Alive on Arrival: Chapter 16

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16

Indian Driver drops me off at the bottom of my old driveway located in a quiet North Albany neighborhood called Orchard Grove (It was once an apple orchard before the bulldozers arrived). I pay him with some of the cash I have on me. I give him a twenty-dollar tip. It doesn’t come close to cleaning me out. But for obvious reasons, I need to conserve what cash I took off of Juarez’s hitmen. Indian Driver seems overly grateful for the tip despite his taxi receiving three bullet holes.

“I wish I could pay you for the damages,” I say. “But things are a little tight.”

“This is Albany, sir,” the driver says. “These are not the first bullet holes the taxi has suffered.”

I nod, shut the door, and with the plastic bag in hand, start up the driveway dressed only in my hospital clothing. If any neighbors are peering out their living room windows at me, they are getting quite the show. The robe and gown I wear barely cover my pale ass. For certain, I’m doing a good job of flashing my old neighbors, not that I give a fuck.

But my bare ass represents a fitting prodigal return to the home I not only used to own but spent all my royalty money on just to lose it in the divorce. Sure, I used to get along with a couple of the husbands who lived in Orchard Grove. We’d get together to watch football on Sundays, drink way too much beer, and bitch about not having gotten laid in months. Such was the life of the middle-aged married man in Suburbia. But that was the extent of my friendships.