Al was hardly skinny, though. He was so swollen with girth and charisma, it was as if he’d sapped all sustenance and character from the rest of that skeletal, ever-rotating cluster of local junkies and twitchy vagrants: the skinnies. Al regarded this crowd and its transitory members as both a revenue stream and a disposable workforce for his various hustles around town. The way they came and went—what with all the ODs, arrests, and babies—there wasn’t much point in remembering names.

But it wasn’t as sketchy as it sounded, he’d assured Henry, believe him. The thing was that every single last one of them skinnies was already in too deep and too far gone to think of themselves as anything but disposable. He meant like, all the filthy shit they did for a fix? They’d debase themselves just to freebase, dude. Fun to watch, though, fucking hilarious, and, now that he mentioned it, if Henry ever needed to nut, just say the word, and Al got him. Had some favors coming his way, if Henry caught his drift.

“Dead serious, though,” Al had said. “You can do literally anything to these skinnies, whatever your kinky black heart desires, feel me?”

The, as he chortled through a menu of sex acts and torture methods, Henry tuned him out, cringing but nevertheless grateful that he’d made a real friend.

Today Al stood where he always did between deliveries, with his rump crutched against the yellow cement-filled post at the supermarket’s loading dock. This was his outpost. From here he arranged drug deals and black market trade-offs, collected bets, and coordinated a ring of meth-heads who ran liquor store errands for high schoolers across the county. If the grocery store manager hadn’t been one of Al’s most loyal and depraved clients, Al could never have used the loading docks as his side-hustle headquarters.

It was Friday, payday, and Al looked uncharacteristically nervous, gnawing on a Kool and clapping his flip phone like a castanet. The store manager had gotten too high, needed to come down somewhere private, and so tasked Al with passing out paychecks. He was using his gut as a desk to shuffle a deck of envelopes while a dozen workers circled tighter, tapping boots, reminding him of their last names and the order of the alphabet. A flake of ash clung to Al’s sweaty double chin, his face shaken by the responsibility of distributing livelihoods. When it was Henry’s turn, he saw that Al had set his paycheck apart from the stack, pinched between two fingers.

“Lap dance funds,” Al said.