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of 45 th closest to my apartment was refreshingly low on tweekers. The drug trade here was more rigidly enforced, and the arbitrary shitbird behavior of the Hex clientele brought too much attention and risk. If you were moving Hex here, you did it as a tangential, on the low and at great danger. The Kept Squad played this territory tight, and the rumor-mill put them at the center of last year’s anti-Hex art installation: One dealer, one tweeker, barbed-wire bound at the torso, eyes plucked, arms slashed, left to bleed out on an intersection roundabout. This wasn’t the kind of art open to subjective interpretations. Hex heads got the message. I’d have eight blocks or so to walk before I had a shot at finding my guy.
    The Kept Squad blocks reminded me of the office. Plenty of slow/sad grinds. Plenty of getting by. But Fire-Day Friday down here was far more likely to put you in the ground.
    I clutched my bear spray tighter, felt nostalgia for the quiet warmth of my apartment.
    In my twenties, slumming down here had a fun edge to it. That kind of edge gets sanded right the fuck off the first time someone puts a gun to your head and says, “Your wallet. Now. No joke.”
    Shit—I’d kept my wallet on me. Car and house keys, too, when I could have just key-coded my way back in when I got home. I was forgetting the old protocols: Bring nothing you don’t want stolen. Dress down. Walk fast. Head aimed at the pavement three feet in front of you. Ignore everything. Hear something, shrug it off. See something, shrug it off. Eye contact is a liability unless you suddenly need to sell yourself as crazy (and then you better be ready to fill that bill of sale in an ugly way). Quiet customers get served first. Empathizing with hunger is not the same thing as living inside of it. Do not make assumptions. Don’t laugh, even if it seems okay—that flash of bared teeth reads SUBMISSION.
    This wasn’t anything I was proud of knowing. These were lessons I learned by being stupid and lucky and knowing that same luck runs out.
    I was out here on a series of questionable assumptions: That Hungarian was still in the Hex game, that he was extant at all, that he’d be willing to extend his clientele list to include a man he’d last sent away bleeding. I heard alleyway sounds, the kind of muffled, fleshy smacks which could only be producing a variety of traumas. A far-too-young tranny pro dressed in an American Flag bikini and faux fur coat called out “Kirby on the block,” which I assumed triggered cop watch. Had it been so long? Was I now reading lawman instead of twenty-something fuck-up? Maybe my hints of gray hair popped in the streetlight.
    I picked up my pace. I was already drawing too much attention.
    Another block, a slight shift in demographic. Gutter punk kids spending the day’s spare change getting blasted. Gassing hard like they had auxiliary brains on back-up. I’d tried gassing once—face locked inside a gas mask with spray paint-soaked filters—and got a concussion and a three day headache for my interest. Never again. I’d learned to apply my bank brain to drugs, running a cost/benefit analysis, determining return on investment. Gassing paid zero dividends next to something as transformative as Hex.
    Next block, and I knew I was headed the right direction. More punks, two of them pointing at a friend who was punching himself in the groin and shouting, “This is the steel forged in Valhalla!” He ran over to a burn barrel and started baboon humping. “I will impregnate the Earth’s core!” His buddies were dying, tears from laughing.
    They spotted me watching. I was rusty. I blew it. I smiled. Maybe camaraderie would play?
    “Whatchu creepin’ on, faggot?” Guy with a bullring in his nose pulled a hammer from his back pocket.
    I decided to keep my teeth. Head down. Damn near running. Two more blocks and I heard the call.
    “Toppers. Benzos. Twoferfiddy over here.”
    Normally I would have a pre-set amount of