Contents
Cover
Coming Soon from Titan Books
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
Postscript
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also Available from Titan Books
COMING SOON FROM TITAN BOOKS
Cracked: Rehab Run (November 2016)
Cracked
Print edition ISBN: 9781783296989
Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783296996
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: November 2015
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 Barbra Leslie. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For my much-missed late mother
Donna Leslie
I hope that wherever you are, the crosswords aren’t too hard,
the Chardonnay is on tap, and there’s a new episode
of CSI every night.
PREFACE
It was November, and I love November. I love the sunny mornings and the slate gray afternoons, and waiting for the first snowfall.
What I hate are perfect July evenings when all the young couples in love stroll around with arms around each other’s tanned waists, jeans hanging off their hips in such a way that you know that they just pulled them on after having sex all afternoon. Or maybe they just drove back to the city after being at their parents’ summer homes for long lazy weekends, diving off the dock into cold blue water. They wander the streets, meeting other carefree youngsters for drinks on the street-side patios of bars, their voices carrying into the night.
I like that in November, people cover up and walk faster to get where they’re going. And I don’t have to see young people with the cockiness of a perfect past and a promising future in front of them. Or so they think.
My sister thought that. I thought that once, too. And look at us now.
She’s in her grave. And me?
I’m going to find everyone who put her there.
1
A handy tip about addicts:
For every crazy-eyed, brain-fried crackhead you see shambling down the street with flip-flops on in the middle of winter, there are a hundred like me, who stay at home and have their drugs delivered. If you have ready cash and know a dealer (and preferably one who doesn’t dabble in his own merchandise), it’s not much more difficult than ordering in pizza. But unlike the Domino’s guy, dealers drive black SUVs with tinted windows, they never get out of their vehicle, and forget about thirty minutes or it’s free.
See, we’re not much different to alcoholics. You see boozers on the street drinking two-dollar wine out of paper bags, and you know they’re only five steps ahead of your Uncle Eddie, who drinks a quart of Jameson every night and falls asleep on the couch with a lit Marlboro in his hand.
We’re like rats: if you see one in an alley, you know there are dozens more, hiding inside somewhere in the dark.
But this isn’t about crack.
This is about Ginger.
* * *
It was a typical day for me, or at least a typical end-of-bender day. I’d been up for two days with Gene, my partner in crime. We were watching a stupid comedy on cable, laughing and feeding each other hits. As usual, we were carefully watching the size of the rock sitting on the CD case on the coffee table dwindle, the anxiety building.
For a crack addict, the coming down is so bad that you’d rather keep going until there is no going left.
“Call him,” I said, referring to our main dealer, D-Man. “He can get down here and back by rush hour.” Gene lit two cigarettes and handed me one. We were a regular forties movie brought to life, we were.
“No, darlin’,” Gene said. He always did this, pretended that we should stop. He wasn’t the one paying for it. “We can’t.” It was pure show. As usual, I ignored him.
“If I call him, you have to go outside and get it,” I said. For a full-time crack dealer, D-Man wasn’t a bad guy, but I didn’t particularly like having him up to the apartment. It was not a pleasant experience. He had some kind of paranoid mental illness that he obviously wasn’t treating with the right medication, and having him around made me feel like I was in a bad early-90s movie about the dangers of the druggie lifestyle. He was a slightly built but pudgy Slavic guy. He wore Bee Gees or Air Supply t-shirts tucked into combat pants that left very little to the imagination. And I have a good imagination. His real name was Darko, and he had a heavy Eastern European accent. Some days he said he was Croatian, some days Czech, but who was going to argue. The D-Man moniker he had come up with on his own, he said. He was proud of it. He wanted some of his customers, the ones he had never met face to face, to think he was a black dude. The black guys got more respect, he said. I never wanted to tell him that even over the phone, no one was going to mistake his accent, but keeping drug dealers sweet is something junkies tend to aspire to.
D-Man answered on the second ring. At this time of day, late morning, he would have been asleep for about three or four hours, and he always feigned impatience with us when we woke him up. But we all knew that Gene and I were his best customers. He lived way, way uptown, but within an hour, he or one of his scary-ass drivers would be idling at my back door with a little white rock wrapped in Saran.
“Hey, babe,” I said, perky and sounding as blonde as I could. My looks were still there, and they still worked for me when I wanted them to. “We watched all our movies. You bringing more down?” This was our stupid code. Hey, don’t blame me, blame D-Man. Or Gene. One of them. The cheesy gangster shit was always embarrassing to me – I had absolutely no paranoia, and couldn’t imagine that our pissant dealings were important enough to warrant a wiretap. But if I had to play the game to get my rock, then play the game I would do.
“What? You watched all those films already? You people need to get some sleep,” D-Man said. I could hear him straining to sit up and lighting a cigarette. He was probably in bed at this hour, and I didn’t want to imagine what kind of state his bed was in – even though he didn’t smell, per se, I had a vague image of his apartment as something out of a movie about the East Village in the 70s, with cockroaches and a hot plate with tomato sauce burned onto it.
Then again, he was just as likely to have a bourgie middle-class home with wall-to-wall Berber rugs. I’d paid him enough.
“What can I say, we’r
e celebrating,” I replied. “You know we like our movie marathons sometimes.” Yeah, like twice a week for two or three days at a time.
“What you got for me?” D-Man wanted to know. Ouch. This was always tricky. I had started out paying him huge sums of money, in cash, drawing it out from the bank machine downstairs from my building once or twice a day. Then I graduated to cash advances on credit cards, then to applying for and getting more credit cards. Having been such a nice middle-class girl for so many years meant that I had had a spectacular credit rating, once upon a time. And a lot of credit cards. But when the credit card companies turn on you, they turn nasty. Usually, I only plugged my phone in to call D-Man or one of our other, backup dealers, or when I was expecting a call from them to say they were downstairs. What friends I had left knew to email me, and I would check my email account every few days or so. And Gene and I would head down to our bars every week or so to keep current on the doings in the neighborhood, so we didn’t tend to speak to people on the phone much.
I was out of money again. All my cash advances had run out, and while I was expecting a spousal support deposit from my ex, Jack, in a few days, I already owed D-Man upwards of a grand.
“On Friday, D,” I said to him. “You know I’m good for it.” I always had been, too. As far as he was concerned, I was a cash cow. He didn’t have to know that this cow was now bone dry.
“Friday,” he said. I could hear him drawing on his cigarette. He liked to pause a lot, as though considering whether to bother. He wanted to keep me on my toes, but we both knew it was a game. He knew Gene and I had options, other people we could go to. But not everyone delivered, and when you’ve been up hitting the pipe hard for a couple of days, delivery is key. Daylight is the enemy.
“I drew out my maximum this week, sweetie; you know how my bank is set up,” I replied. I stubbed my own butt out and motioned for Gene to clean out the pipe so that we’d have some resin to smoke along with our crumbs of crack until D-Man arrived.
The resin is the powdery, ashy remains of the crack that collects on the inside of the pipe. It can be more potent than the actual rock. Ideally, Gene and I liked to time it so that we weren’t left jonesing and crashing for an hour or so until D-Man arrived. It was bad news if it was too close to rush hour, because the trip one way could take over an hour in Toronto traffic. “Oh right, your bank, your bank,” D-Man said. He was fairly simple for a drug dealer, not as wily as some, and he liked to think that he was our friend, that he was In The Know. “Man, you got to get that sorted out, you know? They can’t be holding your money that way. That is your money, Danny.”
And yours, too, D-Man. “I know it, D. I know it. So you coming down?”
I could hear him shuffling around. “Gotta make a call. She’s on her way.”
This was part of D-Man’s brilliant code to foil the police. “She” was Bruno, a cabbie friend of D-Man’s, a junkie himself who delivered crack all over town in his cab in exchange for free hits. He was a fat old white guy with a nasty dermatological condition that made most of the skin on his hands and face look like it was constantly peeling off. The first time he met me, he shook my hand through the car window and it took every ounce of my nice-girl breeding not to retch in revulsion. After that, every time I met him outside my back door, he kissed me on the cheek and told me he loved me.
Right back at ya, Bruno.
There was nothing effeminate about him, which I guess is why D-Man reasoned that anyone listening would be fooled by the female pronoun. Hey, he may not have been a Harvard grad, but he gave us what we needed.
I hung off the phone and took the pipe from Gene. This was our ritual: he would light it for me while I took a hit. He would set it all up for me, with the foil and the ash and the rock on top like a cherry on the sundae. We were old school with our pipes, MacGyvering them out of empty Tylenol bottles, hollowed-out Bic pens, tin foil, duct tape, and safety pins. He would light it for me, like a gentleman. Even junkies like routine. A year into this habit, I had started to notice Gene was putting less crack in the pipe for me than he was for himself, and it was starting to burn me up. This was my money, and now my debt. Gene couldn’t hold down a job – his habit was older than mine, and before crack he had been into regular cocaine – well, so had I, come to think of it – and before that he was just a friendly alcoholic. And a bartender, which is like letting a pedophile babysit your kids: not a good idea. At his last job, he got caught one too many times on the boss’s secret CCTV, sitting after hours doing lines off the mahogany bar, helping himself to shots of Jack and playing the trivia machine with money he pilfered from the till.
Despite the fact that we had been joined at the hip for a couple of years, Gene and I were just friends. With the odd benefit. True, we did sleep in the same bed a lot of the time – when we slept, that is. We cuddled and were affectionate with each other, especially in bed. We went to sleep in each other’s arms and woke the same way. But we never kissed, and we only had friendly, perfunctory sex about once every few months or so. I couldn’t see myself getting over Jack, and Gene was one of those addicts whose sex drive had long since gone down the drain. But affection is good. Friendship is good. And as far as we were concerned, we had all that in each other. We didn’t need anybody else. “How long?” Gene asked me.
I shrugged, keeping the smoke in my lungs. It wasn’t the best hit, but it would do. Oh boy, it would do, do, do. The longer you hold the smoke in, the better the rush.
“Dunno,” I exhaled, dropping my head onto his shoulder. The movie was over, and Gene was flipping stations. “Look. The Feud is on.” Gene fixed his hit, and for once I refrained from watching how much of the precious leftover resin he put on his.
We sat in silence, watching Family Feud. Often we yelled out answers, but just as often we sat in silence. I was more of a talker than Gene while high. Well, I was more of a talker than Gene, period.
We sat like that for an hour, slowly using the last of our stash with Gene cleaning the pipe assiduously, waiting for the phone call. It rang once and we both jumped out of our skins and grabbed for it, but the caller I.D. showed that it was my bank. Fuck you, Bank.
The phone rang again. It was long distance, a 949 area code. My sister Ginger. I glanced at the clock on the DVD player – noon, so nine a.m. in California. She would have just gotten back from taking the rugrats to school and Fred off to work. She was checking up on me.
“Ginger?” Gene asked.
“I’m not answering it,” I said, nodding. Ginger knew about me. She hadn’t given up on me either, and I did talk to her once every month or so. I loved her. I envied her. I didn’t want to think about her. I let her call go to voicemail, and five minutes later, D-Man called to say that She – Bruno – was outside.
Gene sprang to life, grabbing his jacket and his keys to get back into the building. His boots were already on so as not to waste precious crack time when we got the call.
“Do you have twenty bucks for Bruno?” I asked. That was the price of delivery – even if we didn’t have money to pay for the product, we always had to fork over twenty for delivery.
“Shit,” Gene answered. He checked his wallet. “I have ten.”
I jumped up and checked the pile of coins I kept for laundry money. I had nine dollars in loonies and four quarters. I handed them to Gene. It meant that we only had a half pack of cigarettes between us and no money for more, but who cared.
He smiled. “This is embarrassing,” he said.
“Deal with it, dear,” I replied. “Go get me my drugs, and make it snappy.” Our moods always improved when another eightball was waiting for us outside.
Anticipation. Just like the song says.
“You’ll just have to wait for it, bee-yatch,” Gene said, all happy tough guy.
“Fuck off and get me my drugs,” I replied, happy right back.
Gene left and I got up and went to the bathroom, peed and brushed my teeth, splashed water on my face. It’s important to keep u
p hygiene whilst consuming large quantities of drugs. You sweat so much while smoking crack that you might as well have just finished a triathlon. I actually kept crack clothes, old worn-out workout clothes, in which I only smoked crack. It was a good thing I’d never been all that vain. Gene was taking a few minutes, which didn’t worry me, because usually D-Man called too early, and one of us would be waiting in the cul-de-sac outside the back door of my art deco-era apartment building for ten minutes or more, strung out but coolly pretending to be waiting for our ride somewhere. Just behind me was, literally, the most expensive restaurant in Toronto, a place so upscale that you had to know where it was, located on a back residential street. Limos drove in every few minutes between seven and ten p.m., and Gene and I always thought the valets had made us. However? So far, so good, was our motto.
Inside the apartment, I paced and picked up a couple of glasses, stuck them in a sink full of soapy water, made more ice, got the Murphy’s Oil Soap out and had a swipe at the ugly-ass coffee table that my ex had made from scratch. In a previous life, I had been married to a man who had decided to take up woodworking to help quash the demons in his head.
I didn’t like to think of my previous life.
But it made me think of Ginger. I picked up the cordless and decided to stay on top of things, the manic hyperactivity of the addict waiting for a fix. I would check my messages!
Five minutes later, Gene came through the door.
“What an idiot,” he said, kicking off his boots. “This is twice what we ordered.”
I looked at him, my whole body shaking.
“Ginger is dead,” I said. “She’s dead.” I stopped.
My sister. My beautiful sister.
My twin.
2
There were no twins on either side of either my mother’s or my father’s family, so imagine their surprise, they used to like to tell us, when they were told that Ginger and I were growing together in my mother’s womb.
“I thought your father was going to faint, right there in the doctor’s office,” my mother told us. It was one of our favorite stories, Ginger’s and mine. We loved to hear how we began, and to imagine growing nestled together, all safe and warm and protected. There were no stork fantasies in our house; both Mom and Dad were very no-nonsense about the facts of life. “But in those days it was rare enough that the man even came into the doctor’s office for these things, so I was proud of him anyway,” Mom told us. Dad said that he even drove down to Boston to hear some famous psychologist give a lecture on raising twins.
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