My mama told me being a limo driver was bad news.

—If you wanna see how ugly rich people really be, then go ahead, baby. If you wanna deal with drug-addicted movie stars and suits, divas and teenagers tryin' to front some Gatsby shit, then go ahead, baby. I ain't gonna stop you, but they is, and when they do, change gonna come.

After I left the Florida state line, the guy at the Georgia 400 Extension Toll Booth acted like he was doing me some big favor by taking my money, like he had it rough, working in an assembly line of human faces. Those sons of bitches never look at you, like they see right through you, like they see your whole life in a blink. And I got to thinking, I mean, I couldn't help but ask myself as I drove through a city of abandoned warehouses, why in the world that Mr. Henjaw made me lock the doors, roll up the shade, and swear to never, never look in back, unless I wanted to lose my job and four fingers.

But I looked, I did. I'm only human, goddammit. And I know what Mama would do if she knew—she'd smack me good across the head and drag me to the 75th Street Baptist Revival Church and force me to sing "Light Shall Cometh Oh Lord," even if the light never came, which it rarely does, really, how could I explain, even to God, why there's thirty-five blue Bengali cubs—endangered cubs, as the papers would point out late that summer—all of them passed out on the limo floor, their paws twitching like the hands of old men trying to shake off old age. They was the most beautiful animals I'd ever seen, too beautiful to be drugged like that, too calm to know their own rage.