Like now.  The Wolf wouldn’t tell you a fuckin thing my friend, same as he didn’t tell the man in black pajamas a fuckin thing all those years they kept me in that fuckin hole in the ground.

It’s Winston that’s on the surface now.

Little Winston came into this world to a single mother in a little shit hole called Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1939. She was a drunk, God rest her soul, but she raised Winston as best she could.  Sometimes I think of her looking down-or up-at me, and I wonder if she’s smiling.  Maybe she’s crying for all the bad things that have happened to me, maybe she’s crying for the bad things I’ve done, I don’t know.

I first knew I was different from the other kids during my second year of elementary school.  I always had an idea, but until the day I made fifteen dollars selling stale cigarettes to the other children, I wasn’t sure how.  What solidified the fact in my young mind, was I got caught.  The only thing I’ve ever been caught doing, and I talked my out of it.  I was a straight ‘A’ student, I did my work, and I think the principal know my mother wasn’t home much, so I promised not to do it ever again and I walked.

A week later I was stealing the cigarettes and selling them to children at the junior high.  I don’t know why they didn’t just beat the shit out of me and take them...maybe they could tell I was different too.

You get the idea of how my childhood was.  I was always the robber instead of the cop, and I never got caught.  I was smarter than the other kids, I was stronger and faster than them; even the older kids.

I was with a lady for the first time when I was thirteen years old.  She was my history teacher, and we carried on the affair until she killed herself four years later. She’d kept me out of trouble for the most part, I filled that empty spot in my chest by filling the empty spot between her legs, and when she died, a part of me went with her.  A part of young Winston was splattered on her eggshell white bedroom wall with a shotgun lying on the floor.  Of course no one knew of our affair, so I called the police when I found her and snuck out the back.  I didn’t go to her funeral, and I’ve never seen her grave.

Ha!  Who would thought that The Wolf would get a little misty at the thought of some psychiatrically maladjusted woman forty years dead?  Strange fucking world.

After that, I started stealing cars.  The thought of selling them wouldn’t occur to me for awhile...I started out just driving them as fast and as far as I could until I found something else.  I tell you that year, I quit high school (for it no longer had anything to offer me), and I drove all the way across this great country of ours in stolen vehicles.  Sports cars, pick-up trucks, station wagons, more sports cars.  Back and forth twice, just chewing up the road, trying to fill that void...

I ended up in New York, and worked the streets for a few years, running numbers and selling goods and I found my calling as-that’s right-a driver.  A wheelman in a getaway car, a chauffer on off days.  I’ve never felt so whole as when I’m behind the wheel of some fine piece of American machinery.

Then came the war, if you call it that.  Our government never did.  I signed up voluntarily, I did my first tour-killed seventeen men-then signed up again.  I was special forces, a sharp-shooter.  I finished my second tour and came back for one more, this time with my own squadron, and this time I got caught.  That was the day I found out I wasn’t invincible, I wouldn’t live forever, that other people-people I didn’t even know-could hurt me in ways I’d never imagined.  I saw them come and go in that hole, I got to be very good friends with two men, one named Coolidge, the other was Koontz.  Coolidge didn’t make it out. All told I was in that stinking fucking miserable hole in the earth for eight years.  Eight fucking years, nearly a decade.

I was finally returned to the states and picked up where I left off, as a wheelman.  I was getting a little too old to be working for someone else...being a commander in ‘Nam soured me on it, really, and I worked hard at setting up my own crew. New York wasn’t happening for me...too many swinging dicks, too many cops, too many politicians, and too much history.  Too fucking cold, too, so I made a few phone calls, bought four grams of purest cocaine, and drove straight through across the country one more time.  The east has been in my rearview mirrors ever since, and I wouldn’t change it. So have the drugs...no more powders and herbs for me, thank you, I’ll stick to my dry martini’s and the occasional cigarette...after all these years I still smoke the brand I used to sell as a child.  Weird, huh?

All this time, The Wolf devoured more and more of Little Winston, until he’s reduced to a small voice that sometimes wakes me up in the night, or speaks out when I have certain work-related nastiness to attend to. A wolf is a fierce animal, but it can also be a kind animal, a loving animal.  It works well with other wolves, and it does ok on its own, too.  They started calling me that in Nam, in the beginning of my first tour.  I just kind of wandered away from my platoon, into the jungle, and uncovered an ambush...that was eleven of my seventeen...and two days later I just fell into step at the rear.  No one really realized I was back for about an hour and a half, until we stopped to set up camp.  I tell you, Sarge nearly shit his pants I kid you not, when he saw me leaning against a tree, splashed in yellow blood, smoking a cigarette.

I’m much the same now, I guess.  I have my own dealings on the side, my own businesses and my own employees. I’ve taken on much of Marcellus Wallace’s business as he’s begun to fadeout of the foreground and run things behind the scenes.

But I like it that way...I do my own thing, but I can do the job for other people, too.  Like a wolf.