“Hell yeah, we like Cash Money,” one kid said suspiciously. “But we ain’t wanna buy no stolen CDs.” I had about thirty or forty stolen CDs and a stolen electric guitar in my trunk. I casually popped it open and pulled out a new Cash Money hit, Tha Block Is Hot. I tossed it to the kid.
“I said I ain’t wanna buy no CD!” he said and caught it. He balanced the disk case flat on his palm. The rappers’ faces on the cover disappeared in the sun.
“I’m giving it to you,” I said, closing the trunk. “I’m an A&R rep for the label. I travel around to find out what’s hot on the streets. Then I go back to Cash Money and they read my reports, and modify their raps accordingly.” They stared at me.
“Look, I write reports on the real street feeling. Cash Money changes their raps based on what my reports say. So when you see me talking to Dom, or Henry, or you, it’s not for fun. I’m using this shitty little car so I don’t draw attention.” I was telling that shitty little story to disappear a little. Big lies like that made me feel a little more see-through.
“You met B.G.?” the kid asked suspiciously.
“Sure I met him. He has a platinum syringe, with little diamonds on it.” I was going to say he had a working gun carved out of a single enormous diamond but I stopped myself. But then I said this.
“You kids know what grenades are?”
“Duh.”
“You know the difference between a live grenade and a dead one?”
“Yeah.”
“Well one time I went up with B.G. in his helicopter, and we flew around New Orleans, all high, just tossing live grenades out the goddamn windows.”
Just then Henry and Dom shuffled around the corner. Every event in this book is true. It happened. Here comes Dom and Henry rolling around the goddamn corner.
And if you had been up in a helicopter that minute, you could have gotten all three of us with one grenade. Sitting ducks.
I’ll be your little spy. I’ll set them up, you knock ’em down.
“You can tell the difference between a live grenade and a dead grenade by the sound,” Henry said. “You shake it, and if you hear a little tinkle, it’s dead and you gotta get a new one.”
“That’s lightbulbs, Henry,” Dom said. “I said that’s fucking lightbulbs you are talking about, not grenades.”
We were sitting in an upstairs room at Dom’s. It had been stripped down to the bone. A few of the drop-ceiling tiles were missing. They’d been stripping copper piping to sell. Dom was wearing his brother’s tool belt, a black wife-beater, camouflage shorts, dead white legs, big red flip-flops, and a Band-aid on his neck. Junkie chic, fall 2000.
“Whaddaya mean lightbulbs! I was in the Army!” Henry honked, “I was in Vietnam! Whatdaya think happened to my arm?”
“You were not in Vietnam,” Dom said.
“And no one knows what happened to your arm,” I finished.
“No one knows what happened to anything,” Henry said mysteriously. Henry had located some good dope. Dom paid, I’d driven. All sickness was forgotten. And now we were shooting some unbelievably potent coke.
“Little devils,” Dom whispered. He was looking down into a palm full of red-top vials. He had a needle sticking out of his arm. Staring straight ahead mouth open like someone had pressed pause.
“I got sticker shock,” he said suddenly. He picked the needle out of his arm and stuck it quick in and out again. “I got sticker shock.” We laughed slowly. Like people trying to breathe underwater.
The daylight came in through the window. Two happy little 7UP cans sat on the floor with us.
“The girls downstairs are still sleeping,” Henry said. They still had the prostitutes in there. Even after Fathead’s friendly warning. “Lazy girls,” he added.
“Get out of bed and get ahead,” I said.
“Get out of bed and give head and give me the bread,” Dom said. We laughed slow.
Then I remembered what I saw when I was little on a television show called The Electric Company. They had electron microscopes that showed the surface of a human eyelash. It was like the moon. Enormous flat worms crawled slowly across it. There were no colors there. The no-color of total realism.
“I think this coke is helping my vision,” I said. I was staring at the colorless wall across the room. “X-ray vision. I can see every little groove and hollow.”
“Every nook and cranny,” Dom said.
“That’s not X-ray vision,” said Henry. “If it was X-ray you could see behind the wall. X-ray vision cuts through things. Like a buzz saw. What you’ve got is infrared vision.”
“But I don’t see any red.”
“Infrared,” Henry said, “Infra means smaller than. Smaller than red. Red is like the outside of the house. Then you open the door and go inside the house. That’s infrared.”
“Little infrared living room and kitchen,” I said. “Little infrared cups and saucers.”
“Every nook and cranny,” Dom said. Infrared. Smaller than red.
“I’m infrared-blooded,” I mentioned. I thought of a colorless sun. The world below color. The real world.
Meanwhile an ant was stepping very carefully across the dirty wood floor. One leg, then the other, then the other, then the other. When he put one of his straight legs down into a little crevice between the floorboards, I saw a tiny puff of dust rise up. My breath caught in my throat.
“What do you think about those hot teenage hookers you got downstairs?” Henry said to change the subject.
“This is what I think,” Dom said. He unzipped his fly and took out his big flaccid white penis. We laughed fast and slow. There was a sore on it.
“The only thing I hate worse than girls is fags,” Henry said mysteriously. “It’s time to go, though.”
Henry didn’t have a watch. In fact his whole left arm was missing. He kept his time down deep in his veins, and he was right. It was time to go.
It was always time to go at Dom’s. We had just stopped starting to sit down, and now it was already time to start standing up. We were always on the move. It might not have looked like it. Dom’s mouth hung open and his eyes were closed and his penis was flopping loose out his pants. But deep down he was moving. He was on top of things. There was never a single second to spare, never an instant to relax.
This fact might surprise a casual visitor. At any given moment, the house was full of people with their eyes closed and their mouths open. On chairs, under chairs, on the floor, on the toilet.
But after a while you realized everyone was moving. Just very, very slowly. They were starting to get up or starting to get down. There was never a moment of real rest. That’s why everyone was so bone tired. Everyone was always moving. It just didn’t always look that way. From the perspective of a rabbit, a turtle looks like it’s sitting still. Take some of these joyriders. Lawyers coming through the door to buy some Oxys. Looking at their watches, on the way to some meeting.
Those lawyers came in looking for quick-stop service and what they found looked like a motionless swamp. Like Mississippi or Mexico. You pull up at the gas station and there’s one old lady asleep in a chair under a shitty third-world tree. You go inside and the cashier is asleep on his folded arms. A ten-year-old boy is dozing on the step. An ant is crawling across his lips. A slow-crawling ant.
These lawyer types are impatient, always in a hurry. They paid top dollar for the damn pills and they expected service. They opened the door and Dom was on the floor. As their eyes adjusted to the no-light they could see he was slowly moving, like spilled oil.
“Um, Dom, I really must get going. I called ahead. Please if you could just, maybe, hurry. Let me help you with that, I can get that for you.”
“Let me just get my…my…”
“Your keys, Dom, they’re right here on the floor. Here they are, take them.” They were always finishing his sentences for him.
“…my gun.” Because the turtle wins the race. The turtle wins in the end. The rabbit moves fast, but he o
nly moves for eight or ten hours a day. But the turtle is always moving. Plus the dope-body makes new kinds of time. Secret hours inside the hours. Dom’s green, leather neck. His deep-sea metabolism. Always moving.
That day, it took us two hours or so to come in, to get down and get the drugs in, and then to get up and go out on another run. If you filmed all that, and then played it back fast, you’d see. Like they do on the Discovery Channel when they show you the seasons changing on the savanna. All the endless gray and green matter you think of as still, is actually always moving. Even the trees. Even the mountains.
You’d see us move like that, slowly sitting down and slowly standing back up. But I bet you’d never see us sitting completely still. What the hell is there to sit still for? You think these drugs are free?
We moved slow on purpose. One time Dom lit a firecracker under dozing Henry’s chair and Henry fell off so quick he blurred. Fast was no problem for us. We moved slow for conservation.
To conserve the precious drops of dope inside us we moved slowly. Like you move a full glass of water slowly so you don’t spill it. Moving fast spills the dope, it speeds up the metabolism. The idiot heart chews up those twenty-dollar vials faster and faster. Maybe there was a little bit of brain damage too.
I never thought of myself as slow. In fact, all I thought about was getting some rest, just a little time to rest.
OK, I guess I could tell I wasn’t exactly Speedy Gonzalez. Sometimes the same view of floor or wall would lodge in my brain like a shard of glass. Then I knew I hadn’t moved in a while. Maybe hadn’t even blinked.
And sometimes I gently hit the car in front of me as I was slowly starting to hit the brake. Sometimes the car behind me would honk as I was slowly starting to hit the gas. Sometimes I would think it was May when it was July.
One time I woke up, and the little punching bag in the back of my throat was all swollen up. I mean it was huge. It took up almost the whole throat hole. The tiny bugs in the air had to go past it single file. I don’t even know what that little punching bag is called.
“What’re you doing back there?”
It was itchy as hell. I scratched it gently with the tip of a syringe.
And who knows what caused that. Air bugs maybe. Something you never even noticed suddenly swells up. Swells up into your day. Squeezes out the fun.
Later that day I met one of the people who wanted to kill people I knew. I’d heard about these people.
“You seen Dom, man.” The young dealer’s cap was pulled down low, the brim pointed straight at my knees. He said it again. It didn’t really sound like a question.
“No,” I said, surprised. “I just need a white top and a nickel of coke.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, nodding at a runner across the street who came running up with the dope, “nigger owes, doesn’t pay, gets got.”
That sounded simple. And I knew Dom owed and didn’t pay. Witness Fathead. But I thought that maybe now Dom was just a little too low to get got. A little too deep. Deep down.
For example, I went fishing once when I was a kid. I put a hook and a weight on the end of a long line and it sank down out of sight. There was a little plastic disk attached to my fishing line. The disk floated on the surface of the water, to let you know the place where the line dropped down.
Dom’s face and head reminded me of that disk bobbing on the water. His visible body was just a marker, marking the place where he went down. I’d seen three hundred dollars of dope go into that body in one sitting. Go in and go down. How can you stop it? Who or what is it?
“Nigger needs to get got.”
I mentally wished the teenage dealer good luck. I didn’t think he knew what he was dealing with. Dom shot overdoses in his neck. He woke up crawling. Crawling for more. I didn’t think Dom could be stopped. He was something uncanny. Raw habit.
But then I wondered how easy it would be to stop me. How easy would it be for me to stop?
I’d gotten in the bad habit of scribbling down “Quit Dope” notes when I woke up freaked out in the middle of the night. When I woke up suddenly like that, I kind of surprised my life. I saw it as it was when it thought no one was looking at it. Looking up at my life from that angle way down deep in the night, I saw what was wrong. I knew I wouldn’t remember the secret in the morning. I’d be back in it. I’d be it.
Lying awake in the middle of the night I knew the answer, and I knew I wouldn’t remember it. Those deep-night panics were moments outside of memory. Unconnected. The hyper-clear night thoughts didn’t stick around. They evaporated at the first breath. Writing was invented for the thoughts you can’t remember. Writing is an aid to memory. So I’d scribble down “Quit Dope” notes and “My Life Matters” notes and leave them in obvious places around my apartment.
Every morning I’d wake up and throw the notes out without reading them. Then I’d drive, steal, score, and pass out.
I knew how to write. Reading was the problem. It is easier to write than it is to read. In the middle of the night I started to wonder how to get myself to read the damn notes. I began to experiment with different colored ink, super-big letters, super-small letters. But by then developments had rendered this nighttime project obsolete. By spring, daytime things had got me thinking about quitting in the daytime.
First, there was the billboard, right on Charles Street near the train station. It had a picture of a stethoscope floating in a sunny sky. At the top it had a doctor’s name and phone number in big block letters. And below that, in even bigger letters, it read:
Heroin Detox
One Day
Safe Painless Medical Procedure
$1000
That billboard rose right in the middle of the main street in downtown Baltimore for maybe a year. I saw it every day. So I started to figure there were some people who wanted to get off heroin.
I know it sounds odd, but back then that came as kind of a surprise to me. I’d quit before, of course. But it was always a practical, short-term thing. No money. Habit too big. Gotta back off it a while so I can get high on ten dollars again. That kind of thing. But really quit? Quit for good? I wasn’t used to thinking of heroin as something you wanted not to do. At least not in the daytime. It took me a little while to figure it out. It was a process of deduction. If there’s a billboard advertising a way to get off dope, there must be a desire to get off dope. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And if it costs a thousand dollars to get off the shit, people have got to want to get off it real bad.
A thousand dollars. We’re talking about junkies. A thousand dollars is fifty twenty-dollar white tops. So the presence of that billboard implied that there were some junkies—probably rich ones, but still—who were willing to trade fifty white tops for no dope.
That didn’t make too much sense to me. People said the doctor had a way of taking you off it with no withdrawal. It still didn’t make much sense, but it was something to think about.
Plus I’d been kind of seeing my ex-girlfriend Eva again. She was living in New York with the guitarist for some band. She’d tell him she was visiting her parents and drive down to visit me. We got extra high and tried to have sex for hours. I’d tell her how great it would be if she’d just move in with me. Cat was a drag. Eva understood. In late May she came down for the last time.
On a humid Sunday afternoon we drove fast to cop. Then we drove slow through the dusk after fixing. Down Route 40 through the east side of town. Deep Baltimore. It was my favorite Sunday drive. We stopped at a red light. On the left-hand side there was a glass-enclosed building. It looked like a car showroom, with the raised floor and full-length windows designed to display the new vehicles. But instead of new cars, the building sold new wheelchairs.
Some were motorized. Some had red leather. One had thick armrests like a couch and an extra-high back. It turned slowly on a mirrored dais. On the sidewalk in front of the building, an old man leaned on his cane and stared at the beautiful wheelchairs. The setting sun lit up the
chrome spokes.
The light turned green. But we couldn’t go because an old woman was slowly caning her way across the intersection. When she was about halfway through, the light turned red again. A car behind us beeped. I looked in the rearview mirror. It was a very old man in a Buick. I could see his angry lips moving in my mirror.
“I got a new name for old people,” I said. “You want to know what I call them?”
“What?” Eva said.
“Faggots,” I said. I was joking around.
We drove a little more.
“I can’t take this,” she said.
“Take what?” I said. “I was just joking around calling the oldsters faggots. I don’t have any kind of problem with real gay people. In fact, one time I did something kind of gay myself.”
She began to cry softly.
“It was an accident,” I said. “I was drunk.”
“It’s not that,” she said, wiping her eyes and looking out the window.
“Then what?”
“You want me to move in with you. But everything with you is so…makeshift.”
For some reason that word seemed particularly damning. It was the worst thing she could have said to me. I didn’t say anything for a while.
“Yeah, I know it’s makeshift,” I said finally. “But this is a special party time. Not makeshift, more like fun. A special occasion. Not makeshift. Don’t leap to conclusions. Don’t assume life together would always be makeshift or something. If you move down here, the regular days will be…organized.”
I imagined us holding hands in my bare apartment, with the sickening smells of home food coming in from the kitchen. I imagined me slowly putting on my shoes to go to some kind of job. I shivered. She did too. She went back to her guitarist boyfriend. That was something else to think about.
Plus if you owe and you don’t pay, you get got.
Well, that didn’t really apply to me. I always paid. I paid with bouncing checks and stolen credit cards and stolen cartons of cigarettes and stolen amps and emergency wires from every relative I had. One afternoon I even walked down the corridor of my own apartment building, knocking on doors and asking for twenty dollars.
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