Free Pipsqueak by Brian M. Wiprud

response would be but decided to see if his story changed any. Otto claims to have done things and been places that I sometimes don’t completely believe.
    “Otto, of course, pack very nice.” He waved a piece of newspaper at me, rather resentful that I might even question his talents. “Tall ago, like young man, home in gulag. Ve not just play card, drink tea day into night. Guards take us to factory, I wrap package night to day.”
    Otto picked up his tub of snakes and I hefted the rolled blankets of lizards. I unlocked the cellar door to the sidewalk. At street level, we emerged and aimed at the Lincoln. I put the top down and we loaded up the backseat with all the wrapped beasts. Once the cellar doors were locked again, Otto took the opportunity of being out in the fresh air to light a cigarette. I paused before getting into the Lincoln.
    “Otto, how’d you get out of the gulag, anyway?”
    He paled, the circles around his eyes darkening. At first I thought the smoke had caught in his throat, but the peaty vapor came out in a long, thoughtful stream as his eyes narrowed sharply toward the Hudson River.
    “How is Garv see man die? Knife? Kalashnikov? Rope? Hand? Teeth?”
    “Uh, what, you mean like on TV? The movies?” Naïveté is my specialty sometimes.
    The sun glinted off his steel dental work, the smile of hard knocks flickering on his scruffy jaw. His gray eyes met mine.
    “Otto, he is not knowink how seeink many men die. Very much, Garv. Eetz not good place, maybe, God put to man.” Cryptically, he drifted off toward the roar of the West Side Highway, smoke rising, arms folded, silhouetted by shimmering afternoon sun on the Hudson.
    I got in the Lincoln and drove past him to the highway. Did he misunderstand my question? Or had Otto killed someone to get out of the gulag? Was there a massacre of some kind? Had he witnessed carnage? There was a grim story that he wasn’t keen to tell, and I was slightly queasy just from his innuendo, not so much for what the particulars might be but for all my vast ignorance of and ultimately indifference to the systematic brutality seemingly endemic to far-flung places.
    In that he slept on bar tops, aspired to sell hot dogs on a nude beach, smoked too much, and babbled, I didn’t take Otto very seriously. Quite the contrary. But I was beginning to think there was a lot more to him, that maybe his flip everyday persona was the result of some very difficult times. Times in which he learned that all is fleeting and perhaps meaningless.
    As I drove south to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, I looked around me. A Rollerblader had fallen and scraped an elbow. A taxi had a flat tire. A couple argued outside a restaurant. A Lost Our Lease sign. An enraged motorist honking at someone who’d cut him off. A woman limping along with a broken heel. A shabby man slumped in a doorway.
    The problems of Mall Age America seemed somehow paltry in comparison.

Chapter 11

    A s usual, the male of the species had little trouble choosing a wardrobe. My choice was made easier by having only two options for the occasion: the blue pinstripe or the ivory cruisewear. With the remarkable foresight of a collector, at the tender age of twenty I had rescued four seriously dated suits from my late grandparents’ wardrobe before my parents sent them off to the Salvation Army. (The wardrobe, not the grandparents.) In the midst of gargling, I had turned from the image of my sleep-tousled hair in the bathroom mirror in time to see the SA truck pull up in front of the house. I had sprinted down the stairs in a towel and half a faceful of shave cream. Catching the Salvation Army man as he was going down the front walk, we got into a bit of a tussle, much to the dismay of my folks. To peeping neighbors, the tableau must have looked like a missionary in hand-to-hand combat with a Watusi savage right there on Red Robin Road. I’d pretty much got the suits out from under his arm when I made a bonus grab for a