Cogito Ergo Zoom

We cruised past the closed gas station lot with a glut of hot cars parked on it. Tim shifted his 1967 Pontiac GTO down to second gear and rode the tach right up to maybe five thousand rpm, the 400-cubic-inch engine roaring and snarling like a chained dragon. My Hemi Charger R/T added to the mechanical harmony. As we wailed away in second gear, two cars rolled out into the darkness behind us. The headlights in our mirrors rocketed up Woodward like anti-aircraft missiles turning toward enemy planes.

We signaled into a wide Woodward crossover to the southbound side at Bassett Street. A wildly modified ’65 Buick Riviera rolled in next to Tim, and a crappy ’62 Ford Galaxie stopped beside my Charger. The Galaxie was not a serious street racer, just a poseur. He couldn’t or didn’t want to spend the money it took to be serious. That’s actually a thing in racing.

Speed costs money. How fast can you afford to go?

The timeless jet-black Riviera was box stock on the outside, but in its engine bay growled a throaty, modified V-8 with the kind of spiteful intent never envisioned by Buick engineers. The owner had spent a lot of money on it, and that did not work in our favor.

We shut down all four cars and stepped out into the street, like gunslingers.

“Hey,” the tubby kid from the Riv said. “You guys lookin’ to see what those things can do out here?” He stood with arms crossed, but it only accentuated his thick midsection and made him look defensive.

Advantage ours.

“We know what our cars will do,” Tim said evenly. “We wanna know what yours will do—if you have the balls.”

The Riviera kid laughed like he’d been challenged this way before, and had sent the annihilated challengers home strapped to the hoods of their cars, like trophies of war.

“Yeah man, I got the balls. You got any money?”

Tim reached into his back pocket and withdrew an envelope thick with fifties.

“Well, all right,” the Ford kid said eagerly. He had a gap-toothed grin and an oily waterfall hairstyle, that sort of surf-wave coming over the front and slicked back on the sides. We looked at him like he was a turd—Not talkin’ to you, jerk.

“You got any money, dude?” Tim demanded. The Riv kid reached into the left front pocket of his blue jeans and pulled out a roll of cash, fanning it back and forth in the air. It looked to be all hundred-dollar bills. A shit-ton of them.

“Asshole, I got the money. You got the courage to go with your daddy’s allowance?”

Tim didn’t take the bait.

“Here’s the deal,” Tim said, deadpan. “One grand, one run, no bullshit. Winner-winner-chicken-dinner. We line up over there at Hadsell Drive and race down Woodward to South Berkshire. That’s a bit more than a quarter mile, but I need less than that to put your shit on the fuckin’ trailer. The first car—the first car—to cross South Berkshire is the winner. Agreed?”

Damn, I thought. Who the hell are you, and what have you done with my college-prep pal, Tim?

“Who holds the money?” the Riv kid snarled. He was trying to sound tough now but it just came off as squeaky indignation. “Somebody needs to hold the money.”

Tim laughed an evil laugh.

“Well, it ain’t gonna be you, and this idiot”—he pointed to the Ford driver—“has an IQ about two points above plant life, so he’s out. We will hold the money.” He gestured to the Ford boy again. “Your little girlfriend here can ride with my friend and the cash, if that blows your skirt up. I get to South Berkshire first, we keep the cash. If you get there first, you get paid. But you are losing tonight, my friend. Bad. Your friends will still be laughing at your ass next September when you go back to do your junior year of vocational school over again.”

“Deal,” the Riv kid said. Tim reached out to shake hands on it and the kid slapped it away. “Fuck your handshake, asshole. Let’s race.” He gave me his cash, got back in his Riviera and burned rubber out onto Woodward.

Tim turned to face me.

“Oooooh,” he stage-whispered, “must be a tough guy.” He smiled with confidence, gave me a thumbs up, and went to his car.

Tim lined up next to the hulking Riviera. When the engines sounded like they were about to explode, I blipped my headlights once and they launched.

A smoky blue curtain of shrieks and melted rubber enveloped them, and then the black Riviera lunged forward like it came off the catapult of an aircraft carrier.

A few seconds later, I saw the flashing red lights of two police cars reflecting off the pine trees in the median between north and south Woodward.

Tim was casually driving twenty-five miles per hour in the center lane when I caught up with him. The Riviera was stopped and bracketed front and rear by two Birmingham police cars, and officers who looked angry even in the poor light.

When our cars rolled past him, the kid glared at us something fierce and Tim flipped him the bird. Seconds later, the GTO indeed was the first car to cross the finish line at South Berkshire. We pulled into the Mobil gas station about a block farther on.

“You can get out here,” I said to the Ford kid sitting next to me. “First car won. You can walk back to your little buddy. He’ll be a few minutes yet.” He got out and looked up Woodward to the traffic stop, irritated and bewildered.

We drove a few miles over to our eastside hangout. I got out of my Charger and into the passenger seat of Tim’s GTO, grabbed his right arm in two hands and shook it forcefully.

“What just happened?!”

He chuckled. “‘Situational awareness.’ I saw those cops lurking on that side street, and goaded that Riviera kid into a big-dollar race knowing he couldn’t resist the challenge. We launched hard, but I shut down.”

I looked at my mastermind friend in frank admiration.

“Then, as you saw, I was the first car to cross South Berkshire. We win. Cogito ergo zoom.”

Cogito ergo sum is a Descartes phrase generally translated into English as “I think, therefore I am.” Cogito ergo zoom was an axiom by legendary advertising and car magazine editor David E. Davis.

It means, “I think, therefore I go fast.”

Written by: Daniel Charles Ross
Photograph by: Daniel Vidal

The Killers, Part I

Carl points his gnarly, yellow-nailed finger (cigarettes) at the graffiti and says:

“Hey, that’s pretty funny.”

The graffiti is Don’t Open. Dead Inside.

“Yeah, that’s pretty funny, Carl,” you say.

You’ve been killing people, you and Carl, long enough to know that the graffiti might as well be tattooed on your chest. When your time comes and they open you up under the fluorescent lights of the basement morgue, out of you will come a stink that smells like sulfur and gut rot. You’ve been thinking that each kill is you playing god, and that each loss of life measures out in some place unseen on the cosmic scale, and that in this invisible place beyond the horizon there are racks on racks on racks of unpaid tickets, crimes against humanity, and that eventually you will be responsible for those tickets.

Lately, you’ve been getting nervous about this whole death thing.

Next week, you turn thirty.

“Carl, do you remember when you were a young man?”

“I remember everything, honey. Remember it all like it was yesterday.”

You’ve been telling Carl to stop calling you “honey” for years but the old fool does not listen and now it’s honey, honey, honey, and goddamn, you cannot mess with things you cannot control.

“You ever worry about fate, Carl?”

Carl flips his half smoked cigarette out of the open car window and says:

“Honey, I don’t think too much on fate. That’s a mad man’s game, worrying about fate.”

It’s so hot outside that the open window doubles as an open oven door when you’re not moving, so you pull the truck slowly away from the graffitied garage door with the dead inside and the warnings to keep shit closed.

East Austin: ain’t like it used to be. There used to be dusty parking lots and shabby bars, Mexicans and blacks, a faint whiff of danger in the stagnant summer nights. Now, you ask, what’s left? Condos. Fancy restaurants always crowded. Hordes of tourists that move up and down the street like newborns blind to traffic or death. The Mexicans moved east, and the blacks, well, you don’t know where the blacks moved.

Carl is black, so you ask him.

“Gone fishin’, brother.”

He doesn’t say anything more, so either he doesn’t know or he doesn’t feel like sharing the information with a shithead young buck white boy, and you know both answers mean the question will drift down the street, out of town like an unwanted stranger.

It is funny, you think, seizing the hypothetical before it goes, that you can kill a man with Carl, an act of instinct, and one that is very intimate, and yet he still won’t talk about his race and color.

“Weird…” you mutter to no one; not to Carl, nor the faded blue paint on brick walls, sixth street, steel bones of prepubescent buildings covered in sun and burning to the touch; none of it is weird, none of it is much of anything, and goddamn if it doesn’t make you pretty sad.

You pull up to the coffee shop and Google Maps goes:

You’ve arrived at your destination! Happy killing!
The coffee shop is an old house with mismatched antique furniture in the front yard. There’s a wraparound wooden porch, home to a half-dozen white-painted steel patio chairs and their table partners, each one in varying stages of disrepair. Everything is manicured, the environment subjugated, the scene one of inflated good taste, the revelation of the cool.

Carl walks with a limp from the time he took a machete to the thigh. It clipped his femoral artery and there was blood, blood, blood. You remember you were close quarters with some whacked out Colombians full of crack and unpaid dues, tenants of your boss, in this little white house with white walls and a white staircase, and when a bleeding Carl tumbled down that staircase, dude left a trail of macabre painterly genius, like Jack the Ripper and Jackson Pollack came together and opened an art exhibit. You even took a picture with your iPhone after you shot the Colombians dead-meat dead.

Those days were a little wild, but Carl survived, and eventually everything went back to normal.

“What if he ain’t here?” Carl asks.

Even though he’s two decades older than you, Carl knows that you’re smarter than he is, and so he capitulates to your plans most of the time. But the old-timer still gets nervous around cell phones, doesn’t trust technology or GPS, has dreams about floating satellites beaming nightmares into his sleeping skull, and so he’s always afraid “the guy” won’t be where he’s supposed to be. That’s Carl’s mantra, motto, and creed: What if he ain’t here?

“He’ll be here,” you say. “If he ain’t here now, he will be shortly, and we’ll just wait and have a coffee and strike up conversation.”

Inside the coffee shop there’s a wooden bar with stools painted different colors of springtime pastel. There’s a glass case of muffins, a big fat tip jar full of pennies and nickels and one poor bastard fiver, and a chalkboard with: Today’s Specials! Vegan White Bean Chili! Split Pea Soup w/ Rosemary!

You’re in what was the kitchen of the house, and they’ve knocked down the wall to what was the living room, with windows that open out to Sixth Street, and dark couches with light floral patterns and millennials on them. Some asshole plays an acoustic in the corner and behind him the Texas sun is turning purple through the window and even from this distance, you can see flecks of dust rise and fall, disappear and reappear like electrons, with the in and out breath of the dozen or so young adults chatting and drinking coffee and carrying the fuck on.

You and Carl take a seat at the bar.

“Place looks faggy,” Carl mutters.

“Get you something?” asks the barista.

“Black coffee,” you say and Carl nods, one for me as well.

The barista looks at you like: French press or...? And then says:

“Anything else?”

“Not right now,” you say. “We’re waiting on a friend.”

Written by: Logan Theissen

Photograph by: Daniel Vidal