Patches tugged his fingerless glove tighter over his fight-swollen hand. “Look,” he said while placing his palm flatly on top of his Philly Flyers bucket hat, “we all got a job.” He was a piggish brute of a man, sneering his words out of a snout filthy with the shame of poverty and violence. “We all got a job to do,” he repeated with a snort of his flared nostrils. A third time: “WE ALL GOT A JOB TO DO.”

Jazz-man’s ferocious enforcer, Mr. Patches, reared back over the prone body of Spitball Willie and devolved into a diatribe. “So you went to war? That was your job?” Willie wheezed as though to answer. “No!” Patches snapped, “asking you a question don’t mean I’m asking you for an answer.”

Patches crunched Willie’s wrist with his black and red Yeezy Boosts. “You think fighting wars for this fucken country means I gotta respect ya? Fool, you gotta understand something… this fucken country ain’t mine, I don’t got no passport. They won’t let me out, and fuck… if I did get out, they wouldn’t let me fucken back.”

It was true, Patches wasn’t allowed to leave the country owing to his well-earned period of incarceration. Discovering antinationalism was convenient; a nationalist society rejected him, so he rejected a nationalist society. Besides, that ideology offered him license to be the feral fuck he loved to be.

“So, that shit you did in the past for something that I don’t recognise don’t mean nothing to me.” Patches jammed an index finger in each of Spitball’s ear holes and proceeded to drag him across the cracked concrete of the back alley. “You gonna need to get yourself a new job to do! One that’s gonna put the money in your pocket.”

To his credit, Spitball Willie was—grimace and whimper aside—tight lipped. After all, what could you say to a pair of bulging eyes and a frothing mouth? Willie knew Patches was right, there was only one thing that could talk back to Jazz-man and his Old Boys: money.

“You were a soldier, I’m a soldier,” Patches continued. Willie bit his tongue with what teeth he had left. “You might think you’re better than me,” Patches said as he stomped on Willie’s other wrist, “because you got a rubber stamp to kill people.” Patches paused, confusing himself with his own logic—realising, maybe, that there wasn’t much difference between taking orders from the government and taking orders from Jazz-man.

“Difference is,” he said after experiencing a relative light bulb moment, “that I get fucken paid for the fucks I shoot.”

The truth that the government, in spite of his sacrifices, had abandoned him, was an agony as genuine as all of his broken bones.

“I’ll set ya up,” Patches sneered, while pulling his phone out of his pocket, “I’ll call ya an ambulance.”