Penny Ante

The refined sythesis of hard living and regular controlled substance abuse is as much a draw as it is obvious; this woman is tall and lean in a way that exaggerates her features. The countenance is the portrait of the soul and the eyes mark its intentions. Summed up in a word; pin-points. Green eyes, dyed-black eyebrows obvious on the paler skin. Her mouth a red, ripe stain; a suggestion of violence in the curve of her lips.
She's got white hair, a canvas for other color. With a part on the extreme left, it was cut with a blunt tool and layered across. If you could stand above her, it's shaped exactly like an almond and drops across one eye.
She has an incredibly pretty face, nothing hidden, no lines of early aging, no mark or scar. An eternity of cheek bones, a long neck and around it one long silver chain vee-ing into the collar of her shirt, something suspended at the end. The lack of sun has turned her pale and she's become translucent where the skin is thinnest, the bluest veins risen to the surface.
Orbiting her head, either on or off her ears, are a pair of mamoth headphones; dj style-ish. The stickers of some obscure band adorn the most solid plastic parts.
Shopping at the SalVal again, she wears layered t-shirts, the topmost a threadbare thing with a single iris printed in bubble-ink. Low on her right side the shirt is spotted with flecks of red where it's tucked into baggy jeans and belted. In battered nikes, Penny's got herself a very new-looking, strikingly red trenchcoat. Also cut for a man, it hangs off her shoulders at odd angles but with her height she can carry it off. The collar and cut is sharp - very p.i. looking.

BACKGROUND
Born 26 years ago. It was a pretty average childhood from any point of view. A latchkey kid, her mother worked odd hours and shifts at Chicago General to make the rent, rarely were the two of them ever a happy family unit. Time with mom was spent in pursuit of better grades, schoolwork, the importance of being earnest and bibletime. When they were home together, they sat in front of the television and watched 700 Club and the Bakers (Uncle Jim and Aunt Fae, as mom referred to them). Most of the neighborhood Penny lived in was like this - basically good kids lacking parental supervision. It only follows that as teenagers they would all push the boundary of the law on occasion and get into trouble together. Nothing maj or, mind. Just the usual rough-and-tumble fights on the playground kinda thing. But this was city-suburbia and parents were taught not to accept that kind of nonsense. One by one her unruly friends were getting sent away to juvie, sent away to prep school and boot camp.

Her only friend and consolation in the middle of the night, when the sirens wouldn't stop and her mom worked graveyard shifts, was the blue glow of the television screen. Suddenly it was her turn to leave.

Catholic school, was there ever a more finely tuned method of adolescent torture? When she was eleven, they started broadcasting a weird, new show around 2 a.m. Broadcast entirely in Japanese, Penny had no idea what she was watching but near as she could tell, it was a cooking competition with a panel of three judges. Capturing her attention, she waited up to see it every night; it was way better th an the after-hours crap they played on MTV. (what the hell was AEON Flux about anyway?) A few years later they added subtitles and added an English title. Iron Chef. Fixated, the chefs were her new best friends; masters of their arts, nobody could make mystery-ingredient cooking more awe-inspiring. Her favorite chef was Ishinabe Yutake, godlike in his green apron, armed with a flawless comprehension of French cuisine and frighteningly adept with a knife.

The year the show went off the air was the same year she graduated high school. With no thoughts to pursue education any further, friendless and jobless, Penny ran off to the big city, though a bit further south than she'd ever been in her life. She'd always wanted to see Graceland. She even got a job there; the management was always turning over though on account of Elvis' estate not finding the dark humor in the gentleman's club bearing the name.

That summer she met Ricky. He was 30 and she was easy. He taught her the short con. Taught her to steal cars. Taught her to drive like a bat out of hell, which is what she did mostly, when Ricky got in over his head. Which was almost always. He also told her about some friends of his in Baltimore, who had taught him the dodgy path (But not awakened him - Ricky knew they were into "weird shit" and could "Make shit happen" but he only talked about it in bed, when stoned or drunk and feeling vulnerable. Ricky never said to Penny outright that Benny was his tutor but it didn't take long for her to catch on; Benny almost made it easy for her:

Benny's real name is Nebuchadnezzar Jones but he doesn?t let on. Can'a worms there that doesn't need opening. So Benny'll do. While Penny was growing up in Chicago, he?d been in Baltimore f or two decades and nobody was the wiser. For the most part he kept his nose clean, everything aboveboard, ran the poker games in the back room (as far as anyone else was concerned, that's what went on back there and nobody asked questions. Benny's a big man) and rented out to college kids in the neighborhood.

He met Penny the second night her shithead boyfriend got a case of the get-up-and-runs. She'd come down a little teary, a little bruised and he'd watch her con every single guy that sat down next to her at the bar. She worked sympathy out of them like turning on a faucet; shift a little this way, that way on the stool and bang. To anyone who knew what to look for, it was astonishing. The way she made a mark and got what she wanted was almost like magic. One night she pulled five wallets, a stack of twenties and a ring. It was the ring that got Benny's attention.

"How'd you do that?"

" Do what?"

"That thing with the ring."

Penny didn't know what to say, but "Don't call the cops, Benny, please."

"Five percent."

"What?"

"Your take, my price."

It was the start of a profitable relationship. The D.C. crowd packed the place on week nights - easy targets - and married men never were the type that never filed a report, being in that part of town would raise some serious issues with their spouses. He would teach her how to judge a man by the creases of his shirt, the pleat of his pants.

Benny taught her Enochian. At the time, Penny thought it was scribble-code. When her avatar started subtitling his messages to her, she started to catch on. The finer points of the language have begun to reveal themselves after years of study but the language is stil l a multi-faceted mystery.

One night Benny says to her:

"We need a way to communicate."
"What, just talking isn't enough?"
"Too obvious," and he starts scribbling on a napkin "Look at this. This means one."
"Okay. Benny, that's an 'L' and thirteen."
"And this means "trouble" or "gun."
"Right. How do you make it plural, add an ess?"

The hurdles of Penny's tutelage weren't easily overcome; often interrupted by days into weeks of alcohol abuse pre-empted often by a fight with her erstwhile shithead boyfriends. It went on this way for years until the day Ricky died. You might call everything uphill from that point on.

The day she came home and found Ricky being thrown around the apartment was the same day she started 'seeing' the world for what it really was. She was 19 when Ricky died.

Interlude_____________________________________________________________________________________

Ricky left the tv on.

She knows this before she opens the door, that awareness that comes from the hairs on the back of her neck lifting slightly. Static or something.

That it's on also tells her that he's not home.

With things as they are right now, as soon as he hears the bell of the antique elevator in this shithole arrive at their floor, the tv goes off on his way to their bedroom, experience having taught him that fast access to a fire escape is sometimes the difference between a night in the hospital and a dirtnap.

Keying into the apartment she passes inside, the smell of stale cigarette smoke and bodega trash puts her a little more at ease. Crossing the floor from door to kitchen, she notices with a bitter smirk that the program on the tv is the 700 Club.

She only half-notices the overweight women and men with bewildered looks on their faces as the evangelist joy-buzzers them to the floor, curing cancers and chronic backpain alike. Must be closer to 8 o'clock, they usually save the 'saving' for the end of their air-time. "All miracles must take place before prime-time," snickering, said in the manner of some tv exec as she mixes Nescafe with bourbon (or closer to that, a bourbon with Nescafe, going by amounts), she answers the televangalists rhetorical questions in a sing-song voice:

"Are you looking for direction in your life?"

"Definitely not", she sips at her bourbon.

"Does modern life seem to hold little or no real attraction to you anymore?"

She looks around the dismal little apartment and then back to the tv "What do you think?" She sits, h alf transfixed by the televangelist's perfect hair, not changing the channel in favor of continuing this dialogue with the tv. The televangalist carries on, unabated:

"Have you thought about how the word of God, relates to you?"

She shakes her head, honestly.

"Have you considered how your life would be, given the unconditional love of Je-sus?"

She swills the coffee around in her mouth, the numbness from the bourbon beginning to spread and considers in a second, a life with religion. It does her no good. She has a brief spasmic memory; her life branching from the day as a child she decided to shelve God, Jesus, and the Devil in the same place she'd exiled the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.

No matter how she tries in that second, imagining a life in which she had kept on believing doesn't come. It couldn't be much better, she reasons, and yet, she's happier she didn't go that way. Emptying the last of the coffee into her mouth, she hears the televangalist ask his last question, florid sweaty face pursed up in false concern:

"Do you find your situation worsening, due to a vic-tim menta-li-ty?".

Sent into a sudden tight spin, her face screws up in anger and she hurls the tv remote at the off button in a sudden rage. It hits the button dead on, turning the tv off without any damage to the remote or tv. "I am NOT a victim" she hisses at the now deactivated cathode ray tube. "I am not a fucking victim" she repeats, and heads back to the kitchen, this time not even bothering for coffee, sloshing the liquor from bottle to coffee cup.

Where's Ricky when she has this aggressive head of steam up? Probably out fucking that whore from the bar. She knew, of course, about the little trysts they enjoyed, but didn't care enough to do anything about it. She'd b rought it up last night, during the screamfest when she'd caught him dipping into her purse. He'd denied it, she'd accused him of smelling of that slut.

He hit her, she'd fallen and damn near cracked her head open on the formica top coffee table, gone to bed angry, and when she woke up this afternoon, he was still gone. Probably at the fucking track. She puts her hands to her forehead, traces what she knows must by now be a fairly decent yellow edged bruise, pushes it until she winces a little, and frowns again. Sitting in the dark, quiet living room she mutters "I am so not a fucking victim".

Sounds at the door again. "Baby? You home?"

****

"Let's see what we've got left in the trunk."

It was a voice charred low by bourbon and smoke. The dr iver.

****

It's 9:30 and she's already in the bar waiting for Ricky. Benny's trying to pay a little attention to her while he cleans the glasses, her nervous chatter a signal of pending disaster. Experience dictates that whenever Penny starts talking, shit goes down.

"I told him we could ditch the savings account and just try to make ends meet, get these guys off his case but Benny, I know he didn't mean it, I just couldn't make him listen.."

The compress of papertowel and melting ice had started to help the swelling above her eye ebb. Scratching into her beat up purse for a cigarette, she sticks a bent Pall Mall into her mouth.

Before Benny could get her a match, the guy drinking the bourbon, neat, offered a zippo.

****

The impala's doors opened simultaneously on rusty hinges. Two sets of footsteps back-tracked around to the car's trunk. Fumbling with the spare set of keys.

****

With a flick, a flame and a clipped "You waitin' on someone too," he interrupted her rhythm, throwing off her one millionth "Hey Benny what time is it?" She noticed his gold cufflink had a diamond chip. It matched the keyring fob next to the highball glass.

"Yeah," a dry squeak of nerves given voice. "My boyfriend. He's late. You?"

His laugh was a little too gruff, a little too familiar. "Friend's having a little heart-to-heart with an associate upstairs." He nodded to the door at the back of the bar - the one that opened into the stairwell leading to her apartment.

She remembers thinking, "Why do all these goombahs have to speak in code? Why do they annunciate their t's? Why wasn't Ricky finished with his meeting? Every Tuesday it's the same routine. They have dinner, they fuck, he kicks her out for a 'meeting' and she goes to wait in the bar til ten..

****

Spare. How did she know they were spare? Vision of the keys coming from the glove compartment. Or was it just the sound of the engine still running, sputtering fumes and making her choke. The smell of oil, of gasoline, of drying blood, of time running out.

****

Penny always knew Ricky was a risk-taker, a two-timing idiot and an all-around bad guy. She knew he gambled, and that he made bets he couldn't cover. That was how they met: like all the other night-school dropouts scheming their way through get-rich-quick courses. Ricky was cute, though. He took her to parties.

Typically, Ricky's 'meetings' were finished by ten and she'd run a bath and ice his head, take him to the emergency room if she couldn't get his shoulder back into place, if he had a broken rib, if the bleeding wouldn't stop... if... if... If...

Looking at the man with the keys and the bourbon, the what-ifs added up to a grim sum in her mind. She knew with sickening certainty there would be no long night ahead of her in the ER.

No insurance forms to fake.

No desperate cruising the land of the Waiting Room picking through wallets and purses of the sleeping for fast cash or credit cards.

No collecting change for cheaply machined coffee.

This was it. It was on.

9:50 by the clock on the wall. Penny bolts for the stairs, the driver's laugh climbing after her. He was following her to the apartment; he knew all too well where she was going. At the sight of her door just ajar enough to scream trouble louder than the mounting laugh, her keys tumbled from her hand. She felt the impact before it happened, felt Ricky's body slide down the slammed door and hit the floor on the other side, sensed the bruises as they burst beneath his skin.

The driver was rounding the landing, wheezing loudly when Penny shoulder-rammed the door. On the third blow the tired wood gave up and buckled.

Judging by the holes in the wall, a bomb had gone off in her kitchen. It was all she could to to stare at the strewn wreckage, to take in the sight of her broken life. Ricky's bloodied heels left streaks on the linoleum when they collar-dragged him towards the bathroom.

That's all she remembers.

****

The key was in the lock, turning. Slivers of light cut into the mineshaft darkness of the trunk. "Hey maybe we got lucky," it was the other voice, the muscle. He was laughing. "Maybe you cold-cocked her alla way into a coma."

****

When she woke up, something was keeping her tongue from moving. Ricky's socks in her mouth. She coughed them out. Her hands weren't tied, instead they were in contact with something... wet. Heavy. Breathing? No, dying. Ricky. Bleeding out into her torn dress. No, not dying.. death rattle? Candy Striping at the hospital - it's a familiar sound. Panicked, she tried to move only to knock a hand into his jaw. Did he groan? "Ricky? Ricky baby, oh god Ricky don't go.. don't leave me don'tleavemedon'tleavemedon'tleaveme," Her words blurred into terror so overpowering it stopped her from speaking at all.

Just thinking. Realizing. Realizing that there was no way she could get through this alone, whatever 'this' was.
She grabbed and pulled, searching for the hands of the dead man, willing him to squeeze hers back, demanding reassurance. Ricky couldn't leave her at a time like this - how DARE he? It wouldn't happen like this. How many times had she fixed him up when he couldn't walk, how many meals had she forfeited to his addiction, how many nights in that fucking dive.. He would be crying "Sorry, baby" when he woke up, when he came back, when he sat up and ..and.. and then, then she would show him "Sorry, baby."

That's when he squeezed.

The squeal of bad brakes filled the trunk. The car stopped. She heard him whisper her name, felt his hand vice-like around her wrist, saw even in the dark his eyes open - milky white and nothing else. She had to shut her eyes to summon the strength to choke back the bile. Behind her teeth, the acid was searing her tongue. She trembled as her stomach spasmed, but only clenched her jaw tighter and refused to bow to her gag reflex. That wasn't his voice. The trunk opened and she lay still, feigning unconciousness. The driver and the muscle reached in, coarsely grabbing Ricky and manhandling him out of the trunk, over Penny's faintly trembling back. He had let go of her wrist the moment her attention strayed.

"What about her?"

"Leave her. We'll ditch her in the lake with the car."

It took hours. She could hear everything as they hacked him up. Crying silently in the trunk, she felt each wet fall of the axe blade parting the cold, dead flesh as though it were her own.

****

About a mile down the road, in a coat she grabbed from the back seat, Penny sa w the sign for the highway and stuck out her thumb.

****

--- "Weak as I am, no tears for you
Deep as I am, I'm no ones fool"
Skunk Anansie ---

___________________________________________________________________________________________

So she hit the road running, newly awakened and paranoid, back to Benny.

She doesn't remember the Awakening in the most vivid detail but has a feeling of deep, unsettling anticipation, trouble, like coming back to one's own self after a psychotic break. Televisions talk to her. Specifically her Avatar, which has taken the form of Ishinabe Yutake. He takes great pains to make a puzzle out of his words of wisdom and therefor does not truly speak to her yet; ev erything is subtitled in the multiple-meaning enochian alphabet. It takes her often days to string together what he says and more of than not, Penny gets it wrong.

She discovered that Benny's backroom wasn't used for card games at all. It was a nexus of information trading; he ran it just like an OTB, touch the screens a few times and snippits printed out on little white receipts. And you don't get to leave until you pay the man. The power company didn't know about it - Benny's wattage per month never changed. Ever. "Spirits," he said, "did most of the dirty work in the wires." It seemed like an ideal situation, in the care and relatively small world of the bar where lessons were endless.

It seemed like an ideal situation, in the care and relatively small world of the bar where lessons were endless. Lucky for Penny, wanderlust hit her square and solid just when Benny started to run into trouble getting his messages across the lines:

"You're going to S an Francisco."

"I'm going where?"

"SFO. Pack a bag and keep in touch."

"Okay, why?"

"Because this needs to be there in the right hands."

"Benny, these are liner notes for a CD."

"Yes, I know. And you're taking them to him."

Interlude_____________________________________________________________________________________

Five hours later it was 2pm in San Francisco and Penny was jet-lagged, chewing her way through the worst cup of coffee in the world. For another six hours her time could be her own. No cab fare and no patience for the leather and latex crowd milling around the public restroom, a stall couldn't open up fast enough. Penny pushed the crowd and took a Sharpie out of her bag. She writes HOSTEL over graffiti that says 'My girlfriend gives the best head. Call her! 415-829-1023' and hopes against hope that the stall doesn't open into the girlfriend's bedroom.

The crowd was going bugfuck. Wild. Ecstatic in the presence of Willy and his band. It hadn't even started yet; it was like the idea of the music got them buzzing ahead of time, two-stepping and passing joints. Perfect crowd to make a few easy lifts. But first she had to make the drop and then call Benny to let him know it was done. With no real security presence (small venues are rarely safe) Penny wandered to the front of the stage-area and grabbed the first person that seemed like he knew his way around. He pointed her to where the band was loitering, selling CDs before the show.

"You Willis?"

Of course he was Willis. Easily the largest black man she'd ever men, he stands 6'5'' and weighs over 350 pounds. Wesley Willis: Rock God gave her a twitchy nod, lips pursed like he might scream "Budweiser, king of beers!&q uot; because he couldn't control the impulse. That's what they said about him; he had impulse-control problems.

"Okay, then this is yours."

In the folder from Benny were the liner notes for Spookydisharmonius Conflicthellride. She knows this because she's nosy and looks at everything. The notes made no sense at all. Not to anyone that couldn't read them. Wesley thanked her in his own way when he got on stage and started his first set

"JESUS IS THE ANSWER. EVERYWHERE YOU GO. GOD IS WATCHING YOU."

She wanted to leave.

He doesn't even really play an instrument, warring with her inner-music-snob. It's a pre-programmed Technics keyboard.

But she stays, riveted just like everyone else. Including a dead-ringer for Elvis and a guy with a pig-nose.
Through the sets, all his songs sound basically the same. He plays them at an interval of one minute and twen ty five seconds. The set is the most structured, most rigid and strange performance she's ever seen in her life. All the songs are 2 or 3 minutes long and have exactly the same lyrical structure, and he repeats some phrases many times.

Every song ends with, "Rock over London, rock on Chicago," commercial slogans, like "Sprint, be there now," "Budweiser, king of beers" or "Can you hear me now? Good."

They're screaming his name, shouting his obscene lyrics to him. Little prayers. Half way through the set, somebody yells "Chicken cow."

"That's a Fiasco song," he says. "Fuck the Fiasco."

The crowd cheers and jumps, the blue haze thicker still. "Chicken cow," somebody yells again. "Chicken cow, my dick," he says. He touches a key, setting his Technics keyboard into action. "Chicken cow my dick," he sin gs, and the crowd backs him up.

The people love him, and he loves playing for them. He gets something from them. She looks at Elvis and the fat boy. They can tell. He's one of them.

She needs a phone and the fat boy definitely has one.

"Borrow your phone?"

***

I live with them now, this small band of malcontents and I don't think it was coincidence. I think San Francisco didn't pan out for us for reasons contained in the liner notes. I hate the cold up here.

I'm addicted to the food network. You may consider it a strange preoccupation but consider the options. Reality TV? Music? Friends for fuck's sake? The Food Network is perfect programming - educational, entertaining and most importantly - it's something I can Use. I've got recipes for everything now.

Penny's paradigm is the sort of eclectic yard-sale syncretism that reminds one of salvation army chic. An unconventional Hermetic, Penny's beliefs are best described as Postmodern Mystic. The power of symbols and imagery is the heart of the paradigm, though Penny doesn't realize this. She hasn't theorized her magick yet - for her, this is just how things are done. Correspondence lets her walk in one door and out of another. Reach into one purse and pull something out of somewhere else. Look in one mirror and out of another. How? She writes, on the doorway or mirror or television, to change the place it 'points to'. Clothing and fashion accessories are at the heart of her mind sphere. The right kind of lipstick to seduce; the kind of hat that intimidates. A persuasive knot to her scarf. And, in reverse, a sort of 'fashion critic' mind reading : Look at the way he's wearing that tie with those shoes. He's hiding something. Instead of reading palms, she reads the creases in someone's shirt. Televisions let us commune with the stars. Everyone knows that. But, build a shrine to someone on top of your TV, and you can change the reception. Not being very advanced, she can only interact with spirits and her Avatar, travelling into the TV will take something else - she isn't aware of this possibility so she's not yet sure how to do it. Foisting a single off after flashing a twenty is an old sleight of hand trick. Write 'gun' on a pack of cigarettes and you can bait-and-switch the big rube in the sky. Her matter transmutations and conjurings, like her correspondence tricks, rely on labeling things. However, in a pinch, she has a knack for reaching into her purse and finding just what she needs. The chaos that is her purse's contents, however, is so bad that you'd swear it's a paradox flaw. Magickal penance or simple packrat mentality, the truth of the matter is, half the time it's not even magick - men have lain awake in terror at the thought of how much /crap/ there is in that purse.