Lucky Us (5 page)

W
HEN
I
GOT
to New York I was much more cautious. My aunt Angie noticed it right from the start. She said, “What the hell happened to you?” She thought I looked “beetle browed” and she said I spoke so goddamn softly she could hardly hear me.

In New York I stopped using my real name. I was Greg (in honor of Gregor Samsa in
The Metamorphosis
) to anyone I sold anything to. I set up other policies as well. I didn't socialize with other dealers. I didn't hang out in large groups.

I sold to a much smaller number of people (my subcontractors, I liked to call them) and I wouldn't do business with anyone who was flighty or loud or brainless or too reassuring. This narrowed down my opportunities quite a lot, but I was trying not to be greedy. I was trying to be steady but with my forces gathered, my targets clear. The Zen dealer, that was me. Steve and Zorro, two of my guys, used to say I was too strict.

I had moved into another hotel—I knew how to do that now—a colonnaded barn in downtown Manhattan that was regarded fondly in certain circles because all the rooms had their own safes. The second night I was there, a rock group whose album I had left at Maureen's trashed a room three floors down from me. They broke a chair and threw a burning mattress out the window and made a mess out of the plumbing. That kind of good time never made sense to me, but I bragged about their high jinks to my old friend Joel with proprietary chuckling.

It was the start of my thinking of all my days as a spell in a resort. I moved from room to room in that hotel, and in each room I set up my radio, my books, my favorite shirts in the closet. Every day for five years I had the same breakfast—a salami omelet—at 2
P.M.
in the diner down the street, while I read the papers. I got the
Times
for the news and the
Post
for the funnies. I made my calls from a pay phone in the diner, and I went out on business appointments a few times a month. At night I hung out in the bar. I was confident enough so that women came to me pretty readily, and my relations with them were friendly and lustful and unimportant. I had a running poker game on Thursday nights with Bob, a guy I started buying from when my Tucson shipment ran out. He was the only smuggler I was ever friends with and an amazing
bluffer at cards.

I spent money freely, it seemed to me, on iguana-skin cowboy boots and dinners out and drugs from other connoisseurs, but still I was saving money, not something dealers were known for doing. I didn't own anything really and even with weekly poker games and feeding half the people I knew (nobody ate elaborate food then), I didn't run through what I had.

I knew that most dealers were done in by always wanting to push things further. I believed in being careful. I never met my subcontractors in the same place twice. I picked noisy Chinese restaurants or workingmen's bars in stale basements. Some of my subcontractors found this insulting—people liked to do business with more flair than that—but I wouldn't even argue about it. “Bear with me,” I said. “Humor me in this.”

I saw what happened to hot dogs. Bob, my poker buddy, went south on a dope run to Mexico in December—he liked to be in Mexico for Christmas—and in January his girlfriend told me he'd been shot by a border guard outside Brownsville, Texas. Shot dead: it took me a few beats to understand that was what she meant. We were in a bar, with a loud jukebox behind us. Someone next to me was complaining about a bad movie, a waitress in a miniskirt was trying to edge past me—nothing in that
room suggested that such news could be true. “Can I do anything to help?” I said. Bob's girlfriend was weeping. “Tell me if anyone needs money. Let me know,” I said.

And then I forgot about him. I had to find a new supplier, with Bob gone. My brothers, whom I'd made the mistake of gifting with large bags of dope one Christmas, suggested a friend from Ocean Avenue, great prices, a wonderful guy. I knew not to use anyone they suggested. I was not a total jerk. People told me Maureen was living with some hotshot who smuggled in his own planeloads, but I knew better than to have business dealings with the current boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend. Meanwhile, time was marching on. I risked losing my own network if I dawdled. At last, through Joel, I met a Jamaican guy from Fort Greene who had the kind of even, casual disposition I respected, and I sent one of my brothers for the pickup. I didn't show my face.

I picked Rich (who was definitely more sensible than my other brother, Dom) and I made him promise to shut up about this forever. I had him put his hand on his heart and swear. He probably liked this part of it. He was glowing when he came back, with his teeth flashing in victory and his eyes sleepy from smoking a sample. We unloaded the car at 4:30 in the morning, and then for three days I did nothing but sit in the house with those bricks of straw
I was about to turn into gold.

I thought about the money, and how it was going to pile up in the coming years. I counted my chickens before they were hatched. I believed that happiness had been very close to me but had eluded me so far and now I was getting closer to it again. What I wanted to do was travel and then buy a place in a particularly beautiful part of the world (I was thinking of Morocco or Bali) so that friends could visit for months or years, supported by my cache of eternal plenty. A big house, with ample grounds and gardens, on the outskirts of a city.

When I finally came out of the apartment, I was calm and cheerful, and ready to meet with Steve, the quietest of my subcontractors, a frog-faced guy I'd known in high school when he was in Bridge Club, before I was Greg to him. We were in the Lovely Fortune Palace eating chow fun, my favorite kind of noodles. When I got up to go to the men's room, I made it as far as the hallway outside the rest rooms, and Steve and another guy put me under arrest.

T
HE RESTAURANT, WITH
its red ribbon streamers and its bamboo-print wallpaper, had become a room with no floor to stand on, a pit that was my future. I tried to walk decently after I was cuffed; I lagged and swayed and
then I got in step. I was angry enough to want to hurt Steve, who looked like a gargoyle to me, drop-mouthed and chinless. My mind was stuck on the word
ruin;
my chest cavity was hollowed out and blasted, the site of something gone.

In the cop car and at the precinct station house, I was very, very polite to both Steve and the other man—all my refusals to speak were couched in measured, gentlemanly terms—and the two of them probably weren't as menacing or brutal as they might have been, although they certainly scared me.

At the station, the other man, a heavy guy with shiny lips, kept asking me, “What slap-happy loony-tunes idea made you think you knew how to do this?” He called me boy and kid, which I was. Steve suggested I might want to remember some names—who sold me weight, who made the pickup—didn't I want to help myself out? The worst thing I could think of was that I might bring my brother Rich down with me. How could I go home after that? I wouldn't speak at all once they got on that tack.

I
T WAS EVENING
and no one could get me out on bail until the next day. The cops at the station were naturally gleeful about this piece of information. I was afraid that my father, who had not seemed to take everything
in when I'd phoned him, hadn't moved fast enough. At midnight a van took me and some others—a few hookers and a very noisy transvestite—to Central Booking, where we were taken to the pens in the basement.

My heart sank when I entered that room. It smelled like a very old urinal, and the men, who were sitting or lying on cots, looked miserable and exhausted and furious to find themselves washed up on this miasmal shore. But they did look like men to me, like an assemblage on some particularly grim corner, not like demons or wolves, and some of them talked to me when I came in. I would not say they were friendly but they were almost social. I knew something about how to have that kind of conversation, and I didn't look as young as I was.

It is true that I was terrified as well. They kept the lights on all night and some people dozed but most people talked. The transvestite could not keep quiet. She cawed and hooted and when people threatened her she giggled. She said, “I'm leaving soon. My boy is so late. My boy is late to come for me.” Around dawn a man in an orange T-shirt took her by the hair—it was her own hair and not a wig—and dragged her across the floor. “Let me sleep,” he said. “You won't let me sleep.” Whenever she shrieked, he said, “You have to shut up.” Everyone was looking but no one was doing anything yet. And then—
very fast—he swung her head against the base of the toilet. We could hear the crack, under her screaming, and her smeared face was streaming with blood, her face was a bloody mess. We were all shouting. He was just about to whack her again when the guards showed up.

W
HEN THEY TOOK
me into the court for the arraignment, I was very shaky. I didn't shake, in fact, but I knew I looked like someone who'd been in jail all night, pale and funky and sullen. My lawyer was there and my brother Dom. After I was charged and released, I tried to tell them how someone's head had just been smacked against a toilet in the cell. They couldn't figure out why I was talking about that now, and they listened as if I were crazy. They waited, fish-eyed and embarrassed, until I was finished. And then I knew (I had not really understood this before) that I was about to enter this craziness, and no one was going with me.

M
OST STAGES IN
anyone's life have their own same-old anecdotes, tales told a billion times over, but the days in prison are an unsorted mess to me. I don't have stories.

When I was in prison, people always complained about what happened when they telephoned home. Somebody's
girlfriend acted as if a two-minute conversation was a big favor, somebody's sister bitched about how much the collect calls cost, somebody's parents were less than chatty. There was a lot of whining about all those people who didn't give a shit and had no understanding at all. It was clear that we were not the same familiar characters they'd known; we'd become something they didn't want to think too much about.

But I didn't mind being out of people's ken for my eight-months-to-a-year. I wrote a few letters to keep my mother from getting too distressed, and otherwise I was just as glad not to have to connect what was going on inside to whatever was happening out there. Aunt Angie sent me some food (dry sausage and pignoli cookies) that I never got, which was nice of her. I told friends and old girlfriends not to write and they didn't. For me it was all right to be left as I was during that time.

W
HEN
I
CAME
out of prison, I wasn't blinded by the light of day or anything. People say you get out and things are too stimulating or there are too many choices or you forget how to read ordinary social signals, but I wasn't in long enough for that. I went in in August, I came out in March.

On the other hand, I wasn't the same either. I had run
my life before—insofar as I ran it—on a kind of pirate's faith, a sense of harvesting what was there for the taking. That was over, all that sunny mischief.

In prison, I got good at two things, amusing myself on my own and not thinking too far back or too far ahead. I had to quiet myself so that I wouldn't get eaten up with bitterness. I couldn't think about Steve or how I'd gotten fucked over or why a lot of people weren't here and I was. I had to learn to still my thinking.

W
HEN
I
CAME
out, I went back to the hotel where I had lived before, to a room as small as the one I'd first had. I had lost a lot of weight and it took awhile for my prison haircut to grow in. People who knew me before were spooked at the sight of me, although they tried to be hearty.

My parole officer was in Brooklyn, and I got the habit of walking over the Brooklyn Bridge for my appointments. It was a cold and windy walk, in that first season, but beautiful, with the light glinting on the water and the roaring traffic noise like an enclosure. I felt best on those walks.

My parole officer was so impressed with my fondness for the out-of-doors that he got me a job for the Parks Department. Wearing the uniform humiliated me and I was afraid of seeing someone I knew when I was painting
benches or cutting grass in Prospect Park.

It was Maureen I didn't want to see. As it happened, she showed up one night in the hotel bar, on the arm of some jerk in a leather vest. She was the same, maybe sleeker and brighter, and she made a big fuss about me, for the guy's benefit or out of sympathy; everyone knew my whole goddamned story. I was glad enough to be hugging her (“look at you, what a trip,” she said), and I let the two of them buy me drinks all night, which depressed me later.

This did make me get myself out of the park, where I still worried that she might pass by. I found a job in a store that sold water beds. I was always good at sales, which is odd because I haven't ever cared whether anyone bought anything or not. Even when I was looking at hundreds of kilos of marijuana, I didn't care when it got sold. I let people dicker over the price and then if we couldn't agree, I peddled my papers elsewhere, with no hard feelings. I was never in a hurry. They liked me at the water bed store.

J
UDY, A WOMAN
I was with for a long time, wanted me to move to California with her. Yvonne, who came later, thought I should go back to school. I loved these
women and I gave them a hard time. What did I want? Women kept thinking it was their job to find this out. It wasn't true that I wanted nothing. I had my enthusiasms and obsessions. I had disappointments and losses. Things happened to me. I had a life. But it is true that I lived it without depending on anything turning out well.

When I got out of prison, the entire country seemed weirdly sentimental to me. All the constant insisting that things were going to get better, that it was necessary and admirable to believe this. No provision was made for things getting worse. It was as if no one had thought anything through.