The Optimist: Part 2

Do Onto Others As You Would Have Them Do Onto You

Read Part One Here.

Charlie, despite his many misgivings, considered himself an optimist.

By his own estimation, he had spent the better part of eight years leading The Parishioners through one of the most competitive industries New York City had to offer. During his tenure, he had been stabbed, shot, extorted and bitten by so many dogs he had lost count. One would be surprised by the sheer number of rabid dogs involved in this line of work. Nevertheless, Charlie believed his longevity, in a profession where living past fifty was an anomaly was due to his positive attitude and unwavering belief in his own convictions.

There was a time when New York’s Five Families dirtied their own hands. They collected their own debts and personally took the time to shake down the businesses they strong armed into protecting. They ran prostitutes, gambling parlors, stolen goods, and moved enough cocaine to keep Manhattan talking to itself for thirty consecutive years. Those were much simpler days, back when men still believed in personally committing the felonies they profited from.

But that was then. For even organized crime could not escape the peculiar genius of American capitalism: if something unpleasant needed doing, there was always someone poorer, and more desperate, willing to do it for far less.

The old families discovered there was far more money in owning the pipeline than standing inside being rinsed by the flowing muck of it. As such, their violence became outsourced and their risks delegated as well. Prison became an unnecessary operating expense. So too did the expensive lawyers required to keep important men out of it. They became investors in crime rather than laborers of it, leaving the uglier work to neighborhood crews, ambitious young gangs, and men who mistake proximity to danger for importance.

Charlie and The Parishioners occupied one such rung on an endless ladder of delinquency. To the outside world they were a violent street gang and self-appointed defenders of the white race. But this was little more than a convenient fiction. To the Five Families, The Parishioner’s were overhead. An annoying but seemingly necessary business expense, like ordering staples for an office or toilet paper for the company restrooms. So, Charlie lived each of his days knowing, despite all of his immense power, he was truly powerless.

“But for how long?” He thought to himself.

---

A knock at the door jolted him awake. The knocking continued in uneven bursts while Charlie took a moment to compose himself. After spending some time making himself presentable, he opened the door to find his nephew Josiah standing in the frame wearing an over sized Knicks jersey, his typical dark sunglasses covering his eyes, holding a walking stick.

“Shiid, nigga,” the blind white boy called out. “How long you was finna have me out here?”

Charlie closed his eyes.

His good-for-nothing mudshark of a sister had long been a source of embarrassment to Charlie and the rest of his family, but the crown jewel of their collective disappointment was, without question, her son. Josiah.

Josiah had been blind for as long as Charlie could remember. Becoming a wigger, however, was a far more recent development. He was not yet twenty-one. Charlie remembered a timid little boy who, over the years, had slowly begun imitating the succession of Black stepfathers his mother brought in and out of the house. Charlie blamed his sister for that, too.

It was by the grace of God that the only time his sister had ever gotten pregnant, she had the decency to do it with the one white man she ever let crawl on top of her. The odds of such a thing bordered on miraculous. Unfortunately, miracles are not always noteworthy and the disappointing result of that miracle stood before him now. Josiah was several inches taller than Charlie while somehow remaining every bit as physically unimposing. Five feet, seven inches of chewed bubble gum. Pudgy. Red. Splotchy, and blind as a bat. The doctors had said they had never seen a boy as blind as him before. He couldn’t see a thing and vaguely make shapes out in front of him.

“My fault for being late, baby boy,” Josiah grinned. “Had to handle some bidniz before stoppin’ by.”

Charlie pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head in disbelief. “Josiah…”

The blind boy staggered into Charlie’s apartment, tapping his cane lightly against the floor in search of a place to sit.“Motherfuckers been givin’ me shit all day,” Josiah said. “Where you find these lil’ niggas, man? All I been getting is lip form these niggas all day man.”

“Josiah…”

“Shit, Knicks about to play and you got me comin’ up here and shit.” He kept moving forward, one hand out, cane sweeping carefully ahead of him. “Been robbin’ motherfuckers for you all goddamn week. A nigga can’t have a Sunday off?”

“Josiah…”

“Nah for real tho. Where you be findin’ these lil’ niggas, unc? Runnin’ around and shit. That last motherfucker said somethin’ about how his grandma was dyin’.” Josiah finally found the couch and dropped into it with a grunt. “Like I give a fuck!” He cackled by himself for a while.

Charlie said nothing. He crossed the room and sat directly across the boy, watching his laughter slowly die out as the young wigger shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“How are you today, Josiah?”

“Shiid, you tell me. The fuck you call me over here for? You know how hard it was getting here on a Sunday? The 4 train hot as fuck this time of day. It was five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred Hasids on the subway.”

Charlie blinked and stared at his nephew for a long moment. “...Right. Well, the reason I called you over here today-”

Charlie was interrupted by the sound of his nephew’s phone ringing. He watched in silence as his nephew answered it, laughed loudly at something the caller said, contributed what sounded to Charlie like absolutely nothing of substance to the conversation, and hung up without so much as an apology.

Charlie felt the familiar pressure beginning to build behind his eyes. It was a peculiar kind of disrespect, the sort only family members seemed capable of. Had anyone else interrupted him so casually, they would have done so exactly once.

“You’ve been making a lot of noise lately, Josiah,” Charlie said at last, his voice almost unnaturally calm. “Do you have anything you’d like to say for yourself?”

“Oh here we go again. One of this niggas long ass lectures.” Josiah threw his hands in the air before digging into his pockets. He tossed an envelope on the coffee table in front of Charlie with surprisingly good aim for a blind person. “There’s your cut. You’re getting 80% and you got the nerve to complain! Unreal.”

“Josiah,” Charlie said, “I do not want you to think I am unappreciative of our… arrangement. But I need you-”

“Arrangement?” Josiah sat up. “Hold up. This a business partnership, player. I know you my uncle and shit, but we equals.”

Charlie stared at him.

“You makin’ money hand over fist right now,” Josiah continued. “I’m the one gettin’ my hands dirty. You sittin’ up in this big-ass apartment, fuckin’ hoes.” He patted himself down theatrically, as though checking every pocket for a woman he might have misplaced. “I don’t have hoes. Do you see any hoes on me?”

Charlie drew a slow, measured breath. “Josiah,” he said, “I hired you because you are my sister’s only child. That’s what family does. We look out for one another. You needed work. I provided you with work. That makes you my employee.”

“Yeah, and I’m doing all the fucking work! I’m the mother fucking employee of the month! We got a good thing going, man.” Josiah leaned forward, growing more animated. “You loan these niggas drugs. I rob ’em. You get the drugs back. Then you press ’em for the money like they lost your product. This shit is beautiful. What is there to complain about now?”

Charlie’s jaw tightened. He looked at Josiah the way a surgeon might look at a dog that had wandered into the operating room. He wondered how he had gotten himself into this situation. Eight years as a leader, and his nephew was threatening to ruin all of this.

“Do you remember the boy you assisted me with a month ago?” Charlie asked. “Wyatt McFarris?”

“McFarris?” Josiah frowned, then grinned. “Bucket-head lookin’ boy? Dusty-ass yellow shirt all the time?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, I remember him. What about him?”

“Why does he know we are related?”

Josiah thought for a second than displayed a sickly grin. “Oh,” Josiah said. “I changed up my story this time.”

Charlie blinked slowly and exhaled. “You… changed up your story?”

“Yeah.” Josiah sat back, pleased to have the floor. “Normally we get out there, find the lil’ motherfucker, snatch him up, take the dope, and name-drop some other gang to throw ’em off our trail.” He tapped two fingers against his temple. “That’s the kinda shit you hired me for. Mexicans don’t think like that, neither do the nogs and the zogs.” He chuckled again to himself. “But that shit gettin’ played out,” Josiah continued. “We been doin’ this for what, eight months now? I’m runnin’ out of gangs. You givin’ me a new nigga to rob every week and shit. So this time, I told him I was your nephew.”

The apartment seemed to go still around them.

“I told him I ain’t wit that redneck hillbilly nazi shit y’all got goin’ on, so I was stealin’ from him to teach you a lesson. On some robin-hood type shit.” Josiah laughed alone, continuing with the confidence of a child displaying their art work. “I’m really too good with this shit man.”

There was a decanter on the coffee table between the two. Charlie looked at it. It was a beautiful thing. Crystal. Heavy-bottomed. A gift from a man Charlie had later been forced to penetrate and ruin. He had always liked it for its weight. Some objects, by their nature, understood consequence. He picked it up. Josiah was still laughing when it landed square between his eyes. The blow caught the blind wigger square in the face with a thick, wet sound, and for a moment Josiah seemed completely rearranged. His head snapped back. His cane clattered to the floor. and then, came the howl.

“What the fucking hell was that?” His accent was gone. So was the swagger. For one bright and honest second, Josiah sounded exactly like what he was: a blind white boy from Westchester bleeding onto expensive furniture.

Charlie stood over him. “Listen here you blind little fuck,” he said in a tone that had lost all of its familiar warmth and patience. “I pay you to get my dope back!” Seething and nearly spitting in anger, he looked down as Josiah clutched his face with both hands. Blood ran between the boys fingers as Charlie pressed his foot deep onto his shoulders, pinning the boy to the ground. “I do not pay you to tell stories. I do not pay you to improvise. I do not pay you to decorate my business with whatever diseased little theater is taking place inside your head.”

“Man, what the fuck-”

“Out of the love I have for my sister, I haven’t killed you, Josiah. Do you understand that? Do you? If you were mixed with half of what she normally sleeps with, I would’ve done it already!” the little man screamed.

Josiah lay curled on the floor, whimpering into his hands.

“I... I’m sorry,” he managed. “I swear I’m sorry, Charl—”

Charlie studied the boy with the weary disappointment of a father seeing his son bring home a single mother. Family had always complicated business. Blood possessed an extraordinary ability to mistake mercy for weakness and patience for approval. Charlie had spent years teaching himself that affection was best expressed through opportunity rather than indulgence, because indulgence had a way of producing men who believed consequences were, at least, negotiable. Looking at Josiah now, he wondered whether his sister had ruined the boy long before Charlie had ever hired him. There are some trees, he reflected, that grow permanently crooked. One wastes a great deal of energy attempting to persuade them otherwise.

“Josiah….” Charlie took his took off his nephew and faced the window. “Have you ever had…. your ass taken?”

The boy panicked, spinning his head around the room in search of company. A toilet flushed somewhere deeper inside the apartment, followed by the sound of a door creaking open. Faint wheezing came next, gradually increasing in volume until it filled the room with a metronomic rhythm: a labored inhale followed by an even weightier exhale. Harry Strickland stepped into the room, breathing as though he had just climbed a flight of stairs rather than walked the short distance from the bathroom.

“Boss, you have got to do something about that bidet situation. The power on that thing is enough to blow my asshole right out!”

Charlie had known Harry for the better part of six years and still found himself periodically surprised that a man of his proportions could ever exist. There are fat people, there are enormous people, and then there are those rare individuals whose size borders on cartoonishly large. Harry belonged firmly to the latter category. His shoulders were impossibly broad, his stomach projected several seconds ahead of the rest of him, and every movement possessed the slow, reluctant momentum of continental drift. Standing beside him, Charlie often felt less human and more like one of Harry’s extremities.

Josiah stared directly at Harry Strickland in absolute terror. The boy had turned white as milk. “Unc…. C’mon man, why is he here?”

“What in the hell happened here?” Asked Harry.

“Josiah and I were having a bit of a discussion about his role in our organization, Harry.”

“What’s wrong with his face?” Harry asked. “Aww kid, you trip and fall? Lose your cane?”

Josiah had stopped whimpering. Whatever pain he had been feeling had now been replaced by terror. Harry had that effect on people, even with his pants on.

“Harry,” Charlie said, his voice having returned to its usual softness and composure, “I was just asking Josiah whether he’d ever had his ass taken. Have you?”

“Me?” Harry chuckled. “Nah. Can’t say I have. You, boss?”

“Me?” Charlie smiled faintly. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I have.” He began pacing the apartment, his hands folded neatly behind his back, wearing the peculiar expression of a man remembering an old vacation. “Quite the experience, if I do say so myself. The fear. The anticipation. The worry. The pain. Perfectly natural emotions, every one of them. But then again, aren’t those the emotions of life itself?”

He paused.

“What is life without fear? Without anticipation? Without worry? Without pain? You can’t think of this as… inconveniences, Josiah. They are the oldest instincts we have! They keep us alive. They remind us that our actions have consequence. A man who spends his life avoiding those feelings avoids life altogether.” Charlie looked down at his nephew. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

Josiah was sweating profusely and began sniffling and weeping the more and more Charlie spoke.

“Josiah, do you know why we are so effective? Why me, Harry, and Pharaoh are so good at what we do? Why we take asses instead of just killing people who disrespect us?”

Josiah leaned back in desperation and shook his head, looking more confused than anything.

“Because the truth of it all is just too unbelievable for anyone to stop us.” Charlie laughed to himself. “I mean, it’s a perfect system, really. I find people down on their luck. I promise them an easy opportunity to get rich. I have my doofus nephew rob them. Then, when they cannot repay the money, instead of beating them within an inch of their life, stabbing them, killing them, or doing any of the other things people expect from criminals… I fuck them. We fuck them.”

Harry Strickland's breathing had grown louder, or perhaps merely impossible to ignore. Charlie couldn't tell, and neither could Josiah. However, the big man’s slow, deliberate rhythm filled the room like the ticking of an enormous clock, each breath measuring the shrinking distance between the boy's confidence and the inevitability of his ass being took.

“I suppose they could go to the police,” Charlie said. “But then what? Who would believe them? Who would honestly believe that a a racist, good-for-nothing death cult led by a tiny, effeminate little man, is running around the city literally ass-fucking people out of their own money? I mean is that really believable? That racists are bending people over every day to steal their own money?” Charlie chuckled to himself. “It’s too absurd. That’s the beauty of it. Even if you showed them evidence. Even if you had witnesses. Even if every victim told exactly the same story. Ever one would just assume everyone else was lying. Surely something this grotesque couldn’t be happening right in front of them.” He tilted his head “There’s just no way something like that could ever happen… is there?”

Josiah had pulled himself upright, his back pressed tightly against the couch. Harry lumbered toward the boy and, without ceremony, let his pants fall to his ankles. He came to a stop behind him, his enormous frame swallowing what little light remained in the room. It was a shame Josiah could not see the very thing he feared most. Then again, sight was hardly necessary. Its presence announced itself all the same. He heard the belt jingling, and he heard Harry Strickland’s pants hitting the floor.

Josiah knew. The weight of it was unmistakable. A lump the size of a frog caught in his throat as his breathing became shallow and frantic, each hurried inhale threatening to rival Harry’s own labored wheezing.

“So what? You’re gonna fuck me in the ass too? I’m the one who helped you get away with this shit.” Josiah panted groggily. “You can’t do this man. This shit ain’t right man. I’m begging you!”

“Oh Josiah, where is all your bravado!! You walked into here with such hope and joy and… and…” Charlie snapped his fingers, searching. “Hah, what’s the word I'm looking for here?”

“Gusto?” Said Harry.

“Gusto! Thank you, Harry. Gusto. We’re business partners remember! Yo yo my nig! Remember that! I’ve been running this city for eight years because I eliminate liabilities before they become problems. The moment I see a crack, I seal it. The moment I hear loose lips, I cut them out. That’s why I’m still here.” He pointed at his nephew. “You telling somebody we’re related? That’s a problem. It connects us Josiah. People are stupid, but they’re never as stupid as you hope. Eventually they stop looking at the puppets and start looking for the hands.”

“But I’m your nephew! I’m your blood! I’m the same as you!”

“Yes, and you will now have your ass taken just like me as well!’ Charlie replied with a smile and a short laugh.

A knock at the door interrupted the impending ass-raping of Josiah, forcing Charlie to postpone the matter for the moment. With an exasperated sigh, he motioned for Harry to pull up his pants and answer the door. Harry obliged with visible disappointment, hoisting his trousers over his considerable frame before lumbering toward the entrance and pressing one enormous eye against the peephole. and opening the door for the next guest.

Another towering figure entered the room. “Pharaoh! What on earth took you so long.” Said Charlie.

He lifted two brown paper bags in the direction of his boss. “Every Jew in America decided they wanted lamb over rice today. Unreal the amount of them they’ve got down there.” The size of the paper bags looked like children toys in Pharaoh’s hands. “They didn't have mustard so you’re going to have to deal wit…. What in the hell happened here?”

Josiah was still clutching his swollen face. The bleeding had slowed, but the arrival of Pharaoh had only compounded his terror. “Pharaoh,” he blurted, “you gotta help me, man. He’s really gonna do this. He’s gonna fuck me like I’m some regular Mick off the street and not his own goddamn nephew!”

Charlie watched as Pharaoh studied the situation. “Charlie?” He asked. “Is that true?”

“Josiah’s recent actions have placed us in a considerably worse position than we have ever been in before. I’ve warned you repeatedly, my boy. We are not common street criminals chasing next week’s rent. I’ve watched Black gangs and Mexican gangs spend decades building organizations only to dismantle them through ego, noise, and incompetence. They become visible. Then they become dead.” He looked at Josiah. “You are becoming visible.” Charlie turned to Pharaoh. “Surely we all see that, right?”

Charlie had never dealt with insubordination from either of his two most trusted associates. For the first time in years, it occurred to him that obedience was not a condition of employment but a decision they made every day. He had relied on Harry and Pharaoh for so long that he had mistaken their loyalty for obligation. And perhaps, he thought, clapping the cheeks of a blind twenty-year-old nephew was a bridge too far, even for them.

Pharaoh stared at Charlie, then down at Josiah, who was still sprawled across the floor.

“Let me fuck him,” Pharaoh said matter-of-factly.

Harry shrugged. “Hell yeah.”

“WHAT?” Josiah cried, scrambling backward as far as the couch would allow. “Bro, please. Nah, man. I’m blind! What the fuck is wrong with y’all? Just kill me! Why y’all always gotta do some gay-ass shit?”

Pharaoh continued studying him with detached curiosity. “I ain’t never had wigger ass before,” he said, sounding less like a violent criminal than a man contemplating an unfamiliar item on an omakase menu.

The three began circling Josiah as he scrambled around as the boy panicked and screamed. Pharaoh unbuckled his pants and an unmistakable rage took over the apartment.

“This is to teach you, to help you my boy!” Charlie said.

Charlie’s phone began to ring, its cheerful little melody so hopelessly out of place that, for a fleeting moment, no one moved. It continued ringing until Charlie slowly raised a hand and the room fell silent as the little man listened to a voice on the other end. Harry’s wheezing diminished to a patient murmur. Even the apartment itself seemed to wait while Charlie answered the call and listened without interruption. He said nothing. He merely stood there, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the opposite wall, as whatever was being told to him quietly rearranged the afternoon. By the time the voice on the other end had finished speaking, the warmth had left his face, replaced by the careful stillness of a man who had just been reminded that there were powers in the city to whom even he owed an explanation.

“Help him up,” he said quietly. “We’re leaving.”

Harry frowned. “Boss?”

Charlie slipped the phone into his pocket and glanced toward the front door.

“The police are on their way.”