To Walk Alone Beside Myself
“Don’t be ridiculous, Ma, course you gotta take it. Don’t be stupid.”
“I’ll be stupid if I wanna be stupid! I’m old, we’re allowed to be stupid!”
“You ain’t that old, Ma, come on. You take the pill, you ain’t that old, that’s for sure. You could live another—”
“So is this pill gonna make me young again? Is it gonna wipe these wrinkles off my face, make me look like Alessandra Mastrionari again?”
“You look beautiful, Ma, you barely aged a day since I was a kid!”
“Is it gonna make me stop forgetting what time my shows come on? I can’t remember anymore without looking at the T.V. Guide every night.”
“They ain’t gonna stop making the T.V. Guide, Ma, you can just look.”
“The way you don’t answer my questions makes me know what the answers are, Francesco. I’m not gonna be a broken down old lady forever, better God should take me now and spare me the indignity. Forget about it.”
“I’m not gonna forget it, Ma, you gotta take the pill. You could live an extra hundred years, maybe two hundred. You could see your great-grandchildren grow up and get married and have babies! Can you imagine?”
“They won’t have time for an old lady like me.”
“Of course they will!”
“Don’t contradict me, Francesco, I’m your mother.”
*****
Frank Tochutti—nobody but his mother called him Francesco unless they wanted a beating—was not, in fact, a wise guy. He wasn’t mobbed up, he didn’t hang hang around with made guys, and zero percent of his income came from illicit sources. He owned and operated three laundromats, two all-night diners, and two auto body shops in the greater Dallas Metro area. Each of the businesses were consistently profitable, and despite their cash nature making it easy and natural to engage in some money laundering or related crimes, Frank didn’t find the juice worth the squeeze of possibly losing the businesses and his excellent living altogether, and so he kept them clean, saying things like “nobody ever went broke taking a profit” when someone would approach him and renew the temptation to get dirty, which happened regularly.
He did, however, adopt many of the affectations and mannerisms of a wise guy. He certainly looked the part, with his olive skin and voluminous, jet-black hair, but he accentuated this by dressing in velour track suits with shiny white sneakers, or silk shirts and leather jackets that cost more than a cheap car. He concealed-carried a Colt Cobra, practiced with it three times a week at the range, and delivered enough beatings to attempted thieves and general assholes that he figured one day he’d have to shoot somebody looking for some payback.
He’d married a girl named Vicki Golazzo, who he’d met at a bar during his lone semester of community college. She was wild and wore too much makeup and he proposed six weeks later, dropped out of college to get rich, and never looked back. She’d given him two babies even though she admitted she didn’t really want to be a mother, she pushed him to be much more successful than he’d otherwise have cared about, and because of those two facts he’d basically accepted that she was going to be a pain in his ass the rest of his life, recognition of which fact did not help her general attitude in the slightest.
Frank also had a goomah, the ultimate status symbol among mobbed up types, although as an additional pretension, Frank never referred to her that way. His goomah was also named Vicki, Vicki B to his wife’s Vicki T. Vicki B was twenty years his junior and cocaine skinny, hot as a pistol and still thought she was hotter than that, attracted to his gangster persona but looking to better deal him at a moment’s notice. She had a guy on the side, Jimmy, who was closer to her age, not rich yet but supposedly up and coming in the Cannabis industry. Frank knew that Jimmy existed, and of course hadn’t given any sort of actual approval of the situation, but he didn’t check her phone and in general made only half-hearted efforts to keep track of her specific whereabouts, because in the end, he wasn’t a gangster and wasn’t crazy.
His father had restocked vending machines, and now he had an empire, clearing high six figures and hiding a bunch of the cash from the federal government such that he paid a very low effective tax rate indeed, still getting his dick wet by way of objectively attractive women on a regular basis at the ripe age of 48, living on his own terms and with enough cash to buy himself whatever respect he cared to command, politically incoherent and unbothered, getting a little fatter every year and telling himself he was aging gracefully, cognitively dissonant, immoral and getting away with it, miscreant and richly rewarded, hungry for more with no real plan for what to do when he got there, just ready to expand for expansion’s sake and optimistic about the future. So, on the contrary to crazy, he was the American Dream made flesh.
In other words, he was a miserable fuck on the verge of a breakdown.
*
“She won’t fuckin’ do it, she won’t take the pill.” Frank was naked in bed with Vicki B, bitching about his mother. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
“Why the fuck you gotta do anything? Let her do what she wants!”
“Yeah, well she ain’t your mother.”
“I don’t give a shit if my mother lives or dies.” Vicki B lit a cigarette as she says this, turning slightly away to hide the smile that says she knows she’s provoking him and enjoys doing it.
“Hey! You wanna talk that way about your mother, what’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t like my fucking mother, I’d have thought that was obvious.”
“Well, I like my mother.”
“I don’t know why, all you ever do is bitch about her.”
“Ho! Enough!”
“You got me naked in bed, you wanna talk about your mother?”
“Excuse me for havin’ a fuckin’ emotion!”
“You gonna have another hard on any time soon?” She spread her legs under the blanket, grabbed his hand, and started to use his fingers to play with herself. “Cause I’m ready to go again.”
“Jesus!” Frank yanked his hand away. “There’s somethin’ fuckin’ wrong with you, Vicki. I’m supposed to be the one making it all about sex. Ain’t you supposed to love cryin’ or whatever?”
“You want me to get more emotional?”
“I’m tryin’ to have a fuckin’ conversation here!”
“Fine, when are you gonna tell me I need to take the pill?”
“What?” Frank senses danger, like a train conductor noticing something shiny on the track, but he can’t slow the train down in nearly enough time to avoid derailing if that’s what’s going to happen.
“You’re so worried about your fucking mother living like a half-dying old lady for another hundred years, but what about me? I could live three or four hundred more, right? And I could look like this for most of it! So what about me? Why aren't you so concerned about getting me to take it?”
“For Christ’s sake, Vicki, you got plenty of time—“
“I don’t wanna get any older, Frank! Do you want me to get any older?”
Frank looks at her. There’s not a wrinkle on her, even approaching thirty, but if he says he doesn’t care if she gets older, he might not survive the fallout, even with his trusty Colt in his jacket on the floor beside him. Vicki B hates bullshit above all else.
“I fucking knew it!” She stubs out her cigarette and gets out of bed. “You don’t want me around that long!”
“Come on, Vicki! That’s not—“
“No, fuck you, Frank, you come over here, you can hardly get it up to fuck me ‘cause you’re so in your head about your mother, and then you insult me for the cherry on the sundae. I’ve had enough for today. Go home to your wife. I bet you’ll make sure *she* takes the pill!”
*
Frank, indeed, had gotten a dose for his wife. He hadn’t talked to her about it yet, but he’d gotten one, and he hadn’t gotten one for Vicki. He hadn’t really thought about it, he’d just done it that way. They were expensive, and he was starting with the oldest people he cared deeply for, is what he’d have told himself if he’d bothered to justify it internally. But he hadn’t.
He stopped by his office to shower and pick up the day’s cash skim, as was his habit, and then went home to find the house quiet anyway, both his teenaged children up in their rooms and Vicki T out at some social obligation she’d mercifully left him out of. He went down to his man-cave on the basement level, opened up the large safe hidden behind the bar, and added what amounted to a few thousand dollars in cash to the half a million already sitting there waiting to be spent. Looking at the money was one of the few things that made him feel unadulteratedly good. The cash didn’t ask questions, it didn’t have needs, it just sat there and held energy, potential he could unleash at a moment of his choosing and that would never age or change without his permission.
Frank poured himself a drink, leaving the safe open to stare at the money some more. He imagined how big that pile could get in a hundred years, or two hundred, and how good the technology could get, to the point that he might be staring at the pile with eyes that work better than they did at that moment, a trimmer waistline, hell maybe a bigger dick and a nicer goomah.
It suddenly clicked into place for him why he hadn’t gotten a pill secured for Vicki B; The future felt much more open, with many more possibilities, than it had just a few short weeks ago.
*
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” Vicki T was ladling lukewarm Chinese food out of single use Tupperware onto plates that had cost Frank $50 each for some unexplainable reason. She had her back to him, and didn’t seem to miss a beat when he told her about the pill and the life extension.
“Think about it? What’s to think about? Did you hear me?”
“We’re standing in a quiet kitchen together, you think I can’t hear you?”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is I wanna think about it, that’s the problem!” She finished emptying the container of Moo Goo Gai Pan, and tossed it down into the sink with enough force that oyster sauce shot up and across the counter and hand-laid tile backsplash.
“What’s to think about? It’s free life! You don’t wanna live four hundred years?”
“Not if I’m not allowed to think about it first, I don’t!”
“We’re not gettin’ any younger, Vicki, we need to slow the aging process as soon as possible.”
“Well that’s the problem, maybe I’m already too old. Maybe I don’t wanna wander around for two hundred years all wrinkly looking at all the young girls with their smooth skin and their attitudes.”
“Wait a hundred years, they’ll invent new surgeries or whatever that’ll make you look however you want!”
“So then I’ll look the same age as our kids?!”
“What?”
“We’re not gonna give them the pill this week, are we? At sixteen and thirteen, so they don’t age? We’re gonna stop getting older ourselves, but they’re gonna catch up to us, and then they’re gonna freeze at some age where they’re closer to us than they could be naturally. Ew.”
“Don’t overthink this.”
“But then for most of that time we’re gonna be old together, is that the idea? Are we gonna be two hundred and they’ll be a hundred and seventy? It’s unnatural! I don’t think it’s for me.”
“Has everybody gone fuckin’ crazy?!”
“Everybody? Who else did you tell about this before me?”
“My mother!” Frank could see that his lack of any hesitation in spitting out that response made Vicki T more suspicious than an actual hesitation would have. She didn’t know about Vicki B, or at least he didn’t think she did, but she knew Frank better than anybody, plenty well enough to feel her general suspicion was justified.
“Marone, your mother also? You want me to put up with two hundred more years of your mother? You’re moving me in the wrong direction here!”
“She won’t live two hundred more even with the pill. Another hundred, tops.”
“Oh another hundred, I can’t wait then. Where do I sign up?”
*
The pills were due to arrive in one month, one each for him, his mother, and his wife. He ordered one for Vicki B at her insistence, but it would not arrive until a week after the initial set of three. Vicki B discovered this, and continued to complain both in person and via text message about being what she called a “second cash citizen”, which even the woefully undereducated Frank knew wasn’t the right way to say what she was trying to say, but which he did not point out to her was incorrect because he didn’t want to make the situation worse.
Frank had never been worried that Vicki B would tell his wife about their relationship, and he still wasn’t worried about that. There was too much selflessness to it. It would be too close to Vicki B doing Vicki T a favor, and that just wasn’t in her nature. Thus he had always been able to proceed with their relationship without thinking too much about the future, or worrying that when the dynamic with Vicki B became too much and they endured an explosive breakup, as they surely would at some point, it would blow up his family. He would have to pay her off, but he could afford to do that, and she was too scared of him to make some sort of ongoing blackmail threat.
Now, however, the presence of the pills was making him start to think about the future, not just the next month or the next year but the next century. Of course he didn’t have to stay with her that long, but what if he stayed with her too long during that time, and she changed into a person who would tell his wife? What if she couldn’t support herself over that long a period and she grew desperate enough to start demanding ongoing money? What if his willingness to give in and buy her a pill emboldened her and changed their dynamic enough that he lost control of the situation?
Such what ifs piled into his mind atop each other until there was no room for anything else.
Which is how he found himself standing over her, while she slept in the small but luxurious condo he’d put in her name, with concrete block walls that would trap even a loud sound inside the building, holding his trusty Colt Cobra with a load of 38 Special in the chamber, a pillow in front of the barrel to further muffle the report, with his finger on the trigger and all the slack taken out of it, trying to find the impetus to exert one more ounce of force and end this Vicki B problem before it had a chance to get worse.
A gangster, Frank told himself, a real gangster anyway, would have already pulled the trigger. In the movies they often hemmed and hawed the first time they killed somebody, they sweated and cursed and doubted themselves, but they always pulled it, and the second one was always easier.
Frank had the hemming and hawing and sweating parts down pat. He’s been standing over her for the better part of fifteen minutes while she slept peacefully, perfect breasts rising and falling under the top sheet, so blissfully unaware that she was a quarter of an inch of finger position away from death.
What stopped him was the thought that he had not put enough thought into getting away with it. Or at least, that’s what he told himself. It would make too much of a mess and he had no plan for getting her body out of the apartment or of disposing of it. It occurred to him that it would be better to get a gun that couldn’t be traced to him and make it look like a suicide, regarding which Vicki B had a history. Or, he thought to himself, he could strangle her. That would probably be easiest, but he should have a garrote or other implement to make things more sure, as well as gloves to protect his hands from bruises. He should also wait until just after the cleaners had come, so there was less evidence of him floating around the apartment for a forensic investigator to find. Perhaps he could do it in such a clever fashion that he never even came under suspicion, because if he even came under suspicion, then surely Vicki T, who was no fool at all, would become quite suspicious indeed and start asking questions and snooping for burner phones and in general making the kind of fuss that a married person could not ignore.
It was for such thoughts—and such thoughts alone, Frank assured himself while walking to his car—that he withdrew his finger from the trigger and spared her life.
*
“I told you, Francesco, I’m not taking it, now I want to stop talking about this, it’s making me upset and unhappy!”
“Do you know how many old farts in this place would kill to have a chance like this?”
“Let them have mine! Give it to a needy child who’s got more life left to save, I’ll be fine without it.”
“You can’t give the pill to kids, Ma, it interferes with their development.”
“Well, if it’s not safe for children then I’m not taking it either.”
“Who said unsafe? You can’t give it to them because they’d be kids for fifty years, you gotta wait til they’re adults.”
“If it’s not safe for children it’s not safe for me!”
“Ma, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Language, Francesco!”
“There’s all kinds of stuff you take that kids can’t take. Your blood pressure medication, for starters!”
“Well, that’s another thing! It’s not safe safe for somebody on blood pressure medication to take this other pill, I could have a stroke.”
“Of course it’s safe, Ma, the doctor did a full medical history before he prescribed it, remember? We spent three hours at the doctor and you complained the whole time about missing 'The Price Is Right’.”
“That Drew Carey, he’s very charming.”
“Don’t change the subject, Ma, you gotta take the pill.”
“He’s not very handsome, though, I thought Bob Barker was more handsome. It doesn’t matter for the show, but I just think people on television ought to be handsome.”
“If Bob Barker had taken the pill, he could still be hosting Price is Right. Don’t you wish he had taken the pill?”
“Don’t patronize me, Francesco.”
“For Christ’s sake, Ma!”
*
Frank spend most of the next month driving hot laps around the inside of his own mind, fueled by pure anxiety, obsessed with getting his mother and wife to take the pill and also get Vicki B out of his life permanently. He could not explain why these things seemed so urgent to him, but of course Frank wasn’t the sort of person to even ask himself that question. Instead he just put his mind to the effort of convincing.
He argued with all three of them every day, his wife and mother about the necessity of the pill, and Vicki B about how unreasonable she was being about the week’s delay, gaslighting her about it and hoping she’d get sick enough of it to leave him. He called them to argue while he was eating the same greasy midday sandwich he had every lunch, foregoing his usual practice of watching Sportscaster and refusing to speak to anyone. He texted them under his desk while yelling at subordinates about unrelated matters. He wrote them strongly-worded emails he knew they’d never even read because for some reason he had a penchant for Luddite women.
He did not turn his gun on Vicki B again, despite fantasizing about doing so many times. He was not sure why he did not repeat this scenario, and he resolutely did not ask himself the question, opting for a psychological defense mechanism that held it was immoral, as if he gave morality a thought in other situations.
Instead, he bitched. He pissed and moaned and cursed them all for their ingratitude.
And all the while, as he got angrier and angrier, he kept his nose to the grindstone and kept his businesses running. This was Frank’s true great strength—an unshakable and unthinking commitment to keeping the machines running and the money flowing in. Clothes got cleaned, cars got fixed, bellies got filled, and Frank’s pockets swelled from all this commerce even as he started to break down mentally and finally approached a place of admitting to himself that he wished he’d never heard of the pill in the first place.
*
“Don’t move or I’ll kill you, Frank.”
Frank’s eyes flew open, instantly awake. He could feel the silk sheets against his back. The weight of his chains on his chest felt like an anvil crushing his lungs and stealing his breath. The snubby barrel of his own Colt Cobra was pointed directly into his face from about a foot away.
He looked past the barrel at the man holding it, and recognized the face from the photo the private investigator he’d once hired had shown him—Jimmy. Vicki B’s other guy. Vicki B was behind him, looking nervous which she never was, shifting from foot to foot in the near darkness of his bedroom, where she’d never previously set foot.
His wife sat bolt upright and screamed as she saw the gun.
“Shut up, Bitch!” Jimmy swung the gun wildly at her and then back to Frank. He was nervous too, Frank could see. Neither of them had done anything like this before.
“Get up, Frank,” said Vicki B suddenly. “It’s time to open the safe.”
“You’re fuckin’ robbin’ me?!” Frank almost laughed, although he knew it was his own nerves that wanted to. He’d never been in this situation before, either.
“Get up and get moving or your bitch gets one in the leg,” said Jimmy.
Frank sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He didn’t know if Jimmy had the balls to kill them in cold blood, but if he had the balls to break in at all—and without a gun, until they stole the Colt from his bedside table—then icing them both was at least a maybe. Too much of a chance with three hundred years and more potentially in front of them, that was for sure.
“You too, Bitch. Get your ass up or take one in the leg.”
Vicki T followed her husband’s lead, and in moments they were padding along the hallway’s plush carpeting, down the stairs, past their sleeping kids’ bedrooms, to the basement where the safe awaited.
Frank felt lightheaded during this transit, almost gleeful. He expected to be terrified, but the adrenaline was pumping so hard that he didn’t feel anything at all, just high from it. There was no begging, no negotiating. He didn’t remind them he had children. Vicki T didn’t cry. They just walked in silence.
Finally, they fetched up in front of the safe. Frank stepped up to it. He considered refusing, spitting in Jimmy’s face and daring him to do something about it. He could threaten and bluff and maybe scare them into reconsidering. It would have been a gangster move.
Instead, he keyed in his combination, opened the safe, and stepped backwards. Jimmy and Vicki B caught a glimpse of the enormous pile of cash, and they both choked on some spit simultaneously, as did Vicki T, who had never seen the inside of the safe before either even though she lived in the house with it.
Jimmy pulled a duffel bag out from under his jacket and started loading cash into it, holding the bag with his gun hand and keeping the barrel more or less pointed at Frank the whole time.
The adrenaline was starting to wane, and Frank’s thoughts were starting to return. He glared daggers at Vicki B, who gave him a sullen stare in return.
“Don’t look at me like that, Frank,” she said. “You were a ball hair away from cutting me off anyway.”
“You ungrateful cooze,” he snapped. “You have no idea—“
“You’re fucking her?!” Vicki T rarely cursed, and it landed like a bomb when she did. “You’re fucking this stupid— What’s your name?!”
“Vicki,” said Vicki B. “Just like you.”
Vicki T didn’t even look at her, only at Frank.
“You’ve got a goomah with the same NAME as me?!?!”
Frank sighed. Oh, right. He’d forgotten his wife and his mistress were in the same room together.
Now Vicki T sure looked at Vicki B, with murder in her eyes.
“I’ll kill you you home fucking homewrecker!”
Vicki T threw herself at Vicki B, and what she lacked in any fighting skill or experience she made up for in pure ferocity, biting at her and scratching and clawing and pulling her hair somehow simultaneously.
“Hey! Hey!” Jimmy stopped loading money and turned towards them. He stepped towards the fighting women, seemingly ready to intervene, and in the process passed a little too close to Frank, with the barrel of the gun not pointed at him.
Frank was in motion before he realized what he was doing, and he had time during the move to contemplate what a large risk indeed he was taking, putting three hundred years of life on the line in this five seconds, trying to tackle someone and wrestle a gun away from them without getting shot.
That moment of initiative lasted an hour, and the wrestling match seemed to pass in an instant. Frank could not have described the sequence of events in any detail, but suddenly found himself holding the gun, with Jimmy on the ground at his feet. Vicki’s B and T had stopped fighting and were staring up at him.
He had them dead to rights if he wanted them, he knew that. His state was a stand your ground jurisdiction, and killing two home invaders wouldn’t even catch a charge. He might not get arrested. Everything that had been wrong with his plan that night in Vicki B’s condo was right now, by an accident of fate. He could pull the trigger twice, and prove his bona fides as a gangster beyond any doubt. He could become the real deal in the next ten seconds.
As a hesitance to do so crept over him, Frank started to realize that everything he’d thought he was had been a lie. Like an addict walking into an intervention who knows what everyone is going to say to him before they open their mouths, the wave of realization and illuminating and epiphany broke over him, the fakery of everything he’d lived until that moment, and Frank realized he’d never been a gangster at all. He’d wanted to be. He’d thought he was. He had that potential, at one point in time. And even though he knew there was nothing morally upright about being a gangster, he’d wanted to be one. He’d admired their uncompromising nature and their individualistic philosophy.
But somewhere along the line, his life had gotten too good for that sort of abandon. He was rich now, he was connected, he was having fun, and for Christ’s sake he had another three hundred years and more to become even richer and have more fun and get laid in creative ways. He had so much to lose he’d become unable to lose himself inside situations, and thus unable to discover who he really was.
Until now. Until he stood with a loaded gun over two people who richly deserved a bullet, stood over them like a porn star with a limp dick, knowing what needs to be done but woefully unequal to the task, unable to pull a trigger even while truly believing he would get away with pulling it.
The gun didn’t shake. He wasn’t nervous. He just didn’t want to. The gold chains hanging around his neck didn’t feel like his anymore. The Frank that Frank had known, was gone.
“Frank?” Vicki T’s voice was frightened, but he wasn’t sure of what.
“Call the cops,” he said.
*
Frank stood in the clothing section of a Costco, fingering waffle knit Henleys, wondering how comfortable the material would feel against his skin. He’d never worn 100% cotton in his life, and now he could hardly remember why.
It had been a month. Vicki B and Jimmy were in jail, charged and awaiting plea deals. He and his wife had taken their pills. His mother had not. He had given up trying to convince her and had given her pill, along with Vicki B’s, to friends who couldn’t afford it otherwise.
His gold chains were gone. Sold, quietly, along with the Colt, which he’d still never fired outside of a range.
Vicki T had forgiven him. He hadn’t promised to be different. She’d just looked into his eyes and seen that he was different already, she said she forgave him, and they hadn’t spoken of it much after that. She was standing across the section from him, reading the labels on Kirkland Brand protein bars vs. the other offerings. She caught him looking and stuck out her tongue at him, which she used to do often when they were younger.
Frank tried to summon that old feeling, that character he’d played for so long. He couldn’t name what had gone from him. Youth, maybe? An innocence, strange as it sounded? Presence? He rubbed his fingers across the waffle-knit cotton and wondered if he’d ever really felt those things, or if they were a dream he’d had once, that only seemed to go on for a long time because that was the way of dreams.
He asked himself whether he felt happy, and it seemed like a strange question. He’d never felt much, he now realized. Anger when someone crossed him, satisfaction when he got one over on somebody. He’d felt horny and powerful and frustrated before. But happiness was like meeting a dragon—he could picture it happening, what it might be like, but he never expected to live that fantasy, and he still hadn’t. He had three hundred years to figure it out.
END
Thank you, as always, for reading my work. I hope everyone has a Happy New Year and an auspicious beginning to 2025. I will be back next Sunday with an update on the many developments in the A.I. world just in the last month!
We make different decisions at 25 ( with 50 or 60 years ahead of us) than we do at 70 (with 15 or 20 years to go). But 300! That’s a whole new ball game. Great 100th story, Owen!
300 more years? Well good for Frank and VickiT. that they get to start over, kinda like the new calendar tomorrow. Happy New Year Owen!