Heroin Chronicles

by Jerry Stahl

  “I know that, but what foundry would cast these for him?”

  “I can answer that,” a new voice said.

  The two looked around to find three newcomers, two men in sport coats and slacks, flanking a slender woman in a loose top, white jeans, and heels. She wore a feathered and beaded Mardi Gras eye mask. The two men had on pedestrian ski masks. One of the men, slimmer than the other, pointed a semiauto pistol-grip shotgun at Grayson. A slight wind blew but the couple didn’t notice the breeze.

  “How’d you know to find us here?” Grayson asked.

  The shotgun man snorted. “Like that purple car is hard to follow.”

  “What you need to worry about,” the woman interjected, “is how you’re going to pace yourself loading my goods.” There was a trace of an accent in her voice.

  The smile below her mask was brittle, like a robot trying to be chummy. Grayson, who figured she was the one in the wide-brimmed hat at the auction, noted a mole to the left of her plump lips. The lines on her face indicated a woman of some years, though clearly fit.

  The shotgun still on Grayson, the stockier thug retrieved a white van and backed it close to the loot. He opened the rear swing doors. Resigned, Grayson and Fleming loaded the ingots into the rear cargo area. There were 124 bars.

  “Now what?” Grayson said, using the heel of his hand to wipe sweat from his brow. The temperature had risen past the mid-eighties.

  “Now we say bye-bye,” the woman answered triumphantly.

  Fleming was standing near the rear of the van, at an angle to the shotgun holder. She rushed at the man, hoping to tackle him and relieve him of his weapon. But he was a pro and wasn’t rattled.

  “Back that ass up, you big bitch,” he said, clubbing her with the pistol-grip end of the shotgun.

  Fleming went down heavy.

  “Mora!” Grayson blared, rushing to aid her. The larger hood produced a stun device and jammed it against Grayson’s neck. He convulsed and spittle coated his lips as he too dropped to the ground on his knees. A second jolt toppled him and he lay twitching, his muscles unresponsive to his commands. He wet himself.

  “That’s a cherry ride you got, bro,” the one who’d shocked him said. “I’ll look good driving that bad boy.” The hood removed the keys from Grayson’s pocket, easily knocking aside the other man’s hand in his feeble attempt to stop the thug.

  “Is that necessary?” the woman said.

  “It’s a perk, baby,” the man shot back. He and the shotgunner laughed harshly. The woman said something in Spanish, and the three left in the two vehicles.

  Mora Fleming moaned and rolled onto her side. She then got herself up and helped Grayson to his feet.

  “That was exciting,” she said dryly.

  “How’re you feeling?” Tenderly, he placed the flat of his hand on the side of her face.

  She touched the back of her head. “Some painkillers and intravenous tequila ought to remedy the situation.”

  He looked beyond her. “I hate getting beat,” he declared. “Not to mention, that was a serious haul of gold. And that bastard took my car.”

  “Maybe we should be happy to be alive, Chuck.”

  He had an odd smile on his face when he addressed her. It wasn’t an expression she’d seen before. “Maybe they shouldn’t have left me alive.”

  Despite him just standing there with the front of his jeans dark from urine, Fleming got nervous.

  There were hardly any photos of Frank Matthews aside from booking shots. But Grayson found one of him at a club in Harlem taken by the black-owned Amsterdam News, as the white press at that point didn’t know who he was. Using a magnifying glass, Grayson studied the picture that showed Matthews smoking a cigar, holding court with a tableful of cohorts. Because it was a close-in shot, not all the faces were distinct. He wonderd if there were other shots from the club.

  Via the online records of the New York Public Library, Grayson was able to narrow his possibles to two photographers who worked for the News then and who might have taken the uncredited shot. One was dead, and the other, Tim “Cheaters” Pleasy, was still alive. He was seventy-six and taught an extension photography class in Sarasota. Grayson promptly got him on the phone.

  “Yeah,” Pleasy said after the exchange of pleasantries, his voice clear and young sounding. “Ol’ Frank fancied himself the big shot all right. Passing out twenties to the kids on the streets like free lunch, buying color TVs for the senior center … Yeah, he was something.”

  Grayson let the old timer drone on some, then asked, “You remember a shot you might have taken of him at the Montreaux Club? Him at a table of people having a good time?” He described the scene in further detail.

  “Naw, young man, that don’t ring no bell,” Cheaters Pleasy said. “I’d bet Garmes took that shot.” Davis Garmes was the deceased photographer.

  “Any idea where his outtakes got to? He have family? I wanted to see if he had other shots showing the faces clearly.”

  “You sure seem to want to go through a lot for your book,” Pleasy observed.

  “I might have an uncle in that shot, and I want to know for certain,” he lied.

  “I got you,” the older man said. “I’ll check on that and will get back to you. I might know where some of his old photos went.”

  “That would be great, Mr. Pleasy.”

  It didn’t take the photographer long, as he and the late Garmes had stayed in touch. He was able to locate the man’s photos left in the possession of an ex-wife he also knew. Garmes’s photos were in various film boxes designated by years. She found two other shots Garmes had taken that night, had them scanned, and eventually they reached Grayson via e-mail.

  “There she is,” Grayson said to Fleming. They sat at his kitchen island. He tapped the magnifying glass against his opposite hand. “That beauty mark, mole, whatever you want to call it, gives her away. She’s at the table here with Matthews.”

  Fleming folded her arms. “And she’s the one playing Madam Satan in those two pornos he produced?”

  “Yep. Jackie Salvo, but that’s an alias.”

  Fleming frowned. “Okay, let’s say you find out her real name, which isn’t hard, then what?”

  “Get our shit back.”

  She put a hand on his. “Darling, we go see action-adventure movies and read comic books. But unfortunately, I’m not Wonder Woman and you aren’t the Punisher.”

  He winked. “But we’ve role-played them.”

  “I’m serious, Chuck. This woman ain’t playing.”

  “We’ve handled guns,” he countered.

  “Shooting targets at a firing range isn’t the same thing as blasting a human being, and you know it. We might be geekazoids but we’re solid citizens, baby. We pay taxes, have businesses, homes—in other words, unless you’re willing to give all that up, I say drop this.”

  “Let me just identify her. Just that, for my own satisfaction.”

  She folded her arms again, a questioning look to her. “Don’t think you’re slick.”

  “Me? Never.”

  Finding out the real name of a woman who starred in two X-rated cult movies from the ’70s was easier than buttoning a shirt. Once he had that information, Grayson was able to document the up-and-down career of Pilar Ortega Renaud De La Fontana. She’d gained notoriety back then from the Madam Satan films and graduated to starring in a few grade-C horror and sci-fi movies. She had some TV roles too, and in the ’90s hosted a cable access show where she made smart-ass remarks and one-liners throughout whatever turkey she was showing.

  Naturally, there were a couple of fan clubs devoted to her among nerd-dom, and getting an address for the woman wasn’t too tough either, given Grayson knew who to ask what. At a coffee shop on Olympic Boulevard, he met with a man who De La Fontana twice had imposed a restraining order against.

  “It’s not like I meant her any harm,” said Fred Summerville, an underemployed box store clerk. He nibbled on the second Rice Krispies treat Grayson
had bought him.

  Grayson sized up Summerville as the type who got off on some peep action, and heaven would be sniffing De La Fontana’s panties. But he said, “I feel you, man, where would these celebs be if it wasn’t for us keeping their names out there?”

  “Exactly,” Summerville agreed happily, bits of his treat exploding from his mouth.

  More commiserating included Summerville warning Grayson about a fifty-some-odd-old boyfriend of De La Fontana named Boris who’d done time for strong arm robbery. He didn’t know the last name of this bruiser, but what the restraining orders couldn’t do, Boris had done when he’d come into Summerville’s store and calmly broken his hand.

  “I stayed away after that,” the former stalker stated flatly, looking down.

  The $150 in cash Grayson offered elevated the man’s mood and produced an address. She lived in a modest Craftsman in East Hollywood not too far from the large Kaiser medical facility on Sunset and Vermont.

  On the second night of his stakeout in his Leaf, Grayson saw the Mustang arrive and a stocky man in his fifties exit the vehicle and enter the house.

  Fleming was right. Grayson wasn’t about to storm in there armed with an AK, a bandanna tied around his head, demanding the gold and his car back. But he’d be damned if he was going to get taken advantage of and not do something. Driving back to Santa Monica, he came up with a plan and discussed it with his girlfriend the next day in her office.

  “Oh, man,” she said finally. “That’s a shitty idea, Chuck.”

  “It could work.”

  “Or we could spend several years in prison, if we don’t get killed. And if it’s the former, I couldn’t stand the thought of a booty bandit wearing out that fine ass of yours.”

  “Good to know,” he said. “Anyway, it’s not we, just me.”

  “Bullshit. He’s my patient and you’re not doing this without my help. Besides, I don’t want you going to the next con talking about how I pussied out on you.”

  They both grinned broadly.

  Grayson wanted to obtain a kilo of black tar heroin—those tense opening teasers of many a Miami Vice of cool crooks and sweating undercover cops flashing through his mind. He owned the complete box set on DVD. But trying to buy that kind of weight also meant making connections beyond Fleming’s patient. And this meant gaining the acquaintance of certain individuals who’d cut out your intestines and sell them back to you as a scarf. So he settled for two small glassine packets with a blue devil head stenciled on them.

  The patient Fleming was treating for back alignment problems was very much into holistic health and organic foods, which he gladly talked about extensively. Yet when you work on a person’s body up close and personal like she did, the conversing invariably covered a lot of territory—like one’s past.

  Todd Jessup, the patient, had been a pharmacist who got hooked on the drugs he dispensed. He lost his license and in his descent, encountered various unsavory individuals. He’d subsequently rebuilt his life, and it took some coaxing but he came up with a few contacts from the bad old days. Thereafter, Grayson and Fleming bought the blue devil packets from a hard-ass runaway teenager working for her pusher-pimp boyfriend in the Valley. The one-time pharmacist verified the authenticity of the packets’ contents.

  Staging the accident came next. Boris no-last-name was driving the Mustang back to De La Fontana’s house from the Vons supermarket, blasting the Eagles on the aftermarket CD unit. Grayson almost cried as he purposely bashed his Leaf into the left front fender of the classic vehicle. Boris was out in a shot, yelling.

  “The fuck is wrong with you, man? You blind or something? Hey, it’s you,” he said, recognizing Grayson.

  “Your mama’s blind, bitch,” Grayson responded.

  Boris rushed over and Grayson jabbed him in the face without hesitation. This earned him a left to the stomach and a right to the chin. He was younger than Boris by more than twenty years, but the other man was far more experienced with his fists.

  “What, figured you’d try and get your car back, punk? Well come on.”

  He laughed and again hit Grayson, who rocked back; he ducked the next blow but the inevitable was upon him. A crowd gathered, cheering the combatants. By the time the motorcycle cop arrived, there was a cell phone video of Grayson getting his ass kicked up on YouTube. Though at one point, down on all fours, Grayson had managed to get ahold of his tormentor’s calf and bite through his pant leg. A couple of people watching clapped at that.

  As Boris Stallings had no paperwork for the Mustang, nor proof of insurance, the car was impounded and searched. Stallings was arrested for possession of heroin, planted under the floor mat on the passenger side by Mora Fleming as her boyfriend took his beatdown. The door had been locked, but when Grayson got the car he’d been given two sets of keys. She’d argued she should be the one to plow into the Mustang as she felt she could handle herself better against Stallings.

  “Dammit, woman, you’ve already seen me piss myself. What pride do I have left?” Grayson had said.

  She’d kissed him. “A man must do what he must do.”

  It took a week to recuperate at home from his encounter with Stallings. His face was still tender. The Santa Monica PD notified Grayson about his car once LAPD contacted them. Grayson told the police he had been in the area to shop at Skylight Books and was shocked to see the Mustang that had been jacked from him the week before. He’d lost control of the car and that’s when this horrible Stallings person went wild on him.

  He also saw on the news that De La Fontana had been found shotgunned to death in her house, though no ingots were mentioned. A known associate of Stallings was said to be a person of interest.

  Among the online fan club there was talk that De La Fontana had family ties to one of Frank Matthews’s South American financiers. It was speculated that she and Mathews had been romantically linked at one point. There was also a rumor about her being the mistress at age seventeen of a general who’d absconded with treasures from his country’s coffers.

  In a chat room, Grayson read the suggestion that maybe she’d done Matthews in after he ripped her off, and that she must have been on the hunt for the gold for a long time. But her killing him didn’t make sense, since she would have needed him alive to reveal where the gold was hidden. Though could be she got carried away having him worked over, someone else offered, and so it went, back and forth. All this merely conjecture among her fans.

  Grayson got the Mustang repaired and painted a sedate color. Now and then behind the wheel, Mora Fleming humming to an oldie on the radio beside him, he wondered whatever became of Black Caesar’s gold.

  ANTONIA CRANE is the only person from Humboldt County who doesn’t smoke or grow weed. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the Rumpus, Black Clock, Slake, PANK, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She wrote a memoir about her mother’s illness and the sex industry, SPENT, and is currently seeking representation for that memoir. She teaches incarcerated teenage girls creative writing in Los Angeles. For more information, visit antoniacrane.com.

  sunshine for adrienne

  by antonia crane

  The first man who raped her went blind. Her mom called with the news.

  “That handsome football player you dated got eye cancer in both eyes,” she said.

  Adrienne heard chewing and the wet slurp of Nicorette gum. Her ma chewed two or three pieces at a time and when they lost flavor, she rolled the spit stones into gray balls and stuck them to the kitchen counter. The orange cat knocked them onto the floor and batted them around.

  “You mean Terry?” Adrienne’s asshole clenched. Ma didn’t know. All the girls at St. Julian’s High School swooned over Terry’s tanned wide receiver chest and tennis legs. She heard something being chopped on a cutting board with a steady whack, whack, whack.

  “He’s blind as a bat. His poor mother.” The chopping got faster and faster and more precise. She could slice a carrot into paper-thin pieces in le
ss than thirty seconds. She hated cooking.

  “She’s a nut job, Amy!” her father hollered in the background. A cupboard door slammed shut. She heard the refrigerator door make a sucking sound as it opened.

  Adrienne found her prework hit and bent spoon in the top drawer of her dresser, but no lighter. She rummaged around in another drawer where she last saw it and found ticket stubs from a show her father took her to when she graduated high school. It was the Della Davidson Dance Company’s Ten p.m. Dream, an interpretation of Alice in Wonderland. They’d nibbled calamari beforehand next door. Her football-watching, beer-drinking father even sported a silky burgundy tie that matched her favorite red skirt. She’d taken her father’s elbow as he led her to the front row, so close she felt the dancers’ abdominal muscles vibrate and their snaky necks glisten and strain. She watched them as he watched the music pulse through her skin.

  He liked to look at her pictures of birds too. She’d started drawing turkeys, doves, and chickens when she was six years old with accidental skill. Her father couldn’t draw an Easter egg if there was a gun to his head. Where he lacked imagination, she swelled with it. Her talents delighted him and he bragged about her to his roofing buddies. “My daughter’s a genius,” he’d say while ripping off grubby tiles. He collected her bird drawings and stuck them to the refrigerator door, where they were held in place by 49er magnets.

  “Her only son. Can you imagine?” Ma’s voice matched the sucking thud the refrigerator door made when it closed.

  The thing being chopped was gone and in its place, her father’s voice: “Her loser son, still living at home at twenty-nine?” He grunted, which was the same as his laugh.

  Adrienne pictured him in his stretched white gym socks with a spaghetti noodle dangling from a fork, daring Ma to slap his hand away from her butt, which he pinched when he wasn’t yelling at the TV, drinking Coors Light, with their orange cat on the footstool. The skin on his hands matched his face: tanned, calloused, and flaking off from working outside in the wind, rain, and dense fog that made roofs wet and slippery. He fell off a ladder and sprained his ankle last year. It swelled like a grapefruit so he managed the office and bid jobs, and farmed out the labor to his friends.