Free Sweet Nothing by RICHARD LANGE Page A

head. “Picked up a couple days drywalling, but it’s slow.”
    “Let me talk to my cousin. He’s looking for help on that house in Eagle Rock.”
    “You were supposed to talk to him last week.”
    “Yeah, but then all this went down.”
    I haven’t spoken to my cousin in months because I owe him five hundred dollars. Larry knows this but doesn’t call me on it. He’s cool like that, always has been. What’s crazy is that sometimes I wish he wasn’t. Sometimes I wish he’d haul off and punch me in my lying fucking face.
    He slurps his coffee and watches the waitress joke with two cops in the next booth. I remember him contemplating joining the LAPD right after he got married, going on and on about the health insurance and the pension plan. He acted like I was some kind of asshole for pointing out that two DUIs and a burglary conviction might hold him back.
    “You’ve got to move out before the first of next month,” he mumbles without looking at me. “Shauna put her foot down.”
    Like I couldn’t see this coming. Shauna’s been trying to find an excuse to boot me from their garage since the day I moved in.
    “We need someone we can count on for regular rent,” Larry continues. “We’re behind on everything.”
    The rent bit is bogus. I’ve only been late once, maybe twice, in almost a year. I haven’t paid for April yet, but it’s only the fifth, and, guess what, I’ve been locked down most of that time. Larry could tell Shauna to back off. He could say, This is my homeboy we’re talking about. But I’ve been married; I understand. And if me staying there is causing him problems, no sweat. I’ll find somewhere else to crash until I get on another roll.
    “No worries,” I say, and that’s enough about that. “So this chick Lupe, the one from Hollywood Billiards—”
    “By the first,” Larry says, not letting it go.
    “Do you think I didn’t hear?”
    He’s given up on me. It’s there in his eyes. My hands tighten into fists, and ugly thoughts blaze through my brain. But then I see all the food on my plate and the clear blue sky outside and remember that it’s only me who can bring me down, and everything is fine again. Everything’s great.
      
    LUPE ALMOST BLEW it for me the night we met. She kept smiling from the bar as I hustled some pigeon, and it was so distracting that, for a while, I thought they were a team. I let the guy take me twice for twenty a game, then came on as drunk and stupid and challenged him to another, this time for a hundred. He figured he had a fish on the line and said, “Whatever you want, bro.” I stalled all the way to the eight before putting it away, and then it was him begging for a rematch. I held back in that game too, making my win look like dumb luck. He left grumbling but unable to prove that he’d been had.
    His money felt nice in my pocket—easy money always does—and I walked over and introduced myself to Lupe. “Ladies as pretty as you shouldn’t be allowed near the tables,” I said. “You make it hard to concentrate.”
    “You still whipped his ass, didn’t you?” she said.
    “No thanks to you.”
    She was there with friends from the dentist’s office where she worked as a receptionist, somebody’s birthday. I bought the group a round with my winnings, but Lupe was the only one I was interested in. The click of the balls faded, the music, everyone else’s dopey conversations. All I heard was her voice.
    I like Mexican girls. That thick black hair. That brown skin. Those dark, dark eyes, full of secrets. And Lupe had this haughtiness that made me smile because it was such a put-on. She tried to act like nothing meant anything to her, like she was in on the joke, but I could see that was just a shield she was using to protect herself. You win a girl like that over, and you’re going to learn what love is all about.
    “So what are you,” she asked at one point, stabbing her drink with her straw, “some kind of hustler, some