Jonathan Moore was born on Tijuana and he would die on Tijuana. Not that he had any desires to move to the other worlds. Earth was a dump, Mars too fancy, and don’t get him started about Neptune. Jonathan was a simple man with simple desires. He had his bar, El Ray, his cat, Hope, and a few extra legal businesses on the side. On those other worlds, the ones with people who matter, his extra legal activities would be looked at a bit more closely than he’d want them to be. On Tijuana, everyone is treated the same. They were just another body for the pile.
They say the days on Tijuana are largely the same. Jonathan liked the structure of it all. At 2:15 in the morning, he would awake to find some asshole doing some asshole thing. Sometimes it was something as minor as an execution of a rat or a skirmish in a gang war. That morning, unfortunately, someone was trying to steal his cat. Jonathan could hear the yelps and howls of the man stealing the cat while Hope clawed her way out of his clutches unsuccessfully. Jonathan hadn’t had the cat for long. She just showed up at his bar one night and acted as if she was always his. He was sure Hope (whom he’d named after a feeling he once dreamed) would leave just as suddenly as she came. But for now, she was his and he was hers. So he grabbed a gun and went after the man who stole her.
The man in question was a lean man running unnaturally fast. ‘Junkie,’ Jonathan thought to himself. ‘Always a fucking junkie.’ Though one of his side businesses involved the sell of drugs, Jonathan knew, as many a drug dealer knew, never trust a junkie. Jonathan learned that the hard way when one of them tried to kill him for not selling him Red Eye just because he didn’t have any money. He was lucky in that he only got a cut on the forehead. The junkie wasn’t as lucky.
As for the junkie Jonathan was chasing, he was a fast bastard. Probably high on Red Eye and too mad to care that his face was being torn asunder by the cat in his hands. Not helping matters was that the streets of Tijuana were winding and tight. It’s easy to get lost on the asteroid, especially when you’re chasing someone who doesn’t care. Jonathan had, in fact, lost his way when he was a young lad with dreams of escaping this hellhole. They were childish dreams of someone who didn’t know the way the world work. Didn’t know his place. He thought he was going to be some interplanetary gangster with all that implies. Martin Goodman was kind enough to beat those childish beliefs out of the young lad.
But it had been a long time since Jonathan had gotten lost, over a decade at least. He was older and much wise than the child he once was. But chasing a junkie is not like chasing someone who isn’t. Junkies don’t have plans, schemes, or what have yous. Junkies are in it for the high, mostly in the form of doing stupid shit like stealing a drug dealer’s cat.
Fortunately for Jonathan, the sun was rising, the time close to 6 AM. A little known defect in Red Eye is, due to the nature of the drug being directly applied to the eyes, it reacts poorly to sunlight, even the artificial sunlight of Tijuana. As such, when the sun did arise, the junkie started to convulse in pain. Not the pain of having your legs shot off or your face clubbed in, though the junkie would know that pain as well. Rather, it was the pain of having a laser pointer shine directly into your eyes. Like looking into the sun for far too long. Like having a cat maul at your face for at least four hours, though that could have just been Hope. Nobody minded the junkie crumpled on the streets. Just another body for the pile. Jonathan returned to him home at 7 AM with the 15 Woolongs he nicked from the junkie and planned to get more sleep the next night, as he always did.
At 7:15 AM, Jonathan made himself some breakfast, what he called Bacon and Eggs, but was in reality just Eggs. Not many people can afford meat, let alone on Tijuana. But it’s nice to dream every once in a while. There’ nothing wrong with having a dream per say. Dreams have their place in this world after all, Jonathan thought to himself when he first called them “Bacon and Eggs.” Not that they can ever be acted out, mind you. They exist in the place outside of the real world. Those who think their dreams can come true are just another kind of junkie.
At 7:45 AM, Jonathan smoked a cigarette and headed over to El Ray, which would be open at 8:30 AM. Most of the customers wouldn’t come until after 12 PM, but Jonathan felt it was better to keep it open at an earlier hour than to just wait until the people came. Most of a bar’s set up was done in these hours. Sometimes customers would come for an early morning bowl of peanuts or maybe a glass of beer. But the mornings were for more extralegal matters.
One such matter arrived at 10:10 AM. There were three men at the bar already. They weren’t businessmen, just customers who needed a place to talk. Jonathan was perfectly fine to facilitate their mind numbing conversation about which of them was the best one of the three. This time, they were playing poker and arguing about being poor despite their hard work. Though he tried to distract himself, Jonathan couldn’t help but mildly agree with their sentiment. Sure, he knew his place in the world. He didn’t want to leave Tijuana or anything. But there was a part of him who yearned for something more.
Hope was sleeping on one of the tables when the two entered the bar. She wasn’t in mind of a desire to have better. Cats have a natural feeling of being owed better no matter their circumstances in life. Living with a junkie, for example, would be a lesser life than living with a dealer. Junkies rarely feed their pets due to being too busy being high, though Hope wouldn’t consider herself a pet. More of a guest of Jonathan’s. When something better came along, she’d run off and be with a different person. Though, she was happy that Jonathan understood this arrangement and understood it quite well. She might’ve stuck around for another year or so.
The two who had entered the bar were a man and a woman. Jonathan could tell that the man was a junkie. The grungy face, the lackadaisical body movements, the constant need of glasses. He was a junkie if ever he did see one. The woman, however, was not (at least, not traditionally). Her eyes were clean and without blood. She was pregnant, probably just a few months. She was a rare beauty that had been unseen on Tijuana for many years and probably wouldn’t be seen again for many more. And she had a look in her eye, one that danced throughout her whole body like a masochistic tango. It said, “I want a better life than the one I have. I deserve a better life than this one. I was made for better things. I am owed.” No, she wasn’t a traditional junkie in Jonathan’s book, but she was still just a junkie.
The man knocked on the table. “Give me a beer,” he said with a gruff voice.
“And I’ll have a Bloody Mary,” said the woman. “In fact, make it a double.” Jonathan looked at the two. Junkies with product weren’t a rare occurrence in his line of business. In fact, most of the people he bought from were junkies. He didn’t trust them, but he gets more profits when buying from Junkies in bulk. Worth the risk once you accepted that junkies aren’t to be trusted.
Still, Jonathan sighed when he said, “I’ve got the vodka, but I’m afraid I’m fresh out of tomato juice.”
“I’m sure there’s one can in the back room,” replied the man as he pulled out a sample of Red Eye. ‘Least this time the junkie has the product,’ thought Jonathan. He didn’t say this, but instead simply replied that he would check the back room. The man followed close behind.
Jonathan was too busy preparing the quality tests for Red Eye to hear the cars screech in front of his bar. If he had, he probably would have shot the junkie then and there. Instead, he dutifully prepared the tests. The man entered, making his pitch as all junkies do. It’s all the same script, Jonathan noted. They would talk about the quality of the product, how smart of a buyer Jonathan was for going through them. The only thing that changed was the adjectives. But it all meant the same thing to Jonathan: I’m desperate.
That’s what it is to be a junkie, Jonathan thought: Eternal Desperation, the belief that this isn’t the best of all possible lives. A junkie wouldn’t be happy in their perfect world. They would always complain and moan about how it doesn’t live up to expectations or how there are flaws in the world. They’re all just children whining that they didn’t get the toy they wanted. They don’t have names because they aren’t people. Jonathan, meanwhile, was an adult and learned to settle with the life he had. To try otherwise would end with a fist from someone with a better life to teach you your place.
But junkies had their uses. This one looked like he could pop very easily. That’s why Jonathan was setting up the machine before hand. If one isn’t careful in administrating the drug, Red Eye can cause a paranoid episode. If one is very careful, that episode can lead to a brain hemorrhage and a fatal stroke. Jonathan was not as careful as he believed himself to be. No doubt, Jonathan thought, the female junkie could be used to his advantage one the male junkie was dead. She had a nice body after all. It could do wonders at the brothels and he could earn a nice percentage. She’d probably be so distraught that she would give Jonathan all the Red Eye she had, free of charge. She was weak in that sense, Jonathan believed. And like many things, Jonathan was dead wrong.
“Is that…real Bloody Eye?” Jonathan asked, not playing his hand quite yet. “I’m gonna need a little proof. Let’s have a demonstration” Jonathan tossed the junkie the machine, which he caught with relative ease. The Red Eye sprayed into his eyes like mace. Jonathan remained stone faced as the junkie had his last high. He focused intently on the junkie, such that he didn’t hear the men enter the bar, their guns clanging about, their jackboots stomping, their intent malicious. He was too focused on the money he was about to make to notice the man in the room next door waiting to shoot them dead. Jonathan never asked a junkie where he gets the drugs. Junkies are too unreliable to ask such things. Had he, he would have shot the junkie before he took the Red Eye. Even the junkie was aware of what was going on before Jonathan. It’s not paranoia when the mob really is out to get you.
What eventually alerted Jonathan to the source of his demise was the sound of Hope being frightened after someone burst in through the front door as if it wasn’t unlocked. The last coherent thought that went through Jonathan’s mind before it was splattered on the ground in front of him was something along the lines of, “Oh no, not again.” Just another body for the pile.
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