The Long Con

TW: Death

I didn’t know how Janet found out about the unit in the first place. Maybe Mick had mentioned it at some point or maybe she had found the key at his place. She was probably the first one to go over there, managing things, cleaning up anything that had the potential to cause trouble. We had never liked each other, Janet and me, so I didn’t really understand why she bothered to bring it to my attention at all.

Janet was one tough lady. She was mean and hard and blunt, and she always had one eye aimed warily at me. I think she saw me as an opportunist, thought I was just using Mick for the moment, for his game, for the decade of experience he had on me. Of course, there were plenty who were magnetized by his brilliance. Who didn’t want to get in on that cunning shrewdness, that wild, crooked ambition that careened him through life? But there was a real element of true connection between me and Mick. Sexual chemistry, yes, but something beyond that. We cared for each other. 

In the long run, all three of us we were in it for ourselves, along with anyone else in our game. That’s just how it goes in our world. Doesn’t mean there’s not friendship or support or love. But Janet clearly had her feelings about me and there didn’t seem to be anything friendly about them, so her showing up at my door that day came as a surprise. When I found her there, I gestured for her to come in, but she didn’t, so we just stood there, at the threshold of my house.

“It’s for a storage unit Mick was renting” she said as soon as I came to the door, a silver key dangling from her fingers. “U-store out on north Pecos, number’s on the keychain.” I stood with the screen resting against my hip, mouth half open as I tried to figure out what to say. I could tell she wasn’t going to give me much information about any of this so I was trying to find just the right question to ask. But seeing my blank stare, the momentary freeze of my face, Janet simply made her exit. She placed the key on the table outside the door and walked away, jerking her head slightly before she turned, a shrug of spiky brown hair that seemed to indicate either her apathy or annoyance towards the whole situation.

The key was unremarkable. A typical tiny key to a padlock attached to a plastic yellow keychain with a label insert that read “14”. Unit 14 at the U-store on Pecos. A 20 minute drive from my place whenever I decided I was ready to go.

I spent the weekend as I usually did, at Cruisers. Except, of course, without Mick. The gang got drunk and rowdy as we cried and laughed over Mick, just as we had the weekend before. Stories were told, some that were new to me and some were recycled from the week before. Stories of cons gone right and cons gone wrong. Those three blissful months Mick lived in Mexico til he crossed the wrong people and had to flee, barely making it out alive. The two weeks he’d spent in the hospital, leading him to set up one of his biggest grifts ever. That time he won $5000 in a sports bet and took everyone for steaks in the city. We pumped quarters into the jukebox and belted out the words for Runnin’ With the Devil and Honky Tonk Woman (a couple of Mick’s favorites), beers sloshing as we crooned and swayed, numbing ourselves as the grief trickled through. Most everyone there had known Mick longer than me, including Janet, who only showed up Saturday night and was quieter than usual, a few soft cracks peeking through her tough shell. Still, everyone sort of gave me an honored spot at the table, bought me drinks and shot me wistful looks filled with sympathy across the table. Mick may have had a lot of girlfriends in his life, but I was the one he was with when he died. Benny drove me home both nights, giving me long hugs when he dropped me off and telling me whatever I needed, he was there.

By mid-week I felt ready to see the unit. Curiosity was starting to gnaw at me, brewing beneath the heaviness and confusion that had filled the long, weird days and nights of the past few weeks. I realized Janet must have visited the unit herself before giving me the key. She would have claimed anything of value for herself, but I felt comforted knowing it had been looked over. Janet may not have liked me, but she wasn’t out to get me. I felt certain I wasn’t going to walk into something awful, that whatever that key lead to wouldn’t be something that would add to my suffering.

The U-Store was familiar to me. It was one of several facilities where we stashed our swag and other items essential to our grift, so I had no trouble finding my way to Unit 14 that afternoon. I rolled up with gloves, rags, and a flashlight on the seat next to me, the little key placed in one cupholder, a giant styrofoam cup with a slurpee coffee drink from the gas station in the other. With a click of the key, yank of the padlock, and the clanking slide of the metal door, I was in. 

I continued to fuel myself with icy slurps of sugar and caffeine as I took it in the small unit in front of me, this particular remainder of the man who had been with me, had been so very alive in my days and nights, and was suddenly gone. I couldn’t say I had felt him, his presence or whatever, since he died. Some of the others had reported things like that - that Mick had visited them, appeared in powerful dreams, or even given them some kind of message, but that spiritual stuff has never really been my thing. And I didn’t feel Mick anymore here in this cramped, over-full storage unit.

What stood in front of me was a slightly overwhelming stack of boxes and bins, mostly unlabeled, yet arranged with some semblance of order. I noticed a few garbage bags stuffed full of what appeared to be something soft, an unidentifiable piece of rusty machinery which peeked out behind several stacks of boxes, and some motor oil mixed in with the lot. I scooted a few boxes near the door and sat across the edge of unit as I peeked through their contents. The first contained a heavy winter coat and sturdy snow boots; half-drawn sketchbooks and pencils filled the next one. One of the black garbage bags was filled with camping gear; there were several boxes of clothes (some of them women’s), an old laptop computer, and a crate filled with sheet music for the guitar. One of the more interesting containers had old photographs of Mick as a boy, his face simultaneously feral and sullen. Another box was packed with paperwork, pay stubs and tax documents over ten years old, a sparsely stamped up passport, some old letters, and a marriage license? Another box of photos revealed a few pictures from this never mentioned period of his life: Mick, a skinny, smiling twenty something with his arm around a dark-haired bride. She looked innocent and happy, Mick was glassy-eyed and grinning. Deeper in the box were a couple photos of the two of them on a beach, wind whipped hair surrounding their slightly sunburnt faces. Following this, I unearthed a couple stacks of tiles resting between boxes on the floor, various tools and equipment, a decent sized collection of books on gardening (something I never knew Mick to be interested in), some old cameras, a pair of crutches, snorkel gear, and a small supply of cleaning supplies.

A couple dusty hours in I took a break, sipping on the coffee flavored sugar water that remained at the bottom of my styrofoam cup as I looked out over the half perused pile of boxes in front of me. In my gut I knew that whatever was in the remaining boxes wasn’t going to be any more revealing or enticing than the bulk of what had been already been exhumed this afternoon. But I felt a kind of tingle inside of me, an appreciation for these partial pieces of him. This oddly intimate - yet also oddly mundane - glimpse at a now over life had offered me something. I felt...not his spirit, exactly. I don’t know if I really believe in that anyway. But I felt life itself. His life. A life on margins, a life he’d chosen, and which (as he often proclaimed) hadn’t belonged to anyone else. I felt my life, felt the realness of it, the nowness of it, as well as the farce of it all. Behind the gritty presence of the dirt and sweat on my skin, the rush of sugar beating through my heart, and the crush of emotions I’d been left with, was the truth that it could all - and one day, undoubtedly would - just disappear. We’re all here being taken for a ride, fooled into thinking we actually have something to hold onto as we are spun around in the big, beautiful, awful and messy long con that is life itself.