The Front of the Freeway Read Online Free PDF Page B

foot in the rabbit hole?
    “Yeah, I got you.”
    “My man,” Tony sighs, convincingly pleased. As I turn to the front window and examine the street for the first time, Pauly rounds a corner slowly, easing the van into a narrow alley, a thin string of road flanked by two towering, industrial blocks. On the right, an empty brick factory drips with the signatures of a hundred of the city’s most inspired delinquents and their aerosol quills, a web of slashed and scrawled black veins pulsing under the factory’s burnt, red skin. On the left, a perfect cube of cement rises three stories from the concrete, a line of simple, geometric figures etched above the narrow slit windows coupled by one short, familiar line. Korean Christian Church.
    “So we go to church now, huh?” I mutter back to Tony, eyes fixed on the angular script carved across the simple stone monastery.
    “That’s right, the Church of Tony. You’ll meet the congregation soon.”
    “I still think it’s fucked up we’re doing this at Church,” Pauly adds from the front, edging the van into a cramped, vacant cutout in the brick tower, the van’s two backdoors staring down the open alley. “We’re going to get hit by lightning or some shit. This isn’t Christian.”
    “Not Christian?” Tony starts, his voice as warped by sarcasm as indignation. Pauly sighs and jams the gear-stick to park . “How come all the ‘acts of God’—the possessions, the plagues—they never happen in cities. They’re always in the countryside, or South America, or the Philippines. Somewhere undeveloped, somewhere nice and un-Western. What, does God only protect the capitalists? That’s not very Christian of him, is it?”
    “It would be an act of God if you’d shut up for ten minutes,” Pauly sighs, a wrench in the gears of Tony’s mounting sermon, gaining steam with every gasped breath. “Don’t you ever stop preaching?”
    “No, I do not stop preaching! I’m a prophet, that’s what we do. Prophesize!”
    “Oye, mira.” Martín’s on his feet now, hands cupped around his eyes, face pressed to the thin band of glass peering back into the alleyway. Immediately, the friction dissolves as Pauly kills the engine and Tony rushes to join Martín at the window. For a few moments Tony stares out at the street, Pauly, Martín, and I watching the back of his head in silence, tension quickly giving way to quiet unease. And then, after a short minute, Tony speaks into the glass, the whispered breathe of an order that masks the window in fog before melting into the van.
    “Alright, let’s go.”
    With two massive tugs Pauly uproots his legs from under the steering wheel and shuffles to the back cabin, the truck rocking violently under the weight of each elephantine step. Martín scampers away from the window, fluttering around Pauly’s colossal, swaying frame and settling behind the cooler. Tony doesn’t say anything at first, eyes pressed to the glass, breath condensing and vanishing in slow, pensive gusts, but after a moment he turns, and in the cold and quiet unease of the van, he fastens his stare to mine and winks.
    Just watch and listen.
    “Per me si va ne la città dolente,
    per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
    per me si va tra la perduta gente.”
    —Dante
    With Pauly towering at his side, Martín cowering behind the ice-cream, and me frozen somewhere in between, Tony turns again to the rear of the truck and hurls the double doors open, a warm, smoggy Los Angeles breeze sinking into the still, icy air of the van. Between the unbalanced frame of Tony’s lean neck and Pauly’s hulking shoulder, three figures stalk feverishly towards us through the alley. In the center, a gawky, short-haired Korean with irritated eyes marches in brisk, agitated steps, thin strings of muscle twitching over his pointed shoulders. Tattooed frescoes blistered up his elbows and around his biceps writhe and squirm as he moves, orange-scaled koi fish and olive-tinted dragons