Mr. Goya — 料理人

[kosowarner]

Plans.

 

 

At about ten minutes before the courthouse doors opened, the sun was still nothing but just a rumor over The Davis Courts Building at Macdonald Street in LS.

 

A pale smear behind the strip malls and all the palm trees that tried too damn hard.

Sidewalks folded into themselves like old paper.

People moved in small but very urgent patterns.

The air smelled faintly of oil and stale coffee.

It’s that typical kind of morning that makes the city feel like a thing you can put your hands on and shake until its pockets spill loose change.

Gashi walked in with his hands cuffed behind his back and his head leveled.

He wore the orange county jail suit. 

In the hall, all the men in plain clothes eyed him like he belonged to a ledger.

Families would pass by with their flicked glances that somewhat carried that pity about the guy.

Gashi knew that whatever else happened today, the room would be full of listeners with opinions dressed as facts.

In front of the bench, he looked smaller than the rumors had made him sound.

The judge peered down like somebody who’d watched too damn many people try to play the same hand.

The prosecutor smiled like a man who’d practiced this smile in the mirror for years and years.

Cameras were kept away, but their absence made the whole damn moment worse.

Everyone felt like a witness in a theater where the stage was made of fluorescent lights and some shitty cheap oak.

“Mr. Gashi” the judged said. “We’ll hear your allocution. You may now speak.” 

Man cleared his throat. 

He did not wanna give no speech, that simply was not his style.

He did not romanticize himself.

He’d learned super early that words were a currency, always liable to counterfeits.

“My name is Fatmir Gashi” he began, and his voice was even, as if he was reading a receipt. 

“I am forty-two. Born in Kosovo. I was just 16 years of age when I grabbed my gun to fight the Serbian regime. Left my country at 17 years of age, and I was smuggled here via a boat, I left my country because it had nothing to offer to me. I did what I did, your honor, because that is what my neighborhood taught me, stack small wins and keep the brothers fed.”

 

The prosecutor stood and aimed for a precision-like tone. 

“Mr. Gashi, how did you acquire the items listed in counts one through six? Be specific.”

Gashi looked at him for a very long second, and when he spoke, he gave nothing that a cop could use to string another confession.

He offered the truth, but the truth on his terms: human, not technical.

“I did not invent anything new, counselor” he said.

“I worked a chain, as you can see… There is always someone doing the shopping, someone doing the selling, and someone watching the product. See, my part? My part was in the middle: I moved things down a line so other people could breathe easy. Tires and radios from broken up imports, bikes that walked out of warehouses, pills that passed from a guy in a club to a guy who needed cash tonight. I did not build the factories, I just made the connections between hungry mouths and hungry pockets.”

The prosecutor, like any other prosecutor really, tried to pin him with the details, names, routes, phone numbers. 

Gashi gave faces instead, the old mechanic who kept a radio on for news and for clients, the woman who worked night shift at the freight lot and owed a cousin money, the kid who knew how to hold a fake ID like origami.

He described methods in a way that sounded like a street sermon.

“You facilitated trafficking” the prosecutor said.

“You profited.” he added.

“Maybe” Gashi answered. 

“But this is not a story of glory or something I take pride on. It is just a thing of survival. We put plates on table. We paid for funerals. We paid for a mother’s insulin when the clinic would not wait. Every caper in the docket was somebody trying not to sink”.

The judge later asked about violence. “There are allegations you ordered an assault” she said.

“What do you say to that?”

Gashi’s jaw tightened like a wire.

“I never liked the part of business that needs a boot on a throat” he said.

“But force… force protects things people can’t protect themselves. If I had to pick a sin, I would say selfishness. I made decisions so that the others would not make worse ones. It is not a defense. It is what I did.”

When the court recessed and the reporters found their way to the hallway, Gashi’s whole world narrowed to the cell that the city hands you for a day.
He talked, sometimes, not to absolve himself but to name the roots of what he’d become.

Gashi grew up in Burton, near a seam of households, where the city’s refuse and the city’s riches touched a lot and swapped coats at night.

There were men who sold fortunes behind the shuttered stores, goods that had lost the names they were born with and were reborn as cheaper luxuries on another block.

Gashi did learn to read invoices like a tarot: a code here, a canceled line there, a phone number that always answered at three in the morning.
He learned that there were easier ways to get what people wanted than to make anything from scratch.

His networks were made of favors, and favors are very sticky.

A tow-truck driver would /find/ a van left idling too long.

A dock worked would miscount a pallet and smile when something walked away in the dark.

A club bartender could move a box out back while heads nodded to a beat no one kept track of.

Gashi kept his hands very clean by keeping his mouth shut and his ledger very, very thin.

He traded in the hum of rumor, in promises to be useful later, in sort of, splitting small margins that added up when you were patient.
But Gashi never pretended to work as noble. 

“You don’t get into it for ideals” he told the judge once, when the morning had gone long and everyone had tired of the theater.

“You get into it because there is a kid with a fever and nowhere to go, because the landlord knows how to notice empty plates. You get in to string some rope between you and sinking.”

The prosecution painted him as a linchpin.

The defense painted him as a product.

 

Gashi sat between two and let them argue like children over a vase he’d broken.

When the judge asked if he had anything else to say before sentencing, he swallowed and let the silence do half of his work.

“I’m not here to ask for leniency because I deserve it” he said.

“I’m here to say that if you strip me of what I did have, the people who listened to me, the few places I kept honest, I have a vacuum the city will fill with something worse. If you want to punish, do it. But understand what you are cutting out of the map.”

Outside, the afternoon flattened into a smudge of heat and exhaust.

Gashi walked back to the holding room with his sentence which sort of lingered between his shoulders.

He had told enough of his story to make a jury think, maybe pity, maybe contempt, but he had the specifics close, the way a man keeps his passport when he plans to leave or stay.

The city would keep breathing, just pretty much like it always did, fuelling quieter businesses and meaner trades alike.

He’d learned, that in Burton and under the yellow lights, that nothing was clean.

Not love, not money, not law.

In court, he’d tried to make that mess sound like a life.

Whether the judge called it an explanation or an excuse did not change what Gashi’d been: a man who moved goods because the city left him with no cleaner options, and who now stood in a room of people deciding whether his past would be his future.

 

Excerpt from the Burton Journal, “Little Albania”

 

I’m a nobody, I hate it here. I’ve been walking these streets for weeks now, and the more I see of Burton, the more it feels to me like it’s living in two fucked up timelines at once. I’ve heard them call it Little Albania, but I know that it’s more than a name. When you’ve lived here long enough, when you see the flags fade and these streets rot, you really start to see it for what it really is, it’s a massive graveyard of promises that never really made it past the corner.

The elders for example, you know? The first ones who came here, they still talk about their journey, not just from across the ocean, but from hunger to survival. You see them outside a small cafe every morning, thick hands around chipped coffee cups, seaking in a language that I just don’t understand.
They drink that stupid coffee really slow, like it’s keeping them alive. I just can’t stand it. The same words, the same fucking stories, none of them about now and none of them about here. 

They talk about their home like it’s still waiting for them, even though everyone knows that they’re never going back. Their kids? They were born here, raised on American television, American school and American lies.

You walk down the Burton and Spanish Ave. you’ll come across the “eagles” which are still sprayed on the walls, but you can clearly see the red faded color which has chipped away. The young ones wear gold, they drive borrowed cars, they call themselves kings. They talk big too, you know? But they’ll end up just like their fathers, trying to chase “respect” in a city that does not even know how to spell their names. 

You hear them say that this cafe is still the heart of the neighborhood. Maybe it is, I couldn’t care less. That’s where I see what’s left of the men I grew up wth. Their eyes are sunken, their teeth are gone, their smiles are forced. You know what’s stupid? They laugh about the old days like they were anything worth remembering. The fucking owner pretends he’s clean now, but every-damn-one knows that he’s still running the show.

The old folk still believe in besa, it’s that typical promise of loyalty allegedly “stronger than blood”, yes! They believe that! They believe in family before freedom and the respect before riches. But the Americanized young ones, they move reckless, they talk so loud, they dress sharper, they try to carry that same blood but not the same beliefs. To them besa does not pay rent. They’re all after luxurious cars, music and money. The LS dream, or at least their shitty vision of it.

Albanians also own a shitty night club in Burton, it’s all fucking fake. Their faces too damn plastic. You can’t tell who’s “pretending to be rich” and who’s just “pretending to be happy”. Everyone is running from something, and the faster they dance, the closer these motherfuckers get to falling apart.

There’s also a cleaning company down the street that’s supposed to help new arrivals find work. I went there once, years ago. They smiled, gave me papers and directly sent me to scrub bathrooms for people who would not even look at me. Said it was a “start”, but it was not. It was a fucking loop, the same week, the same paycheck, the same fucking silence.

Even the bakery feels shit now, used to be the smell of burek which was supposed to mean something, you know? That typical feeling of comfort, home, safety. Now to me, it’s just another shitty reminder that some people made it out, and I did not. Yes, I am seething. The young ones come in all carelessly, they spend their money like it means they are free. I can’t even look at them without feeling pity for these motherfuckers.

All I see is decay. The same songs, the same language, the same fucking lie we tell ourselves to feel like we “belong somewhere”. Maybe that’s what this place really is, I can’t call it “home”, because it is not, no. To me it’s just a fucking room for people who never got where they were supposed to go.

Sometimes late at night, I think to myself, was it all worth it? You know, coming here, chasing that cheap version of the American Dream? Nah. I fucked up, and I ain’t gonna bore myself with the details. But one thing’s for certain, these motherfuckers? They rule Burton. Hell, sometimes it feels like they run the whole damn city. And another thing, these fuckers? They’d bleed for one another. Does not matter if they’ve never met, an Albanian in need is an Albanian you stand for.

Edited October 6 by kosowarner

[kosowarner]

Availability

[kosowarner]

[kosowarner]

[kosowarner]

[kosowarner]

[kosowarner]

[kosowarner]

[kosowarner]

[kosowarner]

[kosowarner]

[kosowarner]

METH

[kosowarner]

Just now, kosowarner said:

 

METH

 

 

[kosowarner]

[kosowarner]