Las Cucarachas - Softcover

A chewed-up Nerf flies out of nowhere and smacks me in the head when me and Steven are about ten yards past the super. I turn around to see who threw it and there's Fatty, smiling like some retard. It's not even 9 and the bastard's already got a thick red ring around his mouth from all the ramen he eats. The jerkoff must go through a box every three days.

"Yo, my mom told me everything," he blurts out. "They broke into your apartment, right? It's 'cuz they think Korean people keep bags of cash in the house."

I stare at his beady little eyes, wondering just how any kid could be so damn stupid. I mean, yeah our apartment got robbed and my Atari and all 42 games are gone, but why the hell's he gotta remind me for? The kid's just so damn stupid sometimes. I mean, everyone's always going on and on about how Korean kids are super smart and born doing the times table, but what the hell happened to Fatty?

Take the kid's name for instance. I guess Taek-Won ain't as bad as some super retarded f.o.b. names like Man Yoo Suck or Oh Yoo Bum, but it still sounds like the beginning of "tae kwon do" or part of some corny rap like, "Microphone check, take one, take two, yo, let's go." Either way, the name's pretty damn corny. So I don't blame the kid for chucking it. I just don't think Fatty's much better. But he doesn't seem to mind. He seems almost to like it.

Anyway, enough about the dumb fuck's stupid name. I don't appreciate getting whacked in the head, especially first thing in the morning. So I pick the ball up off the ground and fling it hard at his round bowling-ball head. For a kid who hardly weighs nothing, I got me a pretty good arm, so the ball's a bullet. Not that I ever got it measured with radar or anything, but it's fast, at least 95 miles per hour, if not 125. If the Mets ever got their act together, they woulda signed me up already. With me and Jesse Orosco, who's also a lefty, we'd be invincible. Sure, we'd be even better with Tom Seaver, but the bozos who run the team traded him to the White Sox, so what the hell can you do?

The only thing is, Fatty ducks out the way like the chickenshit he is, so the ball hits the side of the super's bananamobile instead. There's no dent or scratch--how could there be when the ball's just a big fat sponge?--but the super just has to make a big deal out of it anyway 'cuz he ain't got nothing better to do than pick his nose and scratch his ass when he's not mopping the hallway. So he crawls out from under the hood real slow and stares at me like he's got static. Not that I care.