by Mann, Marni
Renee and I were walking home one day after finishing our ice cream, and a parade of police cars passed us, blue lights flashing. When we saw the cops again, they were double parked in front of our house. Swarms of officers stood on the lawn, and the front door of the house was open. We stopped a block away and didn't move any closer. We knew if we tried to go inside the house, we'd get dragged into the mess too.
Two officers with canines came out of the house. There was a yellow lab and a German shepherd, followed by five cops, two carrying Que's wooden drug cabinet and the others with trash bags in their hands. The cops had found everything except Renee and me.
Que and Raul were hauled out next. They were handcuffed and placed in separate police cars.
“How'd they know?” Renee whispered.
“Someone snitched.”
She looked at me from the corner of her eyes and her top lip was curled. “Was it you?”
“Fuck you, Renee, seriously.”
“Sorry, it's my hormones, they make me think crazy thoughts.”
The same hormones that led her to believe Que would give up dealing for the baby? Stupid bitch. I couldn't believe she'd accuse me of tipping off the cops.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
I needed my clothes from inside the house, but we couldn't stand here all day and wait for the police to clear out. If we did stay, they might think we were connected and try to question us. I had the important stuff like my purse and cell phone. Renee would have to steal me some clothes from Goodwill.
“Let's go to the park,” I said.
We sat on a bench and people watched. Renee was really quiet. I asked her how much time the guys would serve and if we should call their friends to tell them the news. She didn't answer. She only shrugged her shoulders, staring at the trees that surrounded us.
By dark, I was feening and I knew Renee had to be hungry. We didn't have any dope, and I'd spent the money Raul had given me on ice cream that morning. “You have any money left?”
“I've got Que's ATM card.”
“You stole it?”
“He gave me one.”
He must have really trusted her.
“Let's go to McDonald's,” she said. “Then we'll hit up Roxbury for some H.”
“Roxbury first.”
“The baby needs to eat,” she said.
I was already sick of this baby and it wasn't even born yet. The old Renee would've wanted smack first and food later. This was bullshit.
I walked with her to the ATM and while she searched her bag for the card, she complained about how hungry she was. She said she didn't want to wait in line for the food, so she told me to go order and she'd be there in a minute to pay.
McDonald's was only a block down from the bank. I ordered two value meals and stood to the side of the counter, waiting for Renee. After five minutes, I called her cell phone. She didn't answer. Ten minutes later, she still hadn't shown up. The McDonald's guy had set our food on a tray and placed it on the counter. The smell of the burgers was making my stomach growl and my mouth was watering for the orange soda.
“Is your friend coming or not?” the guy asked.
The clock on my phone showed twenty minutes had passed since I'd left her at the ATM. I tried her cell again and it went straight to voicemail.
I stole a couple fries. “I guess not,” I said and walked out.
I went to the ATM, but she wasn't there. She wasn't in the park either. That bitch had taken off, leaving me without any dope or money. She'd been really quiet since we saw the cops, so she was probably scheming up a plan to ditch me. I had this feeling I'd never see her again.
I sat on the same bench we'd shared earlier that night and thought about what to do. I needed a loan. Who could I ask? There wasn't anyone in the city I knew besides Michael. But wait. I had money in my savings account that I still hadn't touched. Actually, I'd forgotten I even had the account. I used to get bank statements at the Chinatown apartment, but since Eric and I had gotten kicked out, I never forwarded my mail. There was enough to buy me a week at a hotel and a couple bundles of smack.
I took the cash limit out of the ATM and got on the train to Roxbury. I hadn't been to this part of the city before, but I'd heard things. Bad things like girls getting raped and murdered by gangs and dealers who they owed money to. I wished Raul was with me, but if he were, I wouldn't have to go to Roxbury. I was hoping I wouldn't have to walk too far from the train and could stay close to where there were a lot of people.
A block away from the station, I saw what I was looking for— groups of guys hanging out on both sides of the street. They dressed in baggy jeans with hooded sweatshirts and jackets despite the warm weather. When Raul did drug runs, he wore a jacket too and stashed the packages in the inside pockets. He said if a cop ever approached him, he'd ditch the coat, so they couldn't charge him for possession.
I stopped at the first group of guys. “Montega?” I asked, which was Spanish slang for dope.
They shook their heads and pointed down the street to the entrance of a pawnshop.
In front of the pawnshop were two guys. Thick gold chains with diamond pendants hung around their necks, and jackets were wrapped loosely over their shoulders. One of them had the same tattoo as Raul, a teardrop under his eye.
“Montega?”
“How much?” The tattooed guy asked.
“Bundle,” I said.
We exchanged the money and dope by shaking hands and they whistled at me as I walked back to the train.
I rented a hotel room at the border of Roxbury and Boston. I figured I'd stay on this side of town. The rooms were cheaper than what Abdul charged, and they were bigger too, with a king-sized bed and cable TV. Everything I needed, a spoon, rig, and cotton ball were tucked inside my purse.
Renee called in the morning. I didn't know why I answered when I saw her name on the caller ID or why I listened to her talk. I was high, but that wasn't the reason. Somewhere inside me, I cared about her even though she ditched me. She told me she stayed with Mark last night and was going to live with him permanently even after the baby was born. As she put it, he was the father and the right thing to do was to see if they could make their relationship work. What relationship? Mark had been trying to get with me while he was screwing her, and at the same time, she was also banging Que. She didn't ask about what I'd done after she left me stranded in McDonald's or where I'd spent the night. She said she'd call once the baby was born so I could come visit them in the hospital. I didn't want her to call. She didn't give a shit about me, so why would I want to see her? Hell, I didn't really think her pregnancy would last the whole nine months, not with all the dope she shot.
I wasn't lonely when I sat in my hotel room by myself. Smack was my dream maker. And it was the only thing that stayed constant when everything around me was changing. Raul had called my cell and told me they were being charged with possession, distribution, trafficking, laundering and a bunch of other shit I couldn't remember. They were looking at a minimum of fifteen years. Eric was dead, and Renee was off with her baby's daddy. Everyone in my life had split, and I was in the middle, standing still.
A week later, I was on my way back from Roxbury and saw a middle-aged woman working the corner a few blocks from my hotel. She was decked out in hooker garb, a short jean skirt, backless tank top, teased hair, and makeup painted on like a drag queen. I was out of cigarettes and asked her if I could bum one.
When I met someone for the first time, usually the introduction was awkward and there were moments in the conversation where I had to think of something to say. It wasn't like that with Sunshine and me. We clicked instantly. And we both kept interrupting each other because there was so much to talk about.
From the scars on her arms, I knew she was a junkie too and invited her back to my room to get high. Just then, a car pulled up and the guy asked how much she charged for a full service. She told him eighty, and he hired her. I swapped cell phone numbers with her an
d told her to call when she was done.
She phoned a couple hours later and came over. I split up the dope, taking some from both our bags. Her smack looked more pure than mine. The heroin I got from Roxbury was cut with things like vitamin B-12 and dextrose, which made it less potent. When mixing hers with mine, the hit was strong like the heroin I got from Que.
After our nods, she told me she'd been working the streets for about thirty years and had two kids in their late twenties who grew up in foster care. I told her about my two plus years in Boston, and she asked how I was paying for dope since the guys had been arrested. I said my savings account was almost dry. She said she remembered living on the streets at my age and how no one had helped her out.
“You want to stay with me?” she asked. There was a menthol 100 dangling between her lips, and the ash was on the verge of falling. “I ain't got much, but it'll get you out of here,” she said, using her cig to point around my room.
My room wasn't that bad, minus the cobwebs in the corners. But I said yes. If she wanted to help me out, I had nothing to lose. She said I'd have to pay for my own dope, but if I wanted, we could team up and turn tricks together. I had enough junk to get me through tomorrow and a few bucks left to buy a burger. Raul had told me I was good at sucking dick, and Sunshine said if I could get the guys off fast and land some regulars, I'd make a lot of money.
I moved into Sunshine's place the next day. Her pad was a hotel on Massachusetts Avenue, only a few blocks down from the Roxbury hotel. She'd been living there rent-free for over five years because she banged Frankie, the owner, a few times a week. The only thing I brought was my purse, but that was good because Sunshine was a collector—of everything. In the last five years, I didn't think she threw anything away, including the trash.
We ate scraps from her fridge, eggs and pickles, and listened to old school music, the Beatles and Jimmy Buffet. She said the tunes got her pumped up for work. Before she left for the streets, she told me stories about her clients and the sick fetishes they were into like bondage and blow-up dolls. She even had one guy ask her to bark and lap water out of a bowl. I couldn't help but laugh. I'd met a lot of hookers when I'd lived at Abdul's, but none of them had enjoyed sex as much as Sunshine.
She hit the corner around nine, and I stayed in the room and watched a show on teen pregnancy. The girls they interviewed looked like Cabbage Patch dolls with their baby faces and braces, and their boyfriends were scrawny without facial hair. The parents’ of the teens cried when they talked about their daughters and how bad they felt for them, being pregnant at sixteen. Sunshine had told me when we first met that I looked sixteen too. And every time I bought butts at the store, I got carded. I had an idea.
The next morning I got up early and dressed in Sunshine's clothes, a pair of jean shorts and a tank top. Under the tank, I wore a tube top and stuffed the stomach area with a mound of toilet paper. I made a cardboard sign that said “Six Months Pregnant, Please Help” and sat on the corner of a busy street. The people walking by were dressed in work clothes, carrying briefcases and talking on their cell phones. When they read my sign and looked at my bump, they stopped and donated money. The rich had sympathy for teens with baby bumps the same way they did for homeless people with dogs. One woman even handed me her business card after giving me five bucks. She said she was a doctor and would give me exams for free if I came to her office.
By ten that morning, I'd made eighty-two dollars and got a pretty good suntan too. And after a nice nod at Sunshine's, I earned another seventy-eight from the evening rush.
That night was also the first time I met Richard, Sunshine's dealer. He lived in Dorchester, a fifteen-minute train ride from the hotel. I'd gotten used to the way Que ran things, call before you come over, ring the doorbell before entering, and wait for Que to bring you upstairs. Richard was just the opposite. Sunshine didn't have to call, the door to his house was unlocked, and she walked inside without knocking. There weren't any lights on, and the windows were covered with cardboard. Richard's place was even grimier than the frat houses at UMaine. Roaches climbed the walls, cabinets hung from their hinges, there were holes between the wooden planks on the floor, and in the cracks were broken glass, burnt foil, and needle caps. The smell was similar to the sumo guy I'd found dead at Abdul's hotel.
Sunshine had told me during the train ride that Richard had squatters living with him and sometimes they'd give her a hard time, hustling her for money. I knew squatters lived mostly in abandoned homes and warehouses around the city, but I'd never heard of them taking over someone's house. She said a lot of them ran drugs for Richard or slept with him for dope and that he liked to have them around because he thought they kept him safe. How they'd be able to protect him, I didn't know. The squatters were so fucked up they never even looked at us when we came inside. There were two half- clothed, bug-eyed men cuddled on the uncushioned couch. They stared at the black stained walls and scratched their arms so hard they were covered in blood. There was also a young girl sitting on the kitchen floor next to a mound of trash. Her face was spotted with blemishes like mine; her shirt was ripped open, she was snorting lines off a slice of a mirror.
I followed Sunshine to the back of the house, and we stopped outside a closed door. She knocked twice and opened it. Richard was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, wearing only boxer shorts, and injecting between his big and second toe. He was long, thin, and pale like a Q-tip with ringlets of black hair on his chest and legs, and his face was covered in pockmarks.
Sunshine took a seat on the air mattress, and I stayed in the doorway, watching him do a second shot in his other foot.
He licked his fingers and wiped the blood from the needle hole. “You brought me a present?” he asked Sunshine.
“She ain't no present,” she said. “Nicole's a new customer.”
She patted the spot next to her for me to sit down. Richard's eyes followed me, and when I sat, he stared at my chest. “You a hussy too?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“You got any money?” he asked Sunshine.
Sunshine took out her cash along with the money I'd given her.
“Damn it,” he said and his eyes came back to me. “Your lips would have looked nice around my cock.”
Not that I'd want my lips anywhere near his cock, but at least I knew that was an option if I ever ran out of money.
He stood and walked over to the closet. Inside on the floor was a black safe with a number pad. The safe looked out of place. I thought he would have kept his stash in a pillowcase or in a Ziploc under his bed.
He handed three bundles to Sunshine, and her and I moved to the door.
“Come back soon,” he said to me.
She closed his bedroom door and once again the squatters avoided us, looking at the walls while we left his house.
“Don't pay him any attention,” she said as we got on the train. “He's full of himself, but he's got a tiny pecker.”
I'd been living with Sunshine for a couple weeks, and we had a routine down. After my morning shift of panhandling, we'd go to Richard's house together and while I hit up the evening rush, she'd go to the needle exchange. And when she came back from work around two, we'd do a shot. For a few nights in a row, she'd been complaining that she hadn't been doing very well on the streets. Johns were only looking for blowjobs instead of the full service, and she made less money. She said younger girls were crowding her usual corner and getting picked up more than her. She wanted to switch up the clientele, so she decided to go to Ted's, a biker bar and asked me to come too. I'd already earned around a hundred and fifty that day, panhandling with my fake baby bump. But some extra cash meant I could take tomorrow off, and letting some guy fuck me for ten or fifteen minutes was easier than sitting out in the hot sun all morning.
She dressed me up in a short black skirt, shiny tank top and black heels, and lathered my face with makeup. When she finished primping and teasing, I looked like I was enterin
g one of those beauty pageants. My face and hair hadn't even been this done up for prom.
We planted ourselves in the back of the bar and leaned against the wall, looking at all the prospects. In the front of the bar was a younger crowd, probably still in college and broke. The women flocked in the middle by the tables, wearing clothes like I was wearing, but they were around Sunshine's age. The bikers with their leather jackets, tight jeans, and steel-toed boots were in our corner of the room playing pool.
It only took a few minutes before two men approached us. They had thick beards, wads of chew in their lips, and they kept spitting into a cup.
“What you looking for, sugar?” Sunshine asked.
“Full rounds, Mama,” the guy standing in front of me said. His eyes were almost black, and when he smiled there was dip stuck between his teeth.
“Hundred,” Sunshine said. “Apiece.”
“Meet us out behind the bar in twenty,” the guy said.
Sunshine and I went to the bathroom and into separate stalls. I sat on the toilet, using my lap as a table and dumping three bags onto the spoon. I usually only did two bags, but I didn't want to feel the burn when he shoved his dick inside me. Sunshine had said the men didn't usually do any licking to get you wet first, and I didn't have any lube. She had told me she pretended all the guys looked like Patrick Swayze and that got her all worked up. It was going to take a lot more than fantasizing about some movie star to make me horny on smack.
When the rush hit me, my mouth went dry. I needed to get a drink or my lips were going to stick to the condom when I gave him head. Sunshine was still in her stall, so I told her I'd meet her at the bar and asked the bartender for some tap water. My legs were wobbly, and I sat on a stool, sucking on the end of the straw.
Damn. The nod came fast. And I couldn't help but follow it. I was so warm, and the leather seat was like silk on the back of my legs.
I felt someone lift me up, and I bounced in their arms as they walked. I didn't open my eyes to see who it was. The dream was so beautiful, I was in a boat and the water was calm and sparkly.
