The Cocaine Chronicles (14 page)
Ronald. His real name was Ronald.
Roughly a year after my rendezvous with Flash, my family moved from Pittsburgh to Philly so that my mom could take a “real job, with benefits” at Temple University. She was a clerk in the admissions office but hell-bent on the idea that if she held the job long enough, she’d somehow get smarter by osmosis. During this time we vacationed in Brigantine, a sleepy South Jersey island nearly as populated with dive bars and drug dealers as it was with washed-up sand crabs and tall, grassy weeds. There was never enough money for designer-brand clothes or frivolous food items or the slicker-looking school supplies, but somehow my mom had managed the mortgage on a small beach bungalow. She went in on it with Viki, and they alternated weekends.
Situated just across the bay from Atlantic City, Brigantine was a bedroom community for casino workers. Each evening, card dealers and cocktail waitresses, hotel maids, bartenders, and lounge singers made the trek over the bridge onto the glittering Vegas “mini-me” strip. Here, barely out of earshot of gagging slot machines spitting up coins, is where I lost my virginity for the third time, the one I count as “official.” I was nineteen, not yet aware of what had really happened with Flash, and still holding out for “that special someone.” It’s what goes on record in the annals of “important girl moments” in my mind because a) it involved another person, and b) I remembered it.
I was on coke quite literally that night—a makeshift bed of flattened cola boxes laid out discretely by a bank of sand dunes on the beach. The little nook, sandwiched between a spindly wood fence and a ten-foot-high mound of sand flecked with bits of jagged shell, was a landmark of sorts—couples tramped there after dark for some privacy—but it never received a deserved nickname, like “makeout point.”
Sean was a bartender at the Big Brown Bar, or “B-cubed” as we called it, a local dive with a jukebox that leaned toward reggae and soul, and a shabby back porch that emptied onto the beach. We’d met in a darts tournament. As I stared down the bull’s-eye, nibbling the inside of my cheek to harness my concentration, I caught Sean ogling. I reminded him of an old girlfriend, he told me later. I had the same pouty mouth.
What I came to notice about Sean, once he sparked my interest and I’d gone back, repeatedly, to B-cubed, was his erratic temperament. One night he’d be charged up and tending bar as if it were an extreme sport, all but tossing bottles in the air like Tom Cruise in
Cocktail
. The next, he’d be sulky and sullen, quickly irritated. But like so many of the girls who padded behind him, I sat there night after night—ingesting ridiculous amounts of greasy fried mushrooms and teaching myself to blow smoke rings from bummed Camel Lights—until he remembered my name. His mood swings would come to make sense. Sean made an okay living mixing drinks, but his rent came from coke.
B-cubed sported a somewhat uninspired nautical theme, with lots of dark wood and hanging, knotted rope. From the porthole above the toilet in the bathroom, one could see Atlantic City in the distance, a toy, snow-globe skyline glittering against the sooty sky, its fuzzy reflection calling attention to itself in the murky water below. Brigantine was to A.C. what Brooklyn had been to Manhattan in the 1970s: a place you aspire to leave. But Sean never got Saturday Night Fever. Sean took pride in hardly ever leaving the island. The last time he embarked from the fourteen-mile stretch of gravel and sand had been nine months earlier, to have a tooth pulled. Sean detested Atlantic City. “It’s a playground for shoebies,” he’d say.
“Shoebies,” that’s what they called the summering crowd.
Because shoebies wore their weathered, strappy leather sandals, flip-flops from the five-and-dime, beat-up Converse All Stars onto the beach; then, after the methodical ritual of spreading out oversize towels, setting down coolers, and muttering some form of “ah, smell that fresh air,” the flock of shoebies would enter into a flurry of buckle- and shoe-strap-releasing and the subsequent, near-choreographed wriggling of newly emancipated toes. The locals, they didn’t mind hot sand on their feet. The locals went barefoot.
We were shoebies of the worst variety. We actually owned a house on the island. And B-cubed was situated, a little too conveniently, on the corner of our street, so that you had to walk past its rowdy entrance—which reeked of sweat, salt water, and coconut-scented tanning lotion—after every stint on the beach. The bar was popular not because it was any good, but because the owners were generous to underage drinkers and it was, simply, the nearest toilet around if you weren’t the type to pee in the ocean.
Sean was in an especially spry mood the night we hooked up, full of jerky, happy movements and short bursts of laughter, all white teeth and lanky, toned limbs, lips so fleshy and red it was as if he’d just soaked them in a Dixie cup of Kool-Aid. I was sitting at the bar with several other shoebie girls from the city who had equally weighty crushes on Sean, facing the open door, when a yellow Camaro with a wheezy muffler pulled up and Sean slipped out. I recognized the driver from Island Pizza. He was still in uniform. Through the doorframe I could make out a slice of activity:
Sean leaning a little too deeply into the driver’s window, laughing nervously and glancing periodically over his shoulder. There was the quick, surreptitious exchange of cash accompanied by another cautionary glance in either direction, then a handshake and “See ya later, man. Yep.”
Back inside, Sean was leaning against a pinball machine thumbing through a wad of bills, when the Camaro screeched to a halt and did a 360. He stuffed the cash in his pocket and headed back out, a nothing-to-hide lilt in his step, walking straight into the car’s headlights—too overtly confident to be anything but scared shitless. The Island Pizza guys were rankled over something and, illogically, as their voices rose they bumped up the volume on their tinny car stereo.
Finally: “Can you turn that goddamned thing off?” Sean said. “Fer Christ’s sake.”
I couldn’t make out what, exactly, the Island Pizza guys were accusing him of. But Sean’s voice was fairly audible.
“No way, man, I work here. Weigh it out in the back of the car.”
More protesting from within the Camaro.
“Nuh-uh, there’s nowhere private here, I’ve got customers, I’m on the clock.”
Perhaps I craved adventure, and this was my late-teen, melodramatic way of claiming it; or maybe it was the beer, which was finally kicking in; or possibly the confidence induced from finally having perfected the smoke rings. Who knows? But I strode outside and rammed up against Sean, as if I’d known him since we were kids. “You need a place to go?” I said. “Because my house is right there, the little yellow one on the corner.”
That was the pinnacle of the drama, however. The Island Pizza guys, Sean’s “clients,” as he referred to them, had been mistaken about his cheating them. And to smooth over the discrepancy, they offered us each a line before finally cranking their car radio back up and rumbling off down the street. Sean and I walked back to the bar, but when we got there, he led me past B-cubed and onto the beach. “It’s late, they don’t need me anymore tonight,” he said. “Come on.”
As we reclined on the sand, I mistook the gnawing in my stomach, the butterflies, for some premature version of love. “You’re so cool, you know that?” Sean said. “Thanks for doing that. Really, really cool. Yeah.” He stretched out the “yeah,” a Jersey thing. “Yeehhh.” Then he held my face and stared into my eyes as if they weren’t mine, in a way that was far too familiar, too loaded with intimacy, for the short time we’d known one another. “Yeah, you’re all right.” And then we did it; simple as that.
Later, as we lay in each other’s arms, the cardboard cola boxes under our bare backs, Sean turned onto his side and kissed my eyelids gently. He traced the bow of my upper lip with his index finger—over and over again—and, just before nodding off to sleep, he silently mouthed what appeared to be “
Trina
.” Which, even under the muted rumble and crash of ocean waves, isn’t remotely close to my name.
I spent the next morning tanning with a school friend, Amy, who’d driven up to spend labor day weekend “with you!” she’d said. But she was a casual classmate, the type of friend who rotates in and out of your life according to the semester schedule; and I suspected she was really after a good browning of the neck and shoulders before classes started up the next week. I didn’t particularly enjoy sunbathing; but the night out with Sean had been significant enough that only a grossly girlish activity—gossiping while baking baby-oil-slicked bodies on those silver foils, say—would do.
As I filled her in on the night before, our tangerine wine coolers nearly the exact shade of our toenails, Amy went from puzzled to agitated to flat out rude: “I don’t get it. Why would you lie to me?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know I don’t care how many people you’ve slept with. So why say Sean was your first?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I know about Flash. We have Mid East History together. He told me all about your road trip.”
“But we didn’t sleep together. I mean, we
slept
, but that was pretty much it.”
“That’s not how he tells it.”
We went back and forth like this for a while, then Amy peeled the now warm and wilted cucumber slices from her eyelids and tossed them into the sand. She stood up and dusted off her roasted shins and calves. “Whatever,” she said.
I sat on the beach alone for quite some time after that, wringing my brain for details about that night along the Susquehanna River; but all I remembered with any clarity was the careening coke binge and my last moments with Flash before, apparently, passing out.
Flash could have been lying, of course.
Amy
could have been lying, though I don’t see why. She’d only recently taken a liking to Sean and she wasn’t even a shoebie, not officially. But there was no way to know for sure after what had happened in Viki’s office so many years earlier. No proof, in other words. So I wrote off the first time as unfortunate, the second time as a sloppy mistake, and I trudged back to join Amy inside the Big Brown Bar. It was Friday and still warm outside and, well,
the first time
—that was worth a round of shots.
After I returned to college for my senior year, Sean did a stint at the Jersey State Penitentiary for dealing. And when Viki was carted off to rehab that fall by her newly appointed fiancé—a “sea captain,” he called himself, but really he just operated one of those boats that carried tourists across the bay—we sold the beach house because my mom couldn’t keep up the payments. Flash, who knows what happened to him; but he was well-equipped with a large vocabulary, at least. And except for a few lines off the back of a navy three-ring binder on the way to a concert that year, I didn’t bother much with coke anymore. I preferred beer and pot and mineral water with a spritz of lime. But one thing was certain: I walked differently now. I held my head up high and walked like a lady.
I had to. You know, consider the alternative.
Leslie Barton
NINA REVOYR
was born in Japan and raised in Tokyo, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles. She is the author of
The Necessary Hunger
and
Southland
, which was a Book Sense 76 pick, won the Ferro-Grumley Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and was named one of the “Best Books of 2003” by the
Los Angeles Times.
It all got harder when my mother left, three weeks ago now.
That’s when Chester started saying he needed somebody to drive around with, and there’s no one left to go with but me. He’s got a big car, would
have
to be to fit him in it; his belly’s like a sack of potatoes stuffed under his shirt. When we came out to L.A. ten weeks ago, my mother looked at him once and said, “Don’t ever go near him.” My mother understood about men.
He grabbed me one day with a grubby hand, slid his fingers down my shoulder, said I looked older than I am, thirteen. Close up, he smelled like old tobacco and sweat. I pulled loose and stayed away, but now my mother is gone. I sit next to him while he puffs his cigarettes and watch the smoke curl toward the ceiling, looks almost pretty till the car fills up. He laughs when he sees my eyes tear from the smoke, me bent over to cradle my cough.
Every day at lunchtime we drive down to the school. All the kids come outside at 12:15, and we go so he can watch the little girls. Chester parks the car on the street right next to the schoolyard, under a row of big trees with leafy fingers hanging down. He’s like an old animal washed up on the beach, brown and wheezing. The little kids don’t see the fat man and the girl watching from the car in the shade. They’re only five or six years old, same age my sister was. They look so shiny and pretty, chasing each other and laughing, in shorts and white T-shirts or bright blouses. Sometimes they fall and start crying and then the older girl runs over and scoops them up. She’s got almond eyes and gold-brown skin, royal-looking, a Mexican girl. Chester doesn’t notice her, though. He keeps his eyes on the small ones. His breath changes
when they squat on the sizzling pavement, bony bottoms pressing tight against their shorts.
We left D.C. in June, right after school got out. My mother said too much was happening and she had to get away. She said the weather was bad for thinking. D.C. summers so sticky and hot they sweat the soul right out of you. It didn’t matter that we left because she had no steady job, worked off and on, a lot of places wouldn’t hire her because of her crumpled hand. Then a man she knew said he was driving out west to California, so we packed two bags and went with him. She had a friend in L.A. who said we could stay with her, but when we got here and called, the friend was gone. So we were stuck in L.A. with twenty-six dollars, the man who drove us on his way to San Francisco. All the clothes except the ones on our backs stolen out of the car in Oklahoma. Most of the money gone after two plates of greasy chicken and a night at the Golden Pacific Motel. We were right downtown, you could see City Hall.
This place was supposed to be a motel, but it looked more like a bunch of boards standing up with some paint slapped on to hold them together. So old the whole building shook when they ran the washing machine downstairs. My mother’s eyes sad the whole time she talked to the shriveled old man at the counter, said she’d never take me into a place like this except she couldn’t do any better just now. Piss stains on the outside wall and dirty air that pressed like fog against the window. Inside our room there was a Bible under a chair leg where the end got broken off, grooves in the wall behind the headboard so deep I could lay two fingers in them. There was a freeway outside the window, and it was loud in the room, like the sound came in and got trapped there, bounced and bounced off all the walls.
It was the next morning we met Chester. We walked into the coffee shop down the street for breakfast, and he looked up from the counter, said he knew the Lord was looking out for him when He sent two such beautiful ladies his way. He was wide awake and cheerful, as if he thought he was somewhere else. My mother smiled like something hurt her, quick-shuffled me into a booth. Chester got up, stretched wide, sleeves slipping down his arms, and slid into the booth right next to her. He said he had no particular plans that day and wouldn’t we like to go for a ride. L.A. was dangerous, he said, could eat people alive, especially those who didn’t know their way around. I don’t know how he figured out we were new. There were big rips in the fake red leather seats and I poked my fingers in them as he talked. My mother looked away from him, held her bad hand in her good one; it was dried up, shrunken, a bit darker than the rest of her. She kept saying we were busy, but anybody could see she was just putting him off, and Chester smiled at her the way she smiled at me when she knew I was lying. Chester’s fingers are like splotchy brown sausages, and he has big liquid eyes. His forehead and upper lip are always wet, too, and when he walked ahead of us toward the door that day, I saw the sweat spread like disease across his back.
He paid for our room that night, twenty dollars. My mother didn’t like the neighborhood—men hovered in doorways, caked in their own dirt, talking to themselves in low, lurching voices. Boys slid down the sidewalk, watery-eyed and wary, stopping to palm money for packets pulled from their big pockets, or to follow nervous men into cars or motels. We walked around the block once and saw shells of buildings with boards for windows, covered with graffiti, food, a few speckles of blood, the sticky yellow-brown patterns of piss. My mother hated the motel, but Chester had paid for it, and there was nowhere else to sleep except the beach. I would’ve gone—I like palm trees and water, the salty smell of the ocean—but my mother wouldn’t have it, said no child of hers was going to sleep outside like a beggar. So every day for a week Chester drove us around the city, and every night he paid for our room. He took us to Hollywood, Venice Beach, the San Fernando Valley, and told us stories about what he’d seen there. He bought us burgers and burritos, poured beer into an empty Coke can so he could drink as we drove. He didn’t tell us about himself—he had no job that I could see, and I didn’t know where he got his money.
My mother wouldn’t talk much on these drives, not unless he asked her something, but Chester didn’t seem to notice or care.
When we were alone in the room at night, my mother shut the window against the noise of the freeway and made plans. She said she was going to start looking for a job, something easy where she didn’t have to use her hand much. She said she was going to get us an apartment, and me into school, and enough money together to buy us both some new clothes and pay Chester back. We prayed every night, and sat and looked at the picture of my sister Tammy she’d set up on the dresser. Tammy was always happy. Mother said that when she was born and the doctor slapped her, she opened her eyes and laughed. When she was older, she chattered and cuddled, took her Raggedy Ann doll everywhere; even strangers had to smile when they saw her. She was skinny; I could feel her bones poke my legs when she sat on my lap. Those nights in our room, my mother didn’t want to talk about Tammy. I guess she had enough to think about with me, and I could tell she was worried. I stayed thin no matter what I ate, which wasn’t much, because I couldn’t eat in front of other people without feeling my stomach shove the food back up my throat. I had to scoot around a corner to eat the burgers Chester bought, and chase my mother out of the room to eat my dinner.
It was all right, though, until one night I went downstairs after eating a chicken sandwich to tell my mother she could come back inside. She was sitting in Chester’s big tan car, and it was facing the other way, and the windows were rolled all the way down. It was sunset, the sky was hazy and brown, and I heard Chester talking in that big ripe voice of his, still cheerful but something else now too, and he was telling my mother that he wasn’t the social services department, that he expected something in return for all his kindness. He said she’d better reconsider what she was saying because if he stopped paying for that room, she and I would be out on the street. But if she was smart and did like he told her, then he’d give her something special, something to take her troubles away and make her feel better. And as I stood there I heard an unfamiliar sound, and it took me awhile to realize it was the sound of my mother crying. I didn’t recognize it because I’d never heard it before, not when we’d left D.C., not even when Tammy died. I stood there a second, but then my mother saw me in the rearview mirror, and she straightened up in her seat and stopped crying so quick I wasn’t even sure I’d really heard it. Then she said something to Chester and opened the door, calling me over. She told me to wait in the car with the door locked until she came back out and got me, and then she hugged me, hard, the heel of her crumpled hand pressed tight against my ear. Then she and Chester went into our room and shut the door.
There’s not more than fifty kids at the school Chester drives us to, which is a few miles away from the motel, in Culver City. I thought there were so few because it was summer, and the only kids who go to summer school in D.C. are the ones who have to. These kids get twenty minutes to eat their lunch, at picnic tables where the green paint is chipping so bad there’s white spots big as quarters. Then another half hour to play before they go back inside. I wish my mother was here to see them, but it’s probably better that she’s not. Every time she saw a little kid on our drive across the country, she pressed her lips together and all the lines in her face got deeper. The kids in the schoolyard make me feel better, though—they all seem so young to me, only babies, still happy. But it’s the older girl I keep my eyes on. Every once in a while she looks down for a second when she thinks that no one’s watching, and I think how alone she seems, even with all those kids. Then she looks up again, and smiles at whoever’s near her. Sometimes after they eat she takes the kids to the park right next to the school, lets them play on the slide and the swings. She pushes them gently, their small, sneak-ered feet tracing the arc of their swing; she laughs when they come squealing down the slide. After a while a bunch of boys show up, Mexican boys, thin nets over their hair, bright white T-shirts under plaid work shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and baggy tan pants buckled high. They look about the girl’s age, or a little younger.
Sometimes, when they scratch their arms and their shirts flap open, you can catch a glimpse of black metal. The girl’s hands flash left and right as she touches the kids, gathers them in, takes them back to the school in a hurry. The boys are real respectful, though. They nod to the girl as she passes and don’t start talking until the kids are all gone. Then they sit on the swings and rusting merry-go-round, laughter lifting from their circle like smoke.
One day the girl walks the kids past the car. She leans toward the window and asks if I have the time. I’m so surprised it takes me awhile to answer. Then she tells me her name, Yvonne, and asks mine. Right before she turns away she smiles, and that white smile flashing out of her gold-brown face is like a birthday gift, a burst of bright flowers. Her hair is clean and shiny, reflecting the sun; it twists and flows like smooth black water.
After that I start getting out of the car. As soon as the kids come pouring from the building for lunch, I get out, shut the door, and walk over to the metal fence. Chester doesn’t seem to mind—he’s maybe fifteen feet behind me, can hear everything that goes on, anyway. Yvonne comes to meet me, half an eye still on the kids.
“I’m going to college soon.”
“When?” I ask.
“Next month.” She’s real excited, as if she were getting married or something. It’s a quiet kind of excitement, though, more in her eyes than in her voice, like she doesn’t quite believe that it’s true.
She says the college is about five miles away, but the bus trip takes an hour—she’ll take the commuter line that goes down Venice Boulevard.
“I just graduated in June,” she says. “I’m the first one in my family to go to college.” I can tell she’s real proud. I am, too, although I don’t know why. A gust of wind comes along and shakes the fence, makes a sound like twenty people rattling chains all at once. The fence is maybe eight feet high, diagonal squares set spinning on their corners, three strands of barbed wire across the top. I glance up at the barbed wire and then back to Yvonne, who’s smiling.