The Cocaine Chronicles (10 page)
T
his is the story of how I, hardheaded and some might say hard-hearted, Roger Deakens, actually learned something about the highly touted, but seldom seen, spiritual side of life and found my own true love.
My little tale begins in a bar, The Lion’s Head, my favorite old haunt, the great hang for journalists, novelists, village politicos, and the occasional famous actor from the Theatre In The Round, which was just down the street, on the other side of Sheridan Square.
The dark, friendly dive where I met Nicole.
She was trim-hipped, with shining black shoulder-length hair, and she stood between the service station and the last seat at the bar, my usual spot.
I slid onto my stool and was immediately attracted by her perfume. Subtle, classy, a fog of desire. She had a long, sensitive, fine-boned face, and small pearl earrings. She wore a dark tweed business suit that accentuated her tight, athletic body. I ordered my usual, Scotch and soda, from Tommyboy, the 300-pound Yeats-quoting bartender, and tried to remember if I’d ever seen her in the Head before. I thought not, but there had been more than a few nights over the past six months when I couldn’t remember much of anything at all. No, I figured, she must be a new girl, probably worked in one of the office buildings nearby, perhaps one of the restaurants that had been springing back up after a few rough seasons.
She sipped a glass of white wine, not looking at me at all, which was fine. I had plenty of time. That was my edge with women. I could wait them out. A lot of guys come on to every girl with the same kind of game-show-host jokes and fast riffs, but that’s not me.
I’ve learned through hard-won experience that when you’re trolling for love, you’ve got to be “riff specific.” Tailor each and every riff to the particular girl in question. That’s how you get them to fall in love with you, which after all is the ultimate goal. Or at least it was my goal. I never felt that it was satisfying to merely get them to undress, to open their beautiful legs. No, I wanted them to want me, to need me, to love me. I’m talking about the hurting kind of love, where they’d beg to see me the next day and the next and the next. They wanted to be my girl.
But I didn’t want a girl. Not that way. Love wasn’t my thing, not back then. Not that I didn’t care about them. I did, like another man might care about a vintage car. I was a young man, the field was ripe, and I had become a connoisseur of hearts. Okay, technically speaking, I broke their hearts. But, come on, they loved it. Well, at least some of them did. Or else why would they keep coming back?
In those happy days, I liked to think of myself as an artist, an artist of seduction. An overblown, self-regarding epithet, to be sure, but I did have a more than modest talent for love. What were my talents? Well, first off, I could size up any woman within the first two minutes.
Oh, what do we have here? Short, spiky hair, glasses,
Levi’s … must be the intellectual type.
The way to proceed here is to drop some little thing about a lady poet. I’m not talking about Sylvia Plath, for God’s sake. Even a frigging football lineman can quote something from Plath. She’s just another pop suicide now. No, with this kind of “sensitive rebel type” you have to mention a woman poet only women revere. Like, drop a nice line from, say, Mary Oliver. That’s the kind of poet close to a bright woman’s heart, the kind she’s sure that no man would even know about. Oh yeah, you lay a little Mary Oliver on her and she starts thinking,
Wow, this
guy isn’t bad looking and he’s so sensitive, as well. Maybe, just maybe,
he’s the man of my dreams.
Yeah, that’s the thing. You want to be her dream lover, you have to pay consummate attention to the details.
But details aren’t the only thing. Oh no … You have to appear to be a fun guy, as well. Sensitive plus fun. If you’re too sensitive, after all, you might just as well be some kind of pushover. No, you have to show you’re a little dangerous, but fun-dangerous, not deadly dangerous. And what better way to show this than to have your ready vial of pure white cocaine with you.
Ah, with the coke plus the riff-specific sensitivity, you were just too good to be true. (Which pretty much sums up what I was … way too good to be true, ever.)
Anyway, after a few laserlike riffs, which honed in on something the woman couldn’t see coming, and a few spoonfuls of the requisite powders, well, she was pretty much all yours.
Man, I know it sounds cold but it wasn’t . . . not really. It was fun, sharp, predator-and-victim fun. And what’s more fun than that?
Not to mention the fact that I got something else out of it. I mean, besides the obvious things. Can you guess?
Nah, you’re not smart enough.
Reverie. That’s right, reverie. Of the two or three hundred girls I bedded with my artistic approach, I could remember about half of them in stunning detail. I mean, every lick of their tongues, the curve of their thighs, the way they looked in naked profile. I could see them down on all fours; I could see them on their backs, their legs open. I could see them up against the wall, their asses out, their long legs spread, begging for it again.
Yes, I could replay my conquests any time, night or day. At my little pad, there was no need for television. I had my own movie theater, Roger’s Memory Lane, and in every frame I was the star. And some beautiful, fantastic creature I’d picked up was my costar.
And, I might add, I was very picky. I didn’t exert all this energy or attention on just anyone. No, the girl had to have a certain quality, and she needed to present a specific technical problem for me. A challenge, if you will. Now take this girl … the one in question, Nicole. There was something special about her, not just her great dark looks. At first I wasn’t sure what it was … so I waited, watched.
Then I began to see. There was a sigh after she sipped her wine. The way she wearily shifted her weight from one great-looking leg to the other. She was beautiful, but above all, she was tired. Right away, I guessed she’d been through something tough. That told me how to tailor my opening gambit. What she needed was a little coke and sympathy. Well, reverse that. Sympathy first, then coke.
Fortunately I had a ready supply of both. Sympathy, in New York City, perhaps more than in any other place, is essential to seduction. For making women fall in love with you, sympathy is a basic ingredient … like, say, bread or water to a starving man. The city is so full of truly creepy guys that most women spend half their time frightened, wary, bummed out. If you don’t have a fine reservoir of feigned sympathy, you really have no shot. And as for the chemical side of the equation, I’d just purchased a gram or so of coke from my local dealer, a guy named Wease, who stood at his post at the south end of the bar. The Wease, as his customers called him, sold decent, cheap blow. Granted, sometimes it might have a little crank in it—the kind that made you grit your teeth for about fourteen hours—but basically it was good, reliable stuff. And the nice thing is, if you got greedy and snorted all the shit up, all you had to do was hustle down to the other end of the bar, and there he was, ready with another handy little packet to enrich your emotional life.
Yeah
, I thought, looking at the surreal sheen of her black hair,
this promises to be a very exciting night.
“Roger Deakens,” I said, smiling in my most understanding way.
“Nicole,” she said, smiling in a sad way. “Nicole Draper.”
A great name, a great-looking girl. Classy, with that touch of sadness. I felt my heart begin to beat.
“You okay?” I said, using my soft, caring voice and doing “concern” with my eyebrows.
“Is it that obvious?” she said.
“You just look a little down,” I said. “Hard day?”
“Hard week,” she said. “Our stock is down and my boss is going nuts. Not to mention that he’s hitting on me every chance he gets.”
“Oh man, I hate that,” I said, trying out my PC chops. “And let me guess, you go over his head, complain, and you’re gone.”
She smiled and nodded her head. I saw her nostrils flare a little. God, she was a good-looking woman. And those lovely, small breasts, obviously all her own.
“You got it,” she said. “But I don’t want to bum you out.”
“You’re not,” I said. I shook my head and sighed.
“What?” she said.
“Oh, it’s just I wonder sometimes . . . when two people meet in a bar, why there’s all this pressure to be witty and happy.”
I could see a certain measure of relief spread across her lovely face.
“That’s true,” she said. “Which is why I never come to bars.”
“So how come you’re here tonight?” I said, doing my good-guy, smiley-face thing. (A cross between, say, rakish Mel Gibson in
Lethal
Weapon
and country-boy innocent Ron Howard playing Opie.)
“Meeting my boss,” she said.
“But I thought you just said . . .”
“I did. But he wants to get together with me to ‘discuss certain problems in our mission statement.’”
“Oh,” I said. “I get it. And while he’s explaining these deep problems, he’s playing footsies with you under the table.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Only it’s more than footsies. He actually groped me during a presentation last week.”
“Jesus,” I said. “What an asshole.”
“Yeah,” Nicole said, smiling, “but he’s the top asshole. Nothing I can do. Short of quit and bring in the lawyers, and you know where that gets you.”
I sighed and took a sip of my drink. What a bummer. We’d established a real connection, I mean, even a kind of rapport, and now her jerkazoid boss was coming and she’d have to leave.
I excused myself and went into the men’s room, which was just opposite the bar.
Once I’d locked the battered old door, I put the toilet cover down, had a sit, took out my little vial of coke, and dipped in the spoon. The white flakes were big, chalky, and when I snorted them up, I was pleased to find they didn’t burn the lining off the inside of my nostrils. Indeed, this stuff actually
was
coke and not some weird Wease combination of Mannitol and greaser speed. Within a few seconds I felt that ebullient lift in my head and the racing of my heart. Ah, that was good, truly good, and if I could just add the fair, elegant Nicole to the mix . . . Images of delight flashed through my head: Nicole lying in bed in front of me with her garter belt on, her legs open, on her knees, her lovely lips parted. Ah, but what of the boss? How could we rid ourselves of the boss?
I got up from the toilet, checked the mirror to see if I had any telltale white residue under my nose, and headed back to the bar.
She was still standing there, but she was no longer alone.
Looming next to her was a hulking guy with a $200 haircut and a tan Burberry coat, the kind that would have cost me a month’s pay.
Obviously, the boss had arrived, and before I could walk the three or four feet to the bar, he’d edged even closer to her and put his arm on her back, moving it up and down in a familiar way.
Perhaps it was the drugs that made me do it, perhaps the challenge, but before I could think the thing through, I found myself opening my arms and stepping to Nicole’s left.
“Nicole,” I said. “I can’t believe it.”
She turned and looked at me. Stunned. The boss, a big, dark guy with thick eyebrows and a broad bear’s nose, was shocked and, better yet, annoyed.
“I was just over at your office and they told me you might be here.”
She hesitated for about a nanosecond, then went along with my performance.
“Terry,” she said, winging it and throwing herself into my arms.
The combo of her fabulous little breasts pushing into my chest and my cocaine high filled me with a kind of soaring inspiration.
“It’s so great to see you, baby,” I said.
I kissed her on the cheek, and after beaming at her like Mister Sun himself, I looked up at the boss, who stood looming, glowering, totally usurped.
I pretended not to notice the scowl on his broad, thick-lipped face.
“Hi,” I said. “Terry Andrews. I’m Nicole’s fiancé. Just in for the night from Chicago.”
“Fiancé?” he said, his head jerking like I’d backhanded him in the mouth. “Nicole, you never mentioned that you were engaged.”
She smiled and looked at him with big, innocent eyes.
“You never asked, Ronnie,” she said.
“But I assumed that . . .”
She ignored him, put her arm around me, and beamed into my face.
“Terry, this is my boss, Ron Baines.”
“Hey, Ron,” I said. “Great to meet you.”
I flashed my hand, but he pulled away from me like I had a fungus on my fingers.
“Yeah, well, you’re from Chicago, how come you’re here?” he said, blurting out the words with a barely disguised hostility.
“I had a few days off between meetings, so I got the first plane out this afternoon. Man, I miss my baby. She’s a real great girl, huh, Ron?”
“Right,” Ron said, gritting his teeth and quickly tossing back his vodka. “One in a million. You staying long?”
“Not that long,” I said. “Just long enough to get married.”
There was a long silence after that. Finally, Nicole spoke up.
“Oh, Terry, you’re serious?”
“Why not?” I said. “That is, if Ron will give you the morning off. I bet he will, too. You’re a married man, aren’t you, Ron?”
“Well, yeah, technically,” he said, biting his lower lip.
“Oh, separated?” I asked.
“Not yet. I mean, practically.”
“Oh, you don’t want to do that, Ron,” Nicole said. “What about the kids?”
“Yeah, the kids,” I said. “You have to consider them. How many do you have, Ron?”
“Three,” Ron replied, sounding as though he’d announced that nuclear war had just commenced in New Jersey.
“That’s great,” I said. “Well, Ron, I hate to take this little girl away from you, but it’s kind of a big night for us. I’m sure you understand.”
“Yeah, well . . . yeah, right,” was all he could come up with. He looked down at Nicole’s finger. “How come you don’t have a rock on your hand?”
“Tomorrow, Ronnie,” I said. “We take care of all that tomorrow. Well, we have to run, pal. I just want to say what a pleasure it’s been to meet you. Great to know my baby is in such good hands .