by Abby Bardi
So this was the life the Little Chick was horning in on. It was all I needed, I thought as I saw her and Puffin glued to the tube, another damn person to get in my way and interfere with my business. That's how I thought of myself, as a business. There was a kind of economics to my daily life—output, input, regulated by the Invisible Hand. (I know about economics—I went to college, at least for a while.) I left the house at about eleven each day, which was when the runners began to hit thestreet, regular as clockwork, like scoring was my real job. Most days, the buy went smoothly, though every so often my regular guy did not show up and I had to go out looking for someone else. A few times I had to get all the way down to D.C. and back before work, but luckily the public transportation here is good, and I always just about made it.
When I got to my job every day at about noon, give or take, I was in good shape. I never wanted Alice to know that I had a job, and as far as I know she never had any suspicion at all. I mean, it was the last thing on earth you'd think I'd be doing. I figure she thought I just slept late, puttered around the house for a while, then went to hang out in town, since I made a point of being there, sitting in Sonny's Kitchen with a bunch of scuzzy guys, when she walked past on her way home from the Metro station. For a while, I collected unemployment, since I had in fact been gainfully employed as a file clerk in a law firm when I moved in with Alice, or she might not have suggested it— though knowing her, my lack of funds wouldn't have stopped her. The telemarketing gig was all under the table—I was paid in cash daily so I never had any telltale check stubs lying around, and I spent almost all of it every day, so there was no telltale money lying around either. Alice used to give me five bills every so often and she probably figured that was keeping me in coffee.
So this was all fine with me. Life was good, at least I didn't seem to mind it as long as I stayed well, as they say. The few times I screwed up and missed the runner, I did get pretty sick, and was pale and sweating when I took the Metro to D.C. and walked around till I was able to score. But I was always fine by the time I got home, and Alice never knew. When she asked me if I was okay, which she sometimes did, I just told her I was tired.
But the Little Chick changed all this somehow. It was likeshe threw everything off balance. One of my pals from town, Zeke, was heavy into astrology, and sometimes I wondered if the Little Chick had disrupted our Zodiac. See, while Puffin and I were water signs—she was Cancer, I was Pisces—Alice was a Sagittarius, a fire sign. Things were okay when water outnumbered fire. But when Alice got another Sag to move in, things started to shift. It was some kind of natural process, like the weather. I began to feel myself drying up, boiling, evaporating.
The Little Chick was always in everybody's face, cooking and cleaning and just generally being helpful. She asked a lot of questions, and she paid attention to what everybody said. And she just seemed so damn dumb. She stared at things like she'd never seen a can opener before, or a Cuisinart, or a man without a job. I couldn't sit down for five minutes without her asking me some goddamn annoying question about whatever the hell it was. She asked me my age (36), and my favorite color (black), and what kind of cake I liked best (I don't like cake). She asked what I thought about the issues of the day, though she seemed never to have heard of abortion, and she didn't understand the basic facts about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I must admit I was tempted to set her straight but it would have been too much trouble. I kept expecting her to ask me about my drug of choice, and how long I had been using it, but she didn't seem to have heard of drugs either. It was all she could do to comprehend wine with dinner.
I basically found all this terribly annoying, though most of the time I stayed too mellow to care. I would take a hit in the bathroom just before leaving work, so by the time I got home, I was feeling good, and I would hang out and joke around a little before I went upstairs and did another hit or two before dinner. I was just snorting it because when I started, the guywho gave it to me—we were in a bar on Capitol Hill after work, and I was completely bored with life—said that you couldn't get strung out if you just did it that way. As it turned out, he was misinformed. Anyway, I would come down to dinner and have to sit at the table, which the Little Chick had spruced up in the most ridiculous ways, with origami and weeds from the garden, and party hats. I was used to eating in the living room in front of the TV, where no one could check out my eyes, and at first I had a hard time sitting right across from the Little Chick with her staring into my face and jabbering at me. I made a point of never sitting across from Alice, so she couldn't see into my soul. Though I actually had no real reason to worry, since Alice wouldn't have realized what was going on around her if someone had sent her a telegram that said, “Your ex-husband is a shit, your daughter is a brat, your little brother is a junkie, and by the way, have a nice day.”
So we went on this way for weeks, then months. I sat at the table with the three of them and joked around, and after a while the Little Chick, who at first didn't seem to understand jokes at all, started joking back, and pretty soon we were laughing over dinner and somehow, though I don't know when or even how this happened, it got to the point where I actually looked forward to coming home. I tried to be just a little less loaded when I came in so I could appreciate my surroundings some, see what new wacked-out thing she had made into a centerpiece (my favorite was when she and Puffin made pink papier-mâché pigs one night when we were having pork chops). I wouldn't say I did less heroin at that point, but I did it more judiciously, in more frequent, smaller doses during the day so I would be on an even keel all the time. I noticed that when I did that, I made even more money on lightbulbs, and at one point I did start to think, hey, if I wasn't spending fiftybucks a day on drugs, I could be pulling in $350 a week and would be able to give Alice rent money and still have a bunch left over. I didn't act on this realization or anything, but I thought it.
It's probably some time in August when I walk into the living room and find a beautiful model standing there. Then when I look again, I realize that it's the Little Chick, and that Puffin has dolled her up in that hoochie-mama way she admires. The Little Chick looks like she's stepped out of one of those horrible magazines that Puffin reads, or a rock video. Her eyes look like someone has punched her, and I know this is what Puffin thinks girls should look like. Despite all that, the Little Chick is gorgeous, I have to admit it, and when I see her, my eyes bug out just a little bit, though then I catch myself and make some kind of sarcastic remark, which is what anyone would expect of me and I try not to disappoint them.
But this was not the first time that the Little Chick had seemed beautiful to me. It was a few days after Puffin got back from Paris, and the Little Chick was so great about that, doing welcoming things that Al and I would never have thought of, and turning the whole occasion into a big party. Well, I was sitting at the dinner table across from her a few nights later and suddenly when I looked at her, I saw a golden glow all around her, like one of those auras that my crazy neighbor Paula talks about. She was sitting there shining like a lamppost or something. A flashlight. A camping lantern. Okay, I was high, but I'm sure it was nothing to do with that. There was this shininess in her that I had never seen before in anyone else, and as I sat there, it just radiated all over me, dripping down on me like honey, or some kind of magic golden nectar.
Now, I don't want anyone to think that I was in love with the Little Chick. First of all, that would make me technically apedophile, which I am not. I am a normal American heterosexual man, though at that time it had been years since I had had a girlfriend and women were the furthest thing from my mind. Second, the Little Chick was not someone you wanted to go out with or marry or anything. Or God forbid, sleep with. No, you just wanted to sit there looking at her and feeling that whatever it was that I suddenly felt radiating from her.
So I did that. Night after night, we just sat there at the dinner table, and in the living room, and I watched her as the year went on and after a while she seemed to lose
some of what Puffin always called dorkiness and became more graceful, more golden. I didn't know much about her history, but it started to come out around then that she had been raised in some kind of weird religious sect, which accounted for her seeming like she was from another planet, and she evidently had some kind of obsession with imminent doom. Later, Alice told me the details about what the Little Chick called the Big Cat, which just seemed crazy to me.
“I get it,” I said to her one night. “You're Chicken Little. You think the sky is falling down, am I right?”
“Why, no, Uncle Roy,” she said. That was what she called me. “It's nothing to do with the sky falling down.” She was always so literal, and I realized as she was talking that she had never heard of Chicken Little, since the only bedtime stories she'd ever heard were about Jesus or Zoroaster or whoever.
“Chicken Little,” I said. “That's what I'm going to call you from now on.” The next day at dinner, there was a little plastic chicken sitting next to my plate. When I asked her if she had put it there, she looked astonished and said, “Put a chicken next to your plate? Uncle Roy, why on earth would I put a chicken next to your plate? What a strange thing to do. Must have been some kind of burglar. We're going to have to startbeing more careful around here.” She went on like this with a totally straight face, a trick she had learned from me. There was such a thin line between joking and lying that I was amazed she could do it. Finally she said, “I guess it probably fell out of the sky,” and winked at me. She was a good little winker.
So I just sat there, watching her. I started to feel all sorts of complicated things, things that made my stomach hurt, and I'd make a run upstairs for some more heroin but even that didn't help. One night I found myself looking out the window and saying, out loud, “There is beauty in the world.” I couldn't see anything out there but the darkness, since it was late at night, and the sound of my own voice startled me. I'm finally going nuts now, I said under my breath. It was November, and the breeze was cold through my window, which was supposed to be closed, but air still wafted through it and blew the curtains around lightly. I asked myself why I was sitting up late at night talking to no one, and what it had to do with the Little Chick. However, I did not receive an answer, so finally I did enough dope that I actually went into a nod, something I tried to avoid normally, and the next morning I did some more and felt better.
When I had those feelings, I stayed away from the Little Chick for a while, sometimes for a few days at a time. I'd sit in my room, or I'd get home late and miss dinner, but eventually I would come back and find myself at the dinner table again, across from her. Just before Christmas, the three of them were bustling around the house, with decorations and all, but I began to realize that the Little Chick was starting to act kind of weird and moody. I could tell she was upset about something, maybe some religious thing or missing her family, I didn't know. When she first came to stay with us, I really didn't notice or for that matter care, but about this time I started tosee that though she was always cheerful, in fact annoyingly perky, there was often something beneath the surface that seemed to be hurting her. This began to affect me, and all I wanted to do was make her feel better, so I would kid around with her until the shadow would seem to lift. But as Christmas got closer and closer, nothing seemed to help—I came home earlier every day and joked more, but it didn't seem to take the edge off her face, like the darkness of the world was finally going to catch up with her and turn her into one of us.
This was how I got roped into spending Christmas at home with Alice, more or less. As it happens, the lucrative lightbulb business closes down for the holidays anyway, so I would have had nowhere to go and would have had to actually sit in Sonny's Kitchen all day talking to my creepy pals and ordering just enough seaweed soup to keep from getting thrown out. Puffin really wanted the Little Chick to go with her to her dad's stupid Christmas party. I can't stand Puffin's father, though I do a pretty good job of not showing it. I mean, he was okay when he was married to Alice and was just a selfcentered moron, but when he proved that he was evil incarnate by dumping Alice, the nicest, sweetest, best woman he could ever have hoped to find, I started to dislike him in a big way. I was just about to tell Puffin to go by herself or not go at all, so the Little Chick could be with Al, and I could leave and do my thing, whatever my thing happened to be. But the next thing I knew, I found myself volunteering to spend Christmas at home so Puffin wouldn't have to go to her father's alone, and Alice would have some company on Christmas Eve. The truth is, I thought the Little Chick could use some cheering up. She was looking kind of pale and miserable at that point. She hadn't joked with me in days, her centerpiece output had fallen off, and though the house still shone with all her cleaningand tidying and was crowded with tacky Christmas crap, I could tell her heart wasn't in it. Now, I didn't really think that idiot's yuppie party would cheer anyone up, but I thought it might be good for both Puffin and the Little Chick to go there together and do some girly stuff beforehand, like get all decked out in red and green or whatever and slather makeup on each other, and I damn sure didn't want Al to be home alone brooding on what the party would have been like if she had still been married to Peter and would have been able to invite the kinds of people Alice would have invited: a bunch of mentally challenged homeless people, some psychic healers, some incontinent old men, you get the idea.
So when I stayed home, you've got to understand that this was probably the first act of altruism I had performed since I was a kid. I was a nice boy, and I did fairly thoughtful stuff for people on a regular basis, though my parents didn't seem to notice or appreciate it, being too wrapped up in their own problems most of the time, my dad's illness or later, after his death, my mom and her complicated love life. At some point, I don't know when, I must have realized that samaritanism didn't pay, and that I was better off looking out for number one. It was probably during the eighties, when selfishness became fashionable—anyway, as far as I recall, I hadn't done a single nice thing for anyone since, oh, probably since the day Reagan took office.
But suddenly, there I am, singing “Frosty the Snow Man” with Alice, trapped in the house with no excuse to go out and only enough dope to last me through Christmas. Al and I sat in the living room all night chatting, as she calls it, and drinking eggnog (mine laced with whiskey, which just made me feel sick), and watching White Christmas on TV. Every so often I would go upstairs to the bathroom and do another hit, so I was okay all night, but I have to say that I felt panicky beingtrapped indoors, and not going out to the corner to score, even though I had thought to buy twice as much the day before. My whole routine was interrupted and I had trouble with that, in general.
The day after Christmas, I slept too late, and by the time I got up to Oak Street, my runner had gone. Maybe he had had a big holiday sale and gone home to his family. I rushed past the hardware store, the liquor store, the dollar store, all of which were padlocked shut, like it was still a holiday, though it wasn't. I couldn't see my runner anywhere, and I began to get a sick feeling in my stomach. He usually loitered near the theater that was now a church with religious writing on the marquee in Spanish. I stood in front of the theater, looking for him, for about an hour, but finally it was clear to me that he was not going to show. I walked up to the next block but there was nobody else there, at least nobody who looked right.
There was nothing to do but jump on the Metro and go down to D.C. I spent the next three hours walking around some scary part of Southeast, waiting for somebody to walk past me saying “I'm on, baby boy,” and offer me some of his latest shipment of Mike Tyson, or Body Bag, or Sudden Death. It seemed like the more ominous the name, the better the stuff was supposed to be, and the biggest selling point of all was if someone had actually OD'd on it. So I saw a couple of guys who I was sure were runners, but they didn't say anything to me as I passed. I went up to them and asked them if they had anything, but they just said no and looked at me coolly. As I walked up to the next street, I
saw my reflection in the window of a hairweave salon and I realized that I was still wearing the white button-down shirt I had foolishly put on in a burst of holiday enthusiasm, and that my hair was combed, my coat was this preppy-looking coat that Al had bought me last Christmas, and I basically looked like some idiot who was going to get everybody busted, or maybe actually a narc. I went into an alley and put some dirt on my cheek, and messed up my hair, dirtied up my shirt collar a little (I couldn't touch the coat, or Al would have been upset), and before I knew it, guys were coming up to me and saying the magic words, I'm on, baby boy, I'm on, and soon I was back on the Metro, heading home, well again.
