The Tissue Mafia

Fiction Friday

Some people say that Covid 19 was engineered in Zurich by a secret syndicate of the 19 most powerful producers of paper products in the world. With a growing awareness of global warming and recycling being pushed aggressively by governments all over the world, this group of billionaires focused on the one paper product that nobody was recycling and reusing — effectively cutting them out of the sale of their own product — toilet paper.

Either way, nobody could find a vaccine, or rather nobody could find anyone who was willing to try a vaccine, except those who were already very sick. The internet: YouTube, Facebook and the like, was a garden of conspiracy theories. And the more people had to stay home, as the pandemic raged on, the more they consumed random videos and blog posts about the secret survivors of the Russian Romanov family planning to retake control of the world by distributing a poisonous fake vaccine globally, or a tech billionaire secretly plotting to sterilize people of African descent, even though no one seemed to know how he planned to keep white people from taking the vaccine.

By the third year of the pandemic trucks and trains carrying toilet tissue were being robbed in route to stores. The wealthy paid what ever it took to get it on the black market. The cartels got in on it. The Russians. The Colombians. Gangs sold quarter and half roles on street corners.

Sonny could get it. Even when your regular connection was out and didn’t know when they’d have more, Sonny could get it. He was just an average sized guy, but his hands and forearms were full of scares, deep things that moved like worms when he clutched his fists, and he had the kind of face that made you know he wouldn’t worry about it being punched. He had a crew of probably ten to fifteen guys that used to sell meth back in the old days. Armed to the teeth, they’d traded half a truckload to a militia group for a load of assault rifles, hand guns and ammunition they’d stolen from a gun store.

They had a group of kids they paid to unroll it when they got a load of two ply. It was worth almost twice as much that way. That same year, on the Fourth of July, while the rich people of Hampton Oaks sat in their gardens, drinking cold beer and rose’ as they watched the annual fireworks show, Sonny and his guys shot out the front windows of the nearby super store and took an entire shipment that was still sitting on pallets in the back of the store, having not yet been unloaded by the hand full of employees who were still brave enough to come to work in the thick crowds of shoppers. Triple ply. Most companies didn’t even make the stuff anymore.

They’d taken over the building where an old strip club had gone out of business, the lap dance having become too dangerous, and that’s where the little hands of the poor kids went to work unrolling, then rerolling all that tissue.

Normally you’d expect a guy like Sonny to have a different girl for each day of the week, saving the weekends for the wife and kids, but by that point everybody was faithful. A guy could mess around on his wife and wind up getting the whole family sick. So there was only Beatrice. She was a little taller than Sonny and quiet, but not weak quiet.

Sonny had a dream to move to west Africa with Beatrice. There they still had a very small percentage of covid 19 cases compared to the west. They weren’t allowing western immigrants, but Sonny had a guy who swore he had a guy who could get them in. All he needed was enough money to pay the two guys and bribe a border patrol agent, plus a little to get the two of them settled in a little house with a small piece of land. Sonny figured the triple ply could do it, with what he already had saved.

Then the kids started to disappear, each one of them with five or ten rolls. His lieutenants, who along with Sonny and Beatrice had each been using hoses to wash their asses for more than a year to avoid cutting into the profit margin, had all been caught more than a few times happily wiping with fist fulls of the thick, soft triple ply.

The new shipments were escorted by armed guards. Sometimes the shipments themselves were driven in armored trucks and stored in locked cases in the stores. Nobody wanted a repeat of the 4th.

One night Sonny sat outside on the top of an old five gallon bucket while Beatrice and the last two kids worked unrolling inside the building. They had everything laid out on the old main stage, and used the old stripper poles for rerolling.

At first there were only six or seven men, a couple of them with baseball bats, who came walking up the street toward the club as Sonny sat outside on the bucket, his glock in the waist of his jeans. Then there were five more, one with a machete. Then came a big group of women, and a few of them had old shotguns. Sonny stood up from the bucket. Next was a group of kids. Some had small gas cans. Some had bottles of cooking oil. When they got closer he noticed a few of his old workers among them.

The all stopped walking right in front of the club, and for a few minutes they didn’t say anything to Sonny. The whispered among themselves. Then one of the kids walked halfway up the parking lot and everyone was quiet.

“Give us the tissue,” he said, looking straight into Sonny’s eyes. His short hair was knotted into the first buds of flowering young dreadlocks. Sonny looked at the kid and laughed.

“What did you just say? You dirty little thief.”

“Give us the tissue, Motherfucker.” The kid couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve, but here was Sonny standing in front of him with a loaded gun in hand and that kid was just as calm as could be. Sonny took a big step toward the boy who stood there calmly holding his little red gas can. “You better look around you before you do something you’re gonna regret.”

Sonny looked up then and he saw two of the women aiming crossbows at him. One of the men had moved around the side of them and had an old hunting rifle trained on Sonny. Sonny backed up. He still had the gun in his hand, but he was careful not to raise it from his side. The kids came forward and each started to pour gas or cooking oil around the building. A couple of the women, shotguns in hand, went inside as Sonny stood there with the gun limp and impotent at his side.

One of the women came back out a few minutes later with the shotgun trained on Beatrice and the last two kids working. Beatrice and each of the two kids each had three or four rolls cradled in their arms. The first little kid, the aggressive little bastard with the gas can, stood right in front of Sonny then. He looked down at the gun in Sonny’s hand and shook his head the way you would at a poor starving dog.

“Put that in your pocket and go home Sonny. We don’t want to have to hurt you.”