Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but it wasn’t a matter of left or right. I woke up as I fell off the foot, onto my shoes and my just-in-case baseball bat. It was just before noon. Sleeping-in had its price that day. At least I didn’t have to go to work. I wished I had a real job. Behold the groggy downward-spiral of thought.

I shook off the bad feelings and checked my 28-year-old body for bruises as I walked down the hall to the front of my house. It was stuffy inside my house, so I opened the front door, looked up, and sneezed. Maybe an air purifier would be a good, justifiable investment. As I looked down and north, three ducks, one drake and two dull browns, flitted to me. It didn’t take long to figure out they had guns for my bare feet. Bold ducks. Before they could attack my toes, I hopped over the threshold.

There was a broken sprinkler in my neighbor’s yard and it made a miniature lake in her flower garden, to which the ducks lighted after I was safe indoors. Why were there ducks in the front yard anyway? The reservoir where they usually were was a three blocks’ run away, which I made every Tuesday and Thursday, at the park.

I saw a picture once in a magazine with a duck in a sound-engineer’s room, with all of the foam cross-hatched pads on the walls. The caption said that a quack doesn’t echo, which would make the duck the most inconsequential and irresponsible animal out there, at least in my book. Things happen to ducks; ducks don’t do anything, and even when they make a noise, it’s not around half as long as other animals’ noises are. Ducks don’t build dams and they don’t feed too many Americans (that I know of).

I guess I’m sort of a duck, for that matter. I own a few gas stations around town and I stock vending machines. No one’s ever been held up at one of my joints to my knowledge, I don’t write books that change people’s lives, and pay a lot of taxes. Nobody knows gas station owners or vending machine stockers, and what I say only matters in my little world of gas prices and in the investigations of the bursts of kicking and rocking on my machines.

I shrugged the matter off. It was Saturday, I really did have friends, it wouldn’t be long until I had forgotten about the ducks, and I was going to detail my car. I put on my moccasins and changed into an old t-shirt, gathered my car-washing supplies, and found a newspaper for spotless windows.

As soon as I had rinsed off my 1968 Volkswagen Beetle (baby blue and cream two-tone, but a little worse than average Volkswagen condition nowadays), I noticed a black car pull up across the street with windows that were too tinted to be legal. I think it was a ‘70s LeBaron, with expensive rims and no radio antenna. By the time I had soaped down the entire body of the car I also noticed a sticker on the driver’s side of my back bumper.

This was a contradiction of my philosophy. I had vowed years ago that I would never even accept a free bumper sticker.

I expected it’d be a campaign sticker. I knew some nerds in my World Lit class back at the community college who put Republican bumper stickers on some of the liberal professors’ vehicles. Knee-slapping hilarity, I know. But the one on my car said, “Prince Charming” in black block letters against a fire-engine-red field.

I reached to pull off the sticker and the driver’s door opened on the dark LeBaron. A male voice, hoarse and cracking, shouted, “I knew it was you!” I straightened up and shaded my eyes so I could see who was talking to me from across the street.

He was no one I had ever seen before. Pale, skinny, and nervous, he wore a black A-shirt under a navy-blue pinstripe sports coat and tucked into his faded black jeans. His head looked like a squished cantaloupe that was smoothed and polished, but one that had two deep-set brown eyes, a flat nose, and a lipless frown. I never caught his name, but I’ll call him Bowser. I name all of my cantaloupes Bowser.

“Excuse me?” I said and remembered that if this guy bothered me I could soak him at very least.

“I saw you last night stealing my stuff. I saw your car and your bumper sticker, Charming,” Bowser spat out in a hard-knocks-school trained staccato. He glided across the street in his white Reeboks until he was too close, then reached down behind my bumper. He pulled out what looked like a thick wad of duct tape. Bowser continued spitting out words like pills: “It’s all right, bo. We’ll forget the whole thing.”

I liked this situation as much as I liked being attacked by territorial ducks in the wrong territory. But I let Bowser walk off with the duct tape and didn’t say another word. I might as well just let this slide. I didn’t want any trouble. It was Saturday.

I finished detailing my Beetle, but not thoroughly because my mind was ticking off thoughts like seconds. The LeBaron didn’t leave. I kept a wary eye (my right one) on the shady windows.

I vacuumed the interior out after that, still watching the dark car, feeling used. I had been reading too much Hammett lately to not be suspicious. My car had been used as a drop-off for a pusher, I concluded.

I thought back to the first (and only) cigarette I had ever tried and remembered gagging and promising myself that I’d never do anything to alter my personality besides sleep and sugar. I couldn’t dare imagine looking at myself in the mirror and seeing a prematurely gray hophead; being prematurely gray was enough. But I guess it’s different when you’re hooked, so I planned on never getting started.

Soon enough the “used” feeling got carried away by that train of thought. All these self-reassuring, I’m-no-junkie pep-thoughts got me riled up and I started to march over to that car calling the fuzz on my cell with its license number. Duck soup.

But the car had no license plates. Rats.

I finished vacuuming, locked up my car, and took my car-cleaning supplies back inside. I set them in the entryway, scrambled onto the couch, and set up camp behind the Venetian blinds. Before two minutes had passed, I watched bald Bowser sprint from behind my car to his and peel out. So much for the stakeout. He must have gone to my car as soon as I turned my back to walk inside.

I walked back outside, peeked around the corner of my garage to make the LeBaron was out of sight, and went to go peel off the wretched bumper sticker. I knelt down and reached for the curled corner and expected it to be at least a little sticky, since it wasn’t there yesterday. It was grainy, not sticky at all. Then I realized that the paper backing of the sticker was still intact, and duct tape had been used to fix it to my bumper. I peeled it off and beheld a thin but impressive wad of cash between the two strips of doubled-over tape.