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got all day.”
    “I’m doing what I can.”
    “Don’t give me that shit. What do you think I am, a cretin?”
    “No, you’re not a cretin.”
    “We’ve got to be out of here by four. Distribution is going to take all evening. Bobo, you almost done?”
    “Give me another minute.”
    “A minute you get. And by the way, everything’s been sold.”
    “How’d you do it?”
    “Our customers made presale orders.”
    What did I think? We were moving up, cresting a wave. We’d come a long way in the past two weeks, fueling me with bittersweethindsights about the previous summer. Back then, other dealers had been disrespectful of our enterprise, letting us know we were strictly cannon fodder.
    Bobo had stolen a case of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup from a delivery truck at the Safeway near Thirtieth Street. If it weren’t for him, we would’ve gone hungry. As it was, my teeth were getting soft and my gums were going bad. We were hurting something fierce and so Eichmann got on the horn to Maurice, a dealer who owed us seventy dollars.
    At half past nine there was a hostile knock on the garage door. Eichmann opened the gate, and Maurice ambled into our hovel, projecting his pseudocoolness five feet in front of him like an invisible force shield. It was obvious he was rolling in money. Slim and ethereal, he was decked out in red leather from head to foot, and it wasn’t discount third-world cowhide either. Maurice had on a custom-made North Beach Leather suit that must have set him back a grand or more. He strolled over to the coffee table and sat himself down in our beanbag chair, letting his eyes wander over the garage. He smirked at what he saw, remarking with a fleer, “You homies aren’t exactly living high off the hog, are you?”
    For as long as I could remember, I’d been swallowing other people’s insults. I was a verbal garbage dump. It was phenomenal—someone who had more cash than you had to rub your face in it. No sense in letting things be when you could point out the differences, right?
    “You come over here to pay up, dude?” Eichmann asked.
    The question made Maurice chuckle heartily. His freon-blue eyes glittered at the absurdity of giving us our seventy bucks. He looked at me and shook his thinning pompadour. “Money, money, money, that’s all you pitiful fuckheads think about. I’ll tell you what … here’s some advice.”
    “I don’t want your hot air. I want our cash.”
    “Whoa, listen to him. Let me enlighten your ass.”
    “What’s that? You’re going to say something brilliant?”
    “I am. Check this … why should I give you the money? I use it better than you do. It’s wasted on you.”
    Eichmann started to boil. “No shit?”
    “When I see how y’all are doing, living in a garage, I feel like a character out of Horatio Alger.”
    “Who’s that?”
    “You ignorant sap, he wrote rags-to-riches stories.”
    Maurice crossed his legs and settled back in the chair, mighty pleased with himself. A smug and contentious smile was glued to his thin lips. He unbuttoned his leather jacket, revealing an older-model Colt automatic in a nylon-mesh shoulder holster. He stifled a bored fake-yawn. “You should consider the money you gave me as an investment that’s still in progress.”
    I didn’t know who Horatio Alger was and I didn’t care. At my grandma’s house, we only read the television guide, a paperback book of collected stories by Alexander Pushkin, Bernard Malamud’s novels, the earlier work of Cynthia Ozick, and anything by I. J. Singer. Maurice noticed the poisoned grooves around my mouth and eyes, how the hate on my face made me pale. He said, “What’s with the twerp?”
    Bobo offered our nemesis an explanation. “Doojie’s upset because you won’t pay us.”
    Maurice pulled out a five-dollar bill from his coat pocket, crumpled the note into a ball, and tossed it at me. The five spot caromed off my head and fell to the floor. My pride was so far gone,