Chapter Text
Ronald Reagan was declared the winner of the Presidential election by a landslide, and the bar erupted in cheers. Whiskey was poured, money was exchanged, and one guy pissed himself, although that had more to do with how drunk he was than Reagan swinging 489 Electoral College votes.
Stan Pines didn’t see any of this, however, ‘cause he was outside smoking a cigarette.
He won’t actually know (or be able to care about) who won the election for a long while, because he’s about to go through some pretty terrible things. His whole life has been a series of pretty terrible things, though, so out of everything he feels, shock will not be a part of it.
How did our pathetic little protagonist (let’s be honest, he’s barely a side character, but let a man have his delusions of grandeur) get to this point? Spoiler alert: it’s all his fault. Let’s rewind a little bit.
The day is July 4th, 1980, Independence Day, the time is just after noon, and the pain level is about an 8. This is because Stan Pines is getting his shit rocked.
The man rocking Stan’s shit is named Artemio “Icy” Mareno, Stan’s boss and, allegedly, his friend, which is great for Icy’s pockets but not his mental health—
Shit, no— we got to go back further. Really, to understand Stan, we got to study the intricacies of his childhood trauma, but we’re not there yet. I need to— what’s the word— draw you in? Hook, line, and sinker. At least, that’s what happened to Stan. I figured you aren’t quite as stupid as Stan is so— you know what? I’m sorry, this type of shit is supposed to be immersive , ain’t it? Fourth wall breaks are set to go out of style in about 1986 (save Ferris, yeah?) and that omniscient impartial narrator is all the rage. Well, I can’t promise impartiality, but I can promise fun. So, I’ll butt out, no more first person language— we’ll leave that for Y/N and her messy bun and blue orbs. Just sit back for the ride— other people’s pain is always so cathartic, isn’t it?
The day is February 14th, 1980, and Stan Pines is about to become addicted to cocaine. It’s certainly not Stan’s intention, but he’s never been known for considering the consequences of his actions. (This statement is, of course, in many ways markedly untrue: Stan often knows what will come of him at any time, and acts shit-stupid anyway. He can’t help himself.)
He’s in Texas— how, exactly, he got to Texas is a whole different story, one that will eventually be discussed. He’s in the suburbs of Houston, specifically, looking for dock work; no one is hiring. Really, it’s that they don’t want to hire him: scruffy, eternally sea sick, too white to easily exploit.
He’s suffocated in the bowels of grief, jobless and bearing the fresh wound of one his greatest loses: his car. The Stanmobile, that brilliant red ‘65 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, gone to the whims of whatever car thief set his sights on the beaut. He doesn’t blame the guy that took her: she’s too good to resist. He does wish, however, that someone else’s Cadillac, preferably someone with the money to replace it, was the one to be stolen. That was all the way back in Florida, though, and there’s no way he can go back there, at least not until a lot of overly aggressive Floridians kick the bucket— and if anyone is gonna kick the bucket soon, it’s gonna be him.
Here’s the thing about Stan: he doesn’t really care about dying. He’d prefer not to, thank you very much, and when it happens he hopes it’s quick and painless, but he doesn’t have high hopes for either of those conditions. He’s been effectively homeless for… shit, nearly eight years now, and it’s all pretty much fucking sucked. Him losing his car is just another in a long string of karmic low blows.
He was really counting on those leather seats to be his bed, though, and losing his one guarantee of a roof over his head is weighing on him heavily. Stan lived in the Stanmobile— plus all his possessions were in there, too. He was in Tampa, and then he got his car stolen like a dumbass, and now he’s in Houston and he’s even more homeless and jobless than before.
This might, he thinks, be where he dies. Now, in February, the weather is mild and the ground under the bridges isn’t so hard, but he knows come summer he’s in for trouble. Raised in New Jersey, he understands heat, but not Texas heat, the kind that sucked moisture from your body like the sun itself was parched. He’s running out of time to make a name for himself— or find some way to survive— and he’s not feeling very lucky. Stan certainly isn’t a quitter— his track record speaks for itself— but it’s as his mother used to say: “if there’s one thing you can’t fail at, it’s throwing in the towel.” He’s been drinking from the fountain in the town square because businesses have started to recognize him and refuse to give him water. His good spot under the least-mossy bridge was stolen by a fifty-year-old half-blind woman named Anita (he’d say he was being altruistic and just gave it up, but she most definitely scared him off with the wicked arc she could produce with her cane). He hasn’t eaten in four days, and it’s to the point that if he stands up too fast, his vision goes dark and blurry.
It’s in this condition that Stan desperately, once again, makes his way to the manufacturing docks, called Camon Yard, that are yawning to life in the dawn light of a new day. He hasn’t had much luck getting work on the boats, but there’s a factory here, too: he could do factory work, he thinks. How hard could it be? Anything to get cash in his pocket and maybe a meal in his stomach.
What Stan doesn’t know is that Camon Yard, situated on butt-fuck ugly Buffalo Bayou, is currently Texas’ premiere cocaine drop box. Occupied by the influx of Colombian cocaine funneled in from the Bahamas, federal authorities such as the DEA were concentrated in Miami and, in general, the East Coast of Florida. Taking advantage of that were other stores of Colombian cocaine, which moseyed their way up past the Yucatan Peninsula and found their way to Galveston or Houston. In a year or two, the Mexican-American gang that distributed the goods for a steep seller’s commission, Lobos Negros , would start turning their boring old cocaine into exciting, affordable crack for the middle and lower classes, infecting impoverished urban centers with a disease the government would capitalize on instead of try to cure; right now, though, cocaine was still the powder of the rich, and Camon Yard was the salty source of their daily attritions.
Stan stands outside Camon Yard’s main administrative office, which appears to be a shipping container strung with Christmas lights. He rubs his nerve-sweat from his hands off on his jeans, and, scolding himself for his hesitation, knocks on the door. Worst case, they say no. Or beat him up and take what little money he has left. That would be an embarrassment, if not a new experience.
The rickety door swings open, and then Stan is being clinically stared down by a dark-haired man in his mid-thirties, cigarette perched between cracked lips.
“Get your pay from your foreman,” the man says indifferently, voice rolling in the no-nonsense droll of the local Texan-Mexican accent Stan was rapidly becoming acquainted with, already turning to close the door.
“ Wait! ” Stan springs forward, slapping an awkward palm against the door. The metal is sweating from the humidity, and he slips against his own weight, pitched forward and into the man. “ Shit, sorry, fucking sorry, I—”
He’s stopped by a rough hand in his hair as the man yanks him to standing by his head. He catches a glimpse of the inside of the admin container— three other men, all with the same steely glint in their eyes, hands hovering in equal care over money and guns scattered across the tilted folding table.
“I’m actually trying to get a foreman,” Stan laughs nervously, eyes darting away from the scene, the man’s hand still in his hair. Not an unfamiliar position for Stanley, not anymore, but one he’d still prefer not to be in. “Or, you know— a job. With a foreman. That I could then. Get pay from.” He ends with a smile, because his mother always told him he had a getting his way smile.
There’s a long period of silence, punctuated only by the general clamor of the factory coming to life.
Finally, the man grins, releasing his grip on Stan’s head and laughs. “ Lo entiendo , you’re that ratoncito blanco I’ve seen scampering about the past few weeks, ain’t ya? Here I was thinking you were coming to eat up our crumbs. But he just wants a job!” The other men chuckle.
“Uh,” Stan keeps smiling, “that’s right on, man. Uh, please?”
This makes the men laugh some more. Laughing is OK— laughing means they’re entertained, and entertained is easier than angry.
“You sound like a full-blooded yanqui ,” the man blows cigarette smoke into Stan’s face, and he tries not to flinch— a game of dominance, these things are. “ ¿Has intentado incluso encajar y ser culto?”
“No— uh, no hablo …” Stan rubs at his neck, casting around desperately for any Spanish he’s picked up in his short time here. “No Spanish.”
The man rolls his eyes, clearly uninterested. “Si no hablas español, no sobrevivirás aquí. El único empleado que no habla el idioma es nuestro gato, nuestro ranchero. Y, ratoncito blanco, los ratones no pueden atrapar ratas.”
“Please,” Stan begs. “I’ll learn Spanish. Or, no, I won’t even speak. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll sweep the floor. I’ll clean the fucking porta-johns. I’ll be a ghost— or, a ra-ratoncito. Right, un- un ratoncito?”
“Icy,” one of the men inside the room calls. “ El músculo es músculo. ¿Puede levantar?”
The dark-haired man— Icy— smirks. “My friend is asking if you can lift.”
“Of course,” Stan hurries to reassure. He’d be stronger if he had regular access to food, but the strength drilled into him by a childhood of boxing and wrestling has remained with him. “Whatever you need.”
“You’ll start tomorrow.” Icy says. “Four thirty A.M. Not a minute later.” He closes the door in Stanley’s face.
Stanley sleeps under the bad bridge that night. He has no way to tell time, but it doesn’t matter: he doesn’t actually sleep. When he had the Stanmobile (may her soul rest in peace) he could throw cardboard or towels over her windows and crawl into the back, and could almost pretend the cold seats were cold sand, and he was camping on the beach like he and his brother used to—
—RULE #9 OF STAN’S GUIDE TO SURVIVAL:
DO NOT THINK ABOUT YOUR BROTHER. DO NOT THINK ABOUT YOUR MOTHER. ACCEPT YOU WILL THINK ABOUT YOUR FATHER; IT’S INEVITABLE. STOP FUCKING THINKING ABOUT YOUR BROTHER—
He slept better in his car, is what I’m trying to say. Here, in Houston, in the sweat of February, without any of his possessions or anything at all that he could even pretend to be comforting— he doesn’t sleep. He stares at the sky, whose stars are hidden by the orange-dust glow of urban light pollution, and he clutches at his chest, telling himself I won’t fuck this one up. I won’t mess this up. I’ll learn, I’ll live, I’ll be better .
Stan will fuck this up. I’m mean, come on— there’s thirteen fucking chapters of this thing. Were you looking for a happy ending? He won’t get that for another forty years. Let’s not lie to ourselves: we’re here to see this man suffer. There’s something about Stan that attracts both misfortune and the murder of sadistic crows that laugh at misfortune; whether a product of his terrible upbringing, fate, or just plain fucking bad luck, Stan stumbled through a life that was more thorns than roses. Perhaps, however, this is just what he told himself to justify his continual catastrophic mistakes.
His failure is well-assured and preceded by eight years of precedent, but he pickpockets a watch from a white collar worker huffing to work, tie flapping in the breeze, and uses it to show up in front of Camon Yard’s Admin container at exactly four thirty in the morning nonetheless. He’s in the same clothes as yesterday (which are the same as the day before, and the day before that), and he hasn’t showered in— well, he got pushed into the town square’s fountain last week. That has to count towards something.
There are security lights around the yard, but they’re mostly aimed towards the docks and the factory itself; the empty lot in which the admin container sits is empty and dark besides the string of Christmas lights. Stan pops a squat in front of the container, his vision washed in hues of red and green, and lights a cigarette. This is one of his pleasures— vices, whatever— that he pursues no matter his financial or personal situation. That’s what addiction is, anyway.
Stan’s father was— is? He has no idea of the status of his father— an alcoholic. His mother had her addictions too— lying, mostly. Stan did not pay enough attention in school to remember that addictive tendencies are tied to genetics, but that does not stop the fact from applying to him. He was born and bred for bad behavior; it sang in his bloodline and was nurtured by his upbringing. At his core, Stanley was eager to please, but that included pleasing himself: he was weak to simple pleasures, like a cigarette. Seeking those simple pleasures got him in a lot of trouble over the years, but that never stopped him from pursuing them. If he was going to go out, he wanted it to be a blaze of glory or at least a little funny— he wanted it to mean something , and because he wasn’t smart or clever or determined enough to leave behind any kind of legacy, he could at least be a blot on history, or a footnote example of what not to do .
The sun rises over the far eastern edge of the horizon before Icy rolls up in a blue and white ‘80 Ford F-150, shining as if it’s still fresh from the production line and with a Feu Orange traffic light air freshener swinging from the rearview mirror. Stan checks his watch; six forty-two a.m.
“ Buenos dias, ratoncito blanco,” Icy chuckles, locking his truck door behind him. “That means ‘good morning’. Can you say buenos dias? ”
“Come on man,” Stan sighs, moving to stand. “I get hazing, but don’t you think this is—”
He only half-registers the bone-chilling sound of the click before he realizes there’s a gun to his head, and he goes completely still. Stan is not unfamiliar with guns; in the coming years, he will become intimately knowledgeable about them. This does not stop the fear from chilling his bones into unmoving, nor does it stop the dumbass look of shock from showing on his face.
“Attitude ain’t a good foot to step off with on your first day, pendejo .” Icy presses the muzzle into Stan’s skull with the ease of man who has pulled the trigger many times. “You’re going to have to learn to follow directions. Let’s try again. Can you say buenos dias? ”
Stan swallows, throat dry, and opens his mouth, the motion causing the barrel of the gun to bob along his forehead. “ Buenos dias . Uh, sir.”
Icy laughs, and pulls the gun away. “I like your willingness to learn, ratoncito. Normalmente sólo las mujeres me llaman señor, pero tú eres un poco femenino, ¿no? ”
“Of course, sir,” Stan agrees quickly. He doesn’t understand, but he gets the feeling he won’t understand much of what his new boss says (even when he’s talking in English) and that not understanding won’t matter as long as he can follow directions and shut his mouth. (He’s good at the former, not the latter: this has been and will continue to be a problem).
His agreement makes Icy laugh again (just a guy full of chuckles, ain’t he?) as he walks to the large gate across the driveway of the yard to pull off the lock and swing it open.
“Listen up, ratoncito . I took you on ‘cause we need more movers. Our production is growing and there’s only so much I’m willing to carry before I get bored. I point, you pick up, I point, you set down. You don’t speak unless spoken to; you don’t ask questions any more complicated than ‘where do I set this down?’ You’ll get twenty-five bucks a week, cash, obviously, and if you don’t get yourself killed by being idiotic in the first six months, we’ll think about a raise. ¿Comprende?
Stan blinks, processing this new information. 25 bucks a week? He doesn’t even think he has 25 bucks to his name right now . Just to move boxes of mystery goods? Maybe he had stumbled into something good.
(He hasn’t. But the year is 1980, the weather is worrying, and Stan is very homeless. He’s been in varying stages of hopelessness the past eight years, and before that his house was never a home, either, so he’s desperate, and he’s both experienced and naive, and there’s a lot of lessons left for him to learn, none of which will be pleasant.)
And so Stan makes a vow to himself: he will be obedient, he will listen and learn, and, maybe in six months or a year or two, he’ll finally get to live. “Yes, sir. Where do I start?”
Icy, when he’s not actively holding Stan at gunpoint, is actually a pretty chill dude. He’s gotten even better that now, three months into Stan working for him, his ratoncito is finally learning some Spanish. It’s hard not to pick some words up when all of your coworkers are speaking the language.
Stan’s job, truly, is to pick up what Icy points at and put it down where Icy points next, and to sometimes run to the McDonald’s on the other side of the bridge, one of Icy’s suspiciously crisp 100 dollar bills in his hand, and get the whole crew lunch. (After the first month those days become the best, because Stan is useful enough to be included in the crew. He savors those Big Macs like they’re his mother’s cooking.) Sometimes the other three men that were in the admin container with Icy are the ones leading Stan. There’s the sixty-something year old with a large scar over his right eye (Tiburón), the guy Stan’s age with a stutter and a mean streak to match (Twitch), and Icy’s teenage brother (Lombriz). Lombriz is the meanest, mostly because he’s nineteen and all nineteen years are shitstains (Stan would know, he was nineteen once, too, although it feels like so long ago). Tiburón is the nicest, with the even temper of someone who has been through too much fuckery to care about hazing the new guy, and every morning Stan shows up and Tib is his foreman for the day, he breathes a sigh of relief.
It’s pretty obvious this is some sort of drug-related thing, but Stan knows better than to ask questions. 100/month isn’t enough to get any sort of apartment, but he got himself a tent for under the bridge, and for a cool ten dollars a month, the owner of a truck stop down the road gave him his own key to the bathroom/showers, as well as his pick of the travel-sized soaps. He works six days a week, ten to fourteen hours a day; his day off is spent doing laundry at the cheapest laundromat two miles away from his bridge and staring longingly at the sketchy apartment complex he hopes to save enough to move into.
It’s the third week of May when Icy calls Stan into the admin container. Stan, before, had never been allowed into the container— none of the other crew besides the top four were allowed in. He’s in the middle of moving a palette of wrapped bricks of something using his newest skill, the forklift, when Icy throws open the door and calls, “yo, ratoncito! Vienes aquí por un segundo. ”
“Ya vengo .” Stan throws the forklift into park and jogs over. “What can I do ya’ for, boss?”
Icy motions him inside and shuts the door. Lombriz is there, as per usual, reading an X-Men comic instead of doing any meaningful work. “Take a seat, mi compinche . Has estado trabajando duro .”
“Thanks, Icy,” Stan is pretty sure Icy just gave him a compliment, which is a first for the man. He sits at one of the rusted metal folding chairs and rubs his sweaty and dirty hands along his equally dirty jeans. Icy doesn’t do much of the manual labor himself, and his boot-cut jeans and boots are starched and pristine as he lowers himself into the chair across from Stan.
“Remember your first day of work?” Icy muses, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. He offers one to Stan, who gladly accepts. “I thought I was gonna have to put a bullet in you, then.” Icy laughs like that’s a funny thought, and Stan awkwardly laughs along, too. To be agreeable was to be useful, and he sure as hell hopes this isn’t a termination meeting— he doesn’t think he’d walk away from termination .
“Is… is everything okay?” Stan dares ask. The cigarette smolders in between his calloused fingers.
“Ah, Stanley,” Icy reaches out and puts a hand on Stan’s shoulder, and his words, although spoken with a gentle tone, raise an alarm bell in the back of Stan’s head. He didn’t know Icy knew his name: he thought they all operated on a fragile tower of appointed nicknames, the guise of brotherhood a careful excuse for not knowing any damning information about each other. “You’re doing amazing. That’s why I called you in here.”
Stan fidgets; Icy squeezes harder. “I’m going to tell you something— un secreto . Have you learned that word yet?”
“Uh,” Stan blinks. “A secret?”
“Yes, very good, ratoncito . Do you know what you’ve been helping us move these last few months?”
Stan has a pretty good idea. “No.”
“Be honest with me, Stan. No prying ears here today.”
Stan rubs at the back of his neck nervously. “Well, if I had to hazard a guess… I’d say something slightly illegal. Like drugs. Or maybe drugs.”
“You’d be right,” there’s a strangely joyful gleam to Icy’s eye. “You ever try cocaine, Stanley?”
“Don’t got the budget for snow,” Stan shrugs awkwardly. “I’ve seen the type that go for it, though. My old boss in Georgia was into it. And I dabbled in LSD, once.” He shudders at the memory. “Never again.”
“It’s good stuff.” Icy hums, and from the inside pocket of his jacket he produces a small baggie of white powder. He pulls from the desk in the corner a flat, small mirror, and begins to order the powder into a few neat lines as he continues to speak. “This is a gram of cocaine. If I was selling this to you, how much do you think I would charge?”
Stan squints, hoping Icy isn’t the type to be brutally passionate over drug-related trivia. “...twenty bucks?”
Lombriz snorts, then starts to laugh so hard he almost falls off the couch. Stan shrinks away, and Icy shoots his younger brother a glare. “ No te burles del yanqui. Todavía es inculto, ¿recuerdas? ”
Over Lombriz’s nasally cackling, Icy presses on. “This, mi compinche , is 195 dollars worth of cocaine.” He takes a hundred dollar bill, and rolls it tightly. With a flourish and a grin, he leans over and snorts a line. He gasps, delighted at the sensation, and flops back into his chair as his eyelids flutter with pleasure. He holds out the dollar-tube, gesturing for Stan to take. “Go ahead, amigo . Have a try.”
“Oh,” Stan holds up his hands. “No— uh, no thank you. I’m good.”
“Not a request, pendejo ,” Icy snaps, eyes dilated. Pendejo was a word Stan was more than familiar with— Lombriz used it generously, while Tib and Twitch only sprinkled into their day-to-day vocabulary. Icy, however, favored insulting Stan in English to make sure he understood: he only cracked out insults in Spanish when he was especially annoyed; this was usually followed by the waving and/or usage of a weapon. Stan takes the bill-tube.
“It’s not hard,” Icy smiles. “Just one big breath in through the nose.”
The dollar is smooth in Stan’s grip. He still holds his cigarette in the other hand. A silence falls over the admin container; all that remains is the quiet whir of the air conditioner in the window. Both Lombriz, with a shit-eating grin on his young face, and Icy, shivering in the euphoria of his vice, stare him down. Not for the first time, Stan considers the long string of decisions and choices that lead him to this moment. In the half-second between taking the rolled-up bill and leaning down to the mirror-plate, Stan searches his psyche for where, exactly, he went wrong.
He and his brother are fourteen years old. Ford, that idiot, is trying to show their father notes on his— what did he call it— Theory of Weird? If Stan was being honest, it was pretty interesting, but Stan wasn’t raised to be honest. He was raised to be unobtrusive, and to survive; he thought his brother was raised in the same way, but evidently not.
Stan pokes at his chicken savoy as his brother rambles on, half-listening, half-watching the minute changes in his father’s expression. Filbrick Pines was an unimpressed, frank man with a deep-seated undercurrent of anger that he demonstrated liberally on his sons. Success was the goal for Filbrick and failure was unthinkable; he was willing to do whatever he needed to show that to his sons. Filbrick’s fingers twitch against his tumbler of whiskey, and Stan exhales harsh but silent, begging his brother with all the force of their metaphorical twin telepathy to shut the fuck up . His brother, of course, does not shut the fuck up.
Ford finishes his little speech and Caryn, their mother, claps. The cheap bangles she adorns herself with like an urchin wearing shells rattle together as she applauds. No one else makes a sound.
Finally, Filbrick Pines holds his hand out, silently, and Stanford hands over his papers. Stan stares at his brother’s hand in all its polydactyly glory. Ford is special in a terrible way Stan hoped he would never be able to understand; he is jealous of his brother. Filbrick shuffles through them, and every once and while glances at Stanford, who folds in on himself.
“This really how yous spending your time?” Filbrick asks gruffly, “is this why you missed boxin’ last week? The boxin’ lessons your mother and I work hard as hell to pay for?”
“Now, Filbrick,” Stanford’s mother chides gently, “it’s important for boys their age to explore their imagination.”
Filbrick slams his hand on the table, the whole family jumping at the motion. Fiilbrick is typically a quiet man, who moved as little as he spoke, but when one of his boys made a mistake, his passion boiled over quickly– and explosively.
“I don’t raise men to survive off their imagination,” Filbrick snarls. “And I certainly don’t raise no men who make excuses for their weaknesses.”
In one sudden movement, he lunges across the small round table, and grabs Stanford’s left wrist in his large, rough hand.
“This what you’re trying to make excuses for, huh?” He squeezes Stanford’s fingers, shaking his hand in his face as if trying to emphasize the extra finger. “Trying to outsmart being a freak?”
Stanford starts to stutter out what is surely going to be a no – but Filbrick just squeezes harder, and harder. His eyes take on that black gleam, the gleam that was the same reflected in the broken glass of the many bottles he had nursed.
“You're smart, Stanford, way smart.” Filbrick grinds out, and he isn’t yelling, but his cold tone is worse, the most dangerous. “But yous gonna use that big brain to be a doctor, or something worthwhile, not a fairy-chasin’ fairy. No one’s gonna respect you if you spout off madness, just like no one respects your mother. No one barely respects ya because you’re a freak, Stanford, and I can’t believe I’m raising two sons that are mostly pussies and nothing else–”
With a barely audible crack, Filbrick breaks his son’s fingers. Ford lets out a small squeak, his eyes widening with the pain but otherwise remains still, instinctually freezing to avoid more punishment.
Filbrick releases his son’s hand, and steps back. Stan jolts in his seat, fighting the urge to comfort his brother. Silence, like cigar smoke, hangs low and heavy over the table. Stan lifts his fork and, carefully, begins to eat again. Filbrick uses his cigar to burn through Ford’s notes, and gestures at Ford’s plate.
“Finish your chicken. Your mother paid good money for that.”
Tucking his injured hand under his opposite arm, Ford continues to eat. After dinner, Caryn takes her son away to the bathroom to wrap his fingers; Stan starts to collect dishes. He picks up his father’s, and, hovering just a few inches from him, Stan, as usual, commits a sin.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
His father doesn’t even look at him. “Shut the fuck up.”
Stan sets his shoulders. He and Ford hit a growth spurt over the summer, and while he’s not as tall as his father, he’s close. “He’s smarter than any of us. You said his research is worthless, but I bet you’re just too dumb to understand what it all means.”
Filbrick takes his whiskey glass and smashes it over his son’s face. Stan falls to the ground, glass raining down around him; whiskey seeps into his wounds, and he cries out at the burn, clawing at his face. Blood and alcohol drip from his hair and forehead and into his eyes; his father puts one well-shined dress shoe on his son’s neck, pushing his face into the ground.
“You’re going to get yourself killed one day, kid,” he says evenly. “Might not be me, but I sure won’t mourn yous. Then we’ll see who the dumb one is.”
He lets Stan up, who stumbles to his feet. His blood is speckled across the carpet. Filbrick takes one of their cloth napkins and tosses it onto the stains, standing to move to the living room for his nightly show. “Clean it. Don’t upset your mother.”
Stan cleans it well. When he quietly opens the door to his and Ford’s shared bedroom, the light is already off, his brother curled under his blankets. Stan creeps to his bed, pressing an ice pack to his face; if he tends to the wounds well, they won’t bruise so bad. Less questions at school, and maybe, even, Ford won’t notice. He doesn’t want Ford to notice.
He lays in his bed, and looks out the window. A car passes by, shiny red, orange headlights casting a broad glow over the dark road. He wishes that was him, driving away… away… away…
“Do you know why they call me Icy?”
Stan looks up from his hand of cards, vision swimming. They’re in a Mexican bar (Stan hates to stereotype, but he’s the only white guy there), music clouding his hearing, alcohol and blow mixing in his head and blood to create a high-flying, dizzying effect.
“Cause…” Stan struggles to string words together, his heart beating quick and shallow in his chest, “you’re that cool?”
Icy rolls back in his chair and hollers with laughter. The two girls on either side of him, too young to be that skinny and that skimpily-dressed, support his shoulders so he doesn’t topple over.
It’s mid-June, now, and despite the crisp buzz of the bar’s A/C, Stan is sweating profusely. Over the past few weeks Icy has been inducting Stan into the hall of drug dealers, giving him a couple grams of cocaine at a time and sending him to their regulars. It’s a good gig: he still gets his regular 25 bucks a week for moving shit, plus 5% of each gram sold, which usually gives him an extra 50-80 dollars by the time laundry day comes around each week. Where Stan was a pale outcast at the Yard, he’s with his people while selling: Icy has placed into his fine gringo hands the care of the various white-collar whites that indulge in Icy’s product but can’t be bothered to examine their own racism. Cocaine was a lucrative business in that it was highly addictive (as Stan was rapidly discovering) but also cokeheads lacked that sort of nuanced discernment that people who called Stan’s bluffs often possessed. Anyone was funny when you were high, but now Stan, blessed with a small amount of awkward charisma, became hilarious.
Tonight, they’re celebrating: Stan established a new regular, a forty-year-old accountant named Joe, and it’s his powder money that funds their escapades now, given to the bartender by Icy’s loose hand. Icy was knowledgeable in a lot of unsavory fields, and partying was amongst them: drugs and girls and private booths at bars and more drugs.
“No, no, ratoncito ,” Icy giggles, “ eres pinche chistoso, mi compinche. Eso es lo que me gusta de ti .” Icy, in general, was very fluent in English— he had been working and living in the U.S. and with American customers for nearly a decade, now— but it slipped and faltered when he was seriously cross-faded. “ Mi historia comienza cuando era solo un niño pequeño… ”
“ Inglés, por favor, mi hombre,” Stan slurs, a phrase he quickly mastered over his months working at the Yard. “Tell your story, Icy.”
“When I came to Houston,” Icy waves down a bartender, getting them both a lie of shots. “There were not so many drugs. People just didn’t do them! Gente aburrida viviendo vidas aburridas . Well, I was a— what’s the word, ¿ emprendedor? Entrepreneur, yes, that’s right. But I had one they all needed to liven up: meth.”
“You used to deal meth?”
“Still do, on the side sometimes. But it’s so much work— inject it or smoke it or whatever, you need needles or a pipe. My clients wanted the same high with less work. You know Adelaido Mareno?”
Thinking is a sport for Stan in this state (it’s a sport even when he’s sober, if he’s being honest), but he manages to connect some dots. “I’ve seen him in the news. Isn’t he… he leads that gang.”
“‘That gang’, Dios mío .” Icy puts his face in his hands, and Stan has to pitch forward to hear him over the music, “Stan, Adeladio Mareno is my father. You’ve been working for ‘that gang’ for the last four months.”
“Oh.”
“Well, welcome, officially, to Lobos Negros, I suppose,” Icy raises a glass, “I assumed you recognized me from the news, amigo . Did you go this whole time not knowing who I am?”
“I… guessed,” Stan squeaks.
Icy pushes an extra shot Stan’s way. “No matter. Closed eyes don’t see secrets, yeah? You’re a smart guy, Stan, even if sometimes you don’t act it. I want to celebrate, but I also have a business proposition for you.”
“Anything,” Stan agrees. He should be concerned about the fact that he’s been running with the American southwest’s largest and most violent gang, specifically the son of its leader; he is not concerned, however, because he knows nothing about gangs. He’s seen the name Lobos Negros pop up on the news, but between not having stable access to a television and refusing to read newspapers (or read much at all), Stan is, for lack of a better word, completely clueless. He knows negro means black. He should really learn more Spanish, shouldn’t he?
“I need a regional runner,” Icy explains. “We have a growing clientele in Arizona, and I need someone to establish customers and flow of product. And I want that person, ratoncito , to be you.”
Now, you may be wondering, why the hell would Artemio Mareno, second-in-command of an illegal organization spanning six U.S. states and Mexico, funneling over a billion dollars worth of cocaine a year into the country, pick one random white guy that’s been working with him for less than half a year to oversee the establishment of a new distribution center? There are two main reasons for this:
1) Stan is good at his job, and is blissfully unaware of it. Artemio truly wasn’t looking for any more middle-management when he took pity on Stan and hired him, but the guy has a way with words and certain unconscious loyalty that makes him a strangely invaluable asset. Stan gets along with just about everyone, and his few flaws, like never shutting the fuck up, can be overlooked via the sheer amount of product he moves.
2) Artemio has been told to tap a regional manager by his father; Artemio never says no to his father. Tib, however, has already said no, claiming he’s “too damn old to start something new,” and Twitch would probably shoot someone in the head on the first day for no good reason, so he’s off the table. He tried to get Ignacio to take it, but Ignacio cares more about his cars than the business, and steadfastly refuses to take on any sort of official responsibility for anything. That leaves two options: his younger brother, Aaron, or Franz Herschberg, his father’s creepy Austrian friend who, despite being old and gross and weird, managed to steal not one but two of Artemio’s old girlfriends; Artemio’s girlfriends are already typically young enough to raise some moral quandaries, so Herschberg, who is twenty years Icy’s senior, is even more questionable. His dick must be huge, but his eyes kind of bulge out of his head and he’s balding, and he would most definitely drive business into the ground with his prairie-dog-like laughter. Aaron, whom Artemio not-so-affectionately calls Lombriz, can’t do it because Lombriz is nineteen and all nineteen year olds are shitstains.
Artemio was kind of going crazy over this whole affair, because no one else on his crew was experienced or smart or skilled enough to do this one specific thing his father needed him to do, and he very much respected his father and didn’t want to disappoint him. And also it would make them a bunch of money. Then, the heavens opened and deposited the answer on his doorstep: the lonely white man. Stan learned fast, he listened, and he was good with his hands. His lack of Spanish meant Icy could have important conversations with him in the room, and how easy he was to make fun was a good stress-reliever. He was a sort of punching bag of a man, all muscle but no idea how to use it, obviously malnourished and homeless and hopeless, which made it easy to convince him to stick around and even easier to underpay. All Artemio had to do was throw a compliment his way like a bone to the dog you kept chained up in the yard outside, and he was there to stay. Stan had learned a passable amount of Spanish in four months, which he never seen a guy from the north do, and that wasn’t even the best part:
Stan had no idea how good he was. Something, whether in recent history or in his childhood or all of the above, had crushed this man’s self-esteem so low as to be nonexistent. He had been running in quasi-legal circles for a while, but had no real idea of the structure and culture behind something like Lobos Negros ; at the same time, he could feel out the culture of a place and who was important and who could be safely ignored.
All of this culminated in Artemio deciding, while considerably high, to make Stan this new regional manager. Stan swinging into the office that morning to announce he had a new regular was just the cherry on top. And, of course, there’s no way Stan would say no. The guy, Artemio thought, didn’t know how to say no: like all the options, whether painful or pleasurable, had to be taken.
Whether or not this was a good decision for Artemio to make, it was done. Stan got his promotion and to be special, Artemio got to make his father proud, and Herschberg got to gargle Artemio’s sweaty ballsack. Hopefully.
Stan shows up to Camon Yard on June 22th, 1980, all of his possessions (one folded-up tent and one duffel bag) in his arms, ready for a new adventure; Icy has gotten him a new car.
“It’s not the same as the girl you lost,” Icy sighs wistfully (he was nearly as upset as Stan when Stan told him about the Stanmobile), “but it’s a Cadillac. And she purrs.”
A 1980 Coupe Deville, cranberry red, her 6-Liter V8 humming as she idles in the parking lot. She’s not the Stanmobile, but she’s pretty, and by God—
“Is this mine? Like, mine mine?” Stan can’t believe it.
Icy claps him on the shoulder. “ Todo tuyo para que lo uses y lo ames, hermano. ” He dangles the keys in front of Stan, who takes them reverently.
“ Gracias, Icy,” Stan says sincerely. He shouldn’t be proud of himself: the trunk of this car is loaded with an impressive amount of cocaine, with a few guns in the backseat. When his father told him to be successful, this surely isn’t what he meant. But Stan can’t help but be pleased: for once, he’s doing something right— right, meaning, of course, profitable .
“It’s about a fifteen hour drive to Tucson,” Icy presses a few hundred dollars into Stan’s hand. “Tank is full. This is for gas and food along the way. Call me when you get there.”
“Yes, sir,” Stan mock-salutes, a callback to his early days working at the Yard, and is treated to one last bout of Icy’s rattling laughter as he climbs into his new ride. He adjusts the rearview mirror, eyes flicking across the expanse of water behind him, the factory’s stacks billowing black smoke high into the atmosphere. He lights a cigarette, and starts to drive.
Stan has never killed someone.
That’s not an odd assumption to make: most people have never killed someone. He’s a bit of an outlier in his line of work, however. So when Ignacio dumps a blindfolded, bruised man in front of him, and hands him a gun, Ignacio is expecting Stan to pull the trigger, no problem.
Ignacio Varga is Stan’s right-hand babysitter, and the adopted brother of Icy and Lombriz: his father was Adelaido Mareno’s mechanic, and when he was shot and killed by a rival gang when Ignacio was seven, Adelaido took him in as one of his own. The Mareno family, adopted or biological, are all utterly batshit insane; this is usually an OK thing for Stan, because they end up doing most of the dirty work when it comes to kidnapping and threatening and beating and killing and disposing of people. Ignacio doesn’t like Stan very much, for a reason Stan has yet to fully parse out, and him handing the gun to Stan is his own form of a test of loyalty. Icy trusts Stan, and Lombriz isn’t trustworthy enough himself to be called on as a judge of character, but Ignacio is the last one Stan has to win over.
He didn’t think winning the guy over would require killing someone, though.
“ Él es una rata. Una canalla. ” Ignacio gestures at the man, who is shaking in fear, blood from a cut along his forehead soaking into the blindfold covering his eyes. “ La única forma de deshacerse de una rata es matarla. ”
The man starts to sob, pleas falling from his lips.
Por favor, por favor, por favor, por favor…
“Ignacio,” Stan holds the gun out awkwardly in front of him, trying not to point it at anything. “ ¿Es esto necesario? ”
“ Necesario?” Ignacio scoffs, “¿Es necesario comer? ¿Es necesario beber? ¿Es necesario follar?”
“Okay, I get it, I get it,” Stan placates. Gingerly, he lifts the weapon to point at the man. Should he close his eyes? Would that make it easier? He looks at Ignacio, who is watching him, stone-faced.
Por favor, por favor, por favor, por favor…
Stan has been doing a good job here. He’s making Tucson another center of cocaine distribution, raking in thousands of dollars a day. He has a crew, and people listen to him. He has an apartment, he has new clothes, he has his new car; all of this in about a week. There’s nowhere to go but up. Or, in this guy’s case, down.
Por favor, por favor, por favor, por favor…
Stan fingers the trigger. CEOs never felt bad about exploiting their employees to make a quick buck— why should Stan feel bad about taking one life in order to pull himself up by the bootstraps? If Stan hadn’t learned to follow directions and, on occasion, shut his mouth, this man and him could have easily been reversed in position: really, it’s the rat’s fault for, well, ratting.
Por favor, por favor, por favor, por favor…
He can’t pull the trigger. “Ignacio—”
“¡ HAZLO !” Ignacio barks, and Stan shakes his head.
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—”
“ Pinche idiota inútil,” Ignacio snaps.
He pulls the gun from Stan’s grip.
Por favor, por favor, por favor, por favor…
“Wait,” Stan pleads.
Por favor, por favor, por favor, por favor…
“ Pagarás por tu deslealtad ,” Ignacio snarls at him, and points the gun at the man on the ground. “ Déjame mostrarte cómo se hace. ”
Por favor, por favor, por favor, por favor…
“Ignacio,” Stan tries again, but dares not move. Dread floods his system; how has he failed so soon?
Por favor, por favor, por favor, por favor…
Stan takes one, two, three steps away, as if he can distance himself from this thing. The red thread of this man’s life stretches before him, Ignacio’s blade of death vibrating against it; all Stan can do is watch. What’s his name? Does he have a family? Does he actually deserve this? Stan closes his eyes.
Por favor, por favor, por fa—
The bang makes Stan jump.
“ Abre tus malditos ojos, joto ,” Ignacio slaps the back of his head. “At least help me move this fucking body.”
Stan opens his eyes slowly. The man’s brains are spread across the floor in a gray-red mush, his skull blown open temple-to-temple; the force of the shot blew off the blindfold, and his bulging eyes stare, unseeing, at Stan.
“I’m sorry,” Stan says, although he’s not sure if he’s directing it at the body or Ignacio.
“Don’t even start,” Ignacio tucks the gun into his waistband irritably. “Just shut up and grab his legs.”
Stan shuts up and grabs the legs.
As I was saying— the day is July 4th, 1980, Independence Day, the time is just after noon, and the pain level is about an 8. This is because Stan Pines is getting his shit rocked.
Stan saw Icy’s truck pull up, and abandoned his cash-counting session to scamper to the door. He throws it open to see Icy striding towards him, hands in pockets in cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth.
“Icy—” Stan starts, but Icy isn't in the mood for small talk. He gets a good hit in, driving his fist into Stan’s stomach, and Stan goes to the ground.
It’s all fun and games, then— at least, for Icy. He doesn’t even say nothing, just beats Stan until his cries of pain turn into whimpers. It’s a position Stan has been in before, but didn’t think he wanted to repeat; he covers his head with his arms and lets Icy do his thing, knowing there’s no stopping it.
Finally, Icy’s rain of blows slows then stops, leaving only the sound of Stan and Icy panting together: the former in pain, the latter in exertion.
“ Mi compinche ,” Icy huffs. “Mi amigo. Mi ratoncito blanco. Why’d you have to go and fuck it up?”
“Artemio,” Stan gasps, pressing his forehead into the cool floor. “I’m sorry. I didn’t— I didn’t—” wet, hot tears burn in the corners of his eyes, which he desperately tries to contain. He can’t imagine what Icy will do to him if he realizes Stan is crying. Despite his best efforts, he sniffles in the unmistakable way that precedes tears. Icy crouches down next to his curled-up form, and Stan braces himself for more pain.
Instead, however, Icy just lays a hand on Stan’s trembling shoulder. “ Oh, pobrecita. No sabes nada mejor, ¿verdad? ” He lifts his hand, and runs it over Stan’s hair. “It’s a learning experience, okay? A little punishment and you’re good to go. It happens to the best of us— I can’t even count on two hands the amount of times my papa had to give me a bit of physical correction. No big deal, right, ratoncito? ”
Stan sniffles again, and nods.
Icy takes Stan by the hair and gently tugs his head upright; Stan hates how he somehow finds comfort in the action. Icy forces him to make eye contact, and a smile tugs at the corner of his boss’s mouth. “So, next time a rat comes in, what do you do?”
Stan forces himself not to look away from Icy’s even, dark gaze. “ Exterminio. ”
“Good boy.”
Stan isn’t quite sure how he ended up in this specific spot, but here he is, standing outside a bar and smoking away his November. The cold of his gun presses against the small of his back, a familiar weight, now; not so familiar is the three duffel bags of cash that sit around his feet.
When Artemio had swung through last week, he had been more than pleased with Stan’s performance. “You’re breaking records, mi compinche . I’m almost jealous.”
“Thanks, Artemio,” Stan had looked up from the espresso machine that had just been installed. Icy had gotten really into cappuccinos lately, and Stan was trying to perfect one for him. Stan calling Icy Artemio was a habit that had blossomed unprompted but was far from unwelcome: maybe Stan was trying to constantly show his gratitude that Icy, although he had every right to kill Stan that day in July, spared him; maybe he was desperately latching on to the only person that had shown him kindness in the last decade, irregardless of the few times Icy had to punish him for mistakes.
And then Icy had told him he wanted Stan’s help delivering Stan’s profits to his father, a privilege usually only the Mareno siblings were privy to. Even as he rose to power as one of the Mexican-American border’s greatest ganglords, Adeladio had faded into the background, allowing his sons and lieutenants to control the public sphere and act as the face of Lobos Negros . Only a select few were allowed to know where he lived, much less meet the man, and somehow, Stan had fallen into that group after not even a year of working under Icy. He was a good businessman, in a way even he was amazed by. (“You could sell flour to a drug test and it would start acting high,” Tib told him once. “You’re a storyteller, and stories sell.”)
So, according to Icy’s directions, Stan found himself outside a bar on the other side of Tucson, in a middle-class white neighborhood; for the first time in eight months, he actually fit into his environment. It was almost jarring to hear American country music emanating from the bar, and the constant blabber drifting through the wood be in English. Somehow, he was unnerved.
He doesn’t have to be unnerved long before Icy’s truck squeals to a stop in front of him. Icy hops out and helps Stan heft his cash into the bed, before they both clamber back into the vehicle. Icy’s car smells like him: cigarette smoke, espresso, and that faint edge of rust-metal that came from working at the Yard.
“You ready, mi compinche ?” Icy punches Stan lightly on the shoulder, the lines of his face lit by the streetlamp overhead. An unpleasantly pleasant sensation flips in Stan’s stomach, which he ignores.
“Of course, Artemio,” Stan pulls out a pack of cigarettes from the glove compartment, because he knows that’s where they are and because he knows Icy will let him have one. His fingers shake as he likes it. “Where… exactly are we going? Is your father back in Texas?”
Icy laughs his iconic laugh. “Jesús, ratoncito, you think my father could bear living in this backwards-ass country?”
“Well, it’s just a question, I mean—”
“Stan,” Icy interrupts more seriously, making sure Stan’s eyes are on him. Making sure Stan knows what he’s getting into— not that he ever really knows. “Stan, we’re going to the only place my father could live: the Motherland. Nosotros vamos a México .”