Small Potatoes

#6-out-of-27 "Secrets" story. There are so many "unsolvable" problems in society, that it felt good to try and imagine solving just one, by letting my imagination run wild.

SMALL POTATOES

To the brothers and sisters on and around 9th and D Street in the Lower "E,” (lower East side of New York City), 17 year old Benny Brite was known as "Small Potatoes" due to his short 4' height. And because of his cute face he came across as being even younger than his years, looked more like he was 7 or 8, maybe 9, definitely not 10. Known by everyone, he was able to roam the turf, cross rival boundaries without risking his life. He was looked on as a mascot, sometimes even as a lucky charm when his appearance coincided with a good drug deal or score. Benny had seen friends die or rot in jail, and it pained him. His parents had been divorced since he was 11, father jailed, mother fighting a coke habit that wasn't helped by her live-in crack-dealing boyfriend Jin. Benny had lived almost his whole life as an observer, not really participating, but just watching as lives of men and women he knew went down the drain. What finally triggered Benny to take action was the morning he found both his mother and Jin overdosed.

When he felt himself becoming weak, doubting his plan, he would make an effort to see his mother's face, eyes staring, skin turned deep purple, vomit, clenched jaw, twisted in death. He would return with strengthened resolved to destroy the evil in his community. Since no one feared Benny he had access to everywhere, crack houses, gun rooms, cat clubs, you name it. No one had known about Jin's small bottle of liquid acid, a small bottle containing over 40,000 hits that he was saving as his "retirement fund" when LSD came back in vogue. Benny's plan was to stone out every crack dealer, all the bad-ass killers and users, their women, every evil person he knew, all at the same time. He would then steal all their money and drugs, guns, and dump it all in the river. And as naive a plan as it was, it worked.

Benny thought of himself as a bee pollinating flowers. In a 12-hour stretch he flowed from one house to another putting drops in coffee, water, soft drinks with his eye dropper. Plink, plink plink. He had been invisible so long that no one noticed his activity. For the second 12 hours, returning to the same homes in the same order (he kept notes) he emptied pockets, cleaned out stashes, wrapped guns in paper bags, stole cars and made his repeated trips to Hudson Street dock. By morning his arms and legs were cramping up from all the activity. Aside from some screams of withdrawal, a few stray deaths from people falling out of windows, the operation was a raving success. Benny was certainly visible after that.