From the archives: "Satellite's Broke"

It could come down to this: Deek Reeling never figured that the coin rolls he always gets from the bank took a good pinch on the bottom end to work right. Sitting and skimming over the old print-out the wife said would be a sure help for saving some more coins, so they didn’t have to steal satellite anymore and could have love without that, Deek couldn’t find anything in Mr. Ruff’s Fundamentals of the Washeteria that told him about the something like the good pinch so the coins could be easily stacked into neat, heavy sticks. Mr. Ruff ought to know that rolling up the coins for the coin revenues cannot be gotten a hang of so easily. Besides that, Deek had already bought the front loader machines with the Energy Star rating that Mr. Ruff advised, so the print-out was just another wife thing to crumple. In spite of what his wife said, they would keep watching the movies he won from stealing satellites. Any kind of movie you want all for free.

Deek hook-shot Mr. Ruff’s fundamental crap in the waste and looked out his office pane to see if any of the customers had any of their damn huge and baggy clothes to wash today. No one came in, but he remembered that he never had to look twice anyway. Some kind of loud language was always spitting through their heads from broken ear-phones without the cushions, so he got the sense of them real quick even before they started using the machines and making that rumbling sound of an overstuffed machine. He sure as shit didn’t expect anyone besides that group today anyway, because he, thank Christ for his sake, was getting the hang of accepting how the types with tighter clothes got their own machines and all them just moving farther from King Johnny’s Coin Laundry. Saving themselves, he thought, but he never liked think about leaving and saving himself. Ain’t his place or his business. Deek knew that.

If it could only be the usual rumbles of the washing machines beating the sides of each other that made his ears hear for the first time that morning instead of it having to be another customer on the headphones, bobbing and spitting with his head, pounded with sound and full of a language he refused to give up. That’s something Deek Reeling didn’t tolerate for no one but Deek Reeling and only Deek Reeling.

Good thing then that the only thing making noise from the other side of his office window was his young nephew who was just ripping and banging the joysticks of the table top arcade game. The other nephew, the older one, was just sitting around and staring down at the corner folding table, tearing apart the mag subscriptions from LA that Mr. Ruff also advised he should provide for literature, and that’s wise because Deek liked that soft gloss they gave off. But the older nephew just tore and tore. Tearing or reading some dry, dark looking book was all he could do, but you know, they got to spend the month at Deek’s King Johnny’ Coin Laundry. It should of been nice for them just taking sometime away, just an hour on Highway 50, from Deek’s brother who was bed ridden, because he said that the office was making him sink into his bed, though he also said every other day that it was the kids doing the making the sinking, or better yet, choking him too, he said.

Deek looked back down to get the hang of the coin roll, but he never got that good pinch, the hang of the brown coin rolls.

Through the office window pane, if you got the luck to be the first customer on coin rolling days, you might get to catch him not getting hang: struggling and ending up sticking both his finger tips into the ends of the roll and then jabbing each through until they almost kissed - his ash grey knuckles exposed at end-holes, as if he was caught in some Chinese trap. And that but making his body bubble water upward and out his face’s dark holes toward the desk, forming itchy salt pools, which he would soak with another crumple of the stiff roll paper and then throw it to the mountain of folded and jagged rolls on the far side of his desk, while still whole chest of loose coins in the register tray, set to boil over just in time for the first spic or whatever customer to walk in. He couldn’t even freaking tell what hot southerly place they were coming from anymore.
On coin revenue days, when he would finally get a hang of the roll and was able to proceed with each coin from Lincoln to Kennedy, he would flip-flop the stacks and bowl the finally filled rolls toward the mountain of jagged paper balls that he formed across his desk and hook-shoot the other crumples in the waste, balling around. But when he didn’t get a hang, you can see him fist shoot a half-filled coin roll without the bottom pinched toward the glass in front of the desk and make bursting money showers with the clinks like sharp thunder, making the sound that his prized Plasma screen made when the satellites would be cut off and disappear into the sun, leaving everything silent except for that spic crap spitting through the headphones of that lucky first customer.

Those days with coin outbursts started to come oftener because the street was getting all melty liquid and rain was much less routine. And on these days, more July-sweaty, dark people of all kinds came in Deek’s laundromat and sat all over Reeling’s new front-loaders, licking their fingers and stuffing the scented softeners everywhere inside their lustery trash-bag-looking shirts and twinkling clown jeans. When Deek Reeling was bore witness of all this, fuming and anguished over the mountain of bank rolls and little bits of the aftermath from the coin explosions, he left his office and went to through the rows as if he was going to just be pin-balling for a bit. But only the young nephew did that.

These days when sweat forms a flower pedal on the back of his 4X violet shirt were the dark ones that meant a lot of coin shower explosion, and bright days only being when his machine’s rumbles turned King Johnny’s Coin Laundry into tuneful place and the people wearing their ball caps could come in and have swell days over the soothing white noise, reading the LA literature, never sitting on top of the of machines, and then driving home to thawing meat on the kitchen counter to have dinner with people in soft fitted clothes with and good house-holds and respect for Deek. But this rainless dark day was pretty much like the other day when he got up from a coin shower, came out his office, and started slapping all over with a rolled up LA literature, trying to make a rumbling noise on the hollow machines that would maybe scare the baggy-clothes customers off the machines. But they always stayed on the machines, not noticing the sign, championing the rumbling front-loaders with their jeans, tossing a rubber snake around and even black cigarettes sometimes, one head phone always loud and slipping off. They never even read the available LA Literature and just listened to old black headphones lacking the ear cushions.

Same kind of day just had to happen today, that spic or whatever sitting on the machine with his damn language buzzing while Deek sat in his office, his fingers stuck in the Chinese trap. He intended to say something once he got the hang of the roll. He never really said anything that and never really had to until the smaller-clothes types got their own machines, and left the other group of all these dark people just sitting over every washing machine, scraping the white finish and leaving little scar of silver.

Deek thought the Chinese trap technique was the best way to get the hang going, so he started again until his office pane was rattling because the younger nephew was tapping on the class with a head of a toy robot and the little nose of his die-cast four-engine bomber, wanting some of those coins for pinball.

No, he said, louder and longer drawn each time, until the boy took the die-cast mini-bomber hammered the nose all over the lid of Deek’s only top loader machine, and Deek noticed that his only top loader, clear reading, Don’t Use, was being used. If Deek just couldn’t kick him out, he at least let them know who’s boss, saying all that to himself like that behind the window before he got up, to simply warn that spic or whatever, because he just purely wanted to be the coin laundry man, the happy one with silver coins that glided out from the lip of the filled roll to the cupped hands of these people always trying to get more coins out of you. But as bleeping from the games and the bad language from the broken earphones spread across the rows of machines, Deek, out of his office and roving on down the rows, got damn near nose to nose with that spic or whatever and said to him to read the damn sign. There is a sign, he said, that says don’t use this one, and another one that says don’t sit on the machines, which you’ve been doing since you got here.

I don’t see no sign, dude, the man said mocking with some real pride. Deek was in his office by the time the customer finished talking. He shut the door and you could see him slump down, and start to not get the hang again, the sweat pooling and Deek getting closer making more coin showers. So the customer turned those headphones with the bad language up. He looked at Deak and saw him cupping his ears and pressing his head in, trying to cancel all that freaking noise. The dark day was far from being over, so he hurled the half-filled roller and caused another coin shower, this one more earth shattering. He flung the office door open, fisting handful of heavy Kennedys, smiling some half-assed scary smile, and acting all happy for the visiting kids and pinball. He swiped the head-phone off the man’s shaved head, and he yelled over the games’ exploding bleeps that he asked him nicely the first time and that he had to just leave now and never come back around to wash clothes if he don’t want to listen or read, or just can’t read, the sign that said no sitting on the machines. Thank Christ the spic or whatever felt fine taking those huge clothes elsewhere. That’s the right way to deal with this shit.
So the day was bright for a while and the afternoon in the Johnny King’s Coin Laundry would be filled with nice bleeps from the arcade. The young nephew played the pinball well, and making every high score, he continued to make the nice bleeping sounds, his faces gleaming and drooling over the table top screen, and jerking that joystick over the rattling plastic. When the nephew put down the die-cast bomber and showed him that it just took a bit of folding on the underside and the coins would just stack right on top of the other, the coin showers were over for another day and Deek could make home in time for the thawing meat dinner on the kitchen counter; that thing better be clean, clean as the new purple uniforms with the screen print of King Johnny’s Coin Laundy he got for his new employees. His newly hired employee, a nice but stocky little Guatemalan woman who carried her baby in a sack over her back, took over the shift until the evening when Deek would always return to close this life-blood investment place of his.

Deek finished packing each variety of coins and even intended to give one roll of dimes equaling five dollars to each of the nephews. The older one refused again, while the younger grabbed it so quick that he tore it and spilt open the vein of dimes all over split-up parking lot. So he got the older’s roll, but only after the older was done pulling some the hair of the younger and shoving him in the back seat, slapping his head a few times, just to make him not want to talk, so that wasn’t all that much of a deal. But the older pulled the shot-gun call that these kids do a lot, and sat in the front, so that’s in the order of certain kind of good deals that Deek really got a kick out of, until the older boy took out biggest book he could find written by what looked like some another spic or whatever, and he cracked it to seriously read, for the whole ride back to Uncle Deek’s house. And he got some good reading in because he didn’t even have silence or shush the young one, even when held his little die-cast bomber against pane of backseat window and through it saw a miniature battlefield that he would give the soundtrack to with the noises his mouth made. With wet swishes from his lips for the flying and firing or explosion noises, his plane soared over the malls and that one willow tree that meant they were close to the chained restaurants, so he breathed some more swish bombs. It was a kind of white noise that Deek mistook for washing machines, so the car just a good silent all the way home to Grandma and the wife waiting for the meat to thaw. Good thing the younger got the plane last Easter from Grandma’s house. That was really a great day to see him tear open the plastic and fly the four engine miniature die-cast around the room smiling and swishing, but man it should be hard for the grandma to even take a look at those planes because she went through the whole thing, but it still should be a good thing because that’s why they live in place they do now, away from a Europe fight still actually going probably.

Jesus Christ do I have get a goddamn sign in Spic that says you can’t sit on my machines? Deek spat over the white noise swishes. The older nephew, with a split headache or a certain kind of vomity sick look in face that he always got in Deek’s rocking Buick, said yes that he should have the fucking sign in Spanish.

So Deek says no, and goddamn it I knew that head phone was screaming something in that freaking Spanish. Hey punk, he said, my parents learned English after the war just like every other culture or ethnicity or culture whatever that came to this place.

But they didn’t even teach you Polish, Deek, the older nephew said.

I don’t need to know it. I speak English here and no one else that comes into the damn store any more does, does that make sense? Deek’s asking then.

So yeah, let’s just rename Los Angeles and say it’s always meant to be called The Angels. The older nephew said, spouting that real smart crap and then throwing the book across the dashboard, Deek then just picking it up off the dash nailing the boy’s head when he tossed back, telling him too keep quiet in the car and read again.

Swishing around in the backseat, the younger screamed something about the air and obi one.
That says Nairobi, the older said, and he wants to go there to eat tonight.

Things were already thawing on the counter so that’s out of whole big question of what the visiting nephews were eating tonight. Plus, the place was way too much money. Who did they think their uncle was?

God if they’d only listen, but they never got it, the older one suggested they go to the trusty Outback instead.

Oh yeah! Well I’ll take you out back and beat the livin’ crap outta you! Deek laughed because that was really a good joke compared to his other ones that were too political for the younger in back, who was now tapping the nose on the pane and play-firing, cheek-swishing bullets toward the Nairobi Bar and Grill. Plus the wife said earlier that they’d be watching a movie, an award-winning picture about warring Africans, over dinner anyway. Deek clutched the steering wheel and laughed again because that’s what was funny about Africa.

It’s his damn birthday though, the older Nephew said, and he obviously wants to go there. It’s bad enough that your brother left us here. Didn’t he leave you his card anyway?
We already got steaks thawing, said Deek.

The little boy’s plane suddenly took dive into the in the bench and he tumbled as if he was a belly turret gunner with the force of Deek’s Buick rolling over the curb and across the asphalt lot toward the flat horizon of the town mall. The older nephew knew what Deek was doing again. It was the thing that got to the older Reeling boy the most about his father’s brother, because was the trashiest thing that people do. He felt it just as tacky as the way Deek Reeling’s wife gave the play by play and the blown-up limb count of that World War movie, and he just wished Deek’s wife would shut her mouth during movies that they stole from satellite somewhere.
Deek made a run through the slide doors under the great white sign of House Holder’s as the sun setting over the mall began to pull the satellite with it. Deek’s wife called to tell him that the satellite was busted again, meaning he has to stop by the video store too, but he could get that House Holders because they also had a adult entertainment section in the House Holder’s Family Video. He got a box of Christ Lights and stepped out to suck hard in a hurry the cigarette in front of the sliding doors of House Holders.

The funny part to the older-nephew and the trashiest thing about his uncle were the icicle lights that hung all for the summer and ever after, except when the neighborhood hoodlums would tear them all down for no damn good or reason.

I hope he’s buying more Christ Lights, so more of those the neighborhood kids will rip them down, the older nephew said to the younger who was still keeping on the swishing.
Deek went back in and found the cramped adult section, which seemed to shrink in the presence of Deek and his purple shirt with petal sweat stain and short shorts. The whole world was shrinking and folding for Deek when he noticed the tall clerk flapping the wax pages of some LA literature on the glass counter, and recognized him from back in another dark day. The boy at the counter, pierced all over his face with rings and chains, made Deek reckon about his own son for the first time since the he left the house bruised all over his chest from Deek’s powerful fistfuls of Kennedy’s.

Didn’t you take my son to prom? Deek said looking down over the boy’s dangling chain piercings. He set the case on the glass, trying to block the menacing toys from his eyes. The clerk boy swiped Deek’s card and tapped it, waiting for it to go through.

He gave some queer look and asked for Deek’s ID. The signature on the back is faded, the clerk said.

Oh, well, this is not really my card. It’s my brother’s. Deek responded with a groan. Doesn’t that count?

The clerk tapped on the glass, shaking his head no, and Deek spun his eyes around the dim pink room and cocked his neck to the humming white tubes on the ceiling. Deek said that he had some coins in his car, and that he’d be back.

Deek coming through sensor doors blew out some yellow gas that the little nephew sitting in the car was immediately ready to identify, tapping the pane and pointing with the jagged nose of his die-cast bomber. He made the swishes like it was now that poison gas that he learned about in the movies Deek’s wife would always give the play by play. Oh, she would say, the poison gas makes him turn blew, or there goes his arm, oh man, he’s lookin’ all over the beach for the end of his arm, oh, yeah he’s dead now, and man think about the mother just crying back at the farm.
Deek came and ripped the front seat open, asking for the younger nephew’s coin rolls. He caught the boy in the back seat sucking on a brown paper tube with a coin sticking out and reached to snatch the roll of dimes from his mouth, and his swishing turned into crying siren. Deek slammed the car door and hurried through the lot and went back to the corner room of the video store. He barely recognized that fag punk whatever, but he was sure it was that one from high school, so he took the coins and hurled the five dollars worth at the fag punk whatever tortoise shell glasses. It was loud with all those chains and shattering glass, so then he just took the video and power-walked through the dividing doors, swinging a plastic bag full of Christ Lights to put back up after dinner.

Thing was though, the older nephew kept sneaking out back during the night to plug in the lights so they’d be the only lights in the neighborhood. The chained sit-down restaurant of or the white light of the giant House Holders sign didn’t even flicker, so the Reeling’s house would be a beacon of tacky people who just didn’t care to take down their Christ Lights in the summer, and that’s why they kept coming down.

The meat was now soft on the counter and one by one they were being thrown to the grill by the wife, who was doing the play by play about the problems in Africa this time to Deek’s mother, Basia. She said that those people just kept on fighting for some reason and it was just violent, and yep, she said, their gonna kill them because their from one family, and it’s just a shame that these people can’t be civilized. Basia was also making a very certain kind of warnings herself over the flaming steaks. She especially ought to know about opression, having to serve schmorgesborg after schmorgesborg to Aryans and Russians in a Warsaw ghetto back in Europe.

It’s because they’re black, she kept saying.

After several loud staple gun-shots out on the gutter above the ever-green hedge, Deek came through the screen door and sat down at the table.

During a silent meal without the satellite, the older nephew arose and said that he should be excused because he had to use bathroom to wash off the blood of each of the dinner party members who all sat complacently, stuffing themselves with countless cutlets of red meat. But they kept on eating.

Another break in the silence occurred when Basia peeped up toward Deek in mid chew. She began, asking if the boy had been advised by their father, as she told him, to not let the older to vote for that black man to be president. Deek remained silent, and his wife, too began to choke at the break in silence. For this was not something to discuss over steak dinner, but the satellite was blocked, and no movies were on, so as far as Basia was concerned, her orders were immanent to the now eligible voter in the older nephew. If they are not baptized before I die either! What’s happening? She swooned as best she could.

Well I’ll have to tell him myself, she said and waited for her grandson to return to the table from wherever he was. But he had already overheard her from the bathroom. And he turned back, rushed to the head of the table, and stood yelling.

I can’t wait until that man is anointed president, he began to sneer, so that when he is assassinated by something like sipping poisoned Starbucks coffee while soaring high over this damn country on Air Force One, you people will run around screaming that your prophesies were good and dead-on! Of course, the whole table was aghast and silent with the exception of the soft swishing of the younger nephew flying his die-cast bomber over his untouched food with his soft hand.

Deek said upward at older nephew, I can’t wait till you mature. I don’t really have a problem with him, but where does he get off calling himself black, anyway? He’s only half.
And why the hell does it matter to you what he calls himself if he’s a good candidate? The older nephew pushed his chair in and shook the table. I’m going to the bathroom, he said wishing to be excused. He went through his brother’s stuff to get the lucky black face mask, which the younger kept for times when his father didn’t want to see him. He put the mask on, locked the bathroom door, and opened the window to excuse himself from his boiling, which he figured now should turn to vengeance as he studied the mess of wires and unlit Christ lights.
Deek, scraping his plate, excused himself from the table and said that he was going back to the laundromat to collect the day’s coins and kick out every late customer, bright or not.

Basia and Deek’s wife slept with stomachs full and brains tired in front of the TV, leaving the younger nephew wandering the house. He found the multi-colored and inserted in the machine that closely resembled the videogame system which his father bought him last Christmas. It flashed pink and flesh colors projected on family room walls while the boy’s bomber and toy robot lay neglected on kitchen counter. And the boy, after several minutes in front of the silent flashing, keeled and rocked on to his back and shut his eyes.
Deek’s Buick, on its way home, hopped and cut the corner toward his house. Deek realized, as he approached the driveway, that the car’s headlights caught some dark spic fag punk whatever rushing around the yard, tugging the blinking Christ Lights and ripping out the staples. Deek pressed down the gas, flicked his cigarette out the open window, and sped straight over the curb through his rotting fence and then flipped the spot-lit black-masked figure onto windshield like a big old doll. He paused and listened to the car crushing the picket fence. Deek charged out of the car with it still running, drug the man off the hood and began to kick the every bit of wind out of the man’s stomach.

Uncle Deek! The man bellowed breathlessly, reddened drooling streaming out of the corner of the mouth-hole of the black mask and over the illuminated turf.
My father will know! He moaned.

Deek cradled the boy, pretty much ugly and unrecognizable, and brought him in through the house where he flopped him on the carpet in front of the plasma-screen in the family room next to the younger nephew whose hands were cupped over the front of his waist.

Deek’s wife called Deek’s brother and explained how: while your son was running around in the yard after dark and Deek accidentally hit him with the car. It was just awful and like a bad movie, she explained.

The boy’s were loaded into the back seat of the Buick and driven straight home across the plains through the night back to the boys’ home since only his father could afford the co-pay at the hospital. The rumbling of the engine could soothe him properly, so Deek Reeling calmly dropped off the boys, thinking that his brother should have known better than to leave the boys in the care of a man who couldn’t even manage to keep his own son straight.

On one of his days home from the office, John and his sons watched that black man being anointed as president.

The thing that bugs me, John Reeling said, rather two things: I don’t like it when he says things like spreading the wealth, and where does he get off calming himself black? The younger swished while the just older smiled, and didn’t say shit. Oh well, he sighed, you guys are going to help me with the lights tomorrow, aren’t you?

Not until you take the pumpkins off the porch, the older boy responded, and give me some cash for it too.

Basia died the next summer, and had a funeral nice quiet with everyone dressed in black, and when Deek returned to the laundromat after the funeral and full and half asleep from a steak dinner his brother paid for at the Nairobi Bar and Grill, he found the glass windows shattered and every coin taken from the machines. He listened for rumbles, and hearing nothing, he pinched himself under the twinkling lights of King Johnny’s Coin Laundry, trying to wake himself up. His wife called, and announced the good news of the satellite working again, so he didn’t have to stop at Householder’s to pick up one of those videos.