The Cook Up

by D. Watkins

  “All’s clean, boss, and my God, she lookin’ pretty! Almost pretty as me!” Kruger said, tossing me the key.

  “Kruger, you ugly as two ugly motherfuckers but I love you, man!” I replied, giving him a handshake with a piece of crack balled up in a twenty-dollar bill.

  Kruger cleaned the shit out of my car; it smelled better than a pair of new sneakers. The paint looked wet and the sun hit my wheels from three different angles, blinding anyone who tried to make eye contact. I thought about buying some aftermarket rims, but those factory joints looked perfect.

  My favorite feature was the keyless entry. Not keyless as it hit a button and hop in, but keyless as in I didn’t need a key. The car came with a small black card that fit in my wallet. As long as I had the card on me, I could get in and drive the car without the key. James Bond shit.

  DINNER FOR REAL

  Soni lived with her parents in Washington Hill, a little co-op near Chapel Hill Projects where most of the guys I played basketball with came from. Her block was clean, every house was refaced with fresh red bricks, the steps were marble, and there were zero parking spots—everyone in that community owned a car. I hit her phone. “Hey, I’m outside.”

  “Okay, I’ll be right out!” she said. I whipped around her block and double-parked in front of her crib. Biggie’s Life After Death cranked. I dug through my CDs looking for some soul music. She’s a soulful woman; she didn’t want to hear Biggie. I couldn’t find anything and I saw her walking out, so I turned Biggie down to the lowest level.

  She was wearing multicolored African pants and big colorful bangles.

  “Wow! Nice car!” said Soni, hopping in. “Can I touch some buttons?” She was far more beautiful than I remembered, inside and out. Her energy took over my car.

  “Yeah, you can touch some buttons, but where you wanna eat?”

  “I don’t know, you pick a place. This was your idea! Just make sure it’s good. I’m small but I love food! Don’t get it twisted!”

  I ate corner-store chicken boxes or at Angie’s all of the time; I didn’t know anything about good restaurants. But I did remember that some of those dudes at Loyola used to talk about this place called Ruth’s Chris Steak House near Little Italy. If they ate there, it was probably nice and Soni would like it, so that was my choice.

  We breezed through east Baltimore, my huge car seats made us both look small. She turned up the radio. “Oh, you got Biggie Smalls on, Dee, okay!”

  “Cut it out! You like Big?”

  “Ten Crack Commandments” was on—she switched to “Notorious Thugs” and rapped every line word for word. I was really impressed. She caught me gazing, so I looked away. She giggled and spit every word from Biggie’s to Krayzie Bone’s verse. Who would’ve thought that this Badu-looking chick really loved Big—then I thought that Badu could probably spit Big’s lines as well, which is why you can’t judge a book. The song ended and she ran it back, and then again and again and again! I wasn’t impressed anymore.

  “Gah damn, Soni! Give Big a break!”

  We laughed as I pulled up. I tossed the valet guy the key and we rolled in. Some of the patrons looked at us funny—the dealer and the healer. They probably thought she was dropping me off at a mug shot photo shoot on her way back to Africa.

  “Welcome to Ruth’s Chris, do you have a reservation?”

  “Naw,” I said, “but let me get a table of two, please, and nothing near a bathroom.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, we only seat people with reservations, unless you’d like to sit in the bar area.”

  “No, Dee, we can go to another place, I hate the smell of liquor!” Soni said, pulling my hand.

  “Lemme talk to dude, give us five.” Soni walked to the ladies’ room. I told the dude that it was our first date and I couldn’t fuck up. I pointed to an empty section and said, “Look, I’ll give you a hundred fifty dollars if you can make this shit happen, right now.”

  We had great seats by the time she came back from the rest room.

  “That bathroom was gross. What did you say to that guy to get these seats?”

  “Nothing, I just told him that I was with the sweetest person in the world and asked him to look out.”

  She blushed while skimming the menu. “Okay, Dee, we should probably leave.”

  “What? What I say?”

  “These prices are too high for that bathroom to look like that! I don’t want you spending your money here! Can we please leave?”

  She looked serious, so I said fuck it and we bounced. When we hopped in the car and she said that the place made her nauseous and she didn’t want to eat anymore but we could kick it. I was hungry, but I didn’t give a shit—chilling with her was the prize. We pulled up in front of Federal Hill in downtown Baltimore and took a stroll. I found a bench that sat on top of the city; you could see everything from Canton to downtown and in between.

  “So is dealing a part-time thing for you or will it be forever?”

  I shrugged.

  “I think I like you but I won’t be with a dealer. Like what about the Dawson family? Some of you guys are the worst.”

  The Dawson family were all murdered on Eden Street. Their mom, Angela, kept calling the police because dudes was hustling in front of their crib. One of the guys from the crew heard she was the rat and threw a cocktail-bomb in her house, killing her, her husband, and her five children.

  “I’d never do anything like that! You can’t put me in that category! Those dudes were cowards!”

  She told me how her dad’s dealing and using had crushed their relationship. Drugs turned them from best friends to strangers. She said the car was nice and my clothes were nice and my smile was nice, but my job wasn’t, and if I wanted to be a part of her, I needed to consider a change.

  And dealing drugs and trash bags of cash didn’t seem important while we had that conversation. I didn’t think about drink, smoke, or pills the whole time I was around her. We just sat and talked until the sun came up.

  Right there a future with Soni seemed possible, like something that could really happen.

  WHAT THE FUCK IS RENAL DIALYSIS

  I walked in my crib around six a.m. and fell on the couch. Troy beat on my door five minutes later.

  “Yo, it’s 6:05, cut the light off in the hallway when you leave and twist that bottom lock.”

  “No, Dee, my old head. You gonna meet him today. Put these on.”

  Troy tossed a set of scrubs at me.

  “Are you fuckin’ serious?”

  I tossed them back. He caught them and shoved them in my chest, saying that I needed them just in case a machine broke and blood squirted all over the place.

  “Blood? Why the fuck would blood squirt on me?” I asked.

  “Because it’s a renal dialysis unit!”

  “What the fuck is renal dialysis!”

  Troy explained it as being a place where they treated people with kidney failure. I still didn’t get it so I Wikipediaed it.

  In medicine, dialysis is a process for removing waste and excess water from the blood, and is used primarily as an artificial replacement for lost kidney function in people with renal failure. Dialysis may be used for those with an acute disturbance in kidney function or progressive but chronically worsening kidney function therapy. Kidney injury is not usually reversible, and dialysis is regarded as a “holding measure” until a renal transplant can be performed, or sometimes as the only supportive measure in those for whom a transplant would be inappropriate.

  “So you mean to tell me that it’s like an oil change?”

  “Exactly, and that shit come from high blood pressure, diabetes, and all that shit niggas get, so we gotta watch what we eat on some real shit, man. Niggas be getting they toes chopped off and everything!” Troy said. My quick burst of knowledge on kidney failure had woken him up. After I told him a little about his job, he dropped all of this I’m an expert shit on me. Troy couldn’t have me knowing more about his job than him. I loved when my brot
hers flexed their smarts. I was mostly around people who only cared about a bunch of dumb stuff, dudes who were proud that they weren’t smart.

  “So what you do? They let you work with patients without being a college grad?”

  Troy whipped into a parking spot, explaining how he’s a reuse guy. A reuse guy basically takes the artificial kidneys (dialyzers) off of the patients’ machines, cleans them on an even more flashy machine, and then stores them so that they can be used by the patient again during their next treatment. Each dialyzer got fifteen to twenty-five uses and the patients were treated three times a week.

  “Damn, that’s a good job, Troy; why you wanna sell smack?” The clinic he worked at was nice from the outside. They had grass and a nice bench under a tree, plus there was a Subway sandwich store across the street. Girls with fat asses in tight nurse pants with elastic bottoms and Mickey Mouse print waved at Troy and walked in. I’d take this job over mine any day.

  “Dee, I make eight seventy-five a hour as a grown man.”

  “Damn. Okay, well yeah I forgot, let’s do this.”

  We walked through the double doors and around the back to the room where Troy processed the dialyzers. On the way, we passed a group of patients waiting in the lobby, mostly black and elderly. Troy’s room was neat and clean like him.

  “You wanna see what I do, Yo?”

  “Sure,” I said. Troy put on some latex gloves and opened a small fridge. He stuck his arm in and pulled out a bloody cylinder that was about twelve inches long.

  “This is a dialyzer, Yo. Watch this!” He screwed a tube of water to the cap and turned the faucet on. A pool of blood spilled out, almost filling the sink.

  “That’s fucking gross, man!” I said, taking two big steps back. “How in the fuck is it so much blood in there?” I couldn’t stop staring at the blood.

  “These are full of special fibers that hold a large amount of fluid—think about those dumbass paper towel commercials where one towel soaks up a ocean. This the real shit!” he said, taking the caps off of the dialyzer and washing some meaty chucks of fat off of the tips. Then Troy hooked it up to a machine and hit start.

  “Yo, I’ma go see if my old head here!”

  Troy left me in his office alone. I played on my phone until he came back in around five minutes later.

  “Yo, he here.”

  I followed Troy into the main section of the clinic where treatments occurred. Twenty patients reclined in huge beige chairs scattered all over the floor in a circle. Some laughed, some slept, some moaned. I walked past them and their identical set-ups—a tube of blood connected to their arms running into refrigerator-sized machines, flushing through the dialyzer and then circling back into their bodies.

  “Why they arms so fat?” I asked. Troy said that normal veins are too small to undergo this type of treatment so surgeons stuff their arms with huge fake ones called fistulas.

  “Troy, my boy!” said an old black guy tucked in the corner. His hat was Kangol and it draped over his small face. His skin was leather. He had two gold teeth, one on each incisor, and they shined brighter than the floors in the clinic. He was wearing a Rolex on the arm with the fistula.

  Troy introduced us. “This is Dee, Mr. Pete, he helping out with that thing.”

  We exchanged hellos and Mr. Pete said, “Boy, have a seat!” Instantly, he started rambling. One of those ladies in the scrubs walked by. “Baby, you in for it, his crazy self gonna talk your head off.” I didn’t care; I liked listening. I was always a listener.

  Pete said Troy was a stand-up guy. He said that people with open mouths had closed ears. He said the streets were as fucked up as his kidneys and lower back. He said crack fucked the game up but I’m on the tail end so I won’t make any real money anyway. He asked if I had lead-paint poisoning and I told him no. He said I probably did and just didn’t know it. “Everybody born in the eighties got lead!” He said fancy cars are dumb as the niggas who drive them. He said R & B is dead and rappers are crack babies. He asked what my mom did for a living. I couldn’t answer because he instructed me to get him some ice in the same breath. The nurse said, “No! He knows he can’t have ice!” He said come closer. I rolled forward and he said his kidneys don’t work but she knows his dick does. I gave him a pound. He kept going and going. He didn’t stop—race, class, religion, the streets, cops, sex, money. Three and half hours went by and I didn’t even know it. I left the clinic and headed back to Troy’s office as the nurse started to disconnect Mr. Pete from the machine.

  “Yo, he loves you!” Troy said, loading the sink with a bunch of bloody dialyzers.

  “How you figure that?” I said.

  “Because he didn’t ask you to leave, you’ll see. He’s gonna bless us. You should stop by sometime and see him too. He knows everything!”

  I said I would.

  THE GREEN HOUSE

  I love Nick. He’s a good brother, but—he was funky. He probably took as many showers as anybody else but he was still kind of funky. He’s that pudgy guy with rubbing thighs who sweats in all of his new clothes. Once a week I had to tell him to keep drugs out of the house and that his girlfriends were loud. They all spit when they talk and stomp when they walk. Sometimes my hallway smelled like fat sex. I didn’t want Soni to chill at this place, so I decided to grab a loft downtown. We had been kicking it for a while now spending all of our free time together and she even considered moving in with me. I had been wanting another place to live and the combination of my love and his funkiness gave me a reason to do something about it.

  I had enough money to move wherever I wanted to, but the Green House was on some real boss shit—like if I ever got snatched by the feds, this would be the place I’d want them to show on the news. My brother used to date a Nigerian nurse who lived in the building. I had only been there two or three times, but I always knew I’d grab a spot in that building once I got my dough up.

  And now my dough was up—really up—so I called the rental office and the lady invited me down. The building was located on Pratt Street, not too far from the Inner Harbor. A lot of doctors and healthcare providers in general lived in the building because the University of Maryland medical center was within walking distance. I greeted the rental agent with a handshake and asked to see her best unit. She said, “It’s nineteen hundred dollars a month.” I told her that I didn’t ask for a price, I asked to see the best unit. She turned red and instructed me to follow.

  The spot had wood floors, a billion-foot-high ceilings, and spiral stairs that led to the master bedroom, which was a loft overlooking your loft. Everything was open except the guest room.

  “I’ll take this!” I told her. I could already envision my furniture—white leather couches and a fish tank on some Scarface shit. I thought I’d make everyone take off their shoes once they stepped foot in my crib.

  “If you like this place, we need to do a credit check, sir.”

  “No, we don’t,” I said. “I’ll take it.” I went to my car and came back with enough cash to pay the rent for a year. She gave me some papers to sign and I left with the key.

  SMACK LESSONS FOR TROY

  Troy hit my phone thirty times straight before I could answer; he left hour-long voice mails too, which were super annoying.

  “Old head just blessed us with yeahhhhh, it’s time to rock and roll, Dee! Old head asked when you was dropping by to say hi again too!” Troy said, breathing heavy through the receiver.

  “We gotta rap about some other shit, Troy, let’s link later. One.” I hung up with Troy, realizing that I had to be very patient with him. He talks on phones as if nobody is listening and I’m not sure if they were listening or not, but I’d rather be safe than facing a trial date. He also needed to learn some simple how to’s of this smack game.

  1. How to drive. Troy drives like a nut, and you can’t be like that with drugs in the car. Pull your seat all the way up, pop on the safety belt, cut the radio down, and go the speed limit. Never pull up next to cops, a
nd don’t make eye contact with them; don’t even look at them.

  2. How to act around girls. Basically shut the fuck up: girls will spend all of your money, get snatched up by the cops, snitch on you, and easily be accepted right back into society—fucking with the new dealer, the dude who took your spot.

  3. How to treat your friends that don’t hustle. Basically keep them away from this shit. I didn’t want Troy to hustle but he paid attention to my every move and loved what I made. He was going to try this drug thing with or without me so at least I could keep him from doing something stupid.

  4. How to stretch heroin. A little chemistry lesson was in order, that dope from old head was too good: fiends would die off of that, and the east/west dudes we hit with that first batch wasn’t used to getting dope that good. They were stretching it too so we might as well get some of that money.

  5. How to brand. Dope like cocaine, or Coke or Pepsi, McDonald’s, Twinkies, Taco Bell, and everything else that will kill you needs to be branded right. It needs a strong, catchy name attached to a gimmick that will get the streets excited. Branding was my favorite part.