Spiders and Mashed Potatoes

Note: Some curse words.

It was the day of his first job and the last day of life as he knew it. He didn’t know that though. What he did know was that the last thing he wanted was someone dramatically climbing into his cab and telling him to “Follow that car.” 

He’s not sure where she had come from, but he was waiting in his cab outside Sun Sai Gai in Chinatown when she banged on the trunk of his cab as she opened the door. 

“I’m off duty!” he yelled as she stepped in with her big black boot. 

She either didn’t hear him or she didn’t care, instead she coolly dropped those three words he’d only ever heard in a movie. He wanted to say, “You think this is a spy flick or something? Get outta here!” But he stopped himself when he realized that he did feel a bit like he was in a James Bond film. 

She handed him a big wad of cash and repeated herself, with slightly less patience. Her voice was sweet with a crackle. He imagined someone pouring honey on toast or gasoline on a fire. He turned back to find the car she was nodding at and saw a red Ferrari in front of them starting to pull away. 

Goddammit, he thought. He can’t go. He can’t. But he looked at the wad of cash and then the fire in her eyes and he knew, in a day without choices, that this was another thing that somehow was not up to him. He grunted in response and they took off behind the car.

For someone engaged in such dramatic activities, she was rather calm. It seemed to emanate from her clothes. She was dressed all in black. Long black coat, black jeans, black boots. Even her hair was black, as shiny as a moonlit night. 

He wondered if he looked calm to her. He doubted it. The whole day had him agitated and this certainly wasn’t helping. He was sweating and fidgeting in his seat. He had stuffed the mashed potatoes package into the inside pocket of his coat. He felt it growing legs, felt it crawling out and up his arm and neck, across his cheek and into his nose and settling right between his eyes. His head started pounding at the thought and he tried to rub the pain away. 

He caught her eye in the rear view mirror then. “You good?” she said. It was more of a statement than a question, willing him to pull himself together.

Ignoring her, he returned his eyes to the car. He never understood having a Ferrari in a city like this. Seemed like a disservice to its power. It was ambling now through traffic, a kitten in a lion’s body. At this time of evening, the traffic was starting to ease but still heavy enough that the Ferrari was fairly easy to follow in the stop and go. He tried to keep a safe distance and hoped that his taxi wouldn’t stick out in the sea of cars around him. 

He looked at her again in the back. She was staring intently ahead at the car, but he could see her playing with something in her hand. It was the only sign of agitation that he could glean from her. She was passing the object methodically from hand to hand, careful to not let it fall. He craned his neck slightly to get a better look. 

She looked at him again, the fire growing in her eyes. “Eyes on the car.”

The Ferrari kept an even pace as it weaved through traffic. It was mostly a straight shot, thankfully, so he didn’t have to make any movie-chase style turns. After several more blocks, finally the Ferrari seemed to be making a stop. He pulled to the side of the street several cars back. He waited for her to say something or to get out, but she didn’t move. 

The Ferrari had stopped in front of John’s of Bleecker Street. Pizza. Of course. If only pizza was the crux of his worries right now. 

After a minute that felt like a century, the driver door of the Ferrari opened and a tall, thin man in a blue pinstripe suit stepped out. The man was unremarkable in almost every way, a tabula rasa of a person—it was like looking at a blank space. 

He marveled at the chain of events leading to this moment. He wondered if it had somehow all been planned, if his stupid self had wittingly or unwittingly gotten him caught up in something that was much, much bigger than he thought. 

Though unremarkable in appearance, the man was remarkable in one dramatic way—he knew this man. This man was mashed potatoes. And he had really fucked up. 

#

He was 16 the first time he ever played poker. He and his buddies would meet on the weekends sometimes to play. Small tournaments. Five dollar buy-in. Kid stuff. Sometimes he would win, but mostly he would lose. It wasn’t until many years later that his playing both got better and also became a problem. 

After high school, his friends went off to college, and he didn’t. This didn’t bother him that much, he knew college wasn’t for him. His parents hadn’t cared either and didn’t encourage him to go, or to do anything at all for that matter. They just wanted him out. He didn’t blame them. 

So he moved in with a friend, sleeping on his friend’s couch and starting to look for odd jobs. He fixed a neighbor’s creaky door, painted another neighbor’s apartment. He was a dishwasher in a coffee shop. He helped move furniture for another friend’s moving company. 

After a couple months of this, he decided to post ads for his services. Need a hand? I’ve got two. Call me for all your odd jobs!

He was proud of his ad and little tagline, and he posted them everywhere. Fences, sign posts, light poles. It got him quite a bit of business surprisingly, with someone calling at least a couple times a week. And many of the clients turned into regulars, some of whom he ended up working with for years. The side jobs took him through every nook and cranny of the city, the streets of each of the boroughs becoming familiar to him as the lines on his hands. 

After that, it was his friend’s idea to apply for a taxi driver license. He hadn’t ever really thought of it before. But his friend told him he should give it a try, that he was good with directions and that he knew the city so well. He liked the idea of meeting new people and taking them where they needed to go across the city. 

And so he did give it a try. He applied, paid the fees, did the training and taxi school, and eventually started driving. He would never say he loved it, but he also didn’t hate it. It was a job, and he saw it as one of his many side jobs, which, even though taxi driving took up most of his time then, he never stopped taking. 

He started up with the poker a few years into his time as a taxi driver. The invitation came from another cabbie, who regaled him of the world of underground poker, who told him it was easy to make a little extra money that way, who said that there were so many games, that he had to give it a try. He knew nothing about the underground world of poker, but he decided to look at it as another side job. And thinking of it like that, the decision was easy for him. 

And his cabbie friend had been right. There were a lot of games and a lot of cash for the taking. After going with his friend a few times, he got comfortable and started to make connections. He found it easier and easier to get into a game or new club. Sure, there were raids (only one that he was present for and they thankfully let him go), but this was just the cost of doing business in his mind. And he was doing business. He started to go more and more, and he got better and better. Eventually, he started to make money, enough to supplement his other income, enough to move into his own place, enough to change his life just the right amount that it felt like he had started a new life, enough that losing that same amount would be devastating. 

He did this for years. Taxi driver by day, poker play by night, everyone’s handyman on the weekend. 

He did this until it all stopped. Until he was ruined. He hated to say his luck ran out, but it was hard to say what else it could have been. 

And that’s when he got another call. 

“I saw ya ad at Penn Station.” The man took a long breath. Maybe a drag on a cigarette. “And I know ya lost big the other night. Real big.” 

The guy talked like he was drowning in mashed potatoes, the vowels taking up all the space in his mouth. He didn’t know who the guy was, but the guy knew him. 

“Who is this?” he croaked. He felt stupid for asking, knowing it didn’t matter who it was. He needed the job this guy was about to offer. 

“Ya new client. I gotta job for ya.” The man’s voice seemed to get louder with every word until his ear was suffocating in the sound.

Pulling back the phone slightly, he said, “What’s the job?”

“Eager boy.” The smile on the other end of the line was wet and cold.

He shivered. 

“Look for a text.” 

His stomach dropped at the shortness of the statement, at all the things a simple text could do. Before he could say anything else, the guy hung up. 

A few hours later he got a text from another unknown number. 9th and C. Empty lot. Tuesday 10pm. 

He doesn’t even remember heading over to the East Village that evening. He took the train, not wanting to take his taxi, and the train jostled him into a fog, a haze of anger at himself for being in this situation, anger at the guy who called him, terror at whatever was about to happen.

When he got to the spot, he pulled out his smokes and found a place to wait under one of the trees that hung over a black, wrought iron fence across from the empty lot. He had to wait two cigarettes. As he started to pull out his third, a cool black Mercedes sedan showed up. It looked new, or at least very clean, and the windows were heavily tinted. The rear left door opened, which he figured was his signal to get in. 

He put the cigarette back in the pack and climbed into the car. The driver looked stoically forward, not paying any attention to him as he sat down and shut the door. He found himself sitting next to a man he guessed to be in his mid-fifties, maybe a bit younger than his father. He looked tall, his long legs trying to fill all the open space in the back. He was wearing a blue pinstripe suit.  

The man handed him a heavy envelope. “Everything ya need is in there.” It was mashed potatoes, the guy from the phone. His voice certainly didn’t match his look. 

“How do–”

“No questions,” he barked and pointed to the door with his chin.

He quickly started to climb out and as he did, mashed potatoes called to him, “Hey, I gotta tip for ya.” He paused and lowered his voice, “Ya find a spider, ya betta run.”

He stood there in a daze as the door closed behind him and the sleek car drove off. He didn’t know what to make of any of it. The man, the envelope, the spider. He took a look around. The street was quiet enough that he braved a peek into the envelope. 

It contained two pictures of a man who looked to be around his age. The man was walking into a building which he recognized as one of the poker rooms he had frequented before. On the back of the picture, there was an address with a date and time. Sun Sai Gai. Baxter and Canal. Friday 9pm. He had no idea what Sun Sai Gai was, but he recognized the cross streets as Chinatown.

The other item in the envelope, which he was both expecting and dreading, was a small gun. He had only held a gun once before, as a kid. One of his friends’ dad had one, and they had taken it out until his friend’s parents came home and freaked out. This gun seemed smaller than that even, but somehow much, much heavier.

He quickly shoved the envelope and its contents into his coat pocket and started to make his way home. He walked the whole way, across the bridge to his place in Brooklyn, afraid to take the train or be anywhere confined with the package in his jacket. 

When he got home to his small studio apartment, he sat down at his tiny kitchen table and stared at the package. Friday, Friday, Friday, Friday, he repeated to himself. Maybe if he said it enough it would go away, or maybe it would all eventually seem easier. He didn’t know which he wanted. But it didn’t matter, because he knew no matter what, he no longer had a choice. 

#

At first he was confused. How could he not have known? But he had been focused on looking for the other guy and didn’t see who had gotten in the Ferrari. And of course mashed potatoes wouldn’t have taken his Ferrari to meet up the other night. 

And then, he was panicking. Panicking at the thought of what mashed potatoes would do if he knew he was being followed. Panicking at the thought of who the woman was. Panicking at the thought of how he would ever get back to Chinatown to complete the job. 

His breathing started to quicken. His mouth was dry and he desperately needed something to drink or to smoke. He and the woman looked at each other again.

“You mind if I smoke?” he said, his voice coming out in a thin line of sound. 

She looked from him to mashed potatoes. “You know him or something?”

He told his eyes not to look back at the man and told his voice to shape up. “No, why should I know him?” 

She turned back to the man, who had run inside the pizza joint, leaving his Ferrari double-parked. 

“Move closer.”

He didn’t want to move closer, but he didn’t want to upset her either. He pulled forward slightly and stopped a few cars back. He pulled his cap down further over his eyes. 

Then the man came out carrying some pizza boxes and headed straight for his car and climbed in. And, as if the car was attuned to its owner's body, the Ferrari came to life and took off, the tires screeching.

Somehow, as if parting the red sea, the Ferrari was easily able to make some distance. He could see pedestrians on the sidewalk staring and saw some motioning with their hands at the car in the way New Yorkers do. 

“GO!” she yelled, unfreezing him. He pressed on the gas and they took off behind the Ferrari which was already nearing the next stop and preparing to make a turn. He felt sick now and his vision was blurry from all the sweat. He pressed harder on the gas. They were coming up to the intersection as the light was turning yellow. He had never driven like this and didn't know if he could make such a sharp turn. He also hadn’t seen the person on the bike coming up the sidewalk to the intersection. As he started to take the turn, the biker entered the intersection. He reacted quickly, slamming on the brakes as hard as he could. The woman was jolted forward, her body careening into the front passenger seat. In the collision with the seat she lost her grip on the object in her hand and it went flying forward towards the windshield, ricocheting off it with a loud ping and falling into the footwell of the passenger seat. 

It glowed in the dusk light, a brilliant gold object, perhaps a brooch or a pin of some kind, certainly valuable. He stared at it for a second taking it in, almost admiring it in its simplistic beauty. He saw that it was an insect, and he counted the legs as if in a trance.

Eight.

Time seemed to slow in that moment as he reached for the gun in his coat pocket and turned to look back at the woman. When he blinked his eyes open, he found himself staring into the barrel of a gun. It was her eyes he noticed in that moment. They had gone hard, a ring of flame around them. A stone thrown into a fire. 

And he saw in those eyes himself reflected back. He was a cabbie on a trip he should never have taken, a pawn in a game he didn’t ask to be part of, a fly in a web he’ll never get out of.