text: I remember. God knows if I try I can still remember, believe it or not. I got a brain like a mine. Memories like tunnels all the way down. Branching and twisting deeper down inside me. But you know time. Beams rot and earth sweats and sometime...sometimes I’ll go looking for a name or a face and there’ll be nothing but rubble. Big black cave-in on my thirty-fifth birthday or my high-school graduation. Dropping out of college and my great aunts all buried together. I don’t even try to sift through it anymore. But if there’s one tunnel that’s as solid as a gun barrel it's the time I spent working repossessions in 1966. I worked for a P.I. I met after I got out of the army. He’d been fingered by the V.A. to sniff out deserters and he came looking my neck of the woods. He had been looking for a buddy of mine. At first I told him to shove it but two hundred bucks and a job offer later, I tell you. The look on a mans face when you walk in on him screwing his neighbours teenage daughter with a gun in one hand and an arrest warrant in the other, it’s not a first day story that a lot of people can match up to. Cortez had offered me the job as he was in need of someone able to walk streets he couldn't walk without being fingered for a bad actor. What he meant by that was he wanted a good white boy in brown pants to vault a few fences, look through a few windows through cupped hands without having the cops called on him every five minutes despite giving a very convincing story about a potential gas leak. I called bullshit on that early on, but didn’t press it as it was good money. But straighten my damn hams if a pair of wire-frame glasses I lifted off my dad and a few ‘aw jeez’s and a couple of ‘golly I’m real sorry’s didn’t make people annoyed or assuaged enough to let you get out of their faces without so much as a reprimand. The glasses thing was a trick I used a crazy amount of times throughout my career. People trust nerds. Or at least feel like they don’t have anything to fear from them or don’t think that they’re going to need to prove themselves to them in anyway. They came in handy in fights, too. People avoid the glasses almost subconsciously. But I went on to work with Juan Phillipe Gavrón Cortez for that entire year until I moved on to other P.I. work under my own license. And believe it or not, like I said before, that time was the most memorable I ever spent working that side of the law. But Jimmy, or ‘Señor Cortez’ as he’d have me call him in front of his wife and kids, I drove him from job to job and did some picking up and dropping off and developed a few rolls of film in my granny’s bathroom and then dropped ‘those’ off on some very fancy doorsteps. Besides catching folks dodging the draft or dodging taxes or pretending they can’t walk. I remember this one time, after congress passed this disabilities list ‘morbid obesity’ was one of the new bright and shiny ones. And over eight thousand new people started claiming dissability. And I tell you, you won’t believe how fast some of those fat motherfuckers can move. Not that some of them didn’t qualify. But there’s nothing like having a fat sobbing man being forcefully weighed by two court officers to check that he ‘is’ in fact over 100 pounds. Jimmy and me and his seemingly endless supply of cousins also worked litigations for this downtown law office. Mainly going over to clients places and not outright threaten anyone, but roll up our sleeves and lean against some doorways just so as to flash the leather of what could be a .38 in a holster. But most of the time, we went into bankrupt peoples houses and retrieved physical collateral to pay off their court debts. People who owed money to the bank. People who couldn’t cough up legal fees. I remember this one job. We drive up to this house. Big. Glass house. And we go in and we begin to retrieve the collateral. But there’s this one armchair. This sickly green leather thing with thin little mahogany feet. And there’s this blonde girl sitting in it. Legs tucked up under her. Trying not to cry. She wouldn’t get up. We were nice about it. We weren’t complete assholes. Generally we’d just stone-wall. No reaction. Insults, spit, fists. We just move along. And so when she won’t get up, I just pull the chair with her in it through the house and load it into the truck. She doesn’t say a word. And we’re about halfway down the hill when she starts banging on the side of the cab to be let out. We do, but she don’t say nothing, she just hugs herself with her bare arms and walks up the hill. Her daddy said it was about it being her mom’s chair. Mother topped herself after daddy lost millions. Not his fault. He tried to break into the casino business out in Vegas. And those boys don’t like competition. That is the most walled of all walled gardens. The guy submits all the permits and cost plans and puts up the money and pays off all the right people and hands out all the under the table cash they tell him they’re gonna need from him, they still shred him. Casino built, slot machines in plastic. All those shiny little chips. They waited until the very last second. And then they knocked down every door and threatened every soul who could make his dream a reality. In three days. He lost everything. And on the fourth day he receives the bill for the demolition of his own casino. A demolition that had been booked a year prior to him paying every single one of those pricks. But I also remember the circus. An entire circus. This sun-bleached high-top that sat outside Albuquerque. We turn up and there’s nobody home. Everything set up for a show. Nobody there. Except for the ring leader. This flabby guy with no shirt on and a pair of jeans tucked into treadless cowboy boots and he’s stacking a bon-fire. Broken chairs and shit. And sitting right in the middle of it like an egg in a nest, is this big green safe. This old-school monster with brass dials. Size of a Datsun. And this guy is drawing on this dunhill cigarette and he’s screaming his head off. “This is what you fuckin’ get!” this and “This is what you fuckin’ get! You bitch!” That. And we stroll in and we ask him what he’s doing and he looks at us. And he draws this bright orange cattle-prod from this leather loop around his belt and he’s weighing it in his hand like he’s going to take a swing at us. And so we reach into our jackets and we flash our pieces and he lets his arm fall. And we ask him again, you know what’s the deal here, collateral’s coming in, legal defence needs to get paid, what’s with all the broken collateral? And the guy doesn’t say a word, he just flicks the switch on the cattle-prod and the sticks it into the bon-fire and the whole thing goes up. These big gasoline gorged flames. And we’re all watching this thing go up. And that’s when the safe starts screaming. Just howling. Like a storm siren at the bottom of a well. And my buddy, he pulls his gun and he starts whipping this fucking guy. Screaming at him. We’re running around like maniacs, trying to find water. My buddy Angelo just stomps the flames with his boots and eventually he just crashes right into the blaze and throws his body against the safe and it topples. End over end, it mashes into the ground. Angelo’s dropping and rolling. I go over to him but he’s okay. My other buddy Reese, he’s dragging the leader by the hair and he throws him onto the safe. Guy screams, the safe was red hot. And next thing the guy knows there’s three guns in his face. I’m frozen. But everybody else is screaming. They grab his wrists and make him work the dials. It’s burning his fingers bad. But he’s laughing and soon enough they’re turning that wheel and they all heft the door open. And flying out is this Orangutan. Enormous. And pursued by a black cloud that smells like burning hair and grilled meat. Teeth like sickles it comes at Reese, the monkey takes a swing at him and clips his jaw and I tell you it sounded like a queue ball hitting an eight! Pop! Jaw, broken. And without thinking, guns start going off. And they just shred that poor animal. And the leader, he’s just laughing. And we don’t know what to do. So we just call the cops. We never found out what happened. Until about a year later. There was this bar where all the cops drank and really all the legal servants had a tab. A real fuck-Irish place. There were better bars but I made sure to show up every once in a while to pay tribute to the other, ah, assholes in my line of work. But I’m there with a date of all people. And everyone’s talking and we get onto war stories. You know, gristly shit to rile up the girls and what-not. But out of nowhere, my date starts telling this story! She was a paralegal at the time and she starts talking about this gristly court case she’s on. She’s talking about this class action type deal. This ‘incident’ at this circus that was in the county at the time. She’s talking about one of the acts. This act they did with a magician and this orangutan. This disappearing act. Magician comes out with a pair of mahogany boxes. Big as a mini-fridge. Crank on the side. And this act is an audience participation affair. The magician announces the trick. Something will be going into the box. And won’t be coming back out. The ape is going around and it’s going to pick somebody out for the trick, right? And he grabs this baby. This little toddler out of her chair and he waddles off with her. And the mother follows. And people are kind of freaked out, but the mon’s laughing and going along with it. The ape sets the kid down. Pats it on the head. And the magician’s upset but the mother’s into it. This young blonde. Country girl. And the magician laughs it off, picks the kid out of the ape’s arms, hands it back to the mom and people are set at ease. Now. The magician briefs the woman. Something personal is going into the box. And it’s going to be sucked into the magical googah void or whatever. And eventually returned to her. No big deal. And the monkey. Is supposed to take something from her. Necklace, handbag, hat, whatever! And like you already fucking know, that ape has got that baby in that box quicker than the magician can mace the damn thing. And it’s cranking the crank and smiling and nobody knows wether to scream or not. Is this the act? Nobody knows. Evidently the magician is keeping on with the show, that’s his job. He’s making jokes and assuaging the mother under his breath that the kid is ok and he follows through with a quick spell and the ape hobbles across to the second cabinet and swings open the door. And there’s a top hat. Black velvet top hat. The magician fakes being shocked, the mother is looking concerned and the ape wears the hat and does a dance before putting the hat back into the cabinet. Door close. Crank routine, back to the first cabinet. Door open. Cantaloupe. Ha, ha, ha. Magician is hurrying it along. He’s talking into his head set, and the monkey keeps running back and forth between the cabinets, cranking and opening doors, alarm clock, shoes, cake, microscope, gloves, no baby, no baby, no baby! And the mother is starting to get upset. And so everyone’s starting to get upset. She’s getting a little too wrapped up in it. “My baby, my baby!” And the audience is starting to make it clear that this act isn’t funny anymore. People are calling out. The magician’s panicking, rushing through the act. And then he declares one final joke. “CRANK THE OTHER WAY!” And the ape does a big ‘whoopsidoo’! And he cranks the other way. And sitting in the cabinet, is this little, itty-bitty babydoll. And he walks over to the mother. And he tucks the doll into her thin little arms. And waits for the applause. Police. FBI. Search party after search party. They never found the kid. As much as one can grieve. That is the best damn magic trick that I ever heard pulled. And like they do with real witches. They tried to burn that monkey. I got a brain like a mine. Memories are like tunnels I dug. If I wanna see my brother’s face or my mom’s, if I wanna remember the first ride I ever bought. Or the first girl I frenched. All I've gotta do is take a walk. Down those tunnels. But lately, the more I try to remember, the more cave-ins I find. I couldn’t tell you what colour my mom’s eyes were. Let alone her hair. I don’t remember my pops at all. But I know. As long as I’m alive, the tunnel down which ‘that’ monkey lives. That’s been cast in steel. If it all comes crashing down. That tunnel. Is gonna be there forever.