“Business suits,” said Doug thoughtfully.
“Yeah, business suits. If we get out and walk around in this parking lot the way we’re dressed right now, in jeans and these shitty jackets, the valet guys’ll be on us in a flash. They’ll start asking all kinds of questions. But if we’re wearing business suits, they’ll leave us alone.”
“So I have to squat in a bush for a week wearing a business suit,” said Mitch. “Dude, fuck this. Let’s just go rip off that doctor with a safe full of pills.”
“Pills?” asked Doug. “I hadn’t heard anything about this. What’s this about pills?”
Kevin ignored him. “Mitch, man, what the fuck is the matter with you? You won’t spend a few nights getting your precious little hands dirty for over six thousand dollars? Fine. Fuck it. Me and Doug’ll do it. That’ll be ten grand for each of us. We don’t really even need three people anyway.”
“Yo, you guys, what’s this about pills?” Doug said. “Do you know someone who can get pills?”
Surprised at how easily he was being cut out of the deal, Mitch began to backtrack. “Dude,” he said patiently, “I’m just a little surprised. I thought you knew exactly when and where we could find a Ferrari. I didn’t think it was going to involve a lot of detective work.”
Despite having run a booming pot-selling operation with Doug, Kevin wasn’t sure enough of his intelligence to go into the car-theft business with him alone and felt more comfortable about the three of them working together. He, too, began to backtrack. “Well, I can’t say for sure what night we’ll get a Ferrari,” he said, “but we’ll get one. The plan is good.”
“The plan is good,” Mitch agreed, skeptically.
“OK then,” said Kevin. “Do you guys have business suits?”
“What’s this about pills? Why won’t you guys answer my questions about pills? I know you’ve got pills,” said Doug.
“We don’t have any fucking pills,” said Mitch. “I was kidding.”
“You weren’t kidding. I distinctly heard you talking about stealing pills.”
“Well, if we’re talking about stealing them it means we don’t have them, right?”
“Do you guys own business suits?” asked Kevin again
“Yes, we have business suits,” Mitch half-shouted.
“What kind of pills?” said Doug. “OxyContin? Can you get some OxyContin? Seriously. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been able to get ahold of OxyContin?”
Kevin looked across at Mitch and rolled his eyes. Neither one of them gave Doug a straight answer as they drove back to Wilton.
ON THE DRIVE back, Kevin was thinking about a guy he had met in prison named Eddie Dars. They were in the common room one afternoon, which was really just a huge cell, and as they were the only two white men in the room at the time it was only natural that they gravitated toward one another. Eddie was playing chess by himself and had invited Kevin over and taught him some moves. Kevin had been intrigued by the game. Then the conversation had turned to sports, and they discussed the Steelers and the Dolphins in great depth. Eddie really knew his football, knew the colleges attended by the whole Steelers offensive line, the histories of the coaches. They had laughed sometimes as they talked and Kevin had gone back to his cell thinking, I’ve finally found a friend in this place.
Kevin found out later that same day that Eddie Dars had raped seventeen women. Not one, not two. Seventeen. The guy was a fucking maniac. After a week of jail, this was the first actual criminal Kevin had met and up until that moment it had not occurred to him that the prison’s ostensible reason for existence was occasionally valid. Among the black kids who had driven through white neighborhoods with bags of weed, the drunk drivers who didn’t have connections to get them out, and the junkies who had failed to show enough respect to the judges and police, there were some actual criminals mixed in. This was an eye-opener for Kevin. It turned out that Eddie Dars was only in the minimum-security prison because he was attending court dates in the county and would be headed back to maximum-security prison at the end of the month to serve out a fifty-year sentence. And Kevin had picked him over all the others as a friend.
What did that say about him, Kevin wondered? He knew that he himself was a well-grounded fellow-normal upbringing, popular in high school. Yet in his personal choices he always seemed to gravitate toward the fringes. How else would he have wound up in a car with these two, Continually Complaining Mitch and Pillhead Doug, planning a felony? Was he just like them? He felt normal and he figured that if people saw the three of them together they would see him as an ill fit. But he did fit. He got along with them.
He knew the fact that he got along with them annoyed Linda. There was always something about his attraction to the fringes that had bugged her. He hadn’t decided to grow pot in his basement for the money, though the money it generated hadn’t hurt. He had grown the pot because he knew he would start meeting people like these guys. He had felt that he was about to sink into a middle-class hellhole, and Linda had already started going to PTA meetings. Real PTA meetings. Kevin had thought that the PTA was just a Saturday Night Live joke, a symbol of domestication and middle-class family life, like white picket fences. He hadn’t thought there was actually a PTA. But there was and Linda had found it.
So that was it; he was doomed to spend the next fifty years hanging out with married couples and going to dinner parties at other people’s houses and talking about the cost of gutter replacements and the best way to seed a lawn. Some of the people he met when he was forced to go to a dinner party and reexamine his lost youth were younger than him. One cheerful neighbor named Hank, in his early twenties and dressed in khakis and a sweater (which was almost as bad as going to a PTA meeting), had suggested that Kevin needed to aerate his lawn and spent a full half hour giving him horticulture tips. While Hank had been rambling, Kevin had decided that a little horticulture might not be a bad idea.
He had sat down at the computer the next day and bought lights and seeds online, built a partition in the basement, and told Linda that he was setting up a “workshop” for himself. Rather than buy a padlock to keep her out, he had decided to make her think that whatever he was doing in there was just so boring that she wouldn’t care to enter. She wanted him to have hobbies, so he picked the most boring hobby he could think of-sculpting-and ran with it. The space behind the partition became his “sculpting room.” Linda never asked why a sculpting room required ten kilowatts of power a day, nearly doubling their energy bill, nor why it emitted an eerie glow visible under the panels of the partition at all hours of the night, nor why fans could be heard constantly running in the sculpting room, nor why he never produced any sculptures. His lack of sculpting output could always be blamed on sculptor’s block. But finally, when he had felt it was time for him to produce something, anything, he had gone to the Asian market and bought a raw wood sculpture of an Easter Island-style mongoloid with a huge head. Linda’s comment when he showed it to her had been, “Yeah, I saw that at the Asian market.”
It had gone on that way for months. Linda never asked questions. She must have known all along what he was up to. Must have. He went to dinner parties (when forced to by Linda) and the conversation one night had turned to basement remodeling. I’m going to hook up a high-def sound system in mine; I’m going to get a weight room set up; I’m going to get a sports room/pool room/guys-only room with a bar and a Beer Meister, blah blah blah. They were all talking about brand-name appliances and how great it was going to be when their basements were all finished and how everyone was invited over, and Kevin had only one thought: you guys are never coming over to my basement, unless you want to sample some Afghan sativa hybrid under 320-watt sodium lights. The thought had made him smile to himself, which the other guys had ignored, because they were used to him smiling to himself and never saying much and they didn’t really like him anyway.