Down Here With The Rest Of Us, fiction by Stanton McCaffery

 When I first got laid off, I made a promise to my wife and to myself that I wouldn’t revert back to the man I’d been twenty years ago, angry all the time and ready to fight at the slightest provocation. With a rough childhood I’d somehow pulled myself out of, I walked around with the weight of old pain hanging on my shoulders like a barbell - I would punch walls, start fights, and threaten to kill people in traffic.

It took us a long time - both of us - to be better versions of ourselves and it all seemed to be suddenly yanked away because someone who didn’t even know me made the decision my company would be leaner and meaner without me and some other hapless assholes. My wife knew the lay off would fill me with rage - and it did - which is why the possibility of my regression had come up in the first place.

I promised her I would find a healthy way to deal with my emotions.

What was the method, you ask? Well, it was driving around to parking lots and stealing people’s catalytic converters. Selling them off helped supplement the unemployment and the whole enterprise felt like I was expressing the big ‘fuck you’ that kept pulsating in my brain like a heartbeat.

Whenever I told anyone I got laid off, they’d say that everything would turn out better than it was before, a uniquely American way of saying even when capitalism is fucking you so hard, ultimately you’ll be better off for it.

I got damn tired of it and I wanted people to hurt. Like, you know when Michael Caine played Alfred, Batman’s butler, and he gave that speech about how Bruce Wayne didn’t fully comprehend the criminal he was dealing with? He said he was working in Burma once and searching for stolen jewels only to find out the person who stole them threw them away. He said some people can’t be reasoned with. Some people aren’t interested in money. They just want to see the world burn.

I was a tiny bit different than Alfred’s Burmese friend. I was interested in money, but I also wanted people to hurt. Rage had spent the entirety of my life rotting out my core and I wanted to be a fucking criminal. I wanted to watch the world burn…and stay on top of my mortgage in the process.

It started as a joke. A guy at my gym asked me what I was going to do. I shrugged, “steal catalytic converters.” He laughed. I didn’t.

You know you can learn just about anything on Youtube? I bet you can learn how to implant a pacemaker if that’s what you’re interested in. But I didn’t give a fuck about anybody’s heart. I wanted some stranger’s car to fail inspection and sound like a racecar and for me to make a grand or so in the process. There’s countless videos of boring sounding guy’s with monotone voices telling you how to remove the cats. That’s what we call the converters, you know, those of us in the business. Cats.

I started by taking the cat off my own Toyota Prius. And yeah, I own a Prius - go fuck yourself. I had to use a jack to get underneath it. First try took me twenty minutes. From security videos of people stealing the things, I could tell it was faster with two or more people. Starting out though, I was solo, so I practiced again and again with a timer set on my phone. I got down to 15 minutes. Then I shut off all the lights in my garage and practiced with only a headlamp.

I watched one video on Youtube where some newscaster was talking about a recent string of cat thefts. He said the biggest targets were trucks and SUVs because they were high enough that you didn’t need a jack. I figured, okay, let me start there.

I used to play this game while driving with my wife where we would see some giant truck and guess whether the person driving actually used it for work or off-roading or if it just served as some sort of macho status symbol. Working trucks had dings. They had tools in their beds. Status symbols looked like they were just driven off the lot. When I started stealing the cats, I went for the status symbols. Those rich fuckers that cosplayed as working class - I wanted their world to burn like it had soaked in kerosene.

For about a week I did some scouting. Part of it was I was nervous and part of it was that I’d matured in my anger and knew I had to go about my plan carefully. When I was a kid, somebody said something shitty to me and I’d go over and punch them in the face. No thinking about it, just whack. I still felt that urge, don’t get me wrong, but I learned to let my anger cool. It didn’t disappear, but it cooled down just enough so I could handle it like a fresh piece of bread you’re taking out of the oven to cut into slices. You try to cut it too early and it’s a mess. You let it cool and, man, what a thing of beauty.

With my rage simmering, I cruised parking lots up and down route one in Middlesex County. Lots of shopping malls. Some Walmarts. Bunch of other big box stores. Where there used to be a Ford plant up until the late 90’s, there was this half golf course half restaurant type place. They’d even put this go-cart place behind it. It’s supposed to be the biggest go-cart course in North America.

I didn’t know at that time that certain cats would get you more money than others so I was really just looking for dark lots with vehicles I could get under without too much trouble. After a week of driving around the lot of the go-cart place, I found a spot in the parking lot with no lights and no cameras.

Before I went out for my first steal, I wrote down directions for taking out the cat in a small notepad I would keep in my pocket. If I got nervous and forgot what I was doing, I could pull the pad out and follow the directions, using my headlamp to see in the dark.

Growing up in the area, I knew there was an old park not too far that nobody went to. I parked there around 9pm, had my tools in a bookbag I used to use for my commute into Manhattan, went by the Walmart to take one of their shopping carts, and went to the dark part of the go-cart parking lot.

I was shaking like hell that first time, but I wasn’t dumb enough to light my headlamp until I was fully under the vehicle. It was a Ford Expedition. I always hated those fucking behemoths.

It took me 15 minutes to get the crosspiece down because I kept dropping my socket wrench on my own face. Once I had all the bolts off, the cat still wouldn’t come loose. But my favorite Youtube user, CarTech69, had already prepared me for such an eventuality. Use a penetrating oil, he said. So I opened my bag, took out the WD40, lathered up the cat, and gave it a good yank until it was free.

Now, you need to know something about cats. They vary in size. Some of them are about 3 pounds and some of them are as large as 10 pounds. This one was on the larger size. Nothing too heavy, but they’re solid and can do some damage if you hit somebody in the face with one.

Which is what I did when I got up from under the car and saw some 250 pound, 6 and a half foot tall guy with a flat-brimmed Yankees hat, designer sneakers, and a gold chain running at me, calling me a motherfucker and saying he was going to shit in my mouth.

I took a few months of karate when I was a kid until they told me to leave because I was being an asshole. I didn’t learn much, but I learned how to dodge a punch. So I did that when the guy in the Yankees hat took the first swing. Then I swung the cat upwards and caught him on the chin. He was dazed, which gave me a second to swing again. This time I swung it like a baseball bat and caught him in the temple. After the second impact, he hit the ground and I tossed the cat in the shopping cart and ran as fast as I could.

Some dude in a flannel shirt, a potato sack’s worth of belly fat, and a trucker hat that said, “I got my pork pulled at Frank’s truck stop,” tried to chase me down, but I out ran him. When I looked back at the lot, he was tripoding and spitting something out onto the asphalt that I thought might have been the pulled pork his hat was talking about.

I drove home with the stolen cat and I’m high on adrenaline so when I pull into my driveway I just turn around and stare at the thing, my heart racing like a teenage boy who just ejaculated for the first time. I fell asleep in the driver’s seat and woke up to my wife knocking on the window. She asked me what the thing was and I told her it was a catalytic converter. I gave no further explanation and she didn’t ask for one. Twenty years of me and she guessed she was better off not knowing.

When I brought the cat into the garage I searched my pockets and realized I’d lost my notebook with my instructions written down. At first I panicked about it, but talked myself down because, what, were the police going to analyze it like it was a note left by a serial killer? I don’t think so.

The other mistake was that I hadn’t thought at all about where I would sell the thing. That was pretty fucking stupid, right? Look, I didn’t tell you I was a professional, did I? I was figuring things out as I went along, like I did everything else in my life.

I waited a week before I brought it to a scrap metal yard, figuring the heat might have died down. See, I’m putting some thought into this, and I enjoyed the plotting part of it, honestly. I felt like a mastermind. It’s funny the things that release dopamine, isn’t it? And shit, I needed some after being laid off. For the week while I waited to trade in my cat, I walked around the house playing air guitar and singing “Breaking the Law.”

The scrap metal yard was down by the Raritan Bay and down the block from a methadone clinic. Beyond the mountains of old rusty cars, driers, refrigerators, and God knows what else, you could see rocky beaches littered with beer bottles, then murky water, and then the even larger trash mound known as Staten Island. It was a beautiful urban landscape.

Those guys at the scrap metal yard weighing the junk and giving people cash, they had hard lives written on their faces. You could read their stories through the creases around their eyes. You could hear all the screaming matches they’d ever had when they opened their mouths to speak through scarred vocal chords. I used to think I was better than people like them. I took pride in the fact I had made better choices and was in a better place as a result.

A rotund short man with a braided gray beard that looked like he’d auditioned for a dwarf role in the Lord of the Rings with faded tattoos I assumed he’d gotten in a jail cell stood across the counter from me. He asked in a growl where I’d gotten the cat. I told him it was from a junk car I had in my yard.

“Cat this size ain’t from a car,” he said.

“I meant my truck.”

There was another man behind me with a wheelbarrow full of wound-up rolls of copper wire. Would the Gimli look-a-like ask him where he’d gotten his metal from? Because I seriously doubted the guy was a house-flipper or was doing anything else legit.

The Gimli put his aged hands on the counter and leaned. He stared at me with tired eyes that told his age and mileage like an odometer. “I’m gonna be honest with you brother. We get asked about where this came from and I’m gonna be honest with them too. Don’t tell me your name so I don’t have to lie, but I will tell them your description and about your pussy-ass Prius. If that bothers you, then I think you should turn around and try to sell this thing somewhere else and we can pretend this never happened. No judgment. Everybody’s gotta eat. I just got too much shit to take on more. You feel me?”

I hadn’t expected this. I expected a wink and for the doors of some outlaw brotherhood to open. I told him I did and I picked up the cat and headed back to my Pussy-ass Prius.

In the parking lot and about to drive away and the guy who had the wheelbarrow full of wire came out the corrugated metal gate waving his arms at me. So, this is how it’s gonna go, I thought. This guy is gonna be my ticket into the brotherhood of outlaws.

“You follow me and I can show you where you can sell that. Maybe you can find more work if you’re interested. Me and my girl do work for this place.”

He looked familiar. He was tall with facial scars that looked like tiny puncture-wounds, too neat to be from acne. They must have been from facial piercings. His arms were covered in colorful tattoos, a notch higher in quality than those on Gimli’s. He had threes X’s outside his palm on his right hand, a marker that he’d once been straight-edge. Though from his gaunt face, sunken eyes, and cracked yellowing teeth I assumed he’d broken edge long ago. And that’s when I placed him.

“You’re Dave Fury, aren’t you?”

I didn’t know his real last name because that’s how things worked in the hardcore scene in Jersey back in the 90’s. The singer would take the band’s name like The Ramones did way back. Burnt Fury was huge locally when I was in High School. Me and my friends saw them like ten times at the Elk’s Lodge. Dave was a hell of a frontman and the pit was always insane during their sets. I always thought he’d be in some band that would make it big. You know, one of those bands that plays those three day long metal fests in Europe, but here he was selling copper wire next to a methadone clinic.

“Shit yea, man. You a fan?”

I told him I had the lyrics to his songs memorized and he leaned in an hugged me. He smelled like chemicals and felt like a skeleton.

“We were a fucking brotherhood, man. Shit, we still fucking are, right? Bro, you gotta come meet my girl. I gotta impress her that I still got fans.”

Based on his appearance and smell, I had anticipated his girl being rail thin and nearly toothless - which she was - but I hadn’t anticipated recognizing her too.

She squinted when she saw me, but I knew her immediately. My brain flashed to the last time we talked. It was middle school and I asked her to be my girlfriend. She told me we were better just being friends and I told her if that was the case that I didn’t want to be her friend anymore. I didn’t cry. I just went into my house and punched my mattress until I fell asleep.

She didn’t hug me like her boyfriend did. Julia stayed in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s boxy Toyota looking high. I had heard from old friends over the years that she developed a drug problem and putting two and two together I concluded she’d just gotten a methadone treatment.

I followed them in my car and thought all about my former life and how Julia and I wound up on different paths but still met again at the bottom.

Like I said, I heard from people that she became a junkie and you know what? When I heard that I thought, well serves her right for hurting me those years ago. That’s pretty fucked up, right?

When I saw her though and she looked like Jack Skelington with straw for hair, I didn’t think anything served her right. I wanted to find the person that gave her that first hit that got her hooked and kick them in the dick.

Was it Dave Fury that did it? As much as I loved his former band, I would still give him a foot to the genitals for ruining who she could have been.

When our trip ended and we were in a parking lot in the warehouse district somewhere on the border of Woodbridge and Perth Amboy off of Smith Street under the Driscoll Bridge that led to the other side of the Raritan Bay. My wife grew up in the area and said her old Hungarian grandfather used to take her fishing under there. It always amazed me that she ate fish from that water and didn’t grow extra toes or fingers.

Places changed over time, I supposed. Just like people.

Now, the place looked like a scene from The Sopranos. I could picture Tony, Sill, and Paulie beating somebody to death with bats and burning them in the marshes near the pillars of the bridge. The lot we were in was surrounded by razor wire and the building at its center was built from decaying cinder blocks coated with layers of unskilled graffiti. On either side of its front entrance were stacks of tires.

Me and Dave went in with the cat. I asked him how he met Julia and told him our brief history. They met at a party at Guy Morris’s house. He asked if I knew Guy, and yeah, I knew that piece of shit. Me and him were friends when we were kids until he decided mocking me in front of cooler, more popular kids was his way into better social circles. Responding to his taunts with punches and kicks were my first steps into juvenile delinquency.

Not that Guy steered clear of delinquency himself. He was a notorious junkie and did six years for sticking a dog toy up a guy’s ass after he passed out on his couch during a bender. Guy had died five years ago from a heroin overdose - a fact that never upset me in the slightest.

After we chatted for a minute, Dave brought me to a back office to meet a man named Lou that looked more like a low-level government bureaucrat than a criminal mastermind with a mostly slender build aside from a pot-belly, khaki pants, a polo shirt, and a cheap-looking haircut. He shook my hand vigorously and smiled like a used car salesman. He talked about joining the team, said he would show me how to use their app and at first I would be working with Dave and Julia before I started leading my own group.

I felt like I had entered an alternate universe. A fucking app? Leading my own group? Were these thieves or knive salesmen?

They gave me $1,500 for the first cat, which was half what I used to get in a paycheck twice a month. More than the money, I loved kicking back at the world.

I met Dave and Julia the next night in a liquor store parking lot for a planning conversation. Dave showed me the app while Julia went inside and bought booze. It looked like a tool for monitoring stock options, with prices you’d likely get next to corresponding auto makes and models. The cat from a Ford F150 could get you $1,700, but one for a Prius could get you 3 grand. “You gotta check it everytime you go out though,” Dave said. “That shit changes every day.”

He told me they had been sticking to nearly empty lots late at night but that with three people they could use one person as a look out and go to riskier places like shopping malls. I told him I was down for whatever hurt the most people.

“My man is ice cold,” he said and shook my hand while leaning his shoulders into my chest.

Julia came out shaking her head and swearing. “That motherfucker in there said we drink in the parking lot one more time and he won’t sell to us.” I hadn’t heard her talk much the last time we met but now it sounded she’d aged a thousand years since we were kids. I felt uncomfortable with them out there complaining about the owners and being reprimanded like they were children. But what did I expect, mature behavior from two junkies driving around in a pickup truck stealing pieces of people’s cars?

“Oh, fuck that guy,” Dave said, “I bet he won’t even remember. Shit, our money spends. Plus, let him come out here and say something to me.”

With that, Julia opened a 40 and started guzzling. I asked her how she’d been the last 20 years and she shrugged. “I’m fucking alive, I guess. I was on the streets for a while until I got with this guy. The state took my son away too. They think he’s fucking better off with strangers than he is with his own mother. What a bunch of fucking morons.”

I went home and took the longest and hottest shower of my life.

The next night, we did our first cat hunting as a group - took four of them in two hours. The thieving, the hustling, and the looking out were invigorating. The fact that Dave and Julia were higher than Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats - Julia snorting lines off the dashboard while Dave drove and smoked something from a glass pipe scared the ever living shit out of me.

Julia offered me a snort. “You think stealing cats is a thrill sober,” she said.

I declined.

“You always made good choices,” she said.

A week later was when I found out Dave kept a gun on him all the time. Probably something I should have known to begin with, right? But like I said, I was figuring this out as I went along. Next time I joined a crew of thieves I would know to ask first.

The exact moment I learned of the gun was when Dave pulled it from the back of his pants and stuck it in some teenage boy’s face. The kid might have shit himself and I nearly did. He ran from a backyard firing a paintball gun, hit me in the leg and Julia in the chest.

“Ow, my fucking tit,” she screamed.

Dave ran towards the kid - his insane speed undoubtedly drug fueled - and stuck the handgun under his chin. “This one fires the real shit, pussy.”

With the kid paralyzed in terror, Julia grabbed the paint gun from him and shot point blank in the crotch. The kid yelped and fell to his knees. We grabbed the cat from the driveway and ran to the truck.

Dave left tire marks he drove out of there so fast. Once we were about a mile away and I stopped feeling like my heart was in my throat, I put my hand on the dashboard and leaned forward so I could see Dave around Julia who was sandwiched between us.

“I think,” I said and then paused, my nerves still making it hard to get thoughts straight and words together. “I think maybe we should have just left the cat. What if the gun went off? It’s not worth manslaughter.”

Dave cut his eyes from the road fast enough to cock an eyebrow and shoot me a look. He tapped the steering wheel with one fist. “Gun wasn’t gonna go off unless I wanted it too. Homeboy knew that. Ball was in his court. Why he didn’t come after us.”

Julia snorted. “He didn’t come after us because I shattered his testicles.”

Dave laughed and kissed her on the top of the head.

Looking back, I should have understood how different I was from Dave. He was a lifer. I was a tourist, but in the moment I didn’t get it.

“I still think it would be best not to have the gun with us.”

“Yeah, well what you think don’t fucking matter. People pull guns over their cats and if somebody’s gonna pull a piece on me, hell yeah I’m gonna pull one back.”

“He’s new,” Julia said. “Leave him alone. You weren’t born hard either.”

Dave tapped the steering wheel harder than before. “That’s right, I forgot. He was your boyfriend.”

She turned to him and punched his arm. “Don’t be a prick.”

When we got to the tire shop Dave hopped out by himself and came back with wads of cash. “I should keep this shit myself,” he said.

And I should have stopped working with them after that. The only reason I went out the last time was because I was worried about Julia.

They were arguing when they came to get me. Dave had accused Julia of flirting with a cashier.

“I doubt he’s interested in somebody paying with EBT,” she said when I got in.

“Don’t matter what you’re paying with,” Dave said, “if you’re sucking his dick.”

Dave looked at me before we got out of the truck. “Best believe I brought my piece with me, pussy boy.”

“Would you leave him alone, you fucking bastard?!” Julia whisper-shouted.

Dave said he would be the lookout and told Julia to get the cat off with me. “Why don’t you go under with your boyfriend.”

I felt in my stomach that something was about to happen. Did he hate her? How could you do something like that unless you hated a person? After years of thinking about what happened, I don’t think that was the case. He was just high and pissed off.

When Julia worked under the cars she freaked me out because she had no spacial awareness. She would knock into things and always have her limbs in dangerous places. This time, the reason she had her head under the tire was because she turned to look at me. “I should have said yes to you all those years ago.”

I was about to tell her to move her head when I saw Dave’s boot. My face splattered with blood and brains.The exhaust system banged against my chest and I couldn’t breathe.

Dave was shouting. “Won’t be sucking anyone’s dick now, will you bitch?”

When I crawled out from under the car, he kicked me in the gut. “Wish that shit fell on you too, motherfucker!”

People were on the streets now and filled the liquor store parking lot where we were trying to steal the cat. Sirens were approaching.

Dave was yelling at people for staring when I got to my feet and punched him in the back of the head. He fell into the crowd of people and turned around. “Pussy ass bitch.”

I ducked the first punch he threw but caught the second with my left cheek. The knee to my gut came next. Then there was the elbow to the top of my head. On the pavement, he kicked me in the ribs. Before he ran to his truck and drove away, he spat on my face. I laid in Julia’s blood with a fragment of her skull digging into my face and I cried.

I cried because she was dead and because I was a fool. My working life left me with bitterness and nothing to do with it. My attempts to be something else - even something destructive, had failed. I cried because the only thing I was capable of doing was ruining people’s lives.

I told the cops all about Dave, what he looked like and the car he drove. I gave them his address. And I gave them what they were really after - the network. I told them about Lou and his operation and his polo shirts. They said it was a multi-million dollar operation and they dropped all the charges against me.

I told them that if it was that big a deal then I wanted something else. I wanted them to find Julia’s kid in the foster care system. I wanted them to help me set up a bank account for the kid. I figured whenever I found some sort of job that I could put some money aside for him. It was the least I could do after getting his mom killed.

Stanton McCaffery's short stories have been featured in Dark Yonder, Mystery Tribune, Mystery Weekly, Guilty, Vautrin, and Shotgun Honey. He has published two novels: Into the Ocean; and Neighborhood of Dead Ends. His short story, “Will I See The Birds When I Am Gone,” is featured in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Rock and a Hard Place Press.