The Organ Broker

by Stu Strumwasser

  When I left that house I was wet from urine and shaking a little with outrage. It was starting to get dark out by the time I turned around and doubled back toward home. The intersection of our block and the block it terminated into had recently been repaved and I remember that some of the blacktop was twinkling slightly in the light from the sinking sun. The broken bits of glass that were mixed in with the pavement material were catching the last shards of angled sunlight and for a moment I couldn’t help but notice that it looked a little like stars on a black floor of space that had been laid out in front of our house like a supernatural carpet. The front door to the house was still open when I got there—screen door closed but unlocked, wooden door behind it open, saying, “Nice fall day, neighbor! C’mon in!” I no longer felt sorry for myself by then. I assumed the quiet and purposeful gait of a killer. I walked in, and passed quickly through the small dining room and into the kitchen. He was still sitting in there, now in front of a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, newspaper open on the table. His button-down shirt was open, revealing a white T-shirt and gold cross dangling in the gray and black chest hair tufting out above it, his head angled down to read about yesterday’s games. I stood in front of him and exhaled like a horse and he finally bothered to look up. Our eyes met and then he had the gall to glance down again, casually flip a page, and then look back up at me. We stared at each other for another moment and then I yelled, “FUCK … YOOOUUUUU …” and leaned hard into it. I would’ve puked my stomach up into his face, sacrificing my own guts, if I thought the stomach acids might have burned his rosy cheeks. My father put down his fork but that’s all he did. I could hear the sound of my mother’s footsteps immediately thudding along on the shag carpeting from the direction of their bedroom. I slowly started to walk away, back toward the front door, and behind me I heard him say, “What?!” and I was sensible enough to break into a run.

  I pulled the heavy front door closed, hard, behind me, and one of the three small glass panes cracked—the sound of glass falling to the cement porch behind me somehow made it more real. I was dizzy and felt sick but I ran. I eventually slowed to a fast walk and went all the way to the high school. I sat down on a bench in a dugout next to the baseball diamond and eventually fell asleep. The next day, when I wandered home, I was thinking he’d kill me.

  Instead, he never hit me again. He redirected a little more attention toward my mother, but I didn’t receive it. I think that if he had hit me again, I really would have killed him. I had it all planned out—thought it through in a logical and practical way. If my father had hit me that day I truly would have cut his throat while he slept that night. That is my truth for today. We never discussed it and I guess we both knew there was no point in revisiting it. Doesn’t everyone have to take their shots?

  Instead, he handled me differently. He stopped talking to me. It was almost like the bastard was acting out, like he was the one who was hurt. And for how long did this go on? For how long did young Jackie’s father refuse to acknowledge him or talk to him because Jackie finally stood up and said, “Stop”? I guess it was about two years or so.

  CHAPTER SIX:

  INTRO TO SALES

  After high school I attended NYU and lived in the dorms in Manhattan for a while. I was affable, and articulate and funny and I could talk a girl back to my apartment, but I didn’t do a lot of the follow-up work required to turn acquaintances into friends. A psychologist I dated once told me that I have Aspergers. I don’t really know. We didn’t have psychological ailments when I was growing up in Flushing. No one went to therapists. No one we knew did. You kept it to yourself. In the city it was easy to become anonymous without seeming weird about it, and that felt comfortable to me. Being spotted on a crowded city street, or sitting by one’s self in the sun on a towel in Washington Square Park … I don’t think it looked strange to anyone.

  In 1987 I was a junior at NYU. That was the year of the big stock market crash and a lot of people got hurt. My dad was one of them. That year the question of whether or not he would pay my tuition took on a new seriousness so I decided to take financial matters into my own hands. I took the initiative and got a “job” of my choosing in order to preempt being forced into a more traditional one later.

  Rock was in hibernation, style was, too, but New York was humming. Everyone did some blow in those days. People put mousse in their hair and wore bright colors, trying to be noticed, like putting out “Vacant” signs at a motel. Only a year after the crash, the stock market started to reascend and New York was once again all about money and moving quickly and doing bullet hits of blow in the bathrooms of clubs where you had to know someone just to get inside. The decision to start dealing was so obvious, so easy. First I was just hooking up a few friends from class with a gram here or there. Before I knew it, I was driving to make pickups out on Long Island or in Jersey. My ability to quickly move meaningful amounts of coke on campus, one gram at a time, impressed my main suppliers from Jersey (who I believed to be low-end mafia guys) and even earned me a nickname—“NYU Jack.”

  I was making buys of a quarter ounce, and then full ounces. That’s a lot of cocaine. There are twenty-eight grams in an ounce. By cutting it with baby aspirin, you could get a solid sixty grams out of one ounce. At a hundred bucks a gram (the standard price for many years), you were talking about six grand just to move that one ounce, when I had only paid a grand or two. A four or five thousand dollar profit was a lot of money to a kid only twenty years old. After I built up my list, I could move an ounce in a week. “Screw you, Dad. I’ll work it out.”

  And yes, Jack was the man. I had what they wanted. I was the guy they needed to talk to. By the bathroom. In the car. When I met a group of students, someone always knew who I was, mentioned a mutual friend. The girls looked up at me, furtive, sexy. They were mildly disgusted—in front of their friends … but they respected the fact that I was bold and I did things Jack’s way. I brought the party and the second wind. At times, it all felt like love.

  By the time I was graduating from college, I made more money in a week than most people I knew earned in a semester. I was meticulous about not getting caught. Every time I exchanged a small plastic baggie full of powder and rocks for a handful of twenties, I got a little rush. Every time. For me, the rush wasn’t in the doing it—it was in the selling it. In the moments of closing each little deal, I was the one in control of the world around me. It was empowering to feel like I controlled the thing that people wanted, to feel like I was wanted. Outwardly, I pretended to suffer the burden of it; in my heart, I have to admit, I loved it. I romanticized selling drugs, my underground work, my secret identity. Those were golden days.

  I wasn’t a big enough dealer for the DEA or FBI to come looking for me—and didn’t allow myself to become that big—but getting popped with five or ten grams in your pocket could still bring some serious disruption into one’s life, even on a first offense. I had all sorts of fail-safes, methods I employed to stay clear about who was okay to do business with, when it was okay to do business, and when to just casually walk away from little deals that simply weren’t worth the risk, worth any risk. If a guy in a suit and a black shirt in the bathroom at the China Club acted like we were pals and asked me a question about where I got supplied from—I excused myself and he never got an audience with me again. When some girl I didn’t know approached me on the floor at the Ritz without a proper introduction and said that her friend told her I might be able to help her get something—I took the rest of the night off, went straight home, laid low for a few weeks. I mean, I was vigilant. Staying away from people, not letting them get close or get a bead on me—that was something I was already good at.

  When I was twenty-one I applied to only two law schools, NYU and Columbia. There were a few simple reasons I decided to go to law school:

  1. I liked to argue and was good at it.

  2. I enjoyed being able to tell my father that I didn’t need his help, that I would pay my own way, that
I got a student loan … (when in fact I paid with cash and without all that much effort, laundering some of it by pretending to be an independent party promoter and opening a business account).

  3. It made no sense for me to leave the comfort and facility of Manhattan college life when business was booming and everything was going my way.

  I decided to ride the coke wave for another three years, right through law school. I figured that I could save some money, get my law degree, and then parlay it into some regular straight-up real-world job, get rich and just pretend that the entire experience was in the past somewhere, tucked safely away like the remembrance of a bloody knee or a dream about showing up at elementary school naked. The accomplishments would be locked up in the trophy-case of my memory, but they would always be there for me to privately call upon whenever I might need a boost.

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  CARRIE

  Near the end of my first year in law school I met Carrie Franco. She was so entirely noticeable. She was a second-year law student. Carrie was so incredible, to me, that she pretty much knocked me right out of orbit and whatever force was holding me in line with the remnants and rituals of my life and routines before her.

  We met in a bar, of course. It started with a friendly argument. She was an NYU law student, I was an NYU law student; she was from Boston, I hated the Red Sox; she thought the entire legal system was bloated, inefficient, easily abused, and badly in need of major reform … I truly didn’t give a shit. It wasn’t that long before I started waking up in her apartment.

  Carrie had a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for “justice” on the small of her back before any other girl I knew had ink on that spot. I suppose that she still does. Carrie wore sneakers with pretty sundresses. She rocked Vans before they were cool to anyone but skate kids. She wore Hush Puppies for about six months, ten years after they were out of style and a year before they came back. She didn’t wear much makeup but she sometimes painted her fingernails and toenails black. You just knew that when she ascended to corporate America she’d be the coolest one in the room, but succeed without needing to compromise very much. I was sure she’d have no problem balancing her unwavering irreverence with an ability to swim in the popular channels and have all the little fish fall in behind her. She looked amazing even when she looked like shit. She was sarcastic with everyone, but never annoyed with them the way I was. She loved every one of the nameless bastards we walked by on the street every day. I never got that. I still don’t, but I no longer think it’s strange. During the time we were together we had a group of friends, but they were always more Carrie’s friends than mine. I’d say she thought people were silly, but liked them anyway, whereas I really was disgusted by them—myself at the top of the list. I loved her and the closer we became, the less alone I felt in the world. Carrie had plans. She had specific plans about things she wanted to do. It drove her crazy that I did not.

  Meeting Carrie is also what caused me to get into golf, which is funny because she hated the game, and in the beginning I was only pretending to play. Once Carrie and I got close we fell into the habit of telling each other what we’d been up to whenever we’d been apart. I know this is very common among couples, but it was completely foreign to me, and I could see where it was going. Days I couldn’t account for were going to be problematic. I remembered that Carrie had once made a comment about hating golf, because it was too slow, and because it was for the privileged. So I claimed to be a golfer because she wouldn’t want to come along. I could buy a solitary half a day for myself every now and then, and use the time to buy drugs. I even claimed to be going to night-time driving ranges whenever I had to meet someone after dark, but it probably didn’t matter. Carrie wasn’t fooled for very long.

  By the time Carrie found out the truth, I actually was playing a little golf and had even started to take lessons on Saturdays from the pro at the club in Westchester. That original old pro, he’s dead now, but I’d pay anything to get a look at his face if he could see my swing now. He was such a sweet old guy. Arthur. He couldn’t really play for shit, but he was great at teaching mechanics. I haven’t really thought about him in years, but writing this down now, thinking about him … I miss him. I still belong to that club—I use the name Tuckman. At my club in Jersey I use Caswell. In Arizona it’s Campbell. At Pebble Beach I use Induri. I rotate my appearances and avoid playing anywhere too regularly. Once I found out how much Carrie liked coke, secrecy no longer mattered. She never liked that I sold it, but for a while there in 1989 she chewed up a fair amount of my product.

  Carrie kept a small collection of snow globes on a shelf above her bed. Sometimes when we made love I would try to bang the bed into the wall and make the snow stir up from beneath the hem of Snow White’s dress, or from the foot of the Empire State Building, or from beneath a group of tiny running horses. I wonder if she has snow globes now. That’s something I do think about sometimes. She might have lost some, or left them in Boston. Maybe they meant nothing to her at all. In the years immediately following our breakup, I thought about things like that a lot. I would fantasize about tracking her down, calling her parents in Boston, securing her new number, then calling her and saying, “Remember those snow globes you had on that shelf above your bed? Why did you have those? Why horses? Why Snow White, Carrie?” Of course I never did.

  She wanted me to stop dealing but I couldn’t. Not until school was done. I told her that I didn’t have rich parents to pay my bills. She bitched about it anyway. I was putting her at risk. I could hurt her, she said. She finally left me—“Pathetic, coke-dealing, lying piece of shit. Pathetic, whining, depressed victim. Unfriendly, arrogant asshole, Jack.” And instead of thinking I could love someone else, I wanted no one. I resented them all. I was alone again and more comfortable with my old surroundings.

  When Carrie was graduating, we were still screwing and hanging out a little, but I think she was already seeing someone else by then. We were living in the temporary aftermath of the mess I’d made of us. I knew she’d bounce back; I was sure that I would not. I hated her, but I didn’t want it to end, and knowing that it would eventually end completely made me hate everyone, at least to some degree.

  Usually, when I called her, I got the answering machine. When she was unlucky enough to actually answer the phone, I would try to seduce her through the blur of too many shots of vodka, offering her coke she didn’t need or want. Occasionally, she’d let me come over and anxiously undress her and push myself inside of her, too quickly, too awkwardly. Sometimes I thought she was laughing a little. “What?” I would say, going along, trying to exhibit a tiny bit of strength or self-respect.

  “Nothing. Go ahead. Just do it.”

  “What, Carrie?” I’d ask with a wry smile.

  “Jack, come here,” and she would pull my mouth to hers, pull my hips down to hers and wrap her legs and sculpted feet behind the backs of my knees. “I know you love me, Jack,” she would say while I fucked her, calmly looking me right in the eyes. “I’m sorry,” she would say.

  “You’re wrong,” I would reply, “Stop talking.” I would do it harder, flurries kicking up in the snow globes above our heads.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

  The last month or two really was a mess. She missed her period. We thought she was pregnant. I did too much coke—I had never done that before I got involved with her. She failed a class, couldn’t graduate on time, and she blamed me. We thought she might need an abortion. She said that if she did she’d go with Beth and didn’t want a drug dealer paying for it. It was too sick and clichéd, she said. She loved me, but wasn’t “in love” with me; I wasn’t the person she thought I was. She hadn’t realized it until lately, but I was less. I was less beautiful. When she told me all of those things, in bed after sex, or on the phone while declining to see me, she didn’t even sound mean. Somehow I thought she was being generous. She was right, and she was making the effort to tell me the truth despite how uncomfortable it was for her. I
t was pity but it was beautiful. She was dumping me with a sense of consideration that only someone as great as Carrie could have mustered. I believed that she deserved someone better than me but I still couldn’t bear the thought of letting her go and crashing back to the solitary life I had lived before.

  When school ended in May of 1990 she was still in New York for another month or two, living in an East Village sublet, making up that course so she could graduate. I didn’t see her. She had quit doing blow before we stopped seeing each other, but once or twice she called me to get something for her friends, probably only when she couldn’t call someone else. They had all stopped talking to me. I’d see them around, but rarely. It all just faded.

  The clubs sucked, rap was alive, Pearl Jam was rehearsing somewhere in a garage in California, Bush’s Dad was making deals with the Nicaraguans, and my father died—he had a heart attack in the car while idling in our driveway. We had barely spoken for years. The resentment had hardened before he died and I was forced to finally look at it. No, I thought. I won’t care now. I felt better, released from something that had been tangled around my ankle until then—his recriminating disapproval.

  I felt more firmly planted, more even-keeled—with regard to Carrie too. With Carrie, I had always felt out of control and unsure. There was anxiety that came with wanting things, and it was amplified when I sometimes got them. This was better. The things you want but don’t have can cause an aching in your heart, but the things you have and then lose can break you. The trick, I learned, is to not care.

  ◆

  My father’s wake was held at a small funeral home in Flushing. Carrie didn’t come. She said it might have made it harder for me. My mother was drunk by the time they got started and although I doubt that’s unusual at a funeral where half the mourners are Irish, it still caused a few whispers. Now that’s drunk. The walls were covered with dark wooden paneling, and you could see a lot of knots in the wood—too many for them to be natural. It was a cafeteria-newspaper-stand kind of funeral. My father’s boss, Brad McCloskey, spoke and told a few stories about what a good producer and colleague my dad had been over the years. McCloskey used modest compliments like “good man” and “solid salesman” and described him as funny and persuasive. He made it seem as if he knew my father, which would mean that I did not. I had grown up with somebody else, his stand-in, a drunken, angry and introverted version of the solid, average man Brad McCloskey knew.