Spinning

Short Fiction

by

Matthew Quinn Martin

he DJ had a name.  A trail of them.  DJ Flip, DJ Biscuits, DJ Hitz the Scratch Assassin, DJ Milly Mills, Aztek, D23, and more.  Many more, used and discarded, scribbled into the yellow legal pad he’d kept since he got his first set of turntables as a gift for his thirteenth birthday.  Countless names written and erased in a never-ending attempt to recreate himself.  But the one his mother gave him was Donald.  Don, to the handful who remembered him as the slightly pudgy, but generally well-liked kid in middle school.

Don Millstein.

How he despised that name.  Hated the ordinariness of it.  How he resented his parents for saddling him with that mediocrity when all the other kids at Fairfield Prep––the WASP kids  ––got the cool handles.  Logan.  Hunter.  Stockton.  Walker.  Ford.  Bishop.  Campbell.  Westerly.  The list went on and on and on.

The name Don used these days, the one on the flyers shoved by the fistful under every nearby windshield wiper, the one on the marquee, was DJ Plaztik.  So what if his detractors had taken to calling him DJ Spaztik?  Did any of those jealous pudwackers have a standing gig at the hottest nightclub outside of NYC?  Were they getting pills and powders dropped next to the pitch control of their Technics for spinning one black plastic boom-bap platter the local big shot dealer liked better then the rest of the stack?  Hell no!  They were having trouble scaring up fifty candyravers for a bi-monthly party at the local rec center and lucky to score a little chronic.

DJ Plaztik was king.

But as Don stared down the length of the tremoring revolver in his hand, stared at the two jokers who had cost him his job, who had twisted shut the tap of hot and cold running pussy DJ Plaztik had grown quite accustomed to over the past year, he noticed something.  Something about the calm way these two surveyed the situation. About the way their bodies slipped almost imperceptibly into positions of coiled readiness, twin spring-traps ready to strike.  Something that spoke to the deep primeval part of his brain, which whispered back with chemical surety, these are not men to fuck with.  These are not a couple of out of town jerk-offs flexing their beer muscles. These are stone cold barbarians from the outer steppes who are not likely to be scared by a nice Jewish boy from the North end of Bridgeport brandishing a Saturday night special he had never even fired.  Not once. 

And as DJ Plasztik found himself praying to a God he hadn’t thought much about since his Bar Mitzvah––praying for a way out of this––one thought went through Don Millstein’s head.  That that would be the name on his grave stone. Donald Millstein 1981-2009 , engraved on polished granite, in nicely sandblasted letters under a simple Star of David.

“Walk away tough guy,” the taller one said.  “Walk before I hurt something besides your pride.”

“I’m serious,” he said, not feeling very serious.  Feeling embarrassed really.  Feeling naked in front of these two.  Gun or no, naked. Naked and ashamed.

“You might want to listen to him,” the other one said.  That sounded reasonable enough. He’d just put the gun down. Turn around and––

No!  He’d lost his standing gig. He’d been made a fool of, and word traveled fast around the tight circuit of DJ culture. After this episode became common knowledge, DJ Plaztik, or whatever handle he was going to go by next, would be lucky to be the guest DJ at that bi-monthly rec center party.  The unpaid guest DJ.  And, dammit, he had the gun.

The tall one walked toward him, growing taller with each step.  Or maybe it was he who was shrinking.  Melting.  Melting and losing form like an ice sculpture left out at a party that’s gone on just a touch too long.

The tall one stopped walking when his chest met the end of pistol’s barrel.  Don—he was Don now, sure of it––felt if the tall one took one more step, that barrel would just bend. Bend up with a wrenching screech of metal fatigue. The tall one took a drag off of his cigarette. The red ember head glowing like some kind of cosmic stop light. 

“You gonna’ talk? Or you gonna’ shoot?” he said, not a question.

Talk!  TALK!  Screamed inside Don’s head.  He would have screamed it himself, but in that split second the cosmic stop light had grown larger.   Followed by the shock of agony and a sick hiss that Don heard through his skull, as the cigarette’s smoldering cherry coal connected with his eye, flicked with insane precision.

Before he could scream, before he could even register the pain or the shock, the gun was out of his hands and in those of the tall one, a finger nearly torn off in the process. Out of his hands, and up against his skull.

“You dumb fuck!  You dumb dumb retarded fuck!  I’d be doing the gene pool a favor by kicking your idiot ass out of the shallow end forever!”

Out of the corner of his peripheral vision, DJ Plaztik caught a glimpse of some graffiti.

Some tagger––maybe a project pit bull, maybe some kindred suburban spirit—had put his equally made up moniker there. ‘Toast’, it read in bold ballooney script.   As the tall one drew back the pistol’s hammer he found himself wondering what Mr. ‘Toast’ would think if he found his tag illegible, splattered all over with the blood and brains of what used to be Connecticut’s hottest DJ.

And as the hammer fell, Don wondered if Mr. ‘Toast’ would mind it.