-ball with a guy he knew from high-school who wouldn’t stop talking about how his knee injury kept him out the big leagues and couldn’t stop adjusting the tilt on his flat-brimmed hat. At the end of the night, Jack and Kara got into a cab and I tried to go with them. “We should do this again some time,” Jack said. I figured I’d never see him again. 

I was wrong. 

Two days later I met him in Little Kyoto at a burger joint plastered with posters of Japanese ball players and a TV playing a pro league game on low. When I showed up, he was at a table in the back, a wall of empty cans before him, Kara, gaunt and baggy-eyed, under his arm. I sat. He waved for the waiter. The waiter slouched over the service window and pretended not to see us. Jack shook his head and passed me his glass. 

“You look tired,” he said. 

I told him about the crows. He told me about the Christmas lights, the mixed commercial/office building, the bones, our souls. 

The waiter came over. Jack ordered another beer bucket. We drank slowly, in rhythm with the crackle of bats and whispered Japanese. Kara picked at her nails, sending small purple flakes tablewards. Jack sipped his cans, occasionally smiling to himself. When we were done, the waiter brought the check, and Jack reached into his pocket. In place of a credit card, he put down a small gun. 

“Easy,” Jack said. The waiter stepped back, rattling the table behind us. Jack gestured towards the front. The waiter walked back behind the counter. We walked out.

This became our thing. Jack and me and whoever he met the night before—usually service types with long nails and fake lashes. Aspirational underclass types in knockoffs. The city’s chum. He seemed to have a preternatural talent for finding the lonely, the aloof, the tired. Waiters who didn’t make a scene when they saw the gun on the table. Women who were fine to hang around for a night or two then slip away. I began to suspect that the skill had been honed by a long time spent on the other side of the gun, the evenings. I saw myself in him. I hoped he saw himself in me, but feared he just saw prey. 

We ate and drank and stole, still bottom feeders drinking cheap beer at hole in the wall noodle joints and kebab places run by old men with hollow eyes, but bottom feeders that were finally taking something for themselves. Bottom feeders that finally got to eat.

I started following him around on nights that he was working, lurking outside Cobra or Vacancy, cameras at the ready, sharing cigarettes with the grizzled middle-aged men picking at the bones of the influencer ravaged celebrity industrial complex for scraps. When we got bored or Jack felt that nothing was brewing, we would slip down the back alleys and huff powders from bags of pills we had pre-crushed. Jack called the job crawling. I called it dragging because the entire thing reminded me of those scenes in horror movies where a minor character has their legs chopped off and drags themselves towards the camera for a bit until whatever lies below pulls them back down. 

Sometimes we’d get a picture that paid—some teen starlet with her legs open or some blacked-out heartthrob heaving his guts into the street. When that happened, we’d bribe the bouncer with whatever we had on hand—cash or pills or cigarettes—then lurk around the club finishing abandoned glasses, mixing vodka sodas with beer backwash, piling into bathroom stalls with strangers to get up or down. Usually though we stayed in the pen with our cigarettes and fellow crawlers and did our best not to look down at the fingernail marks on the sidewalk left by those who came before. 

My favorite thing about Jack was that he smiled a lot. He didn’t talk much but the way he walked around, staring off into some middle distance, that little smile plastered across his face, it always felt like he was onto something, like there was something afoot that the rest of us weren’t seeing. Something good, that was worth smiling about. Sometimes, sitting in the sun, waiting for the bus, or standing in the pen, he’d raise his chin skyward and crinkle his nose as if catching a whiff of something. 

“You feel that?” he would say. 

“Feel what?” I’d ask. 

“Nothing,” he would say, then he’d smile to himself. “It’s gone.”

It was in one of these spells that we ended up in that back alley the last time I saw him. When our run came to an end. He was agitated that night, chatty, mumbling to himself. If I had to describe it, I would call it a thinness, the sense that he was scraped raw. The thing about Jack was that there was always an element of grandeur to him. No matter what he was doing, he treated it like it was the most important thing in the world, like he was the main character in his own movie, like every movement, every word, every expression carried in it something larger, something that, if you looked closely, could reveal a fragment of the human condition, a sliver of light beneath the door. 

That night, we were out east of our usual drag stalking some artist down from a city where art still matters. We were having a bad month. Jack had lost his gun in a fight at Korean barbeque joint. We hadn’t sold a photo in weeks. 

I didn’t think it was the place to be, but Jack said I just couldn’t feel it yet. “It’s early, but look at that,” he said gesturing up at the sky with the steak knife he had started carrying around. “Something’s brewing.” I just shrugged and said alright.

The club was crowded, but the pen was near empty, conventional wisdom being that even though the Artist dated one of those watery-eyed girls who lip-syncs into her phone camera, the internet still doesn’t care about the fine art types. It was cool and dry and dark, the nearest streetlight broken, the moon not around. Jack and I passed cigarettes while the crawlers ogled the young, beautiful things slipping through the VIP entrance. Jack watched the road, his gaze set on the grey black middle distance. I watched Jack.  

The Artist arrived in a matte black truck, brights on, engine roaring, as if the mere presence of his minor celebrity wasn’t enough to rip a hole in time and space. The crawlers stamped out their cigarettes, jostled, jabbed, tinkered with their cameras. The general admission crowd shivered. He is here, they whispered. He has risen. He will save us. We are saved. 

When the door opened, a thin, gaunt brunette that I recognized as the watery-eyed lip-syncer stumbled out into the sidewalk followed by the Artist. The cameras popped. The crowd squawked and fluttered. Jack stood, hands by his sides, camera still rested on his chest. 

“It’s them,” I said. “Take the photo.” 

“No,” he said.

The Artist and the girl safely inside, the crowd settled. Around us, the crawlers relit their cigarettes. Sober and hungry, I wanted to go home. I told Jack this. “Just a couple more minutes,” he said. Hours passed.  

When the cigarettes were gone, Jack suggested that we go around to the back alley. I agreed reluctantly, too tired to put up a fight. The alley was deserted. Roaches and rats skittered. Broken glass bathed in dark puddles. The bare bulb over the doorway cast sickly shadows. Headlights flickered in the hills. 

Jack walked ahead mumbling to himself, and I began to feel uneasy. He did this sometimes, wrapped up in his movie, his world, his planet barreling around some distant star. But this was different. Something heavier was upon him. Upon us. The darkness creeped. 

“It’s a wash,” I said. “Let’s call it.” 

“Easy.”

“Fuck this,” I said.

I had never seen him look at me the way he did then. A mix of disgust and fascination, like a kid examining a dead animal. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right.”

He started back in my direction. I felt a soft, cool relief flush through me. Then he stopped, raised he his chin, sniffed, and I felt it, a shift, near imperceptible, like the thickening of the air before rain. We were still there but, suddenly, we were also elsewhere, on a plane slightly higher, or lower, perception muddled, at a precipice, covered in broken glass and rat shit, smothered in the stench of tar and trash. When the door opened, I was already in front of him, Jack, behind, pushing him into my arms. By the time I caught him, the knife was already inside, the life already on its way out. He let out a small yelp as I held him, then it was quiet again save for my heartbeat and a soft gurgling. I held him tight. Jack stepped beside me. We stayed like this, still, me, Jack, the Artist, then I let him fall. 

“I told you,” Jack said, finally.

I didn’t answer.

“Forever,” he said, extending his pinky. 

I laced my pinky in his.  

After that night, I never saw him again. It hurt, but I wasn’t surprised.  Sometimes I like to think that was his movie ending. That he hauled off into the sunset. Just him, the open road, the roar of the engine, the bartender turned love-of-his-life under his arm. Other times, I like to think it was just the first act. Not even the first act. The cold open. The beginning of a story. An anti-hero born. 

Yeah. Jack. He’s not dead dead, but, then again, maybe he is. There isn’t much logic to these things. All you can do is watch, feel, listen. Caw caw.

by Graham Hotchkiss

Graham Hotchkiss formerly worked in film and television in Los Angeles. He is now studying business in England while working on his first novel, a crime story about disillusioned yuppies robbing banks in Los Angeles. He lives with his wife and their two large cats.