White Out

by Michael W Clune

  “As I said, sir, we simply cannot dispense this medicine without a prescription.”

  “The proof that I have a prescription for Zoloft,” I said reasonably, “is that I need Zoloft. Zoloft is not a drug that gets you high. No one in their right mind would want Zoloft this bad if they hadn’t been taking it for months and then suddenly ran out.”

  “But sir—”

  “Look at me. No one in their right mind wants Zoloft this bad.”

  He looked at me. He said he would give me three pills and charge me by the pill. I started to pay him, but then he said they didn’t take out-of-state checks. I said I would buy it with an in-state check if he would let me put some vitamins on it.

  “What is your return policy?” I asked. “In Baltimore you just need a receipt and they give you back cash.”

  “Sir, this check…your total is $115.25. We have a limit of fifty dollars per check at this store.”

  “But you said I could get the Zoloft.”

  “The cost of the three Zoloft pills is $11.15 The remaining $104.10 comes from this, uh, L-Carnitine and—”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I just have to run out and check on my car. It’s a new Mercedes. I don’t think it’s very safe in this bad neighborhood.”

  I thought that telling him I owned a Mercedes would be a good lesson to him. When I came back in I wasn’t feeling very well. There was a different person at the counter.

  “The pharmacy is closed,” she said.

  “What? I was just in here,” I said.

  “We close at nine o’clock, sir. It is now almost nine-thirty.”

  I looked hard into her eyes. She met my gaze without flinching. This particular employee, I thought, has nothing to hide.

  “I was checking on my car,” I said. I stopped.

  “OK,” I said. “The pharmacy is closed.”

  I was able to pay for some of the vitamins at the register up front. The employee at the register did find an opportunity to humiliate me, however.

  “Um, sir? I think you’re forgetting something.”

  “Oh, of course. Right.”

  I picked up my keys off the floor and left. It was one of those things you think nothing of at the time.

  When I got back to my sister’s block, there was no more dope left. Impossible but true. I parked and started to look for the missing bag on the floor of my car, but so much garbage got into the street while I was looking I was afraid the people would come. Hey, smart guy. So I drove back to the pharmacy parking lot, which was the only place I knew for sure I could park without getting towed. And it was beginning to be the only place I could be sure of in other ways.

  “Hi, Jenny, this is Mike.”

  “Oh, hey. Where the hell are you? Are you still staying here tonight?”

  “Yes, but I got a little lost.”

  “Come on! I have to work tomorrow.”

  “Sorry Jen, I’ll be right over. Do you know the pharmacy on…”

  I put my hand over the pharmacy phone and asked the cashier where it was located. I asked her again to make sure I’d heard right. Then I really had to laugh.

  “Jenny, I’m sorry, but ha ha ha. I’m right down the street!”

  “Idiot,” she said and hung up.

  There was nothing to laugh about once I got back in the car. The block looked like a mouth with all its teeth knocked out. I parked almost all the way over the No Parking sign this time. If they chopped it off now, nothing would be left. Some paint chips.

  Can you believe this damn junkie, Carl?

  Didn’t anyone remember anything good about me? Plan for the worst. You can’t plan for the worst.

  I don’t believe it! Hey, smart guy, get your ass right back here. Think I wouldn’t see you pick up that dope right in front of my face?

  I grimly walked all the way around Jenny’s block two-and-a-half times before I found her building. This looks like it. This looks like it. This looks like it. I was biting the inside of my cheek.

  When I finally got inside, I looked back out at the street and saw why it had been so hard to find her place. Everything looked the same. Not literally the same, but brick or stone, gray or brown, a little taller or a little shorter. Right turn or left turn. West Side or North Side. The city was filled with differences that didn’t make any difference.

  I don’t believe it. I went with my family to a hotel downtown. Hey smart guy. It was a holiday tradition. I don’t believe it. I went to the bathroom when we got there. Hey smart guy. At dinner I had something to drink. I don’t believe it. “I think you’ve had enough.” Hey smart guy. They don’t want to be responsible for the drinks you had before you got there. I don’t believe it. The off switch was two-and-a-half bags. Hey smart guy. Tiger called from a 7-11. I don’t believe it. I called the valet from my room. Hey smart guy. “Tell Dad I’ll be back in twenty.” I don’t believe it. Icy morning like a mouth full of broken teeth. Hey smart guy. “They getting everyone together in the building.” I don’t believe it. “The people are here.” Hey smart guy. “I swear I didn’t score yet; I was just—” I don’t believe it. They let me go; I didn’t have any more money. Hey smart guy. Bend over pretend to tie my shoe pick up the bag quick walk away. I don’t believe it. Hey smart guy! Get your ass right back here. Handcuffs, back of the cop car.

  I don’t believe it. Thought you were slick. Hey smart guy. They had Tiger on the concrete. I don’t believe it. “Felony possession, intent to.” Hey smart guy. Heard about one who found part of a toothpaste box and read it for weeks waiting for trial. I don’t believe it. The people took me to a room in the castle. Hey smart guy. Lieutenant Abelove told me I was safer from sleep than ever. I don’t believe it. Shut up, shut up. Hey smart guy. “You going to be just fine, Mike; they gonna lock me up forever.” I don’t believe it. “They gonna lock me up forever! Oh God.” Hey smart guy. “Oh God, I done spent half my life in jail. Oh God, my mamma ain’t raise me. Oh God.” The people shut Tiger up. I don’t believe it. Kind of glad they did. Hey smart guy. When I heard them hitting him I grinned like a devil. I don’t believe it. It was like a little piece of feeling got loose and I caught it between my teeth. Hey smart guy.

  The people let me make a phone call. I didn’t have my heart in it.

  “Hey Dad. Yeah I’m a little locked up.”

  “A little,” the cop said next to me. Hey smart guy.

  “It’s kind of a traffic thing. I might need to be bailed out. Bring, I don’t know how much.”

  I was still hoping for an I-bond. Released on my own recognizance. I’d had those before. But I’d never been locked on a felony before. In the morning they took us from the cell at the station where we’d spent New Year’s Eve to the city jail at 26th and California. It was 2002. I saw Tiger in the back of the paddy wagon. He was all beat up.

  “Do you think I’ll get an I-bond, Tiger? Do you think maybe I’ll get an I-bond?”

  Tiger was silent. Finally the cop shut me up.

  The wagon stopped and they hustled us out. 26th and Cali. I don’t believe it. They dumped a few more paddy wagons of junkies and dealers into the big holding cell while me and Tiger were getting our bearings. I had two cigarettes in my jacket and eight dollars in my shoe. Everyone was lighting up. I borrowed a light. Hooray cigarette. The nicotine rush gave me back everything the people had taken. And more. I felt like I had not yet begun to fight.

  “Gimme your goddamn money.”

  This from a skinny twenty-year-old gangbanger.

  “No,” I said. “Fuck no.”

  “I’ll see you tonight,” he said.

  “I’ll see you never,” I said. I hit the cigarette like Rocky.

  Some of the gangbangers were selling clonidine. Two dollars a pill. Clonidine is a blood-pressure medicine they give you at detox centers to ease withdrawal pain. I bought one. I got one of the last ones. They sold out quick. Clonidine works by making you dizzy. As far as I can tell. I’m no doctor. I sat on the floor for a minute. A big cop came i
n.

  “OK motherfuckers, listen up. Everyone get up against the wall. Everything except your wallet and clothes goes on the middle of the floor. Now. Drugs, cigarettes, lighters, knives, combs, pens, needles. Drugs. Anything you put on the floor now, we will not charge you with. But when you leave this room, we will search you. And if we catch you with anything, we will charge you with bringing contraband into a secure facility. That’s going to be time on top of whatever you’re getting for whatever got you here.”

  Eighty pockets emptied on the cold floor. “You got a needle in your pocket, junkie? If I prick my hand on a goddamn needle I’m going break your teeth out.” Hey smart guy. “With this.” Random brutality is effective population control in conditions of chronic overcrowding. “The jail guards are the same kind of people you see working in the stores you like to go to,” Dave said once. “They’re the people you don’t know. The people who work in the stores are so friendly. You might think all the people you don’t know are friendly like that. But the people who work in the stores act friendly because the boss fires them when they don’t. What are the people like now?”

  “Get us out of here.”

  “There’s a hundred of us in a cell made for ten.”

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “I can’t stand up.”

  “Get us out of here.”

  “I can’t lie down.”

  “Motherfucker passed out standing.”

  “So damn tight packed up in here motherfuckers can’t breathe.”

  “Motherfuckers can’t fall down.”

  “Motherfuckers can’t turn around.”

  “Get us out of here.”

  The brown-yellow-white squirming cell-shaped mass of us pushed tentacles out through the bars at a lady cop walking past.

  “Hey, bitch, get us out of here, fucking bitch!”

  “OK, who said that?”

  The people came by with their face talk and their billy clubs.

  “Who said that? Who said that?”

  There was no “who” that said that. No one. But the people demanded a who. They wouldn’t talk to a two-hundred-legged cell-shaped monster. They demanded to talk to one person. Responsibility. They were going to teach us to take responsibility. We were responsible for our humanity. They looked hard into the cell with their billy clubs next to their faces.

  “Who said that?”

  They were going to cut one human being out of the squirming animal mass. Just to prove there were real people in there. The lady cop came close and jabbed her billy club in at a heart and two lungs.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Get him out of there! Pull him out of there!”

  The cops pulled him out like a tooth and got him by the bloody roots on the concrete floor outside the cell. They started to operate. They grunted with the work.

  “Oh man, that’s fucked up.”

  “They can’t do that.”

  “Man, that ain’t right.”

  “Where’s the video camera?”

  “Better not put him back in here.”

  “All that blood.”

  “I need my medication.”

  “Motherfucker next to me bleeding.”

  “What day is it?”

  “Stop bleeding on me, motherfucker.”

  Hours passed. Blood dried. When was our bail hearing? How long could they just leave us in here? Wasn’t there a law? They pulled a few of us out. A few more another time. No one knew where. Everyone was glad there were less of us. They took a quarter of us out in one lump once. The mass sagged and split. I fell out the middle. I was an independent operator again. My nerves stopped at the edge of my skin again. I walked over to the sink and threw up.

  We could hear them getting called out for the bail hearing in the bullpen down the hall. At 26th and Cali, the bail judge comes to you. You see him face-to-face through the miracle of technology. Technology that matches faces to crimes, crimes to degrees, degrees to bail amounts. Technology that projects the judge’s human face down into the hole where the bodies fuse. Where you forget that you did what you did. Maybe someone else did it. Well, you better remember. Get ready to sit down in a chair and face the video judge. Face him like the human being that you are. Sit down in the chair by yourself. No one’s touching you. Be responsible. A guard reads your name off a list. Now look up. Look into the TV face of the video judge.

  “Video judge, video judge.”

  Anxiety coiled through our cell. One guy whipped out a comb from God knows where and started carefully working his hair. He probably pulled it out of his ass. Where else could he have hidden it? The cops found a single thin cigarette I had tucked into the back of my left sock.

  “Video judge, video judge.”

  It was my turn to face the video judge. The guard pulled me out of the cell and pushed me down the hall and sat me down in the folding chair. He pointed up at the video screen. The video judge was a cube of pink and black TV colors. They had taken my glasses. They said my glasses were a weapon. Video judge looked like an open TV wound. A man in the cheapest suit I ever saw came and stood next to me. He was my court-appointed lawyer for the bond hearing. I craned my neck up toward the screen. Help me, video judge. I tried to adjust my facial muscles to the appropriate position. Three seconds. The colors moved inside video judge and sounds came out.

  “Bond, twenty thousand dollars.”

  The guard took me back to the cell.

  I saw him first. He was snuffling something in his hand. He looked up like what. I moved over.

  “You got some dope, man,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “I seen you got some dope, man,” I whispered.

  He was a big Latino man, Latin King tats. His face was dead bone white.

  “What’ll you give me if I do?”

  “I’ll bail you out.”

  “What?”

  “I got money. I got a lawyer coming by to bail me out tonight. I’ll bail you too.”

  He grabbed my wrist.

  “Oh hey man, yeah man. Look. You gotta bail me out. My bail high. But I gotta ounce of pure at my apartment. Fat ounce of pure. More when I’m on the street. I give you my girl’s number. You can have the ounce tonight. Uncut pure raw. More tomorrow. You gotta bail me out.”

  I grabbed his wrist.

  “Oh yes, yes, yes I will. But I need the dope you have on you now.”

  He grabbed my shoulder. I grabbed his arm.

  “Oh yeah, please, you got to—”

  “Oh yes, now, I need it—”

  “Ounce today, ounce tomorrow—”

  “Dope now, bail now—”

  “Now, tonight, today, tomorrow.”

  He slowly spelled out his name and his phone number and his girl’s number and another number that was maybe his mom’s or his Social Security number while I knelt snorting that half bag, nodding at him, smiling, watching for the guard.

  My minimum habit was ten bags a day. Half a bag just gave the withdrawal chills the energy they needed to snap my spine in half.

  “This…shit…don’t…do…shit,” I sneered into the Latin King’s skull. “You think I’m bailing you out for half…a…bag…of…bullshit?”

  He looked sick but he got up fast. Two hundred and fifty pounds. At least. Those gangbanger junkies weren’t on the street long enough to lose all the muscle they got in prison.

  “Are you crazy? I will kill you.”

  I moved quick to other side of the cell and put my hands in my pockets.

  “Who you got in here, cabron? Who you got in here, maricon? We’ll see tonight! You better get bailed out, motherfucker! I’ll see you in the showers, maricon!”

  I thought how I would break one of my own teeth out in the shower with my fist and walk up behind him and tap him on the shoulder and push it into his eye. “Already dead,” a Zen master said when someone told him they were afraid of dying. “Already dead.” Outside the bars the people were beating a junkie who had a needle in his pock
et when they searched him. “Already dead.” I told the man who was processing me that I was in the methadone program and to give me my methadone and he smiled at me like the Buddha and said no.

  The gangbanger who’d demanded my money walked by nodding at me and punching his fist in his palm. The withdrawal chills took my legs. Blood filled my mouth from the cheek I’d been biting. And the tang of the Latin King’s dope burned through the blood. Through the blood. The tang of dope burned a hole in my blood. It burned a hole at the back of my throat.

  My endless dope body streamed out through the hole. Poured out into the alleys and corners and jungles. Into Chip’s roof and Baltimore and Candy Land and Florida and Burma and Nancy’s apartment and the Church Without Walls. Into Funboy’s eyes and Henry’s arm and Cash’s helmet and the Center for Addiction Medicine and the sky above Mrs. Nichols’s house. Cut me gangbanger! Cut me Latin King! Like cutting the string of a kite. “Already dead.” Already elsewhere. Already everywhere. No way to stop it.

  My body in the holding cell at 26th and California, January 2, 2002. A tiny dot in the vast memory network. The whiteness bled through the memory routes until the past and future were infected. Until the street/jail difference disappeared. Until the Dom/Henry difference disappeared. Until the life/death difference disappeared. Until the then/now difference disappeared. Until the Eva/Funboy difference went, the Chicago/Baltimore difference went, the red-top/white-top difference, the bail/no bail difference, the Michigan/Florida difference didn’t make a difference. The memory disease bled through the borders. Until the incurable world shone white and solid as a ball of metal.

  CHAPTER 14

  Forgetfulness

  I didn’t have to pull my tooth out in the shower. My father showed up with the bail and a breaking voice before lights out. Good-bye jail friends. The incurable world. That’s gone too. Along with a half bottle of prescription cough syrup I stole from my mother’s medicine cabinet the next day. It didn’t do much. I don’t miss it. A week later they asked me my name at the rehab intake desk and I stuttered on it.