Diamond in the Rough

by Peter Canning

  “I don’t want heroin, just a little marijuana.”

  “You should be getting some for yourself. It’s all over the place. You got to learn to pat down your patients. That’s where all my dope comes from. Why buy what you can get free?”

  “Stealing?” I said.

  “It’s not stealing, it’s asset forfeiture. Finder’s keepers. Possession of the law is 9/10s. It’s a well documented legal principle. If the shit wasn’t illegal in the first place, you’d win in court, and because the shit is illegal, they can’t take you to court. It’s just like why we’re going to war in the desert. We’re not going there to save the towel-heads, we’re going for the oil and the plunder. It’s there for the taking. It’s the American Way. Christopher Columbus did it. The old guy Roosevelt in the wheelchair did it. Bush is doing it. No reason we can’t. It’s an American tradition going back to the days of Genghis Khan.”

  “I don’t know about stealing.”

  “It’s getting you laid, isn’t it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t tell me Carrie doesn’t like the weed. How do you like her big bong?”

  “How did you know about that?”

  He looked at me like he often did—like I was an innocent just off a boat. “Jimmie Winslow told me. He used to supply her. The man had his sources, if you know what I mean. I think that was the only reason she put up with him as long as she did.”

  “So can you get me some?”

  He reached in his pocket and just like that handed me three joints. “These are only because you’re my friend, but I want to see you out there getting your own. Give a man a fish and you’ve fed him for a day, teach him to fish and you’ve fed him forever. Besides, you’re soon to be on your own. I’m going to be leaving for more lucrative pastures.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He pointed to the TV where the newscaster was speculating about when the country was going to invade Iraq. “I’m thinking about enlisting.”

  “Enlisting?”

  “Yeah, my brother’s in the service. Since 9/11, a man in a uniform is a pussy magnet. You think medics are pussy magnets? Army Ranger, it’s a whole other exponential power there.”

  “But they’d be shooting at you.”

  “Comes with the territory. Besides, there’s treasure there—treasure for the taking.”

  “Oil?”

  “Gold—that’s what my brother says. This is not going to be desert fighting; we’re going into Baghdad. We’re going to be occupiers. We’re going to be rich, and I intend to take my game to a bigger scale.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I thought he was crazy. I knew one thing: I wasn’t one to put myself in harm’s way any more than I could help.

  “Gold and pussy,” Fred said, “makes the world go round. Now cough up the fifteen dollars you owe me.”

  Chapter 16

  “Sherry’s boyfriend just took her to Boston last week,” Carrie said as we ate the Mu Shu Pork I’d brought over. “They went to a comedy club, then to Legal Seafood where they had stuffed lobster, and for appetizers they got oysters from all over the world, laid out on ice in layered silver trays, stacked almost to the ceiling. They stayed at the Westin Hotel, and had room service bring them breakfast.”

  “That sounds expensive,” I said.

  “Some things are worth spending money on,” she said.

  I got the hint. “We should book a trip,” I said. “How about instead of Boston, we go to New York City?”

  “New York City. That would be awesome!”

  “Instead of eating Mu Shu Pork here, we can get some from a China House there and eat on a park bench.”

  “We go to New York, we’re not eating on a park bench.”

  “I’m just kidding. I’ll take you someplace fancy. A fancy place for my girl.”

  “You’re so good to me. I was starting to wonder if Chinese take-out was going to be the most expensive food we ever had again.”

  “I said I’ll take care of it. I’ll show you the town.”

  “So when are you going to take me?”

  “Soon.”

  “Soon?”

  “Yeah, soon. I won’t let you down.”

  ***

  Me and my big mouth. Even with paying Carrie two hundred dollars a month in rent to help defray the costs of my staying there so much, plus all the other money I spent on her, I had paid off the garage, and then went out and bought a Honda Civic, and put a one-thousand-dollar stereo system in, slapping it on my new credit card. I hadn’t factored in the cost on insurance and local taxes, so I was looking at a cash crunch again, particularly because my mom had also hit me up for a five-hundred-dollar loan to get her car rebuilt. Here I was working eighty hours a week, and I was barely scraping up enough to pay for take-out and a movie. How was I going to finance a New York trip?

  I could say that financial pressures drove me to crime, but it was more complicated that that. It was love and greed and youth, and plain not thinking things through.

  ***

  “463, man shot Martin and Capen on a one.”

  “463, copy.”

  “Wait for PD.”

  We arrived to find a near riot. The cops were trying to hold the crowd at bay while the man lay bleeding on the street corner.

  “Let’s get him on the board, and get out of here,” Tom said as we pulled up, and I did just as he said. As soon as the ambulance stopped rolling, I jumped out, ran around to the back, hauled out the stretcher, threw a board and collar on it, and came around to meet Tom, who had his hand shoved down the man’s mouth, as he digitally passed an ET tube. He grabbed the ambu bag, gave a couple squeezes, and said, “On the board and out of here.”

  The man was shot several times in the chest and wasn’t breathing. We lifted him on the board, put the board on the lowered stretcher and raced back to the ambulance. A second EMS unit had arrived so the other medic jumped in with Tom, and I hit the lights and sirens on, and we headed to Saint Francis.

  They did CPR in the back. Tom had me do the patch, and he’d taught me well. Short and sweet, he said.

  “Male, approximately eighteen to twenty, shot three times in chest, CPR in progress, four minutes out.”

  They worked him hard at the ER, getting pulses back briefly, and then losing them. They cracked his chest open so the doctor could massage his heart while they tried to fix the hole in it, but he was done for.

  I went back to the ambulance to begin the cleanup. The back was littered with IV wrappers, suction tubing, bloody trauma dressings, and the man’s Chicago Bulls jacket that had been cut off him. When I picked up the jacket with my gloved hands, a roll of cash fell out along with a couple dime bags of heroin.

  My first thought was the heroin. I imagined bringing that over to Carrie, saying, “Okay, woman, me and Mr. H are going to make you feel fine. I had heard that heroin gave you erections that lasted for days, and of how it turned women into love slaves.” But it was only a passing fantasy. You only need to work this job a week to see the destruction heroin does, turning people into skanks, their arms covered with track marks, their bodies wasted away by disease. Besides, I still heard Fred’s warning and the fact that he even had mentioned it, even if it might have been a joke, scared me straight off any possibility of even a sample.

  I wrapped the heroin up with the bloody dressings and put them all in a red biohazard bag. And then I picked up the bloody roll of money. I felt its heft. I slid off the elastic. The outer bills were a one and a couple twenties. Inside were all hundreds. There must have been two grand there easy. I looked around and saw no one but myself. I peeled off eleven unstained hundreds and stashed them in my pocket. I put the elastic back on the rest and placed the roll back in the jacket, which I brought into the trauma room.

  The room was empty now except for his body and the blood pooled on the floor. I didn’t feel too bad about taking his cash. It was drug money, and it wasn’t like he was going to be needing it where he was heade
d. You can’t buy off the worms.

  Chapter 17

  Carrie and I caught the 6:00 a.m. Amtrak to New York. She slept most of the way down. I had to nudge her a couple times when she started to snore. The train was filled with business people. She woke up outside of Stamford, and I went to the cafe car and got her some coffee and a Danish. I was too excited to eat. The only time I had been out of Connecticut before was to go down to Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island for senior skip day in high school. While the ocean was amazing, it was nothing compared to what I was seeing outside the window now as we approached New York City. Though I worked Hartford’s city streets, I felt like a country hick. There were no mountains or hilltops or parks, just streets and buildings, endlessly to the horizon, streets and buildings as vast as the ocean. It made me feel like a grain of sand in the desert. Carrie read her Cosmopolitan beside me. I put my hand on her leg, but continued to stare at the new world I saw before me.

  When we stepped out of Penn Station, I felt like I was in a TV movie. If I had had a hat I’d have thrown it in the air, and spun around in circles like Mary Tyler Moore on that old show I used to watch with my mom. The city bustle, street vendors, taxis, skyscrapers, it was the big time. Carrie had been before, so it was nothing to her, but to me, it represented something significant, a turning point, a broadening of my world.

  “You want to impress a chick,” Tom told me, “you take her to New York City for the day. She’ll never look at you the same afterwards.”

  He mapped out a complete itinerary for me. “This is the Tom Spencer guaranteed-to-keep-her-legs-open-to-you tour. I have used this or variations of this tour on three separate women and every one of them I could call up right now, and tonight, I’d be hearing their happy-time moans, and having them cook me steak and eggs for breakfast.”

  “You know where you’re going?” Carrie said. “You look lost. I wish you’d tell me what you have planned.”

  “Leave it up to me,” I said. “I’ve got it all under control.” I stepped to the curb. “Taxi!” I called.

  I held the door for Carrie, and then slid in beside her. “The Museum of Modern Art,” I said.

  She looked at me, as she would often that day, with wonder, as if she was seeing a side of me for the first time, and it was causing her to reassess me in a most positive way. Her grip tightened on my arm.

  “Now when you go to a museum,” Tom had told me, “the last thing you want to do is wander around aimlessly from room to room. After a while you’re tired, bored and everything looks the same and you wonder why you even went in the first place other than to just say you’ve gone. Here’s what you do. You go see one painting—one famous memorable painting. And if you’re going to the Museum of Modern Art—that painting is Vincent van Gogh. Starry Starry Night. You show her that painting and you tell about how van Gogh was this haunted young man, tortured by all his feeling for the world, who eventually killed himself, but how this painting captured the beauty of his vision, and then you sing a few lines of the song ‘Starry, Starry Night’ in her ear, and tell her that that song is about van Gogh and this painting. And she will melt. This whole trip is going to be like she is on Let’s Make a Deal, and she thought you were this little booby prize box, but then Monty lifts the box up, and inside the box is a sign that says ‘Door Number 3.’ And up comes door number three and it’s this great prize, and the prizes and surprises keep coming. At the end of the day, she is going to want to have your baby.”

  She loved the painting—the blues and yellows and oranges and swirls. She had actually seen pictures of the painting before, but to actually see it in person was another thing. “It’s so rich and alive,” she said.

  “It’s worth millions of dollars,” I said. “It’s priceless.”

  “Duh,” she said, though she squeezed my hand, then added, “I had no idea you loved van Gogh.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” I said, “but there is plenty of time to learn,” and I squeezed her hand back.

  At the gift shop, I bought her a scarf with the painting on it as a memento.

  “We’ll come back here again another time,” I said, “but now we have someone waiting for us outside just up the block.”

  I led her out, and we walked up to 59th Street where, just as Tom said, there was a waiting horse and carriage. For thirty-four dollars, we got a twenty-minute ride through Central Park. The only problem was the horse stunk, but Carrie was still in such a good mood that when the horse farted, she laughed and said, “I feel like I’m right at home. What is he, your brother?”

  “Hey, yours don’t smell like roses,” I said. “Let’s be fair.”

  I gave the guy a five dollar tip, then said, “Time for the highlight of our trip.”

  “Why does that give me dread?”

  “We’re going to the famous umbrella room for lunch.”

  “The umbrella room?”

  “Yes, noted for its fine cuisine. People come from all over the world to eat at the umbrella room.” We were standing on the street corner, and I pulled out my wallet and said to the hot dog vendor, “A hot dog for me and one for the missus, with the works.”

  “This is the umbrella room?” she said, looking at the green umbrella over the man’s cart. “You brought me to New York to come here?”

  “You go to New York, you’ve got to try the local tube steaks,” I said, handing her the steaming hot dog covered with relish, mustard and onions. “Fake out,” I said. “Dinner’s coming later. Eat up, we have another appointment.”

  We caught another cab and I took her to a salon on 7th Avenue, where I had made an appointment for her to have a massage, facial and pedicure. “I’ll be back to pick you up in two hours,” I said. “Don’t worry, it’s all paid for.”

  And the farting horse and the tube steak were forgotten. I winked at her as I went out the door.

  While she had herself primed and beautified, I went to an arcade and played Doom for a couple hours. On my way out I saw one of those old-fashioned gunslinger machines, where you put your fifty cents in and have to outdraw the cowboy. I killed him on the first draw. “Aww, you got me,” he said. “There must have been sand in my eyes.”

  And for a moment I thought about the sponsor of our trip, the nineteen-year-old drug dealer who’d caught a round in the heart. I wondered if maybe there had been sand in his eyes. I touched my chest and pointed to the ceiling, then nodded. “Thank you, brother,” I said.

  We had an early dinner at a French restaurant, where the waiter poured a small amount of wine in my glass, and I did as Tom had told me, swirled it around, sniffed it and then tasted it. “Very good,” I said to the waiter. “Most excellent!”

  He nodded his happiness at my approval and he poured Carrie’s glass, then filled mine.

  The highlight of the trip for me was the next cab ride, when I got in, and the driver looked back at me for direction, and I looked at Carrie and smiled, then simply said, “42nd Street, Broadway!” and when the driver still looked at me, I added, “The New Amsterdam Theatre.”

  “We’re going to a show?” Carrie asked, her face lighting up.

  “Indeed we are, my little lion princess,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  And then to see her face when she looked up at the dazzling marquee, The Lion King, was to recognize the possibility to escape any burden that could hold a soul down. What joy we are all capable of.

  So we were in the balcony and not on the orchestra floor, but she held me the entire show, often looking in my face with delight. When we walked out of the theatre, she had a bounce in her step and was singing “Hakuna Matata,” and even got me to join in.

  We had an hour to kill before the last train left. She held my arm and leaned against my shoulder as we strolled. With her sweet scent filling my dreams, I believed we would find happiness together as bright as those Broadway marquees.

  Chapter 18

  I was over at Carrie’s ho
use five nights a week, and every Sunday was Timmy and Carrie Day. We were for the first time a couple in the public sense. She would hold my hand when we walked through the mall. We went to the parties at her friend’s houses, arriving and leaving together, and for my part, she kept a protective eye on me to make certain I’d didn’t flirt too much with her friends. I was always attentive to her, getting her a drink, or her coat before we left. She even talked about taking me to visit her mother in Massachusetts.

  I did what I could to maintain the post New York glow, and that meant taking Carrie to dinners and trips. We went down to Noank and had lobster at Abbot’s in the Rough and up to Springfield to eat at the Student Prince. I even took her on a trip to Boston where we went on the Swan Boats and saw a baseball game at Fenway Park.

  It did, of course, require that I supplement my income when I saw the opportunity. Instead of just taking dope, I needed cold hard cash. I didn’t steal from everyone. I was selective. I could only take from people who wouldn’t miss the money, and of course, I could only take it when no one else on the scene was looking.

  Drunks were my favorite target, provided they hadn’t already been rolled before I got to them. We’d toss a drunk on the stretcher, and I’d pat him down looking for bottles, weapons, any injuries or, in my case now, hidden cash. Once Tom would start driving to the hospital, I’d fish their wallet out on the pretense of getting their ID and medical information. A twenty here and a twenty there, and pretty soon, you’re talking real money. I preferred the high-class drunk—the businessman on a bender to the homeless drunk on the street. I took two hundred dollars off a stockbroker who was babbling about his wife trying to take everything off him in the settlement. Well, that was two hundred dollars she wasn’t going to get.

  One night we got called for a car that drove into a house. An old woman was watching reruns when a Ford pickup came barreling through her living room wall, stopping three feet from where she was sitting. We found the intoxicated driver still behind the wheel, honking his horn, and shouting, “Make way, coming through, coming through.” Once we got him out of the car and on our stretcher, he didn’t appear hurt. We were just taking him in as a precaution. Tom had me crawl back into the car to see if the steering column had been crumpled at all. As I was checking it, I saw on the floor, a bank envelope—the kind the drive-through teller gives you when you cash your paycheck. Three hundred sixty bucks. I figured, what did he need bar money for, he was going to be spending the next two weeks in detox.