I took a week of vacation in July. Work was slow and I felt like sleeping in.
One day mid-week I was feeling bored and uninspired, so I decided to go snoop around PanStar.
I had a feeling Hopeton was up to something grey-area-adjacent, that he didn't want to drag me into since he knew I was in my good boy era, but fuck it. Like I said, I was bored.
I threw on a pair of grey sweat pants, a white t-shirt, a pair of Timberlands and a Mets hat, drove the zo reken over to Nostrand Ave. and found a parking space almost directly in front of the store.
This iteration of Panamanian Star looked radically different from the days when it was a “Shipping and Logistics” company. Once he got his Ria agent’s license, Hopeton had spent a decent amount of money remodeling the space.
The cheap plywood sales counter had been replaced by a series of bank teller style cashier booths, enclosed in bulletproof glass. The bright blue plastic shipping barrels were long gone. In their place were a few mini desks upon which rested stacks of remittance forms and some ballpoint pens. There was light Ria branding here and there, and a pair of upholstered wing chairs in a corner opposite the front door, to remind customers that this was a legitimate place of business.
Hopeton was behind the glass partition, guiding a customer through a multi-point wire transfer. I nodded to him and let myself into the back room- the electronic code was still the same.
The back room had also gone through a dramatic transformation- the entire space had been cleared of all the shipping materials and the walls freshly painted. In this iteration, it was just a big-ass space for people to hang out in and maybe get some work done, if needed.
Hopeton’s gigantic mahogany desk still had pride of place towards the center of the room, but now it rested on an expensive looking Persian rug and the old, metal and pleather swivel chair had been upgraded to an ergonomic Knoll. Luxury and function.
Biz had his own desk, covered in rubber banded stacks of printouts and legal pads filled with chicken scratch writing. When I’d commented on how legit it all appeared, Hopeton said he'd get me my own little mahogany jammy if I ever wanted to come and join them.
I sat down on the new couch- a surprisingly modern slate grey sectional, and took a hard look around me, clocking all of the updates put in place since Hopeton convinced Bolo to pivot.
They'd upgraded the furniture to offer both stability and comfort. The TV was now a sixty-inch flatscreen with surround sound. The CD player and ceiling mounted speakers had evolved into an iPod and turbo-charged Bluetooth speaker-dock. And I peeped that the pub style pro league dartboard that I’d given Hopeton almost ten years ago had been neatly mounted on one of the far walls.
Clearly, the backroom had become a hang-out spot, as opposed to a place to watch drugs and guns be moved in and out. This was the HQ I would’ve loved to have been able to set up all those years ago.
But I knew there was more to the story and I was finally ready to get to the bottom of it.
By the time Hopeton joined me, I’d kicked off my Timberlands, grabbed a Heineken and turned the television on to a mindless episode of Cheaters. Some fifty-year-old simp was in a parking lot, ugly crying, because he’d just found out his twenty-seven-year-old wife was out to dinner with another man.
Hopeton took this in, shook his head and said, “Bwoyyyyyy, you on vacation fi true.”
I nodded my head and raised my bottle in salute.
Hopeton sat down at the far end of the sectional and gave me a sharp look. I grabbed the remote and shut the tv down. We sat in silence for a long moment.
“What’s the problem here?” Hopeton continued. I could tell he was gonna go in. “What do you need?”
“Nothing,” I said, but it sounded just on the edge of whiny, even to my own ears.
“Okay, so you’re on vacation from your legitimate office job- the one you fought so hard to get- and you throw on your Mets cap and Timberlands to come drink beer on my couch? On a Wednesday? In the middle of the day? At my office?” Hopeton didn’t sound like he was trying to be a dick. More like he was trying to snap me out of something.
I decided there was no angle to approach this from other than the truth. Honesty- that would be my angle.
“Yeah, Hopeton,” I said, very quietly. “I’m bored as fuck.” I gestured around the room. “Tell me what’s going on with PanStar.”
