When In Rome~

Every morning I woke up and stared at the water stains running across the plaster ceiling—the particular shape of them, the way one branched off like a river, another pooled into something almost circular. If you blinked fast enough, you could almost imagine them moving—sliding—and that was about as much as I had going for me.

Who needed a TV when you had this, am I right?

Three weeks ago, I’d dropped into Gotham like a wet sack of trash. I had nothing but the jeans and tee, and a name I’d snatched from a video game. Arthur Morgan.

A bell rang. 

The beds on both sides of me erupted in unison: coughing, groaning, the unmistakable rattle of someone who’d spent too many years smoking things that weren’t tobacco. I sat up, ran my hands through hair, and with a yawn joined the shuffle toward the communal bathroom.

The guy in front of me—ratty wool coat, red beanie—looked back as we walked.

“You hear about the girl on 3rd and Grant?” he rasped.

I shook my head.

“They found her in a dumpster. Organs scooped clean. Word is, you walk outside after dark, you best have two things: a gun, and a real short will.”

I nodded. Just last week, I’d watched a man get stabbed over half a sandwich. My impressive survival record was mostly dumb luck I reckoned.

We took turns at the sinks. The mirrors in this shelter unlike the first one I stayed in, were slabs of steel, not glass. You don’t give the desperate and the deranged a ready supply of shivs. 

I splashed water on my face and watched my reflection as my eyes flared with a soft purple light. They kept doing that… I was either going crazy or something else entirely, and I wasn’t sure which was worse.

The director was waiting in the cafeteria, arms folded. Mrs. Yates was the meanest old bag in three boroughs, and probably the only reason most of the people here weren’t already dead or worse. Her gaze swept the room as we filtered in.

“Breakfast. Five minutes. No seconds. And if anyone tries to sneak out with food again, you can sleep on the curb with the rest of the city’s trash,” she barked.

Real warm and fuzzy, that one. Grandma material.

I sat at a table by myself and chewed through the flavorless gray paste. It did nothing to quiet the hollow gnawing in my gut, but at least it was warm.

I waited until the room was nearly empty before I approached Mrs. Yates. She eyed me over the top of her cat-eye glasses.

“You’re early. Didn’t expect you to last more than two nights, Morgan.”

“Yeah, well. Thought I’d surprise you.” I slid my empty bowl into the plastic bin and put on my most disarming smile. “Any chance you need a hand? Around the place?”

She snorted. “You offering to volunteer?”

“More like work,” I said. “But I’ll volunteer. Anything to stay off the street while I figure out how to get paid.”

If doing free labor meant I would get a roof over my head, I would do it without hesitation.

Mrs. Yates leaned in, close enough for me to smell the hot instant coffee on her breath. “No papers, no job kid. But you got hands, you got legs, you got a brain. Use them. Jobs don’t walk in the door and ask for you, so go out, maybe you’ll find someone less… strict than me on the papers situation.”

In other words Grandma was telling me to do crime, and get my papers through less than legal means.

Having nothing else to do, I left as soon as the sun crawled over the stained glass of St. Dismas. The city reeked of rain and smoke, and even though it was too early for the freaks and the masks, you could tell they’d been out last night by the scorch marks on the sidewalk.

Well, it was time to find a job. Hopefully, if I was lucky I would find a job without resorting to crime, but as thing were... I had to be open to the possibility.

First stop: a storefront with a Help Wanted sign so faded it was more suggestion than invitation. I rang the bell. The owner, a big burly man—looked me up and down.

“Name,” he said, and not in a friendly way.

“Arthur Morgan,” I said. Still felt weird saying it out loud.

“You got papers? Social? ID?”

I shook my head. “Fresh start, man. I just need—”

He was already closing the door. “Come back when you’re not a ghost,” he called through the glass.

Strike one.

Well… this might prove to be more difficult than I exp

Next, a corner bodega that doubled as a day labor hangout. A handwritten ad—“CASH PAID. MOVERS WANTED”—taped to the window. I went in. The place was already packed with guys standing shoulder-to-shoulder in battered Carhartts, the universal uniform for the unemployable. The owner, a woman with a neck tattoo of the Virgin Mary, took one look at me and laughed.

“White bread? Here for delivery?” she asked.

“Moving. I can lift.”

“Sure, papi. Papeles?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Papers.” She mimed writing something. “ID. Work authorization. You know—papers.”

“Never mind,” I said.

Strike two.

A hardware store. A dry cleaner. A guy power-washing the steps of the Gotham Library. At every door, the same questions: What’s your address? Who vouches for you? Why don’t you have an ID? Each time I walked away with a little less hope.

No wonder people turn to crime in this fucking city. The cards are stacked against you.

Eventually, as more and more rejections came I just sat down on the curb and watched traffic. It was that, or admit I’d lost before noon. 

This was Gotham—city of opportunity, as long as you were packing a mask, a gun, or both. I had neither.

But I had loads of hope and optimism, so I would work through this!

A few hours later.

“How the fuck am I going to find a job if I have no papers….”

Getting papers illegally meant dealing with people who wouldn’t just turn me away at the door. They’d put me in a dumpster. Still, it was either that or starve. And as things were my options were running thin, surgically thin.

A man in a raincoat coughed to get my attention. He stood right in the mouth of a side alley and gave me a look—that basically said: come here.

I ignored him.

He persisted.

“You’re Arthur, right?” the man called.

How the fuck?

I kept my hands in my pockets. “How do you know?”

“Follow me if you wanna get some papers,” the raincoat man said, as if it was the most ordinary request in the world.

This might end up well for me, or… well, I don’t like to think about the alternative.

Deciding this was my best bet, I decided to follow him.

He led me north, cutting down alleys where most streetlights were dead. We passed under a bridge, where the only sound was the slow drip of gutter runoff and the wet slap of my shoes on the broken pavement.

He led me to a warehouse of some kind.

The warehouse was in the kind of district city planners forgot on purpose. I imagined that, once, someone dreamed it would be the beating heart of trade. Now it was just the home of trade of a different sort.

Raincoat Man stopped at a gate tagged with a dozen conflicting gang signs. He punched a code into a box, and the heavy metal gate rolled open slowly.

“You’ll want to be respectful,” he said, pausing in the threshold. “And no sudden moves. They’re jumpy.”

I shrugged. “I’m a model citizen.”

He snorted, and for a split second, it looked like he wanted to say something else. Instead, he just shoved the door open and stepped inside.

Right away, I saw the setup. Two big guys stood by the entrance, arms folded and heads shaved. They waited for us to get three steps in, then frisked me like they were looking for buried treasure.

They patted me so much my future girlfriend would be jealous of this.

One of them found my wallet, which was empty, and the other found my Swiss Army knife that I had found on the side of a dumpster. He gave a little “tsk” of disappointment as he tossed it in a tray. After a very thorough patdown, they shoved me forward with just enough force to say, don’t get cute.

The inside of the warehouse had been reworked into a stage of some kind. Literally: a few towers of shipping crates ringed a circle of harsh work lights, focused inward, so the rest of the place was pitch black. In the dead center: a battered oriental rug and an armchair that had never been anywhere near a living room.

Definitely the mafia. I had seen enough movies to recognize the set-up. Not sure what kind of Mafia though, the Russian? the Italian?

I suppose that if I go by the rug… it’s the Chinese mafia, but I feel I might be jumping to conclusions based on a rug alone, that could for all I know be Korean, which might make my assumption a bit racist I suppose.

As I looked around, I noticed a guy lounged in the armchair, a glass of something dark in his hand. His suit was high-end, worth a lot by the look of it. Hair slicked back, one ring on every finger, pinky up as he sipped. He looked like he was trying out for the part of a mafia boss, and maybe if you squinted, he’d pass.

The man set his glass down and made a show of standing, every movement choreographed. He smiled, but it was a predator’s smile—no warmth, just the pleasure of a cat before the pounce.

I might come to regret this gamble later.

“Mr. Nobody!” he said, arms wide. “You made it. Welcome, welcome.”

I stepped into the ring of light, squinting. “Thanks for the invite, though I gotta say, the bouncers are a bit hands-on.” Like Deadpool with the tailor, I am pretty sure one of those bouncers was a molester, someone touched my junk one too many times.

He barked a short laugh. “Security, my friend. It’s not personal.”

“I understand,” I replied.

He stepped forward, hand extended. “Alberto Falcone. A pleasure to meet you.”

The Falcone Family?

Fuck me…

Who is writing my fucking story? The Spiderman writers?