Read Made to Break for Free Online

around HelLA a couple hours a day a career? You call that a job even, chucking papers on the curb?”
    â€œHe wouldn’t even do that,” I said, “if he didn’t feel so guilty for a life’s worth of mooching off his sugar units.”
    â€œBitch,” said Basil. “I’m a professional musician.”
    â€œYou’re a record company’s bagboy.”
    â€œI’m the mother fucking mover and shaker who’s going to make your ass pay, is what I am. And guess what else? It’s only a matter of time.”
    â€œYou’re thirty-five years old, Basil. You know as well as those record people do the kiddies won’t be lining up to see your teeth fall out. Not to mention you could stop kicking everybody out of your band all the time.”
    â€œSo I’ll be fat and bald and toothless, but at least I’ll be up there. Sure as hell beats chasing pubes for a living.”
    â€œThat’s not even cool.”
    â€œYou want to be cool, be cool.”
    â€œLook, you boobs,” Lucille said, “are we still playing or what?”
    There was that briefest moment of doubt where Basil and I considered exchanging our knives for guns or throwing the knives away. But really the doubt was feigned. We knew what would happen. The kill was just a dream. The sight of blood was enough. We were only after the blood. This of course was a perversion cultivated over time, like a taste for taboo food, monkey brain or mice. The satisfaction of knowing we’d wounded one another was more than sufficient. In fact, it had become for us a fix of sorts, why our hate for one another always equaled our need. Basil and I were Siamese twins parted only in flesh.
    â€œHell yes, we are,” he said, “and it’s still my turn.”
    â€œYour turn?” Hickory said.
    â€œTo ask.”
    Lucille tossed back a shot. “Well ask away then,” she said. “Ask away the doo-da day.”

BASIL WASN’T GOING TO ASK LUCILLE ANYTHING worth her breath. He already thought he knew everything she had to say, a presumption which, so far as I could tell, was nowhere near the facts. And whereas it was true that before she’d become his woman he wouldn’t have thought twice about crushing her at every meal, now that she was his, he’d save his curiosity for the pillow talk to come.
    I was absolutely positive, for instance, he didn’t know a thing about the times my ex-wife and I found the cupboards full of empty cereal boxes those three months Lucille had crashed our sofa. And if not cereal boxes, it was milk cartons at the back of the fridge, dry, or garbage cans stuffed with candy bar wrappers and foils from TV dinners. An entire roast would’ve vanished in the night, or a pot of spaghetti we’d just made, or a half-gallon of ice cream, all manner of food all of the time. Basil didn’t know, either, how those very mornings, I’d enter the bathroom to the odor of Lysol and vomit.
    And neither would Basil ask why Lucille had slept with each of the three Gladden brothers that crazy summer of ’87, when after munching three grams of shrooms and a hit of blotter our friend Moo-Moo stumbled through a skylight and broke his legs; when our dealer Tony the Tongue invited four girls to the House of Men for a session of free love only to fake an epilepsyfit after two of the vixens tried to pork him with their strap-ons; when in front of the Grand Lake Theater a herd of cops arrested me and Dinky and Basil for having bombed a woman with a fire extinguisher just because she looked, as Basil claimed, like Barney Rubble with tits: while she went ape shit and chased us howling, we burned rubber through a KFC lot full of cops gathered for an ad lib feast. They caught us with three fat blunts, a bottle of wine, and a BB gun, fully loaded.
    But Lucille. First she’d taken Bobby, then Benjamin, then Brad. Not one of these brothers knew the rest were