by Lewis Shiner
Definitely not angry enough. Despair was more his style.
Alex had told him about Madelyn getting married and moving to DC. Fortunately the call came on a Sunday as Cole was waiting around for his four pm shot. He didn’t ask any questions about the new husband, who was apparently some rich accountant or something, and he pretended to Alex that Madelyn was ancient history. When he got off the phone, he took his shot and put on Garvey’s Ghost, the dub version of Burning Spear’s Marcus Garvey, and didn’t think about anything at all.
He was amazed that the days could go by so slowly and the years go by so fast, leaving nothing to show for themselves.
In the spring of 1980, Tupelo Joe called him up. “I talked to your dad. He told me he didn’t know where you were.”
“He was lying,” Cole said. “I talk to my mother…” He trailed off because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d talked to her.
“Well, that’s why I told him to put her on, and she gave me your number. She misses you. You ought to go up to Dallas and see her sometime.”
“I hope that’s not the reason you called.”
The reason, it turned out, was that Joe was getting married in June. He wanted Cole to come, and Cole said he would have to see.
Joe had done exactly what he said he was going to do, gotten his jd and started his political career. Madelyn was headed for George Washington University, in English at last. Alex was making the big bucks working for his dad. In life as in marriage, Cole was the only failure in the bunch.
Cole sidestepped most of Joe’s questions, and some awkward silences ensued. Cole understood that he was a junkie now, and that was what junkies did, hurt people’s feelings and let them down.
“Maybe this was a bad idea,” Joe said.
Cole apologized, blamed Madelyn’s remarriage and his lack of a working band, which was a long way from the whole truth. That was another thing junkies did, which was lie. “You called to ask me something. Go ahead.”
“Well, it’s like this. I was thinking maybe I was ready to try again. With the, ahhhhhhh, the songwriting thing.”
Los Cuervos had put “Could Have Been Me” on one of their local lps and Cole had sent five copies to Joe, followed later by a check for a share of writing royalties that came to $73.25. A tone of vague disappointment hovered over Joe’s thank-you notes.
“It’s for Peggy,” Joe said. “I wrote a couple of poems, songs, whatever you want to call them, for her. I want to hire you to set them to music and put them on tape. Then I want to have them pressed up on a single as a wedding present.”
Cole couldn’t think of a graceful way out. “Send them to me,” he said. “I’ll take a look.”
By the time he hung up he was in the sort of mood that couldn’t bear much scrutiny. It was Thursday, meaning he had the usual flulike symptoms from the previous day’s shot and three more days to wait for the next one. According to his inviolable weekly schedule, Thursday was also housecleaning day. He found the idea unbearable. He went back to bed and hugged his knees and waited for the time to pass.
*
At the end of March, Cole’s connection told him that the new shipment was unusually pure and that he should watch himself. There had supposedly been some overdoses.
Cole took him at his word and measured out only half his usual dose on the following Sunday. He always shot up in the bathroom because sometimes there was blood. Left hip on Sunday, right on Wednesday. He leaned against the counter, naked from the waist down, and shifted all his weight to his right leg. He pinched a handful of buttock with his left hand and reached around to stick the needle in with his right. A single dark drop of blood broke and ran down the back of his thigh, and he mopped up with a wad of toilet paper dipped in rubbing alcohol.
Fifteen minutes later he felt no more than a mild buzz, maybe no more than a Pavlovian reaction to the needle. Disappointed and desperate, he melted another quarter dose and gave it to himself in the other hip. After another 15 minutes he was raging at the dealer, at the fake heroin, at the universe.
He was due a high. He rummaged through the medicine cabinet and found his last two Percocets and washed them down with a beer.
Finally, after another ten minutes, he felt the high come on and he lay down on the couch. The high kept coming, and suddenly he felt like he was slipping down a long playground slide, with no edges to grab onto. At the end of the slide was darkness.
In a panic, he made himself sit up. He was so dizzy. He couldn’t keep his eyes open, couldn’t stay upright. He kept thinking about Hendrix, how he must have felt the same way.
He threw himself off the couch onto the floor, banging his shoulder on the coffee table. The phone landed on the floor next to him, the receiver bouncing out of the cradle and the dial tone loud in his ear.
He rubbed his hands on the carpet and the pain helped, briefly. He managed to punch in Charlene’s number. He heard her pick up, heard the day-after congestion and irritability in her voice as she said hello, and said it again. She was going to hang up.
“Help,” Cole said.
“Cole?”
“Help me.”
“Oh, shit. Cole, did you od, you stupid motherfucker?”
He was drowning. The effort to keep his head above water was more than he had strength for.
“I’m on my way,” she said. “Keep moving. Don’t stop moving, you stupid piece of shit.”
He crawled to the door and unlocked it, and then he started toward the bathroom. The effort made his shoulder muscles burn. Every stab of pain helped him stay conscious another second. Cold tile under his hands. He stuck his head under the shower and got cold water drizzling on it. He had his sternum against the side of the tub and his stomach started to heave, then he was throwing up. He thought it would make things better, but the vomit went up his nose and he was spluttering and spitting, even as he wanted to let the thing that had him by the ankles pull him the rest of the way down.
He cupped some water in his hands and rinsed his mouth, and that was the last of his strength. He collapsed there, arched over the side of the tub, head and shoulders under the shower, legs stretched out behind him, and it was like the summer rain, cool and sweet, and the darkness won.
Suddenly somebody was shaking him, yelling, “Cole! Cole! Wake up, goddamn you!” A hand grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him out dripping onto the bathmat. “On your feet.”
Charlene stood over him. “Can’t,” he said.
She slapped him across the face, hard. A red strobe light in the darkness. She pulled one arm until he was on his knees, gasping, and pulled again until the arm went around her neck and she was dragging him around the apartment. “Walk!” she said. “Use your goddamn feet!”
After a few laps he was able to continue by himself in a flat-footed shuffle. Whenever he stopped to lean his head against the wall, Charlene’s voice came from the kitchen, “Keep walking or I call 911.” Cole smelled coffee. It smelled good.
Eventually they sat at the kitchen table and drank the coffee. Charlene’s T-shirt was wet and Cole had tracked water all over the living room. She made him tell her what he’d taken.
“You stupid shit,” she said. “People almost never overdose on pure heroin. It’s mixing it with pills and booze that kills people. Don’t you know anything?”
Cole started to cry.
“A junkie’s tears,” Charlene said. “Is there anything cheaper?”
“When did you turn so cold?” Cole said. “I’m scared. I’m fucking petrified. That’s the scariest thing that ever happened to me.”
“Don’t call me cold, you son of a bitch. I’m the one who just saved your worthless, washed-up excuse for a life. I thought twice about it on the way over here, too. Call me cold? After all the times you used me and then wadded me up and threw me aside? I should have called 911 and let them deal with you.”
“I’m sorry,” Cole said. He couldn’t stop the tears, and now he was shaking besides. “I’m really sorry.�
��
“Yeah,” Charlene said. “Me too.”
*
Madelyn’s parents took the bus from Dulles to the Metro, whence they had a straight shot on the Silver Line to the Foggy Bottom station at gwu. She’d made a token offer to pick them up at the airport, knowing her father would insist on taking public transportation; it made him feel righteous and democratic.
Naturally Paul was at work when her father called from a pay phone at the station. It was 2:15 on a Friday, and Madelyn had gotten one of the other tas to teach her class. She grabbed Ava, who was red-faced with excitement, and walked to campus. Her parents were sitting on the bench she had described to them, at the 23rd Street entrance to Washington Circle, and as soon as Ava saw them she pulled her hand free and broke into a run, shouting, “Grandpa, Grandpa!”
“Ava!” Madelyn screamed, and Ava froze, thank God, before running across 23rd Street. Traffic, as always in DC, was ferocious, everyone consumed by a pathological sense of self-importance and urgency. Madelyn’s heart had gone supersonic.
“I wasn’t going to cross without looking,” Ava said, already as distressed, at age five and a half, about being treated like a child as she was at having upset Madelyn. “Honest.”
“I know you weren’t, darling. But you have to remember your mother’s nervous condition.”
“Whose name,” Ava said somberly, “is Ava.”
Grandpa was the only male authority figure that Ava had known since birth, and nothing could dislodge him from the top spot in her heart, to Paul’s eternal disappointment. She hadn’t seen him since Christmas, and now the cherry blossoms were already in bloom.
He charged at Ava as if to swoop her up, then pretended she was too massive to lift, a lovely bit of cartoonery that convulsed her with joyous laughter.
He hadn’t been to DC since he was a teenager in the middle of the Depression, so he was hungry to see everything. Madelyn walked them past the Gelman Library on campus, where she spent most of her life these days, then down Pennsylvania to the White House, where her father said, “I bite my thumb at you, all you servants of Mammon.” He then proceeded to carry out his word, to Ava’s great delight. He then coached Ava on the fine points of thumb-biting, including flicking the thumbnail against the front teeth, “for equal-time offensiveness to people from India. Don’t do this with actual Indian persons present.”
Dear God, Madelyn thought, one more way for Ava to get herself into trouble.
Madelyn’s mother was awed to be around so much political power; her father was far more interested in the Smithsonian and the Folger and the National Gallery. “Save them for tomorrow,” Madelyn said. “We have to get home for dinner.”
Paul was late, and more irritable than usual. He’d managed to rebel against his own parents twice: first in his Free Speech anti-establishment phase, and then, as his parents mellowed in the seventies, by “meddling in other countries’ affairs,” as his father put it. Madelyn’s closeness to her parents annoyed him; he wanted to be a fully independent foursome consisting of himself, Madelyn, Ava, and a child of their own that he was pressuring her to conceive.
As they passed around the Indian take-out that Paul had brought home, Ava recounted the thumb-biting incident. Paul chuckled initially, then said to Madelyn’s father, “I thought Carter was your guy.”
“His pious, aw-shucks manner is just an act,” her father said, “to disguise a canny and ambitious politician. Even so, he’s vastly better than Reagan.”
“If Reagan were to get the nomination,” Madelyn said, “surely he couldn’t win against a seated president.”
“He’s close to having the nomination sewed up,” Paul said, “and he can and will win the election.”
“Carter’s vulnerable,” her father said.
“Because of the hostages?” Madelyn asked. Fifty-two Americans had been captured by Iranian students in November, and Carter had been helpless to get them released.
“That isn’t helping,” her father said. “But what’s going to kill him is gas prices and the economy.”
“That’s crazy,” Madelyn said. She and Paul had an unspoken agreement to avoid political discussions at the dinner table. She couldn’t resist the chance to speak her mind now that she had her father to back her up. “Reagan’s economic plan is inherently ridiculous. Balance the budget by lowering taxes on the rich? That’s like ending hunger by burning food.”
“A lot of trained economists don’t think it’s ridiculous at all,” Paul said mildly. “Common sense told us the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it. To pick a better example, quantum mechanics is full of things that seem to defy common sense, but are perfectly understandable to a physicist. Like Bell’s Theorem.”
“Only at the atomic level,” her father said, bless his dear heart. “At the macro level, where humans interact with everyday objects, quantum mechanics has to agree with observable reality, or it’s useless. Bell knew that as well as anyone. There is no evidence of supply-side economics ever working in the real world. It doesn’t even merit the term ‘theory.’ It’s purely hypothesis, and a very silly one.”
Paul’s face turned red. Madelyn had never seen that happen before. They had crossed into unknown territory. “Milton Friedman doesn’t find it ‘silly,’” Paul said, “and he’s the smartest man I’ve ever known.”
“Present company excepted,” Madelyn said, perhaps too quietly to be acknowledged.
Her father, having made his point, retreated gracefully. “Madelyn tells me you studied under Friedman at Chicago. That must have been transformative.”
“It was.”
“I’ve read Capitalism and Freedom,” her father said, “but I appreciate that it’s no substitute for knowing the man himself.”
Paul was quiet for a long time, and then he said, “What you’re saying, about the real world. That’s what I struggle with every day. Idealism tells you that people are inherently good and altruistic, and my experience of the real world, which gets reinforced every day, tells me that people are greedy. Friedman acknowledges that greed. His theories predicted stagflation, which Keynesians still can’t explain.”
“Predicting is one thing,” her father said. “Solving is another. But it looks like he’s going to get his chance. I wish him luck.”
Madelyn’s mother, who had an irrational fear of any kind of conflict, jumped in. “That’s more than enough politics. Can we talk about something really important, like who shot J. R.?”
“Mother, don’t tell me you watch that awful show,” Madelyn said.
“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to have a conversation with any of my friends.”
The talk moved on, without Paul, who’d turned inside himself. He waited a few minutes after the table was cleared, then said he had a loan proposal to review.
Madelyn sat on the couch with her father and said, “I apologize for Paul. He’s been under a lot of pressure at work…”
He patted her knee. “You don’t have to make excuses, dear. I don’t want you to think I’m criticizing Paul. He’s in the trenches with these issues, and all I do is read books and think about them, which is never going to change the world.”
“Remember Middlemarch? You’ve changed the people around you, and we are going to change the world. I know I plan to, one student at a time.”
Her father took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I think there are a lot of people like Paul who were very idealistic and outspoken in their younger days and got frustrated and decided to change things from inside the power structure. Which does not like change. And they end up compromised and disappointed and don’t want to admit it, not to themselves, and especially not to people they don’t particularly like.”
Madelyn started to object, and her father held up his hand. “It’s okay, dear, we always did call them straight up, you and I. The thing is, this may turn out to be the most important election in the history of the human race.”
“Oh, Daddy, you d
o love your hyperbole.”
“I hope that’s all it is. From where I sit, the drama is real. Reagan is the classic optimist and Carter is willing to look at hard truths. Reagan says we need energy independence, so we should burn more coal. ‘But Governor Reagan, what about the pollution? What about the rising co2 levels? What about the Greenhouse Effect?’ And Reagan just waves his hands and says, ‘It’ll be okay.’ Carter says we have to tighten our belts, which demonstrably we have to do. He lowers the speed limit, he puts solar panels on the White House, and people go nuts.”
“I don’t deny that Reagan is bad,” Madelyn said. “But this free market mania is everywhere. It’s like a contagious disease, and Carter’s caught it too. He deregulated the airlines, and now he’s deregulated the banks.”
“I know, I know. And Mrs. Thatcher in England, selling public utilities to the highest bidder. People don’t want to hear about limits. They don’t want to be told they can’t have something for nothing. And they have this unshakable faith that the rich have their best interests at heart. Wasn’t your generation going to hang the rich?”
“Cooler heads prevailed. Maybe this is just a phase. Who always told me, ‘This too shall pass’?”
“I hope so. I dearly hope so.”
A bit after midnight, Madelyn climbed the stairs, checked on Ava, and brushed her teeth. She thought, for the hundredth time at least, of the nights she’d gone dancing in New York. She’d even located a club called Pier 9 that promised to be even wilder than the Gallery. Paul had dismissed the idea, unsurprisingly, and she had failed to muster the time and rebelliousness to go on her own. Someday, she thought. Maybe.
