Dope Sick

by Walter Dean Myers

  “You know what you know, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You scared of hitting the line?” Kelly asked.

  “I heard a lot of bad things happening when dudes be shooting dope right in their veins,” I said. “Infections. You get some bad dope and put it right in your vein—you can be dead before you know it. I’m a little scared of needles anyway. I figured I wouldn’t get hep C or AIDS or nothing if I just skin-popped.”

  “You got to work hard to be that ignorant, but if you going to dope it up, you might as well be ignorant, because it’s all going the same way,” Kelly said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know you got to lie about even using,” Kelly said.

  “I use, but I’m not really into a trick bag,” I said. “You know what I mean?”

  “So, tell me what happened with the cop.”

  I sat down on the armrest of a stuffed chair. It smelled a little pissy, but I didn’t care. I was really getting tired. “Me and Rico got the stuff together and wrapped it in that plastic Baggie you put food in when it got to go in the freezer,” I said. “We put a little tape around it, so in case the white boy got nervous, he wouldn’t want to take the time to unwrap it. Maybe he would just want to give up the cash and return to wherever he came from.

  “Rico was down from his nod and was grinning and bopping the way he do when he’s high. I was mellow, but I was okay. You know, I wasn’t nervous or anything. That’s the way dope does me. I still got the same things going on in my head, but it’s like I don’t care that much anymore. We got down where we was supposed to meet the guy with the cash—he was supposed to be wearing a jacket and a green-and-yellow sweater that said FUTBOL. I spot the dude and Rico goes over to him and says something while I hold on to the drugs. Then we go into the building.

  “I’m checking the dude out and he’s jumpy, like he’s anxious to get the stuff. I figure him to be a dude using big-time and needing to get right. I check his hands, and he’s got tracks on the back of his left hand—you know, maybe he’s right-handed and running out of road—and he’s been hitting the veins there too hard. But I was getting nervous, too. I’m sensing the set ain’t correct.”

  “Your high wearing off?” Kelly asked.

  “No, the white boy is getting me nervous,” I said. “He’s all jumpy and everything, but he’s chubby, too. You know, if he’s that heavy into horse, running up to Harlem to buy it from strangers, how he spending so much money on food he staying chubby?

  “I looked the guy right in the eye and said, ‘Rico, this fool ain’t right.’ Meanwhile, Rico got the money and the guy was scoping the dope and trying to pull out a bag from a hole he punched in the plastic with his finger. He looked up at me and then at Rico, and Rico pulled his piece, put it upside the guy’s neck, and told him not to move. Rico felt around his waist and didn’t feel no piece and said he was all right. But I knew if he was a cop he might have his piece on his ankle and I told Rico to check his ankle. Then everything broke out.

  “The cop hit Rico with his shoulder and tried to push him back, but Rico got the gun up again and told the cop to chill or he would blow his ass away. Then the cop said for us to chill and everything would be okay. He was calm too. I went down to his ankle and found his gun.

  “Rico said we was taking the dope and the money, which was the right thing to do. Then we asked him if he had some handcuffs, and he did. We handcuffed the fool to the banister. We knew he had some backup outside, but we had another way of getting out the hallway. We told the cop if he hollered we were going to come and shoot him. We started down the hall and Rico, thinking with his dope instead of his head, said he was going to check to see if the cop had a wallet. I told him we needed to get up out of there, but he went back. I heard the guy saying ‘Don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me!’ Then…Pop! Pop! Pop!”

  “Rico just wasted the dude?” Kelly asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Then he run by me toward the door. We come running out through a yard. There was a cop in the yard in plainclothes. He had on a uniform like the ones the guys who climb poles to fix telephone lines wear. We surprised him and Rico took a shot at him. I jumped the fence and started running, and Rico must have jumped after me. I felt something hit my arm. I didn’t even know I had been shot. You know, the adrenaline was pumping.”

  “You were scared.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I was so scared, I couldn’t even catch my breath. I was like huffing and trying to suck in some air. I ran down the street, cut through an alley, and then wound up back on the street. I was down on 122nd Street, across from where that warehouse used to be. There was nothing happening on the street except a whole crowd of brothers hanging out, as usual. I slowed down to a walk and headed downtown. I wanted to run, but I was trying to keep cool at the same time.”

  “Why you keep the cop’s gun?”

  “How you know…? I was scared to have it on me and scared to throw it away. I was in, like, a panic. You know what I mean? I knew if the cop was dead, it was going to be all over if they got us. You can’t kill a cop and look for mercy. We could have got away clean if Rico hadn’t gone back for the cop’s wallet. He probably didn’t even have no wallet on him.

  “I circled around and went uptown to Harlem Hospital and got some coffee in that little restaurant right off the lobby. The guy had the news on, but there wasn’t nothing about the deal, and for a while I thought maybe the guy wasn’t a cop and maybe Rico hadn’t really shot him anyway.”

  “You believed that?”

  “Naw, but I wanted to believe it. I really didn’t know what to believe. All the time I was thinking about what had happened and steady hoping for the best. At home I told my mother that they had run out of her medicine and I would get it in the morning. She asked me if I had got the job and I said no. I had the Baggie from Dusty’s loads, and I cooked that in the bathroom and popped it so I could relax.”

  “Why you say you weren’t using?” Kelly asked.

  “It ain’t really your business,” I said.

  “What? What you say?”

  “Nothing, man. I know I was using. I ain’t happy with it or nothing like that,” I said. “You don’t be getting off scraping the streets looking for no dope and you don’t be getting off being half sick all the time.”

  “You nodded out?”

  “No, I was too uptight. I lay across my bed in the dark feeling bad. Rico called me and said he had taken the money over to Dusty and he had some cash and a taste for me. I wanted to ask him if he had killed the cop, but I guess I didn’t want to know. He sounded like nothing had went down, like it was some cowboy movie and we could just move on. Then Skeeter called me, real late, and told me that the cops had picked up Rico. He asked me if I knew what Rico had done. I said no.”

  “So what you did you want to change?” Kelly asked.

  “I want to change going with Rico in the first place,” I said.

  “Just get you out this mess and you be straight?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But I won’t be facing no cop-shooting charge. They got Rico, and I know he’s going to rat me out. Then I got twenty-five years to life if the cop lives. If he don’t live I’m going to be facing…you know….”

  “The rest of your life in jail?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you want to be back looking at the line at Home Depot and thinking how you so lucky you ain’t in jail?” Kelly asked. “What you call it—broke sick? That’s where you want to be?”

  “I’m not saying that’s what I want altogether,” I said. “But what I’m saying is, if I could get out this mess, maybe I could do something good with my life.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know like what!”

  “Okay, like how?”

  “Look, Kelly, you might be okay, or you might be some kind of nut,” I said. “I don’t know. I know I’m tired of talking to your ass. I know I’m tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know
I’m just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can’t dig that? You think I want to live like I’m somebody’s throwaway? I want the same thing as you want—no, not like you want, because I don’t want to live in no abandoned building watching television and being spooky. You know what I would like to be doing?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to be living in a regular house doing something with Lauryn. She’s my son’s mama.”

  “You got a son?”

  4

  KELLY LIFTED THE REMOTE and my eyes automatically went to the television. The screen was full of bright, jagged lines that slanted one way and then the other. Then the picture cleared and I saw some guys in loose white outfits. They were doing karate or jujitsu or something like that. There was a figure up front—I could only see the side of his head. The camera seemed to turn to him, and at first I didn’t know who it was. Then I saw it was my boy Maurice. Just like before, I was seeing the scene and thinking about it in my head at the same time.

  “Why you holding your breath?” Kelly asked. I didn’t answer him. I was thinking that every time I told Kelly a lie, he could turn and see the truth on his television. I didn’t want to lie to him, but sometimes I couldn’t help myself. I watched as the camera zoomed in on Maurice. When he spoke, I knew exactly what he was going to say.

  “Why she gotta sound like that?” Maurice asked me. We were at St. John’s in Brooklyn watching some tae kwon do guys work out.

  “Yo, man, Lauryn’s mother is just one of those chicks who come off dead wrong and don’t give a damn,” I said. “She know she got me in a bind, and she’s working it.”

  “Yeah, but saying you can’t even go see your own baby…” Maurice shook his head. “Everybody’s talking about how guys walk away from their baby mama, and you’re stepping up to the plate and she’s still talking that ugly talk.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “Hey, Mo, check out this brother with the dreads.”

  Me and Maurice had both taken some lessons in tae kwon do. Maurice had lived in Jersey City for a while and took lessons with some Korean guy named Park. I had taken some lessons at Milbank, but I wasn’t sweet with it like Maurice.

  “They call him Rasta Jesus,” Maurice said. “He’s supposed to be trying out for the World Games.”

  “Rasta Jesus? That’s a tough name.”

  Rasta Jesus was smooth and quick and about six seven, maybe even six eight. I wondered why anybody that big would even get into tae kwon do. Me and Maurice were thinking about taking some more lessons, but the guys we saw in the class at St. John’s looked way too good. We’d be doing catch-up for three years.

  “You want to start back?” Maurice asked.

  “Yeah.”

  We copped the A for the long ride back from Brooklyn, mostly talking about Rasta Jesus and the class we had just seen. I was talking on the tae kwon do, but my mind was on Lauryn and how her mama wouldn’t let me come to the apartment.

  “This is my apartment and I’m going to say who comes in and who don’t come in and I don’t care who likes it and who don’t!” she said, shaking her fat finger in front of my face and wiggling her ugly head. “You want to see Brian, then you get your own apartment, and if she want to raise him up there, she can. But she ain’t bringing him to your mama’s house, because I don’t like what’s going on, and you know what I mean!”

  I felt like punching her in her face, but I knew that wouldn’t do any good. Really, I thought she wanted me to hit her. A lot of people do that, try to sucker you into doing a hurry-up so you come off looking stupid. I wasn’t going for it, but she had me feeling bad.

  Me and Moms was living in Section 8 housing, and I thought that if Lauryn and me got married, we could get our own place. A week after Lauryn had Brian, we had went down to the welfare office and talked to some punk interviewer who ran us through a lot of garbage about the rules of Section 8 and how I had to be working and earning a minimum wage and all that.

  “If I had all that hooked up, I wouldn’t be down here talking to you,” I said.

  Lauryn said I shouldn’t have lost my temper.

  “Why you getting mad all the time?” she asked me outside the dingy-looking building on 14th Street. “He’s got to say what he’s got to say because that’s his job.”

  “Hey, girl, this is supposed to be a place where you can catch a break, right?” I answered. “You see all them junkies and guys who just got out of jail and stuff? They running up, signing for their checks, and getting into the wind. We trying to make it as a family and we got to hear his mouth.”

  “Lil J, you need to have an attitude check, baby,” Lauryn said. “There’s just two things going down. You either walk away when people get into your face or you don’t. If you got the cash to walk away, then you don’t have to take nothing. But if you ain’t got the cash to dash, you got to take their stuff. You know that, so why are you tripping over what he had to say?”

  “Don’t go white on me, Lauryn,” I said.

  “Don’t do what?” Lauryn turned and looked at me. “Don’t go white on you?”

  She sucked her teeth and picked up her stride as we walked toward Sixth Avenue. I caught up with her and tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean nothing.”

  “If you didn’t mean nothing, you’d better inform your mouth, because evidently your lips were meaning something!” she said.

  I took Lauryn home, or at least to the door, and that’s when her mama ran the whole thing about how I couldn’t come into her house. Normally, Lauryn would have been in my corner, but she was mad and didn’t speak up.

  What I believed was that Lauryn’s mama was trying to bust us up. The first thing she had done was to get Lauryn to name the baby Brian, after Lauryn’s father. Brian Alexander had died when Lauryn was four years old, and she hardly remembered him at all. I didn’t want the baby named Jeremy, after me, because I don’t like “Juniors,” but I thought he could have a name starting with a J, which would be like saying that he was my kid and everything.

  Me and Lauryn had talked about raising a family. She’s sweet and she’s smart. When I first met her, I didn’t think I could even come close to pulling her. In the first place she was fine. She was five six, almost five seven, with a cute face and full lips that looked like somebody should be kissing them all the time. But mostly it was how she carried herself. She didn’t come off like no round-the-way girl but more like somebody leaving where they were expected to be and heading for where they needed to get to and was steady on her way. It didn’t take me but two times going out with her to know she had my heart. Plus we been through some stuff together. Things were getting heavy for me, and when I slipped from dibbing and dabbing into drugs, from weekend parties to really getting wired up, she helped me do a serious pullback. What she said was the same old same old about how drugs mess you up. I knew that like everybody else. But I knew she meant it just for me and it was coming from way inside her, and that meant something. I cut back some. I wasn’t completely correct, and she knew it, but I wasn’t sleeping with King Kong every day either.

  Sometimes when things got real bad, when I was dope sick like a mother, she would just hold me and ask me to dream with her.

  “What you want to dream about?” I asked.

  “Let’s dream about you going out to work in the morning and me being home taking care of our two-point-two children—they say that’s the average among black people—and then you come home and we can have dinner and talk or maybe watch television,” Lauryn said. “Then I’ll read a story to the children and put them to bed and then we’ll go to bed. You want to know what our bedroom is going to look like?”

  “How we going to have two-point-two children?” I asked. “We’re either going to have two or three. You can’t have a point-two child.”

  “So you want to have three kids?”

/>   “Two’s enough,” I said.

  She would go on about how the bedroom would look, and sometimes she would cut out pictures from magazines showing how somebody had fixed up their living room or playroom. She picked out some nice-looking rooms, too.

  All that was so good. The dreaming, the talking way past midnight. It was like she was putting those dreams up against the dope. The dope was making holes in me. I knew that, and Lauryn was plugging them up. She could make me feel like I was somebody. Maurice, my main man, said that when I was with Lauryn, I used to even look like I was in love.

  Then she told me she was pregnant. When she was saying it, I was smiling, like I was happy. I was happy too, because I thought about all the things we had said, about how I was going to be coming home at night and her reading to the children, and all. But Lauryn was serious as she talked. I could see the worry in her face.

  All those dreams we had talked about were like clouds floating high in the sky, far above Real. It wasn’t that we didn’t know that—we knew it good. But together we could just look at each other and not look down to where Real was waiting. Being pregnant changed that in a minute. Real jumped up, grabbed me, and started shaking hard. It was like Real was saying, Let’s see you sit on your cloud and dream now.

  We talked about getting rid of the baby, but she couldn’t, and I was real glad.

  Brian Dance Alexander was born in Mount Sinai hospital on a cold-ass day in February. Lauryn’s mother was so against me, she hadn’t bothered to learn my last name was Dance, so when Lauryn slipped it in, her mom didn’t even know what it meant. When I first saw him, all little with his skinny fingers spread out like he was showing off that he had five on each hand, I could feel my love for him swelling up inside of me. Lauryn was lying in the bed, her hair making a halo around her face against the pillow, smiling at me.

  “If you’re going to pick him up with your clumsy self,” she said, “make sure you hold him over the bed.”