The Bad Seed
An Elia Degas Conspiracy Theory ©Adam Elia Kidron: April 2018
The Bad Seed
An Elia Degas Conspiracy Theory
©Adam Elia Kidron: April 2018
©Adam Elia Kidron: April 2018
The Bad Seed
An Elia Degas Conspiracy Theory
1. Monica Rivera A few minutes before dusk on a cold, foggy, Wednesday, November 9, 2017. i Below me, on Broadway, at a Bronx intersection where cultures cross and beats thrive, bargain-hunters darted in and out of Radio Shack, seeking out the final ‘final discount’ before its demise. The Company, which had survived a Great Depression, two World Wars, and Reaganomics, was no match for Amazon’s limitless pockets and razor-sharp customer claws. Outside the store, a snarling crowd window-watched recaps and analysis of James Alexander Kunt’s victory over Esther Cunt in the previous day’s Presidential Election, on a checkerboard of large flat screen TV’s tuned to a potpourri of channels. On Fox News, a beaming Sean Hannity, took credit for the win as he fawned over Kunt’s first Tweet as President Elect --- a promise that the forgotten men and women of America would never be forgotten again.ii 88.4% of the forgotten people of the Bronx had voted for Cunt, but neither candidate meant much to me. Scorned Cunt, the tone-deaf spouse of a philandering President, acted like a despot high on Drone-strikes when she acted like Secretary of State. Acted like a Play-Doh Democrat on the campaign trail. Now, she acted like we should give a fuck she’d blown her inheritance. Lying Kunt, the draft dodging son of a demagogue, acted like a xenophobic Jesus as he acted out for the TV news cameras that fed his famished white working-class base. Acted like a pussy- grabbing asset stripper behind the imperial doors of his gaudy estates. Acted like a Play-Doh
Republican on the campaign trail. Now he acted like 25.7% of registered voters was a mandate, having won the Presidency while losing by 2.9 million popular votes. Mandate my ass!iii Opposite Radio Shack on the east side of Broadway, a frayed white Baptist church smoldered in the dusk, the last gasp of a blaze that had tormented the firefighters of Ladder Company Six and Engine Company Eighty-one with its resilience. Madam Esmeralda Ramos’s forty-berth brothel had occupied the old redbrick tenement next to the church since the mid-90’s. Her girls worked fourteen-hour shifts in cubicles little bigger than their beds. They were expected to service at least six Johns a night and comp a 50th Precinct copper. Consequently, the brothel had never been busted. The Johns paid Esmeralda, a gaudy old owl with a heart the size of your wallet, $150 and up, depending on the length of the session and talents of the girl you chose –- harder-core wants like bare-back and anal, were exchanged for tips. The girls were mostly undocumented immigrants from Central America and Africa. If you were fortunate enough to get one just off the boat, the experience was equivalent to anything you might or might not get for free, but without the emotional rope. After a month or two, when the first STD’s had come and gone and come again and a prince still hadn’t shown up to save them, the girls hardened and gave you exactly what you paid for, or less. I’d been with Esmeralda when the fire started at around 7pm. She’d been charged along with her three stepsons, of conspiring to defraud the IRS of more than $2,500,000 from 1992 through 2012, and I was handling her flimsy defense. I’d just persuaded her to cop a plea, when oily black smoke begun to seep through the floorboards. We’d scurried to safety down the rusting fire escape at the side of the building whores and their Johns’ spilled out of the brothel and out onto the sidewalk in various stages of undress, as if Caligula had
come to Broadway. Last one out was a skinny copper in red fish-net stockings, searching for a place to hide as he took catcalls like punches to his honey-brown skin. The fire had left the sidewalk carpeted in soot, which now, sixteen hours later, was being washed away by icy, sulfur-rich, rain, which had begun to play on my office window like a detuned xylophone. I had nothing pressing. The only other case I’d been working, had collapsed when my client, an underachieving Rapper, admitted that the bites he’d inflicted on his 15-year old protégé’s augmented breasts, were caused by his uniquely angled golden molars. So, I occupied myself by following the progress of a Pretty Lady as she floated down the west side of Broadway, wrapped in Canadian Goose, lugging a saddle brown tote-bag, and protected by an attitude that devils like me care about and the umbrella she held in her left hand. She was swiped away by the Nine train, clattering north along a rusting, cast-iron skyway, high above Broadway, on its way from Manhattan to Van Cortland Park, the end of the line. From my perch, a tired second floor office above Broadway. I shared a plane with the train. Through its scratched windows, I watched as a crew of “Showtime Kids” flipped in place, spun around poles, and cartwheeled up and down isles that had cleared to greet them --- immersing riders in gravity-defying magic, for an occasional cash donation. A whoosh of air brakes and the train squealed to a stop tossing sparks into the gloom like a Catherine-wheel. As the train doors struggled apart. I pulled my gaze away from the endless shuffle of passengers trading places, searching for another distraction from a career going nowhere and the stack of bills on my desk that I couldn’t afford to pay. The Pretty Lady stood framed by my doorway shaking out her umbrella; speared it into an ornate mahogany stand I’d lost track of, tossed her mane like a conjurer performing a signature trick, and surveyed me like realtor assessing a distressed property.
I snatched my reflection in her expression. The suitcases under my eyes were same shade of grey-brown as my unruly, three-day growth of stubble. My bespoke, grey, Harris Tweed, double- breasted, wool suit was tight everywhere, and had been pressed so many times that the pants had multiple crease lines. My white shirt had been whiter. My brogues had been re-soled so often they’d webbed at the balls of my feet. But I’m six-three and reasonably self-sufficient and largely drug free, which excuses a multitude of sins. The Pretty Lady offered up a slim right hand, like it was something special. When I shook it, the fat star-sapphire on her ring finger snatched the light like a mirror-ball and threw it about the office. Her mahogany eyes were prettily framed by eyebrows that made elegant arches. The eyes themselves were expressionless. Ink on the side of her neck suggested she’d been manufactured on Christmas Eve, 1986. So, she was 31 years old. “Take a seat,” I said grandly. With a sharp tilt of the head, she drew my attention to two worn dark-red leather club chairs at the client side of the desk. They were piled high with manila files. I ran around the desk, pumping my arms like a sprinter, grabbed the files, and piled them on the desk on top of others. My wit may or may not have been lost on her. I couldn’t tell. It didn’t show on her face. Nothing much did. The files were piled too high and the top file slid open, spilling snaps of an anorexic middle- aged white woman and young black girl screwing out over the desk. She arched her brows higher, spread the snaps like a deck of cards, and picked out her favorite. In it the black girl was in a bridge position with her legs parted as the white lady noshed. “Very nice,” she said dryly, as if she’d seen better. “The groom didn’t think so.” I growled. “Why? Did he want to be in the picture, or was he just trying to stop the bitch having fun?” She decanted ‘bitch’ carefully - calling someone else a bitch soothed her.
“The old man was looking for an economical way out of a relationship that had gotten stale. I found him one.” I jabbed back. She let the snap flutter back to the desk, shrugged minimally, clapped derisively, and purred: “A dirty job that you were just compelled to do?” “Lady,” I snarled, “The sign on the door says ELIA DEGAS, ATTORNEY AT LAW in big, expensive, black and gold, letters. I defend thugs with drugs and mugs on drugs equally, so long as they pay upfront in cash. I write wills to protect the wishes of the dead from the greed of the living. I separate small men from wives they do not love so that they can guiltlessly lavish money on whores. I free women from men that mistreat them so that they can roll the dice again. Occasionally, I get lucky and a poor fuck with a limb in a cast hobbles in off the street and tells me they tripped and fell, were rear-ended by money, or injured at work --- If you’re looking for a lawyer to save you from your sins or those of others, then you’re in the right place, but if its salvation you seek, go find a priest.” This particular juxtaposition of self-serving truisms was a variation on a theme I resort to when my ego’s running low. It’s designed to put the world on notice that, while I may not be the Clarence Darrow I idolized in my youth, I’m no shmuck. She shook her head and spat back: “I don’t need you at all Degas. You got that the wrong way around. You need me!” She let the new status quo marinate. Then she introduced herself: “My name is Monica,” she announced at me, “Monica Rivera --- My papi, Edwin, was a cop with the 5-O.” She paused, gave the ring a spin, decorating her taught dewy skinned face with tiny shooting stars. She’d played her first card and was waiting see if I’d call or raise. I hadn’t decided. Edwin’s trade was information, and I’d made that trade a few times before he moved on to bigger, more corrupt endeavors. He’d retired to waterfront mansion on Sabal Palm Road in swanky Bay Point just north of downtown Miami; a garage full of supercars, a 38-foot, wave-breaking, radardefying, Picuda cigarette-boat; and a lingerie modelling second wife,
who inherited it all when his boat sunk along with 500 kilos of cocaine, on its way from Venezuela to Vieques, an island paradise off Puerto Rico’s Caribbean coast, that was home to US Navy base and Training Range. Until, a Marine Corps F-18 dropped a pair of 500-pound bombs on a civilian, whose gory death triggered a wave of protests that led to the base closing in May 2003. As the Navy retreated, Columbian and Venezuelan Narcos moved in, repositioning Vieques as a landing point for drugs destined for the East Coast of the United States. Not uncoincidentally, if Vieques were a country, rather than a municipality of Puerto Rico, it would have the highest murder rate in the world.ivv I didn’t go to Edwin’s funeral. Our ledgers were balanced. There was no respect to be paid. Monica pushed an old-school. Polaroid-selfie of her with Edwin and the legendary Yankees shortstop, Derek Jeter, grinning under matching baseball-caps, across my desk. Her point being that she was REALLY Edwin’s daughter, about which I had no doubt, as they were a spitting image. “I’ll listen,” I lobbed back over a shrug “But I skipped breakfast and my first Jack of the day, so I’m in no mood for a fucking command performance.” She reached over the desk, her breasts pulling on the fabric around the top buttoned button of her white shirt and pointed through the window to the pitched sky-blue roof of the International House of Pancakes, beyond the tracks of the elevated train on the other side of the street.
“We’d go to IHOP on Sundays after church. I’d get the Silver Dollar pancakes and soak them in as much fake-maple syrup as I could get away with, and he’d get the Breakfast Sampler with a side of white toast to mop up the grease the bangers and bacon left behind.” I was supposing that the syrupy flashback meant that father and daughter had drifted apart, and I was wondering why, when she discarded the thought with a flick of the wrist, undid the top buttoned button, cupped her breasts through her shirt and squeezed them together. “34 double-Ds. Same as Kate Upton’s. And real, I’m saving the silicon for my first post- partum. So that’s not happening any time soon. Now that’s out of the way, perhaps you can give me due respect and focus on my fucking story --- I’ll buy you dinner if you promise to act right.” 7
The first thing you learn in my business is to never make promises you might have to keep, as your clients employ you to represent their needs and not as guardians of their morality. The second thing you learn is that lust is a poor judge of a case’s merits. I ignored all I’d learned. I slid back from the desk, spun away from Monica as I stood to give my interest time to subside, and helped her with her coat. Yes, I keep a little humanity tucked away inside for special occasions. We stepped out onto Broadway together and into a show --- a girl clinging to her methed-up teen mama who was clinging to a life she’d never get to live; big-headed dogs barking at bigger- headed men barking at women barking at kids when they bark back; a posse beating a man unconsciousness for glancing at a girl that was gang property; Mister Softee jingling 24/7/365: the wailing sirens of patrol cars, ambulances and fire trucks smearing the dusk with their flashing lights; throbbing Detroit muscle way past its prime; The Chainsmokers smash hit “Closer”, a drum and bass nursery-rhyme, with a Blink-182 reference as a Millennial prop, on the hour every hour, with spins of Nicky Jam’s hyper-flirtatious “Hasta el amanecer” wedged in-between; and a NYPD Bell 429 chopper taking it all in percussively from its sky-high box.
The Bad Seed
An Elia Degas Conspiracy Theory ©Adam Elia Kidron: April 2018