“We’re going to eat,” Kurt said. “The Vietnamese place is just up ahead. I once heard a guy there trying to speak Thai to the waiters. It was amazing—it was like he was a tourist even at home, an ugly fucked-up tourist. People suck.”
“Do they?” Alan said. “I quite like them. You know, there’s pretty good Vietnamese in Chinatown.”
“This is good Vietnamese.”
“Better than Chinatown?”
“Better situated,” Kurt said. “If you’re going dumpster diving afterward. I’m gonna take your cherry, buddy.” He clapped a hand on Alan’s shoulder. Real people didn’t touch Alan much. He didn’t know if he liked it.
“God,” Alan said. “This is so sudden.” But he was happy about it. He’d tried to picture what Kurt actually did any number of times, but he was never very successful. Now he was going to actually go out and jump in and out of the garbage. He wondered if he was dressed for it, picturing bags of stinky kitchen waste, and decided that he was willing to sacrifice his jeans and the old Gap shirt he’d bought one day after the shirt he’d worn to the store—the wind-up toy store?—got soaked in a cloudburst.
The Vietnamese food was really good, and the family who ran the restaurant greeted Kurt like an old friend. The place was crawling with cops, a new two or three every couple minutes, stopping by to grab a salad roll or a sandwich or a go-cup of pho. “Cops always know where to eat fast and cheap and good,” Kurt mumbled around a mouthful of pork chop and fried rice. “That’s how I found this place, all the cop cars in the parking lot.”
Alan slurped up the last of his pho and chased down the remaining hunks of rare beef with his chopsticks and dipped them in chili sauce before popping them in his mouth. “Where are we going?” he asked.
Kurt jerked his head in the direction of the great outdoors. “Wherever the fates take us. I just drive until I get an itch and then I pull into a parking lot and hit the dumpsters. There’s enough dumpsters out this way, I could spend fifty or sixty hours going through them all, so I’ve got to be selective. I know how each company’s trash has been running—lots of good stuff or mostly crap—lately, and I trust my intuition to take me to the right places. I’d love to go to the Sega or Nintendo dumpsters, but they’re like Stalag Thirteen—razorwire and motion-sensors and armed guards. They’re the only companies that take secrecy seriously.” Suddenly he changed lanes and pulled up the driveway of an industrial complex.
“Spidey-sense is tingling,” he said, as he killed his lights and crept forward to the dumpster. “Ready to lose your virginity?” he said, lighting a cigarette.