Dog Eat Dog Read Free Page B

you. Hanging with me, chasing Evelyn, that didn’t deliver you. Running away from here wasn’t going to deliver you either and at least you finally realized that, that you were just going to carry your crap along with you.
    “Problem with you, Mick, is you think you’re a better guy by changing your clothes or your address. You think your disease is in the leaves, when it’s in the roots.”
    I couldn’t look at him now, so I stared at his boots. Funny, when Carlo threw me out with no clothes on, I didn’t feel like I was naked in the street, but now? Now I felt naked in the street. I always figured this, that Toy knew a lot about a lot. I just never should have asked.
    “Mick, don’t pout. That’s another thing you need to quit. Stop acting like the victim all the time. Get on with it finally, will you please? I’m happy to help you out, if I can, but it gets hard after awhile to be patient with you.”
    I tried hard to stop pouting, but I could feel the face still there. It wouldn’t go away while Toy was in front of me.
    “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Toy said, his timing as fine as always.

Mickey the Dog
    G ET ON WITH IT , Mick. Disease in my roots. Victim all the time. Just going to carry the crap with me. Wherever. Get on with it finally, will you please?
    Finally, it was clear. Finally, something was clear to me. I had to kill the disease.
    “Mick, phone,” Mr. Sullivan boomed. He shook his head.
    “Family?” I asked. He nodded and grinned.
    “I want you to come for dinner.” It was my mother.
    “No.”
    “Please? For me.”
    “Um... no.”
    “Mick, you cannot continue this way forever.”
    I did know that. Finally. I had come to that conclusion. “Is he going to be there?”
    “He really wants to see you, Mick. He says as much every single day.”
    “I’m not coming, Ma.”
    I could hear her fingers drumming on the telephone table. “Well... what if Terry wasn’t here? Would you come then?”
    “I might. Are you saying he won’t be there?”
    She hesitated. “I’m saying that, yes. Will you come?”
    I got a little morbid thrill out of the thought of going back there. But also, I had a need, a condition that needed treating.
    “I’ll be there.”
    Half an idea. When I got myself together for dinner at my parents’ house, I did it the way I did everything, with half an idea. I knew I wanted to look good, to look like I was successful and not needy, but I didn’t know what I wanted to look like. I knew I wanted to stuff it in Terry’s nose, that I got some of what I got from him, but I didn’t want to come in wearing the evidence. So I didn’t wear any of the clothes I stole from him, but I went clothes shopping with the money I stole from him.
    I stood at the door wearing shiny black Doc Martens, the ugliest footwear of all time, but an item they could all recognize. I wore a red silk shirt buttoned to the collar, brown Levi’s 554 baggies, a huge black satin baseball jacket, and matching Chicago White Sox cap. Tiny oval sunglasses that barely blacked out my eyes.
    My father answered the bell.
    “Told ya he’d wind up selling drugs,” he called over his shoulder to Ma.
    She slapped him on the shoulder. “Mick, you look very sharp,” she said, and gave me a quick shoulder hug. She took my jacket, hat, and glasses as I sat at the table. I hadn’t even warmed the chair yet when she started serving. She buzzed nervously around, rushing to the kitchen and back, slapping mushy vegetables, mushy mashed potatoes, mushy boiled ham onto plates. “You look very healthy, you look very nice,” she jabbered.
    “You look very pimp,” Terry said, winging his leg over the back of a chair.
    “Ma!” I called as she disappeared into the kitchen.
    “Keep your voice down,” Dad growled as he started peeling beers off the ring. “That what they do over Sullivans’? Scream at each other like animals?”
    I waved my beer away. Terry snatched it up, nodding, his mouth already overflowing