Cheap women are the holy grail of any a young man's life. As I sat in Joe Odd's Roost nursing a beer and working through a pack of unfiltereds, waiting for Trim and Danny to show up and tell me, laughing over beers, that everything had gone as planned, I thought about the irony quotient rising all around me. Recently, I'd spent a great deal of my life wishing for cheap women, and now that I was in this crummy bar with women being the last things on my mind, a cheap one sat next to me and asked me to buy her a whiskey sour at three o'clock in the afternoon. She was a peroxide vision in a short black skirt, red blouse, and day-old make-up. She looked like she'd sobered up three times that day already, and wasn't happy about it.
    "Isn't it a little early for hard liquor, Mom?" I asked.
    "Look," she said with heavy, heavy effort, as if having to explain herself were some form of disrespect, "we're in a bar; you don't come in here to stay sharp. You want to spare a five spot for me or you like to drink alone?"
    I sipped some warm beer. "I ain't here to drink, Mom."
    "What for, then?"
    "I'm waiting for some friends."
    "Well," she said with a chuckle approaching genuine humor, "buy me a drink and tell me why."
    I bought her a drink. And told her about my lunch with Trim a few months ago.

    Trim and I had lunch every week to talk about our writing careers, or, usually, our lack of careers. Trim was a poet; I wrote a lot of things but mostly short fiction. It didn't matter; we got together to bitch about not selling a goddamn thing and to tell each other we were geniuses, which neither of us believed, quite sensibly.
    We had no money between us that week so we were eating burgers, sitting outside in the sun smoking cigarettes, sucking on milk shakes, feeling decadent. We were both wearing our sunglasses, because, damn it, we were artists. Artists with square jobs, sure, but artists anyway.
    Trim has dyed blonde hair and is a tall, gaunt asshole with nothing nice to say about anyone, including himself. He writes incomprehensible poetry that always leaves me feeling creepy and ill-used, which is why I think it's good. His one rule of poetry is that he never uses the word ‘love' in his poems. I think it's a good rule. When the conversation veers away from our mutually angst-ridden lives, all Trim does is make fun of people, which is another reason we've been friends since school.
    "Harry, that prick," he was saying around his cheeseburger. Trim worked as a video store clerk, making just enough to pay rent and buy beer. Harry was the owner, and as far as I knew he'd been a prick his whole life. "Fucker thinks I don't have anything better to do but alphabetize slasher movies."
    I chewed a french fry contemplatively. "You don't have anything better to do, really."
    He ignored me. "The little shit has me and Jamie working twelve hours each, and he just sits at home and jerks off. I have proof."
    On Saturdays, Trim took off work early and read poems at the bar around the corner from my apartment. I hated most of his other friends: a bunch of dyed-hair dressed-in-black-and-waiting-to-die poets, each of them digging through musty books looking for the most obscure reference, the most idiotically scholarly way to say that you'd rather you'd died before you were born. I stopped by to hear Trim read and we would hang around afterward to drink and make fun of the rest of them, which, oddly, made us favorites there.
    "We shouldn't have to work, man." he groused. "If I could just sit at home and write, I'd—"
    "Sit at home and jerk off. I have proof."
    He tossed a fry at me. "Don't you ever want to quit that fucking job of yours?"
    "Hell, I get more writing done at work than not. I spend too many nights drinking with you."
    "Hmmph."
    I worked as a Copy Editor at a small publishing house. Very small, like my salary, which got me a slightly bigger apartment than Trim and Danny's and, strangely enough, more bills.
    Trim looked down at his burger for a few minutes. "Phil, our lives are shit, aren't they?"
    "Speak for yourself."
    "Blow me. You shlep to a job you hate and spend a lot of time doing things you don't want to do. You waste more time when you get home drinking beer with me, you spend about six minutes a fucking day doing what you supposedly love. Your life sucks, and the sad part is that you don't even know it."
    The saddest part really was, I did know it. I'd known it for months. We all knew it. We were dying inside, the lot of us, rotting away by steady increments of paychecks, health insurance, rent, and cigarettes.
    Lunch was over, but we were still sitting there. Trim was looking at me with his blank sunglasses eyes.
    "Okay," I said. "Thanks for tearing me down."
    He leaned forward and stole my cigarette, which was a favorite trick of his. "You know what we ought to do?"
    I leaned forward and stole it back. "What?"
    He nodded happily, as if his head had come loose. "We ought to turn to a life of crime."
    "Good thing I brought my gun." I said. "We can start here."
    The bastard stole my cigarette again. "I'm serious."
    And so we decided to become criminals.

    Her name was Norma and I'd bought her two drinks. She was staring at me in a way that hinted her headache wasn't quite gone yet.
    "Just like that?" she asked.
    I had given up and ordered another beer. "Well, no. It's not like we just ripped off the burger joint and started murdering people. But that was when the idea began. If Trim and I weren't such old friends, that might have been where it ended."

    Trim's real name was Damien Harris, but when I'd met him in college he told everyone to call him Trim. A few years later I asked him who had started calling him that, and he'd promptly replied, "I did."
    We'd both been English majors, but we were different people. Trim liked to stay up all night drinking shots of tequila and discussing the genius of Frank O'Hara; I liked to sleep late and noodle about with experimental fiction, introducing myself as a writer. I liked to take creative writing classes and tell everyone how much they sucked; he just liked to tell everybody how much they sucked.
    We were roommates for a while, but we couldn't stand each other so we gave that up and ended up with worse roommates, which made us both realize how silly life is, sometimes. Two months after our decision to split up we met at a party and spent the night in the kitchen smoking cigarettes and not drinking. We decided to move in together again, because even if we irritated each other at least we knew we weren't psychopaths; Trim's new roommate had recently searched through all of Trim's possessions without even bothering to hide the fact, and furthermore had grown violent when accused. Trim and I lived together for three years once we realized we didn't have to like each other, and so naturally we became friends.
    There has always been a cracked charm about Trim that made him likable despite his defects. Trim was the inventor and biggest proponent of the Theory of Diminishing Returns. It was the one reason I knew I had to stay in touch with the bastard. It was deceptively simple: don't do anything until someone notices that you aren't doing it.
    It can be applied to almost every aspect of your life: professional, romantic, artistic, whatever. Trim's idea was that if you start doing something because you think you ought to, it soon becomes policy. Wait until someone tells you what the policy is, and you end up saving yourself a lot of effort. While I have never been able to apply this in my own life, it remains a revolutionary concept, and I have high hopes that someday it will change the world as we know it, leaving sloths such as myself behind.
    After school we each lacked the inertia to actually do anything, so we got jobs in the city and found separate apartments, and began drinking. Being twenty-three and employed is a heady thing; it takes about two years for the bills to hit and until then nothing beats waking up in bars and throwing up at friends' houses. Trim and I have hung out so much that we are actually incapable of any strong feeling towards each other, positive or negative. I neither loved nor hated Trim—I merely knew him so well I often completed his sentences. My other friends regarded him as an accident of the Dr. Spock era of child rearing: they detested him for his arrogance, lack of social skills, and eerie tendency to always speak as if he were quoting. My friend Rachel once told me she suspected he wrote down lines of dialogue in advance and used them as needed. The scariest part of that was how possible it sounded. As a result, the only other person on the east coast who knew Trim well enough to comment on him was his roommate, Dan, our third partner.

    "Guy sounds like a prince," Norma slurred. We were getting to be good friends, Norma and I. She was getting into my cigarettes now, and I suspected that I was something of an answered prayer for her.
    "Trim's a stand-up guy in his own way," I answered. "Not many people can get past his bullshit, but if you can he's a good guy, if something of a sociopath."
    "A what?" she asked, taking a heavy pull on her fourth whiskey sour. She had scooted her barstool closer, and I was getting nervous that Norma thought I might be picking her up.
    "He manipulates people, or tries to. He treats people like pieces on a board," I explained, though I doubt she was really listening.
    "Bummer."
    I looked at her. She was maybe forty-something, probably twice my age, and she was canny enough to glom a drink when she could. I didn't know anything about her and didn't want to know, and suddenly felt really creepy about the whole afternoon. I glanced at my watch; Dan and Trim were half an hour late, and I was starting to get worried.
    "That's why it's amazing that he and Danny get along as well as they do," I said, to fill in the gap. I had a feeling that everyone in the bar, all seven of them, was listening in.
    "Yeah?"
    I nodded, sipping beer. "In his own dirty way, Dan's a fucking saint."

    Daniel Quinn was a rarity: a truly nice guy, albeit going slightly brown around the edges in his mid-twenties. Fill a guy with beer and coat him with rejection often enough, and even the nicest guys will wither into something more resembling a bastard. Dan had enough mothers-milk niceness in him to go another ten years before becoming a real bastard, but he was beginning to show bastard tendencies, and everyone who knew him simultaneously rejoiced and despaired at the thought.
    Trim had answered an ad for a roommate, and I'd gone along on the interview/lunch, so we met Danny Boy at the same moment. Dan chose a local Mexican joint and wore a pair of tan khakis, a white oxford, and boat shoes. He shook our hands warmly, asked us to have a seat, and asked Trim is he'd like to order drinks. Trim looked him over from head to foot, and said "Own stock in J Crew, huh?"
    I was ready right there and then to get up and shake Dan's hand, wish him well, and hustle Trim out of there like the good handler I was, but to my amazement Dan laughed and asked Trim is he wrote poetry or sang in a band. "Only pretentious bastards like that dress like you, chum."
    And Trim laughed at that, and roommates were born. We were all supposed to get back to work after lunch, but we got drunk anyway, and Dan told us he wanted to become more of a deviant. Trim confessed he'd once voted but wasn't proud, and I admitted I had a thing for parochial schoolgirls. We were most shocked by Trim's political activities. Hell, I hadn't even known about that.
    I helped Trim move in three days later, which meant I carried one of the two duffel bags Trim kept all his stuff in. Dan had the place (a tiny but well-kept basement place downtown) packed with used furniture, so Trim didn't need anything else. Dan was most excited by the fact that Trim could get free movies from the video store. That was the sort of guy Dan was, before he met us.

    "So what, are you robbing banks?" Norma asked with a cackle that would have attracted attention anywhere but Joe Odd's Roost.
    I had long ago come to regret starting a conversation with Norma. She was loud and obnoxious, unattractive and pugnacious. Add to that the fact that the bar lacked sufficient patrons to keep our conversation a secret, and I was quickly becoming desperate to get rid of her, which I guess is a low and dirty thing to think, but hell, that was me.
    "Do I look like a bank robber?" I asked with a hint of irritation.
    She gave me the foot-to-head treatment, real slow. "Well, you don't look like a criminal at all, honey," she cackled. "So who knows what the truth is."
    I had to grant her the point.
    "Not bank robbers—something a little less violent, I guess. We are just a bunch of kids, after all."
    She snorted. "You're telling me."

    Danny Boy was as Irish as they came, which meant he could drink with the best of them and that he had challenged Trim to no less than seven fights in their time together, and counting. I think Trim stayed conscious long enough to take two punches, once. Trim, who had been taking schoolyard beatings since he'd been old enough to have a fashion sense, took this aspect of his relationship with Dan in stride. He generally extorted large amounts of cash from a guilty Dan the next day.
    Three days after Trim and I decided to become criminals, Dan went through one of the most vicious two-punches life can hand a guy. Within two days, he was dumped by his girlfriend and fired from his job, stripped of his spear, which leaves most men with a vacant stare and little else by way of dignity.
    We took him out drinking after he got dumped to make him feel better, and after a few stiff ones I let it slip that Trim and I were plotting to break laws. Trim was aghast at my lack of discretion, but Dan was hurt that we hadn't trusted him, which melted Trim's reserve. After all, Dan had been dumped by Meredith Simmons and dumped badly, and he deserved some amount of pity. Not only deserved it, but needed it and was apt to complain if he didn't get it.
    Meredith was a striking redhead who wasn't Irish but wished to be. You see a lot of that, actually: Irish is one of the few ethnic groups that nice white girls can aspire to without upsetting their dads, unless Dad is an avowed John Bull. Irish is a popular feel for many white kids who lack ethnic identities but want one; you'll find Polocks drinking pints, Wops wearing clatter rings. Why, I have no idea. I'm half-Irish myself, and I don't consider it my attractive half.
    Meredith was bossy, crass, and tasteless, but beautiful. Dan dated her because he was amazed that a shlep like him could manage to hang on to a beautiful girl like Meredith, but he didn't love her. None of us did. Who could? She began every conversation with "You know what I think," and ended every conversation with "I don't give a shit anyway," and was more concerned with being the It Girl of the moment then with forging any kind of emotional bond with anyone, including Dan and not excluding the rest of us. Still, it's the bossy and crass girls that tie you up in knots most times, so it isn't surprising that when she finally dumped Dan he was ruined for a few days. Deep in our cups, Trim watched in horror as I told Dan that we were tired of selling ourselves piecemeal and wanted to become criminals—at the very least take control of our lives.
    Aside from being shocked, he was doubtful.
    "You idiots can't even pay your bills on time," he said around a beer. "How can you plan a crime? Shall I buy files to bring you now, or should I wait?"
    Trim was indignant. "Listen up, you fucking Mick, just because you can't manage to hold down a job doesn't mean Dub and me are morons, too. We're not talking about ripping off gas stations, you shit."
    Dan hadn't heard the last part. He was standing, weaving slightly, and staring at Trim with small eyes I'd seen before. I looked around the bar and started to edge away.
    "Who you calling a fucking moron?" Dan demanded.
    Trim knew he'd made an error. Trim was no fighter; he preferred to sit in darkened theaters and throw popcorn at kids six or seven rows ahead. "Dan," he said, standing up carefully, "that isn't what I meant, man. I just—"
    And Dan hit him, spinning Trim around and sending him to the floor gracelessly. Trim stayed down. Aside from being a fey poet whose dark side, I had learned, is half-bullshit, Trim had a glass jaw. Dan looked around carefully, and sat down with immense drunken care. After a long, breathless pull on his beer, he glanced at me.
    "So what's the plan, Scarface?"
    I shrugged. "We don't have one. Yet."
    He blinked at me, slow and deliberate, once, and then broke into braying laughter. I glanced down at Trim, then joined in.

    Trim came up swinging two hours later, but was mollified to learn that Dan was in the bathroom puking his guts out. Dan'd had just enough left in the tank to help carry Trim home, and had promptly turned liquid. I was sitting in the living room smoking and feeling myself sober up when Trim popped up, a nasty bruise along his cheek and a wild look in his eye.
    "Filthy bastard," he muttered after a quick search revealed no Dan. "I guess he fled."
    I exhaled smoke. "In the john, reliving the evening. Loudly."
    Trim cradled his head delicately. "You don't suppose he's going to turn us in, do you?"
    I grinned. "We haven't done anything. We don't even have a plan yet, for Christ's sake."
    Trim, in his way, was not convinced that this was a problem. According to the Theory of Diminishing Returns, attitude was half the battle. According to the Phil Dublen Theory of Hard Knocks, attitude like that got your balls cut off.
    Dan had passed out, and in the moment of crystal silence I stood up. "Gotta go, gotta work tomorrow."
    Trim just stared at the floor. "You fucking suburbanite."

    Joe Odd's Roost was a bar with a split personality. On the weekends it was close enough to everything to be a relatively hip bar where a lot of young, promising kids came to ruin their potential. On the weekdays, it was a dreary place filled with a smattering of those who have no potential, or who have squandered all they once had. On Saturday nights its red bricks and old jukebox were charming; on Saturday nights after a few pitchers of beer they were downright homey. On Thursday afternoon with Norma starting to act like my date it was depressing, because I was hunched over the bar just like all the other losers, and if I wasn't as drunk as they were at three in the afternoon, I still looked just like them.
    "You live around here, Phiby?"
    I considered my possibilities. Trim and Dan were late, so I had no idea how long I was going to be sitting there, breathing Norma's air and melting into my barstool. There are two terrible things about sitting in a cheap bar in the middle of the day: sitting alone with only your thoughts for company, and sitting with someone else as pathetic as you are. You just couldn't win.
    I looked at Norma askance. "You picking me up, Norma?"
    A snake-like foot edged along my calf. I fell out of my stool, and Norma burst into cackling laughter. It continued, impressively, as I climbed back up. The laugh degenerated into a wet cough, and I sucked beer in self-defense.
    "Don't worry, pretty boy. I won't seduce you." she cackled.
    I sat and stared while she caught her breath, what she had left after all these years. For a moment I gloried in silence.
    "Why're you doing this, baby?" she suddenly wanted to know.
    I considered really telling her, about Chick and Mom and Trim and Christine and my own stupid little dissatisfactions, but instead I summoned some grim irony. "Isn't crime the great American Dream?" I answered, wittily enough, I thought. Wit, however, was lost on Norma and her silent partners.
    "I thought you kids were writers." she slurred.
    I stared at my beer for a moment, feeling quiet and suddenly depressed. "Well, Norma, maybe I forgot to mention something. There was one more reason why the idea of becoming crooks appealed to us."
    "Yeah?" she asked blurrily. "What?"
    I sighed. "We aren't very good writers."

    There was a party shortly after that, if I recall correctly; but there were always parties somewhere, and we usually got invited to them, despite Trim's tendency to make dark jokes about people's physical deficiencies, my tendency to hit on all the chicks (unsuccessfully, of course, but with a great deal of cheer), and Dan's tendency to kill the kegs. Actually, considering the entertainment value of our activities, maybe we were invited because of them.
    This party was thrown by Chick Parker, who was a waitress at Rue's Morgue, one of the bars that Trim accosted with his poetry sometimes. Chick had no ambitions beyond living in our neighborhood, waitressing, and partying for the rest of her youth, and then getting married at the last minute of her thirties and giving it all up. She was cute, and a happy drunk, and she knew everyone, and when she got bored she threw big parties at her loft and invited everyone she knew, which was everyone.
    I lusted after Chick. She was short and brunette and slim and she had something smart to say to everyone and everything. I couldn't resist. She could tell you to fuck off and make you like it (or at least, make me like it) and very often did. She led me around by my penis all night, patted me on the cheek at the end, and up until we'd decided to become criminals she'd never once hinted that I was anything but possibly the 300th most witty guy she'd ever met.
    Dan, Trim, and I (with a drunk fellow snoozing peacefully on the table) had taken over the kitchen, drinking Chick's whiskey in careful jelly glasses and planning our criminal careers. We weren't very popular that night, partly because someone in the room smelled pretty badly of vomit (my second guess was the unconscious fellow) and partly because Trim screamed "Get out your friggin' social vampires!" at everyone who entered, including (sadly) Chick herself, whose eye I had once again failed to catch.
    "Let's face it," Dan said with the breathlessness of the very drunk. "We're not really criminals."
    "Hell—" Trim started.
    "Wait a second," Dan broke in, "and listen to me. I think we have to be realistic about this. I am not carrying a fucking gun."
    That stopped Trim with his mouth open. "Okay," he said at last, quietly. "Okay."
    We decided to toast this wise decision.
    "Whatever we pull, it's got to be big. I'm not risking all this for small change." I said earnestly. This seemed only prudent to me, but Trim started laughing. Bad music floated around us and the hum of conversation insulated us.
    "Oh, man," Trim giggled, throwing his arms out and leaning his chair back, "he gestures to ‘all this' as if it were a fucking kingdom or something!" He dissolved into laughter. Dan joined him, cackling cheerfully.
    "Let's face it, chum," Trim said after a few moments, wiping his eyes. "You ain't risking a goddamn thing."
    "No, not yet, anyway," I replied blandly. "We don't even have a goddamn plan."
    But we would, very soon.

     Dan had worked in the accounting department of a big corporation because he had never had an ambition for anything in particular, and his low-key nihilism had led him straight into cubicle hell. It was the sort of place where they let you wear jeans one day a week and that was supposed to be the cheese in the trap.
    Every week, Dan got a memo explaining some detail of the rules. They always had to keep explaining the details, because people kept finding ways to get around them, loopholes. I imagined, hearing Dan talk, that his company's dress code-slash-behavior guidelines now filled several buildings rented just for that purpose, probably in Jersey. In giddier moments, Dan drew amusing doodles depicting his bosses as Nazis.
    We only worked about eight blocks apart, really, in midtown, so after I'd gotten to know him a little the inevitable polite lunch was suggested. The day we had planned it, Dan was really busy but didn't want to cancel on me (me being such scintillating company, you see) and we ended up eating take-out in his company's lunch room, which was more depressing than it sounds, believe it or not. It was big and roomy and terminably empty and no matter how many people sat in it like little poison islands of silence it didn't fill up. You could have people sitting in the sink it was so fucking crowded and it would still feel empty. It was white and chill and sterile, and Dan and I hardly talked the whole lunch because we didn't feel like we could. I shoveled shredded beef in garlic sauce into my gut, thanked him listlessly, and ran for my life.
    Dan hated his job more than I hated mine, more than Trim hated his, because Dan had nothing else. I could feel it as we ate our grim lunch that day: Dan hated it because that was him, that was what defined him. Dan had been potty-trained to always have a good job and to always be working hard at it. He was eating shit every day of his life and he was starting to get a taste for it. And then he got fired, and it was like the Bastards had even taken that away from him. No wonder he became the leader of our little gang.

    They were an hour late, and I was losing my small store of smalltalk. Norma had glommed six stiff drinks off me and was losing interest in me anyway since I'd made no move to buy her a seventh. The place was starting to fill up with the slightly less desperate after-work cocktail crowd, the sort of people who like to start off their grim little evenings with a few drinks. A suit and tie popped in, and I knew we were about an hour away from busy.
    I had half a cigarette left, burning effortlessly in my hand, delicate smoke curling around my fingers and rising to the ceiling to mix with smoke stains from a million wasted afternoons, a million endless nights. In that half cigarette, I thought

we got caught we're all going to jail and my only option right now is where do they catch me, in front of my family, my friends, my coworkers or in the privacy with some small amount of dignity or maybe in action, making the proverbial break for it, though lord knows I haven't got the slightest idea where people make a break for

I can't go back to that job, I can't go back to breathless dashes for nine o'clock and bitter coffee and stupid gossip and hungover status reports and ID cards and dress codes and endless streams of paper paper paper I used to love paper so much it used to be my foil, my canvas, and now its just what I do I couldn't go back there and suck it up, I was bloated on suck already I just couldn't do it

where the fuck are they

too many people in this fucking bar I'd been here sixty or seventy billion Friday nights I once even got lucky in here with that girl Sharon or Sherry or something who came in and came on to me when her boyfriend pissed her off and I bought her kamikazes and we started making out and when her boyfriend called her a cunt she decided to fuck me in revenge and I remember not liking the feeling not that it stopped me

I can't go to jail

oh shit what if someone I know shows up what the hell were we thinking meeting in a place we've been before and might be known at Jesus Christ we're morons no wonder it all fucking fell apart

Christ I think they're watering down the beer in here anyway

I never noticed all the pictures on the walls here I wonder if those are real people or not

and then the cigarette was done, down to the filter, and I exhaled smoke, tossed a fiver onto the bar, and stood up to leave. We hadn't made a plan "B," so I made one up on the spot: get the hell out of there and practice amnesia.
    I walked outside, and the sudden sunlight hit me hard and closed my eyes. I stood there blinking for a moment, then started to run.
 
 

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