Pimp Read Free

psychos. In one of his less bright moments, Max had felt it would up his cred to speak Spic. You gonna be down with the
Hombres
, you better sing coyote.
    So he got all them Berlitz tapes hooked up, but did a tad too much meth and passed out, Senior Lopez still lecturing to him. The next day, when he did meet with one particular high roller, the lessons kicked in but the Spanish was high classical Castilian and for some reason stuck on odd directions so he kept rattling to the cartel guy,
“Donde esta el Starbucks?”
and
“Mi aerodeslizador es lleno de anguilas,”
or “My hovercraft is full of eels.” Worse, some weird stuff on concerts, as in
“Hay algo mas cutre que hacer air guitar en un concerto?”
Which he would find later meant, “Is there anything worse than going to a concert and playing air guitar?”
    To see the expression on the face of a top cartel guy when you spat this shit in his face. Luckily he thought all gringos were crazy and let it slide.
    At these times, recalling the glory days, Max would get all choked up thinking about Angela, his soul mate and partner in crime, the love of his life, his
una flor linda
. Or, English translation: treacherous cunt.
    He’d loved her, yeah, but he was glad she was dead.
    He saw her face before him now, her flowing hair, her intense stare, and then, as suddenly as it had come, Max snapped out of his vision. He saw Sage’s hand reaching down to him, and—not beyond a good sucker move—Max grabbed the hand, and pulled Sage down onto the pissy floor.
    “The fuck, bruh?” Sage whined.
    Max wrestled with him—okay, pulled his hair and scratched at him. After a few minutes of rolling around, grappling with the wasted hipster, Max noticed an extra-large Baggie that had fallen out of Sage’s coat pocket, bulging with some white substance. Max’s drug instincts kicked in, telling him it wasn’t Splenda.
    “Whoa, whoa, what’s this?” Max asked.
    “Hey, give that back, bruh,” Sage said, lunging.
    Max pushed him away, then examined the contents more closely. Looked almost granular, flaky, like kosher salt. Wasn’t any drug he’d seen before, and he’d seen ’em.
    “Let’s have a taste, shall we?” he said, more Brit for a moment than Irish, but fuck it. He poked a finger in the Baggie and put a pinch under his tongue.
    Holy shit! The rush was harder and stronger than that green drink they once served to him at a Brazilian restaurant in midtown, but that drink must’ve been laced with something because when he left the place, after half a glass, he tripped over a pile of garbage, needed ten stitches for the gash on his forehead. This feeling was like that, but on crack. Not
actual
crack, because there wasn’t crack in this—Max Fisher knew his crack. But something. Was there hash in it? It was a high-low combo all right, like the perfect poker hand. It was hitting him from all directions at once—up, down, sideways. Was he imagining it or was his sphincter aroused? He didn’t know what it was, but he was hooked, like when he got his first blowjob, on his twenty-fourth birthday.
    He wanted more;
needed
more.
    “Come on, seriously, bruh,” Sage said.
    Max, back to his prison persona, grabbed a fistful of Sage’s hair and twisted it, and in his best Bogie said, “Spill it, Sage.”
    “All right, all right, okay, just quit pullin’ on my hair, bruh.”
    Max squeezed tight.
    Squealing in agony, Sage said, “P-P-PIMP.”
    “Pimp?” Max said. “Your pimp gave it you? Are you some kind of hustler?”
    “N-n-no, that’s what it’s called. It’s called PIMP, now can you let me the fuck go?”
    Max didn’t, said, “Where’d you get it?”
    “I made it.”
    “Made it? What do you mean made it?”
    “I invented it. It’s…it’s my own shit. Now can you please give it back?”
    Shit, this kid
was
out of
Breaking Bad
. More importantly, Max was Walter White and this PIMP, holy Christ, this could be his ticket out of Portlandia, all the way