Free Long Past Stopping by Oran Canfield Page A

you could buy it right next door in grape, cherry, strawberry, or tropical punch flavors. Before the night was through, I had somehow gotten into three fights with my friends, and I don’t fight.
    â€œDon’t you remember what happened last time?” I reminded him.
    â€œYeah. It was fun, remember?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said, trying not to think about my oldest friend, Jibz, whom I had hooked up with at the end of the night. I had been in love with her for as long as I could remember, and as usual, I had found out a few days later that she was with a new “serious” boyfriend. She could be single for months, but whenever we got together, she would always findsomeone the next day. Why not me? I asked myself over and over. As many times as it had happened, it never got any easier to deal with.
    Depressed, I walked the ten blocks to my internship, the first two of which were spent fending off junkies trying to sell me “one and ones.” I was so used to this from living in the neighborhood for the past seven years that most of the time it didn’t really bother me. I just got really used to saying no twenty or thirty times until I cleared the two-block radius of Sixteenth and Mission. The thing I couldn’t understand was that I had been saying no to the same people for six years. After that many nos, over that many years, it would seem fairly clear that I wasn’t in the market. But these guys never let up.
    â€œLooking?”
    â€œOne and ones?”
    â€œChiva?”
    â€œCoca?”
    â€œOutfits?”
    They were like zombies who had learned a few words to trick you into thinking they were human. Sometimes they would form complete sentences like, “Come on, man. Look at me. I’m fucking sick. I need the credit.” They always looked fucking sick to me with their abscesses and open facial wounds. Zombies.
    â€œNo…Nope…I’m cool…No…Not looking…No, really. I’m not fucking looking!” This was my mantra whenever I left the house.
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    T HIS INTERNSHIP WAS LIKE any other internship I’d ever had—a thinly veiled scam to get suckers like me to do free labor. The thing was, all the other interns would figure it out in about a week and stop coming back. I had been sanding pianos now for three months and continued to show up. This guy, Dietrich, would scout the classifieds for free pianos, sand them down, put a coat of varnish on them, and then sell them a week later for around fifteen hundred dollars. Actually, I sanded and varnished all the pianos, and then he would come downstairs and tune them.
    â€œHey, Dietrich. When do you think I’ll be able to start tuning pianos? I think I’ve got this sanding thing down.”
    â€œDid you finish the Chickering?” he asked in his weird German accent. He sounded slightly effeminate, which I had thought was pretty hard for Germans.
    â€œYeah, I finished it last night,” I responded.
    â€œVery good. You know that Knabe in the back. You can start sanding that one today.”
    â€œYeah, well, I think I’m pretty good at this sanding thing by now, so why don’t you give me a lesson on how to tune the Chickering?” I tried to sound pissed off, but it was pretty ineffective.
    â€œOh, don’t worry, we’ll get to that, but I’m actually working on something upstairs right now. Soon, okay?”
    It’s not that I wasn’t aware that he was scamming me, but I had something of my own scam going. I had called Jack and told him about my idea of going into piano tuning, and if he could just help me out for a little while, I would soon be making a hundred dollars an hour tuning pianos.
    â€œOkay, just tell Patti I said it was all right,” Jack had said. Patti was his secretary, and I talked to her far more than I talked to him.
    â€œHi, Patti. It’s Oran.” I had to call her every month.
    â€œOh shit. How