American Spirit: A Novel

by Dan Kennedy

  “I’ll take care of you. What you need today?”

  “I’m good. I don’t need any more of it today.”

  Matthew doesn’t even know if one is supposed to do it more than once a day if one is hooked. He assumes that if you’re hooked on something, you must do it a lot more than once a day. The dealer starts laughing for some reason and walks away.

  10

  Girls, Girls, Guns

  HERNAN HAS A SLIGHTLY larger apartment than one might expect for an aging South American and Lower East Side fixture with a few neighborhood hustles left to grind. One would have to imagine the blocks between here and the alphabet streets have surely changed quite a lot since the eighties and nineties heyday. There are tools littering a corner between the tiny living room and kitchen, a couple of buckets of Spackle and paint, tarps folded, tools cluttered up on a belt and spilling from a box. Hernan is probably Matthew’s age, or a few years younger with the difference made up by a streetwise life that wears and lines one a little.

  “Hey, Matthew, Tim’s boy. Come on in,” this at the door to his apartment after clearing the buzzer downstairs.

  “Doing some remodeling, huh?”

  “I’m doing some of that shit, yeah. I’m doing a lot of things, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Yes. Yeah.”

  “I’m doing some contracting shit, and I’m doing some of the shit you came here to talk about; these are my blocks. I don’t got the jump shot and I don’t produce beats or shit like that, so these are gonna be my blocks forever, B.”

  “Your blocks?”

  “My streets.”

  “I know.”

  Hernan puts three guns on the table in front of the banged-out sofa. He’s excited, kind, and precise in doing this; like a ten-year-old laying out the baseball cards he’s hoping to trade today.

  “That’s fifty-six; two nines and a thirty-eight. I know dudes that roll with that much for rep.”

  “Oh, okay, so, well, I don’t know if…”

  “I’m kidding, bro!” And here is more of that kind of laughing the bartender on the train was enjoying. Inside of Matthew the brain wonders, again, What is it lately with people and laughing?

  “I just…”

  “You should’ve seen your face, B! Can you imagine some guy walking around with two Tek nines and a thirty-eight? All Grand Theft Auto an’ shit?” And, of course, more laughing from Hernan about what Hernan said. When one person is laughing and the other one isn’t, it takes an eternity for the laughing to end. The brain gently screws the face up into a frozen and polite smile on Matthew, the eyes pleasant, lonely, confused, and seeming to be standing by for something to latch on to.

  “Yeah, no, you got me on that one. I just wouldn’t know, really. But, yeah, I think I only need one gun.”

  “Let me ask you: How much would you like to spend for all intents and purposes for this inquisition?”

  “You know, maybe a hundred.”

  “I’m not sure a sufficing number of currency is…”

  “That’s not really the way those words are… just talk normal.”

  “That ain’t enough money; what are you, fucking nine years old?”

  “Okay, well, let’s see what, um, what I’ve got in here.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what the fuck!”

  “Oh! No, I’m… There’s a pocket in there; like a zipper pocket. For your money and driver’s license and stuff, like, while you work out or jog.”

  And now Hernan is cracking up again. Matthew, by now used to the people having a great time laughing at something he doesn’t understand as funny, doesn’t even bother with the convention of a polite smile. He just digs down in under the waistband and above the pubic bone, to the left of where the lump of dull pain lives, unzips the pocket, and pulls up a handful of bills; a loose wad and the rest stacked and folded in half, Hernan looking on, none too pleased with what looks like a paperboy’s salary. Small wadded bills littering his coffee table. After rummaging through the currency yanked from the crotch pocket, Matthew counts to a final number.

  “I actually have to keep some for a cab back up to the train. What can I get for like… sixty-nine fifty?”

  This just brings a sad silence from Hernan.

  “Shit, B. You ain’t walking with a nine for that kind of change.”

  “I’m kind of fucked because I don’t have a job anymore. You’re the first person I’ve told that to, oddly enough.”

  “Well, you better be telling somebody at the front of the line at the state office, because that money under your dick ain’t…”

  “It’s a pocket.”

  “Well, whatever’s in it ain’t gonna carry you far.”

  “How much more would I need for that one?” Matthew asks, pointing at the nine millimeter.

  “Like three and a half times what you were hiding under your dick.”

  “Fuck, well…”

  “If you want, you can run a pack for me tonight and we can work it out.”

  “No, I can’t do remodeling stuff. I’m seriously, like, I can put in a dimmer switch and that’s about it. I can take care of any people that need dimmer switches, but you probably don’t even…”

  “I’m talkin’ ’bout a pack, B. You roll with one of my backpacks to some people’s places and sell them some shit and come back tonight with the cash. People call me; I call your cell and tell you where you’re going. This is weekend shit, nothing heavy; ’shrooms, brownies, X, eighths of bud.”

  “No, I…”

  “I’m talkin’ ’bout mainly dorm room kids and white chicks with offices.”

  “Women? So, I don’t have to stand around in Washington Square or anything, right?”

  “I’m not sayin’ you’re standing around the park in a ski jacket selling fake coke and two-bit green shit.”

  “It’s fake, their cocaine?”

  “I’m thinking you’re playing dumb-as-shit at this point. This ain’t shake, this ain’t kitchen sink scrape, this is out-West shit. These people buy from me every weekend. You’ll clock maybe a thousand bucks in three calls, and instead of giving you a cut for running, I’m just hooking you up with one of these since you’re light.”

  They both look at the guns, common sense making this all seem less of a risk. Who among us doesn’t want to get their life back on track; to get to feeling like one hasn’t got less than he had and one has even fortified what is left? The brain reasons that life is supposed to be a journey, and that means you don’t turn down selling shit for Hernan to make this gun thing happen. That one was so close to Zen that the hands produce the phone and typing device from the running sock. The typing starts and Hernan is staring.

  “I’m just letting my wife know I’ll be late.”

  “Okay, yeah, take care of the home front, B. That shit’s important. Nothing without these ladies, butchu know that, I don’t need to tell you. Shit… Love and God, that’s where it at, B. An’ you got that little boo all waiting for you.”

  “I don’t really think I…”

  “Aw, she all at home waitin’ for her man to get off the corner. She want some company up in there, B!”

  “Right, yes, we’ll… jam. We’ll be… jammin’…”

  Hernan pulls one purple backpack from a small and immaculately inventoried closet where about a dozen others hang from numbered pegs or sit in bins with numbers clipped to them by clothespins. A purple backpack certainly tops off the evening’s ensemble of knee-high athletic socks pulled all the way up to where the scrapes and cuts start on the legs, running shorts stuffed with too little cash, and a promotional tee shirt for a weekly news magazine that New Time publishes. To open the pack is to open up a tiny purple canvas sky above an opaque polyurethane field with a tiny horizon; perfect rows of Ziplocked tops of clean, crisp, categorized poly bags with different-colored stickers on them. Matthew lets his fingers amble over them and Hernan gives him directions through the rows of the field; what the colors are; what the prices are; what th
e contents are; why it’s a sign of quality that the mushrooms look blue at certain angles; what to tell people with regard to storing and using whatever they buy; why freezers aren’t great for drugs; why the Ecstasy is only half as good if the customer is drinking alcohol instead of sugars and acids like orange juice or lemonade; why Matthew can’t take back empty poly bags and how they should be discarded at the customer’s apartment if they’re going to be discarded. Hernan doesn’t tell him that this last bit could mean the difference between being charged with the intent to sell drugs versus the considerably harsher charge of actually selling drugs, because to discuss getting caught and arrested and arraigned is a bit of a buzzkill to someone finally getting started selling weekend drugs to pretty girls in order to buy a gun. Lastly, Hernan mentions that Matthew should be polite, should be talkative and jocular and keep things light; that it’s important not to act like a drug dealer. And also, one shouldn’t stay too long. Matthew stifles a yawn; he has reached for the backpack twice during this little seminar, but Hernan had pulled it away from him both times. Most of the details and instructions from Hernan run through the brain like names in a meeting one can’t wait to get out of, or directions to a store past a barn near the filling station past the pond and around the other side of a country diner; all of it gone the second the head’s gray has parsed it with precision. Finally, the pack isn’t pulled back when Matthew gives it a willing grab.

  11

  Ecstasy in Apartment 4-B/C

  MATTHEW RINGS THE BUZZER and a female voice without timbre grins through in a thin ribbon of static and says hello and tells him to come in; clicks and buzzes the door open. Matthew leans his shoulder into it when opening it because the brain recalls enough about movies and television to know that the door should be gently shoulder-checked in situations like this; weary and urbane and too tired for congenial conversation, that is how the brain informs the posture here. Up the first flight of stairs with a bit of pain and limp jump; and the head reels up one thousand excuses that would get one out of carrying on. The best of the excuses is probably that you have no idea what the hell you’re doing; this is followed in close second and third by excuses such as this is probably a felony, and even if there are no jobs in America at the moment, should one at least be applying at other media conglomerates and corporations in the hope that a job would, sooner or later, surface? But the brain recalls sessions with Milton, how he says that we have to move forward even when we’re baffled; that by taking physical steps and keeping moving we would intuitively handle what only hours or minutes ago baffled us. So the steps continue, upward, onward to whatever situation awaits, to whatever situation will be intuitively handled. Therapy has helped, although this is maybe not what it was intended for, but who among us is to say, really? This could be exactly what therapy is for.

  At the door, Matthew catches his breath before knocking, pulls his jogging shorts straight a bit, tries to affect whatever face a middle-aged upper-management sort from Connecticut turned friendly low-stakes drug dealer should affect; his face doesn’t change a bit. Convinced he’s perfectly adjusted and presented, he reaches up and knocks. The door is opened and there stands a female customer. Maybe twenty-eight, maybe thirty-eight, maybe immortal, a face completely unacquainted with disappointment, seemingly unaware of the scale of the world and how quickly one can be lifted up gently in halcyon days higher and higher, only to realize the lift was coming from a rogue wave forming and cradling whatever it would, before pummeling one into hard, wet sand after being held aloft like this. Jesus, lighten up, you’re selling drugs that are supposed to make people happy, so don’t bring everybody down.

  She stands there with a slight smile. A pause of about two seconds feels like ten minutes; legs that don’t call it quits until the neck below the Irish lips; a narrow, fresh, and fair-skinned face that’s never been long; cheekbones never fallen disillusioned; black gunpowder brows above eyes blue as sky. She’s one long, tall fuse of cordite to gelignite; the last one thousand sweet dreams left on earth, framed by long, straight black hair and bordered below by medium-small breasts defying gravity and time’s cruel pull. South of that are hips equally able to create life as destroy yours, and all of her covered by the clothes that have seen a solid tailor the rest of us can’t pay, but clothes that nonetheless somehow paint the portrait of an expatriate hippy poetess living in Paris. And the heart instantly deals up the usual corrupt input, telling the head that this is a perfect job; that selling drugs for Hernan is the job people should be looking for if they’re laid off. It goes a bit further to suggest that Matthew has wasted years in the confines of straight and narrow America.

  “Oh, I was actually waiting for…”

  “Right, no, it’s me. I’m Matthew. I’m, you know.” And with this Matthew slings the pack around the front of him in explanation.

  “Ah! I thought you were this guy that just moved in upstairs. Come on in. Tatiana.”

  “Matthew.”

  “Yes, you…”

  “Oh, right, okay.”

  Inside, the apartment sprawls clear from the front of the building to the back, littered with the artifacts of a rich quasi bohemian—high-end audio and video equipment stares across the big main room at a huge teak table littered with stacks of Beat paperbacks and half-smoked packs of Canadian cigarettes, the giant kitchen looks like it was carved out of the workings of an old mill or sweatshop; the wood beams reach a peak at the ceiling—an A-frame ceiling in Manhattan, a top-floor rarity. Names and phone numbers written on a beam that intersects with the thick wooden counter by a phone on the wall; some dug in deep with ballpoint pen, others glided on in felt-tip or thumbtacked up with business cards and corners of notebook paper; a big steel refrigerator with a glass door boasts of nothing rotting and forgotten past expiration. Tatiana surrenders to a big couch, legs spidering out, and arms pulling a chair over for Matthew to sit in. Matthew sits down to open the purple canvas pack and do the business of selling. Somehow here and now, selling hallucinogens to a rich girl feels as innocent as fairy tales.

  “I think I’ll get two things of mushrooms and one of the brownies from you.”

  “Okay, so that’s two blue and a yellow, I think.” And the field of poly bags is flicked through and harvested for two and one.

  “Oh, goodie, there’s nuts in the brownies again.” A smile, all teeth and eyes, girlish still somehow and free of regret. “The last time there wasn’t and I told Hernan that he should put them back in.”

  Some sack or gland on the brain or spine spasms and squeezes out a drip of some potion that weakens Matthew’s arms and knees with the palsy of schoolboy crush and optimism. Goddamn, how could the news be so riddled with so many dire stories when there clearly are no sad times left in this country?

  Goods are placed on the table; money is dug from a handbag made to look like the unkempt accessory of the marginalized, but surely still carrying this season’s staggering price tag on Fifth and Fifty-second. Tatiana says to double the order, Matthew rakes the translucent field again, brings to market a second harvest of blue and yellow, cash is handed over, Matthew is green and minor-league to count it.

  “Oh, I see, you don’t trust me.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not, I think I’m just supposed to… this is kind of my first time, so I thought…” And this is cut short by looking up to see her smiling at him and quietly somehow getting a kick out of this. Inside his head, a foreboding suburban Greek chorus, hollering warning that the girl is probably already high on something dangerous and just moments away from stabbing and hacking her visitor to death.

  “Will you have some tea with me? I’ve been in town three days and it’s all been meetings, and tomorrow I’m back to L.A. to work for five weeks.”

  “I’m not supposed to stay with…” But she’s already up and off the couch and into the kitchen with the energy Matthew must’ve had at some point around age eight, the year before he realized the world’s spin was really a slow drill boring into him.
He is left to roam the living room for a few minutes.

  The brain tries again, tells him to run, that he’s slid into being felonious, that he’s a terrible manager, that he made nothing of the opportunities a good solid job had presented him, that this is what his parents always saw in him. The heart counters the head, says to mill about politely and be aimless and pleasant, to look at the coffee-table books of Helmut Newton and Humphrey Spender and a book of rock photography from some gift shop in some museum. Flipping simultaneously and nervously between the three of them tricks the eyes; Newton’s Amazonian blonde women seem to lounge and lord over horizons of infinity pools and glass houses in Hollywood Hills that somehow look out over a skyline of Spender’s bleak, broken, sadly beautiful, burned-out East End of London, where Radiohead and Keith Richards labor in small studio control rooms or perform on giant stages.

  An acoustic guitar leans against a chair and goads Matthew into making the mistake of picking it up, which is to make the mistake of being a middle-aged man quietly producing half-assed discordant hum and buzz on the instrument while the hand’s indecisive fingers tentatively try to peck out a few dumbed-down measures of the intros to old standards like “House of the Rising Sun” or “Stairway to Heaven.” The head hears these attempts and immediately issues common sense; demands that the arms thrust the guitar away from the abdomen, quickly and quietly back down to where it leaned before being picked up. This is done with perfect timing during the two and a half seconds before Tatiana is back with cups on saucers and a little cup of sliced lemon.

  “How do you take your tea?”

  “Oh, I just, you know, drink it. Straight. No, you know… spice syrup or… cream, or whatever.”