by J. R. Helton
Back at our apartment one afternoon, I called and got Mercedes on the phone.
“I thought we’d stop by. Is there anything going on tonight?”
“Yes, of course. I love to see you,” she said, her accent in full force. “Oh, but could you come alone?”
I looked over at Susan. She was reading a magazine.
“Okay, sure.”
“I would like that, please.”
“Okay.”
I hung up and told Susan, “James wants me to come by myself.”
“That was James?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I guess they’re busy.”
“Hmm,” she said, staring at the magazine. “Okay, well, goodbye.”
“Are you mad?”
“About what?”
“Nothing. I’ll be back.”
I got in the LTD, drove up Lamar and down Enfield to West Austin. I stopped in front of the house, went up to the door, and rang the bell. I noticed the Chrysler was gone. Mercedes opened the door. She was wearing a white cotton dress. Her black hair was wet and she was combing it back. “Oh, come in,” she said coolly.
She walked around the couch, down the hall, into her bedroom, combing her wet hair forcefully. “What did you want?” she asked.
“I wanted to pick up an eighth.”
“You’re already through with the other one?”
“I’ve got a little left.”
“You’re not selling this stuff are you?”
“No, it’s all for me.”
“I’d really hate that.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She opened the drawer and looked at me. “Well . . .”
“Yes?”
“Where’s the money?” she said impatiently.
“Oh, here.” I handed her 300 dollars.
She gave me a packet and said, “You know, we give you a good deal. Nobody else gets a deal on such good coke. Not even Mike.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“James is gone right now.”
“Oh yeah?”
“He’s meeting with this man from Chicago who wants to start a club in Austin.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. We’re going out this evening.”
“Where are you going?”
“We’re flying up to Fort Worth. There’s an opening at the Kimball, an old friend.”
“Susan likes to go to the Kimball.”
“Does she?”
“Whenever she’s in Fort Worth.”
“What takes her there?”
“She has an aunt there. Aunt Odessa.”
“Odessa.”
“Yep.”
Mercedes moved up close to me and picked something up off of the dresser. “Isn’t this strange?” she asked.
The object she held looked like a replica of a medieval weapon. A long chain was attached to a dark wooden handle. At the end of the chain, there was a small metal ball with spikes all over it. Mercedes held the ball in her hand and ran her thin fingers over the spikes. “What do you think they used this for?” she asked.
“I guess to kill people.”
“I guess so. You never know.”
She sat down on the large bed and immediately got up and put on a record, what else, but Julio Iglesias. She turned the volume up loud and sat down on the bed. I sat down next to her. She lightly ran her fingers through my hair and down my face.
“You’re handsome,” she said.
“You’re beautiful.”
“Do you think so?”
I kissed her on the lips.
“I’ve wanted to fuck you and your wife since I first saw you,” she said.
I was quiet.
“Did Susan tell you about me?”
“No.”
She was surprised. “She didn’t?”
“No.”
“My life’s been a tragedy. I’m sure she told you that.”
“She might have mentioned it.”
“Don’t fuck with me.”
“Okay, sorry.”
She ran her long fingernails along the back of my neck and chills went down my spine.
“You think I’m fucking James don’t you?” she asked.
“I don’t know why you would.”
“I used to fuck James a long time ago, but that’s over now. You know he can’t even get it up? He’d kill me if he knew I told you that. He thinks he’s some sex master. I told Susan, too.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not fucking Mike either.”
“Uh-huh.”
She started kissing my neck and undoing the buttons on my shirt. “I’m tired of them both . . .” She slid off the bed onto her knees in front of me. She undid my pants, pulled out my dick, and started licking the head slowly.
“You have an attractive wife.”
“Thanks.”
Mercedes stood up and pulled off her white dress. She moved up to me and I saw Susan had been lying about Mercedes shaving herself. I pulled her toward me and slowly kissed the thick mound of black hair in the wide gap between her legs. She moved away and lay on her back on the bed. I stood up and took off my clothes. Mercedes reached under a pillow and pulled out a white cylindrical object. “I’m sure you know what this is,” she said.
“A foot massager?”
“Something like that. I’m going to turn it on and put it right here.”
She spread her legs and I got up between them on the bed and watched her work the white vibrator around and into herself while I slowly jacked myself off. “Hold it for me,” she said.
While I held it, she raised her left leg over my head and turned over on her stomach. I kept the vibrator just inside of her.
“Oh be careful, hold it still,” she said. “There’s some Vaseline on the table. Get some.”
I reached over to the nightstand and got a dollop of Vaseline out of the open jar.
“You want me to put this in your asshole?”
She hunched up and down on the vibrator. “Yes, yes, put your fingers in my ass.”
I worked one finger, and then two, three into her ass while her hips moved slowly up and down. Her head was sideways on the pillow and she looked back at me.
“You know, I’ve haven’t had a man’s cock in my pussy since I was seventeen years old.”
I said nothing.
“I want you to fuck me now.”
She grabbed the vibrator from underneath her and moved it around on her own. I straddled her ass and slowly got inside of her. We started fucking and it went on for a long time while I tried to hold back. Just when my knees were about to give out, she started shuddering and shaking and getting very loud, almost drowning Julio out, and I came into her ass. I pulled out and fell down beside her. She cut off the vibrator and we laid still. She turned over and faced me and I kissed her for about thirty seconds until she pulled away and said, “Hand me that mirror.”
I sat up and grabbed a square mirror off the bedside table. There was a small mound of white powder on it, a razor blade, and a silver straw. Mercedes did out two big lines and snorted one. She handed me the mirror, the silver straw, and I did the other line. I stood up and put on my pants. Mercedes sat up and leaned back against the wall. She stretched her legs out and pointed at the TV.
“Could you turn that on when you leave? I can’t find the remote.”
“Sure.”
I finished dressing, turned Julio off, and the TV on.
“Wait, wait,” Mercedes said, “put it on Cinemax.”
“Which one’s Cinemax?”
“Fourteen.”
I turned the sele
ctor to fourteen and looked at Mercedes. She lay still, naked and thin, her black pubic hair standing out starkly against her pale skin. She stared at the TV.
“See you, Mercedes.”
“Ciao.”
I let myself out, got into the LTD, and drove home.
Susan and I were sitting on the floor doing some coke off of our cardboard boxes/dining room table. I held Susan’s hair back and she did a line.
“We’re running out of money,” she said.
“I know. We’ve barely got any left.”
“Do we have enough for next month’s rent?”
“Yeah, but not much more.”
“We got a high electric bill today.”
“Yeah?”
“They’re gonna cut it off.”
“Well, shit . . .” I did another line. We sat there and watched the silent TV. I had CNN on with the volume down. I saw hundreds of people standing on one end of the street throwing rocks and bottles. On the other end, marching toward them, were hundreds of soldiers wearing black helmets and carrying rifles and shields. They had a big machine in the middle of their phalanx that was shooting tear gas canisters rapid-fire.
“I started looking in the classifieds for another job,” Susan said.
“Did you find anything?”
“Actually, I did.”
“What?”
“It’s a job working for the paper in the classified department.”
“Do you have to have experience?”
“No, they train you. It doesn’t pay very much.”
“I guess I need to ask for a raise. Or pick up a paint job on my own.”
“We need money soon. I’ll go apply tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll need a ride.”
“Okay.”
I pulled out a Pall Mall and lit it. I’d started smoking more since it enhanced the rush of cocaine and our supply was dwindling. Susan lit a Winston Light and we lay still on the mattress and smoked.
I took Susan down to the Austin American Statesman and she applied for the job selling ads and got it. That night, we ran out of coke and got in a fight. I wanted to go over to James and Mercedes’ house.
“We don’t have any money,” Susan said.
“We can get a gram.”
“We cannot afford it.”
“Come on, why are you being this way?”
“Because this is serious; we have no money.”
“We’ll get some money.”
“You’re not being realistic.”
“I bet you’ll do it if I bring it back.”
“I really don’t give a damn what you do.”
“Yeah, sure you don’t. Come on, let’s go.”
“I’m not going with you. I’m sick of James and Mercedes. I don’t even like to look at them anymore.”
“Well, I don’t like them either but . . .”
“They sell a lot of coke, way too much.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going back there.”
“Fine.”
I went down to the LTD and drove over to James and Mercedes’s place. I parked in their driveway and walked across the lawn. The big steel-lined door was off its hinges and laying in the front yard. The steel was twisted and bent and splinters of wood were scattered over the sidewalk. Someone must have taken a sledgehammer or axe to it. I looked in the open doorway and rang the bell. No answer. I walked into the foyer and saw that the living room had been trashed. Everything was overturned, the glass coffee table broken, pictures ripped off the walls. I expected to find James and Mercedes in a pool of blood, chopped up and dead. Instead, I found James in the kitchen opening a package of Stouffers frozen lasagna. He jumped when he saw me and started licking his lips.
“What do you want?”
“I was wondering if anything was going on.”
“What’s it look like?”
“What happened to your door?”
“Hell if I know . . . but uh, whoever did it, didn’t take a thing.”
“Nothing?”
“They just took the coke out and laid it in different places. They took it out of the dresser and put it on top of the dresser, things like that.” He put the lasagna in the microwave and turned on the timer. He stared at me. “Well?”
“What?”
“What do you want?”
“I wanted to get a gram.”
“Sorry, I can’t help you.”
“You can’t?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Come on, James, I thought they didn’t take anything.”
“I can’t help you.”
I looked around the messy kitchen. I watched James raising his eyebrows and licking his lips. He had plenty of coke and, for just a second, I thought of taking it. Kick him in his fat ass, break his fucking neck, and take his coke. But then, I thought, maybe it’s not his coke. Maybe it’s some crazy Bolivian’s coke and he’ll come after me with a chainsaw.
“Where’s Mercedes?”
James looked at me. His eyes were blank. His teeth moved back and forth, grinding together.
“Who’s the lasagna for?”
“Uh . . . I’m going to eat it.”
“Where’s Mercedes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, you can tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she just leave for a little while or—”
“I said I don’t know where the fuck she is!”
“And you can’t help me.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Well, what the fuck am I standing here for?”
“I have no idea.”
“Goodbye James.”
He stood motionless, silently staring at the humming microwave. I walked out of the house and drove home.
-6-
Cocaine was everywhere in Texas in the 1980s due to Ronald Reagan’s war against the people of Nicaragua. Reagan and Bill Casey had created and trained a ruthless, terrorist army, mostly from the ranks of the former dictator Somoza’s military, the Somozistas, otherwise known as the Contras, or the “Freedom Fighters” if you really bought the bullshit. The US Congress had forbidden Reagan then to run this war, so US planes flew illegal shipments of weapons south to Central America, dropped them off, and then these same planes returned to the states loaded down with cocaine for financing. A large amount of it came right through the state of Texas.
After Mercedes and James, I easily found us another connection through work. Susan and I did cocaine off and on for another year, what little money we had going to the drug. We did much smaller amounts and tried to stretch it out but it doesn’t work that way with coke. If you have a party with six people doing coke off the coffee table, no matter what else you do, at the end of that night, everyone will be sitting together around that coffee table waiting impatiently for their turn at a line, watching with disappointment as the white mound of powder slowly disappears. When we were truly beyond broke and could no longer borrow from anyone or hock anything, I ended up not doing any significant amounts of the drug for several years. This wasn’t by choice. I just didn’t have the money. I had been doing quite a bit every other day for months and months but felt no real withdrawal symptoms beyond a simple psychological craving. My body was fine without it.
Crystal methamphetamine—or speed, crank, peanut butter; it goes by any number of names—is a cheap upper high. Because it is so much cheaper than coke, it functions then as the poor man’s powder cocaine, much like crack does. Made with some of the harshest chemicals around, like MEK, a powerful paint stripper, crank burns your nostrils and wreaks havoc on your body with prolonged use. After a very brief initial euphoric high f
rom snorting a small bump or shooting it up, it wears off quickly leaving only anxiety and nervous energy for hours.
I began to notice that Susan was coming home from work every day wound up for hours. She’d smoke, talk, fidget, and move. I was usually quiet and depressed. I’d spend all day on a construction site only to come home every evening and fill the apartment up with cigarette smoke, staring at CNN and watching old movies on video. I was now heavily, physically dependent on nicotine, smoking not only over a pack of Pall Malls or Lucky Strikes a day, but dipping Copenhagen or chewing plug as well. Susan and I talked until twelve at night until I had to go to bed in order to get up at six a.m. and drive to north Austin. I was drinking beer or wine also and smoking pot. I usually passed out easily by midnight, but Susan stayed right on up. I never knew when she went to sleep, and there was no coke around. I had to wonder . . .
I figured it out when her new friend Norma started coming by. She was a nice person, friendly, well read, had worked at the paper for years. When she came over after work, she and Susan sat on the floor by the cardboard boxes, talked, smoked, and made things. Norma had all these little things—pens, colored pencils, decals, stars, sequins, beads, buttons—that she kept in little plastic packets that she then put in containers that were placed in small zipper bags that were in boxes that were in purses and she took every last one of these things out and spread them around our living room. She and Susan then proceeded to put these things together in some form, making jewelry and knick-knacks late into the night. When I got up in the morning, they’d still be at it, the room solid with smoke. Something was obviously helping them get through the long, tedious hours of work.
I’d been out of coke for weeks. I asked Norma and Susan one night if I could have some of what they were doing.
“I thought you didn’t like speed,” Susan said.
“I don’t really, but it’s been a while.”
