The Cocaine Chronicles (5 page)
beneficent diversions from the crackdkins diet
S
he was the most accomplished person in Jerome’s life. Something central to her, he could not trust. Down and out, Jerome couldn’t fathom the chasm between Elaine’s refined lust and his own hunger.
His lover held a doctorate in sociology and an undergrad minor in statistics. Daughter of a minor painter mom and a documentary editor old boy, the woman’s sense of applied visual art was not something he could argue with—even as an artist, one of almost feral ambition.
That animal appetite would ultimately win out, Elaine told him time and again. It would save him from the insinuating downward tug. “Follow
that
urge,” she said, “and you’ll be free in no time…It will feel like nothing.”
Usually she had just swallowed his semen, and before that demanded “baptism of the throat”—her words. Then she forecast. Elaine also offered her most explicit descriptions of the fashion in which he would recover.
She would wipe her chin clean of—again, her words—the “gravy,” his silver, silky gravy.
And next she’d rise and take Jerome by the shoulders, tap his chin up so that their eyes met, and swiftly paint a picture with words, numbers, and theory. Taken as a whole, they said, “It’s going to be all right. I swear it will be all right.”
He hardly ever ate because Jerome was on what he called the Crackdkins Diet. The habit had brought about an effortless—necessary, frankly—yet undesired weight loss. For Jerome’s first date with Elaine—downtown, off Ludlow Street—he forced himself to consume four pieces of sushi.
Although they were hardly acquainted, Elaine at that time seemed peculiarly invested in his becoming nourished. “I really get off on turning people on to new things,” she said, voicing an urgency not often associated with high-end Eastern cuisine. “Don’t you find it sexy when someone enjoys an experience you introduce them to?”
It had become difficult for Jerome to bask in the reflection of another’s pleasure. His joys were now too dualistic, illumination and malevolence twinned. By the time of this dinner, he had taken two or three casual acquaintances into the Tenderloin’s remaining unoccupied buildings for smoking and communion. Recalling those scenes while sitting in this Lower East Side restaurant made him lick his lips.
Jerome thought of hits taken 3,000 miles away.
Those friends were like Elaine—good, adventurous souls looking for the next vivid sensation. Jerome knew the address of every cool rockhouse in SF, Oakland, and Richmond, but he was never clear on how solidly his buddies had stepped into their tango with the rock. For sure, he saw them afterward in the workplace and at openings and award ceremonies. There were no references to crack-fueled rocket rides with tenements for launch pads and homeless junkies as audience. Bic lanterns bright, not spotlight. Jerome’s casual acquaintances kept it quiet.
The blind date, promising as she was, turned into a reminder. As would Elaine, these slumming kids from Generation X had tongued their lips upon swallowing, and he now saw those other lips thin and almost begging, all but squirming now that the caressing was through.
She said, “It’s like when your photographs are published, I’d imagine. Do you ever happen upon readers glimpsing them? Does it turn you on?”
“I almost never see people see my pictures. They’re at home in their pajamas, drinking coffee. Or taking a poop. Generally, it’s a gloss, the way they look. People are mad busy. They pass through the horror. I can’t get there, to the turn-on, so much.”
Jerome picked over his California roll. Mashed into wasabi, the food lost its artfulness and seemed a bit primordial. The Japanese eatery disguised its elegance aurally, through a soundtrack of outer-borough hip-hop and obscure European soul tracks. The DJ, tucked away in anteroom shadows, wore his knit, brimmed Triple Five Soul cap low on his brow and played fewer than ninety seconds of each song.
Cool scene, Jerome thought, but nobody’s gonna face death. And in that, this place struck him as deprived.
The last time he had been drug-free was in Fallujah.
That San Diego soldier, the one who had dropped 150 pounds between enlisting and being sent out, died horribly.
Jerome had seen viscera before. He had even seen that of other youngsters eager to strike up friendships with a black war photographer. Insides out, yes, he’d seen that, but Jerome hadn’t seen the insides of someone with such exquisite back story.
Josephine Six-Pack has got to witness Dude.
And he began clicking away—auto-drive, auto-focus—at the boy’s boots and his gear. From a variety of angles Jerome photographed an iPod clutched in the SoCal corpse’s stiff, newly thin, chalky fingers. Wedged as it was between belt buckle and sand, the iPod would make subscribers wonder what the boy was listening to when death hit. A candid shot might make them ponder the concerns of his parents back home.
This documentarian of deadly conflict thought,
They will be so
trippin’ on the train
.
And Jerome felt kinda high.
He resented that his favorite rhetorical device for preparing for war no longer provided.
The freaks come out at night…
The freaks come out at niiight…
Because they attacked during the day now. And they were not freaks. These were not the coca-crazed rebels and U.S.-worshipping zealots he’d gotten used to in Central American insurgencies. In this war, they were the faithful. They prayed all the time. Or they blindly followed scripture favored by that other land, the one whose bounty earned its minions’ trust.
They came out during the brightest times. Bombing in a fashion that appeared on the surface to be indiscriminate, the locals calculated with the personal specificity of a high-level computer-code creator. Yet their rationale unearthed the truth in terror, robbing light of meaning and upsetting Jerome’s metaphor.
On a return flight to Berlin, surfing the Web via wireless modem, he grasped exactly how untethered his worldview had become. A pop-up for an international restaurant had tweaked Jerome’s sensibility. He’d pushed away a prefab meal he’d pushed away 500 times before. This time he pushed away the food with feeling.
And the faithful came out all day. Maiming their own. They invoked the name of Allah and the other God, and they grabbed hold of their weapons and refused to let go.
While on a brief break from his legal theater of pain, Jerome had dallied with the girl who got excited by sharing what turned her on. He had bracketed the episode by ingesting rock cocaine in San Francisco. Next thing, the most real place on earth was where Jerome set. He huddled with Air Force officers, saw some death, took some pictures. And now the shooter was on his way to the Baghdad airport.
That reporter he hung with, the Aussie who had ended his career in the States by announcing that the war in Iraq wasn’t going so well, was done and so was Jerome. This was his shortest fling yet. He caught a ride with an American newspaper columnist and a documentary photographer he knew only from textbooks and lore.
The reporter talked nonstop about the American mission. The iconic shooter stared impassively into the sand.
Five miles outside town a shell hit, about 150 yards off the bumpy path that passed for a road. The writer insisted the car be diverted.
No one argued, so the Jordanian hired to drive took the next left he could find.
The explosions only got closer. And louder.
The car stopped completely just outside Baghdad. The gunshots started, bullets arriving from every angle, first strafing the top of their Hummer, then piercing its metal and glass. Jerome took cover, pulling his flak jacket over his head. He dug himself as deep as he could into the space between the driver’s side backseat and the floor.
When an acidic explosion blew apart the passenger side, Jerome was surprised to see the documentary photographer still moving, albeit slowly and with more than a little pain. The man’s arm had nothing beyond its wrist. No more bullets hit the vehicle. Careening slightly, the Hummer ambled off the road in low gear.
A degree of same-old, same-old cut in on Jerome’s reaction to the sight of both that writer’s destroyed body and the utter health of their driver. The Jordanian gestured to the roadside man in a skullcap who dropped his Russian rifle and fled. Jerome rose and rammed the length of his telephoto lens into the Jordanian’s ear. As the Hummer commenced to spinning, he again buried himself in the space beneath his seat.
Jerome was on the roof, then back on the seat, and back on the floor. His door turned to the floor. His backseat partner fell onto Jerome, drenching him with blood, touching him with gore.
As minutes passed, both photographers became soaked in the absolute desert quiet.
Jerome tied a tourniquet on his photographic hero. He called his agency’s Baghdad bureau, then picked up a camera and climbed out.
As he captured images of the blown-apart reporter in front of the vehicle, Jerome thought of Elaine. This new thing needed no introduction, even where the afterlife holds so much sway. Death can be a kind of baptism. The reporter’s back story, familiar enough to Jerome, seemed canned and uninteresting. He’d tell it easily enough. But for the folks back home and in Europe and even here, the hit wouldn’t be much stronger than the name that accompanied the man’s newspaper column. No one would be turned on.
And that was fine for once. Not every hit could be truly killer. In fact, each hit seemed to be diminishing in its potency.
Jerome looked at his stoic comrade and, just past him, spotted sandwiches—hints of turkey, cheese, and wheat—sticking out of the man’s Nikon bag.
Lactose-intolerant or not, Jerome wanted—nay, needed—to consume what he saw.
“Can I have some of that?”
His colleague reached with a limb that could not perform the task. He laughed and began to cry and Jerome documented every emotion.
When he finally got hold of the sandwich, Jerome devoured it in half a dozen bites. Perhaps the worst thing about the Crackdkins Diet is that it only satisfies its adherents’ appetites for destruction. And what he really wanted was life.
Photo courtesy of UC Riverside
SUSAN STRAIGHT
was born in 1960 in Riverside, California, where she lives with her three daughters. She has published five novels, all set in fictional Rio Seco; she is currently working on a new story collection featuring Glorette and other Rio Seco women. Her new novel,
A
Million Nightingales
, is forthcoming from Pantheon.
W
hy you waste your money here?” she asked Sisia. The smell of the chemicals at the nail salon went through Glorette’s eyes and into her brain. Passed right through the tears and the eyeballs.
Through the irises
, she thought.
“Not a waste,” Lynn Win said, moving around Sisia’s hand like a hummingbird checking flowers. Like the hummingbird that came to the hibiscus in front of Western Motel. Mrs. Tajinder Patel’s hibiscus. “Only to you,” Lynn Win said.
“Please.” Glorette walked into the doorway to breathe and looked at the cars roaming past the strip mall. Every strip mall in Rio Seco, in California, in the world, probably, was like this. Nail salon, pizza place, video store, doughnut shop, liquor store, Launderland, and taqueria. All the smells hovering in their own doorways, like the owners did in the early morning and late at night, waiting.
Like she and Sisia hovered in their own route: Sundown first, Launderland in winter when it was cold in the alley, taqueria when the cops cruised by. All the standing and waiting between jobs. They were just jobs. Like clean the counter at the taqueria. Take out the trash. Uncrate the liquor. Wash the sheets. All up and down the street. Lean against the chain-link fence, against the bus stop but you can’t sit on the bench, shove your shoulder into the cinder-block wall outside Launderland and sleep for a minute, if the fog settled in like a quilt, like the opposite of an electric blanket, and cooled off the night.
The nail polish vapors stung her eyes. Why you couldn’t get high off these fumes? So convenient. 7-Eleven was a convenience store. Easy. She could sit here and close her eyes, and Lynn Win would paint her like a statue and the vapors would rise up into her mouth and nose and make the inside of her forehead turn to snow. She would pay Lynn Win. Instead of paying for the rock to turn into fumes.
The plant to a powder to a chunk the size of a cocklebur in your hand. Then it turned red and glowed, like a rat’s eye in the palm tree when you looked up just as headlights caught the pupils. Did rats have pupils?
Then you breathed in. And behind your eyes, it was like someone took a Wite-Out pen and erased everything. Your whole head turned into a milk shake. Sweet and grainy and sliding down the back of your skull.
Look at all these nail salons. She turned the pages of the advertisements in Vietnamese, the flyer on the coffee table. Massage pedicure chairs. Swirling water. The women with perfect eyebrows and lips and hair. Every other name Nguyen.
Linh Nguyen. She remembered what Lynn Win had said when she changed her name: “Win like money I get.”
Glorette breathed again at the open salon door. “Sisia. Please. Tell me you ever heard a man say, ‘Girl, I love those nails. That color perfect with your clothes. The decals are fresh.’”
“Shut up, Glorette. You just cheap.”
Lynn Win glanced up at her and frowned, her perfect Vietnamese face sheened with makeup, her eyes encircled by a wash of pale green, her lips pink as watermelon Jell-O. On the left side of her neck was a scar. A healed gash that must have gaped, against tight neck skin.
No one had loose neck skin until forty.
She must be about thirty-five
, Glorette thought.
Just like us.
Sisia had a scar on her neck, too, a keloid caterpillar, shiny as satin. Curling iron. Fifteen. They’d been getting ready for some high school dance. Back when Sisia still hot-combed her hair and then curled it back like Farrah Fawcett and Jayne Kennedy. Hell.
What did the DJ play at that dance? Cameo? She’d have to ask Chess when she saw him next time. Funkadelic?
The hot air at the door mixed with the cold air and nail polish fog.
No scars. She had never done anything with her hair other than wash it, comb in some Luster Pink or coconut oil, and let it hang loose in long, black ripples. Back then. Now she wore it in a high bun every night, unless a man requested that she unpin it.
Now this new woman cruising Palm in the brown van had poked her finger into the bun a few nights ago and then pulled. “Man, I know that shit ain’t real,” the woman had said, her voice New York like rappers in a video, her words all pushed up to the front of her lips. People from New York kept their words there, just at their teeth, never deep in their throats like Louisiana people. Like her mother and father.
Then the new woman had said, “I-on’t-even-care you think you the shit around here. Just cause you light. Cause you got all that hair. Anybody get hair. Bald man get hair he want to. You need to move your ass off this block. Cause I’m parked here.”
She couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-two. Short, thick-thighed in her miniskirt, her hair in marcelled waves close to her forehead. Her words moved behind her lips and her lips moved like a camel’s, while her eyes stayed still.
“Sound like she said she some pork,” Sisia said, hands on her hips.
Glorette just shrugged and looked back over her shoulder at the woman near her van. That’s where she worked the men. She had a CD player in there and some silk sheets, she said. And her man stood in the doorway of the liquor store for a long time, talking with Chess and Casper and the others who were just biding their time.
“I ain’t no crack ho,” the girl called, and Sisia laughed.
“I ain’t either,” she said. “I’m somethin else.”
“This ain’t the eighties.” The girl shot them the finger.
“And I ain’t Donna Summer.”
Glorette watched Sisia move her head on her neck like a turtle and stalk away, and she followed.
Glorette thought,
1980? Was I fifteen?
Damn.
Gil Scott-Heron said the “Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” brother. You will not be able to turn on or tune out. But they did.
That’s what Sere always said. Brothers tuned out.
Green Acres
and
Beverly Hillbillies
will not be so important, Gil Scott-Heron said—but they were. The revolution will not be televised, brothers, the revolution will be live.
One night Glorette had run into Marie-Therese at Rite Aid. Marie-Therese used to be with Chess, back then when they were girls in the darkness of the club called Romeo’s. 1981? Only two clubs in Rio Seco back then—Romeo’s for jazz and funk, and Oscar’s Place for nasty old blues and knife fights and homebrew. That was where she met Sere. A brother with a flute. Didn’t nobody in Rio Seco have a flute.
Gil Scott-Heron’s band had a flute. Yusuf Lateef had a flute. War had a flute. Herbie Mann had a flute. Sere had loved that Mann song—“Push Push.” She could still remember it. Sere’s band was called Dakar. His last name.
Called himself Sere Dakar.
Where the hell was Sere playing his damn flute now? For Jay-Z or 50 Cent? For Ludacris? What else did this girl from New York always have blastin out her CD player when she was waiting?
Nobody said
hey, brotha
. Nobody but the old ones. Her age. Chess and Octavious and them. That Sidney, the one ran into her at Sundown. He used to work at the hospital. Chess and them said he burned the body parts after the doctors cut them off. Said he burned up Mr. Archuleta’s leg, and Glorette always wondered how heavy that piece of meat would have been. She ran her shoulders up under her ears with the shivers. Piece.
Give
me a lil piece, sugar. Just a lil piece
. What the hell was that? What they wanted wasn’t no size. You couldn’t give anybody just a lil bit of anything.
Sisia handed the money to Lynn Win. Sisia’s skin was so thin over her facial bones that her temples looked stretched from the tight cornrows.
They had been smoking for so long. Chess gave her the pipe first but then he got done with it. He said he didn’t need it.
He had his weed and Olde English.
How was the skin distributed over the bones? How did her buttocks stay in the right place? When did men decide they wanted buttocks and cheekbones and hair instead of something else? Like a big nose or huge forehead or belly? Some caveman picked.
Sisia stood up with her nails purple as grape juice and rings winking. But could a woman kill someone with her nails? Because this new woman from New York looked like she wanted to kill Glorette.
The man stopped in his old Camaro. Moved his chin to tell her
come on
. Glorette knew he wanted head. That’s all. He parked in the lot behind the taqueria. Five minutes. A little piece of her lip and her tooth banged on his zipper when he jerked around.
Her piece. Twenty dollars. She walked back toward Launderland where Jazen and his boys kept their stash in a dryer.
The rock was so small. Not even a piece. A BB. A spider egg. A grasshopper eye. But not perfectly round. Jagged-edged.
A white freckle
, she thought, and started laughing, waiting for the screen like a windshield in front of her eyes when she breathed in hard. Like someone had soaped up her brain. Store was closed.
Headphones. Al B. Sure—“Nite and Day.” Switch—“I Call Your Name.” All those sweet-voiced men from when she was first walking out here. Not jazz. Jazz was Sere. “Poinciana.” “April in Paris.” And funk. Mandrill and Soul Makossa and Roy Ayers.
But somebody always stole the headphones. And she wanted Victor to have headphones, and they kept stealing his, too. So he slept in them, with a chair against his bedroom door. She tried to make sure only Chess or someone she knew came home with her, but sometimes Sisia begged to let her use the couch or the floor with a man and then sometimes he stole.
Her son Victor knew everything about music.
“New York rappers, man, I have to listen real careful to understand,” he always said. “Oakland and L.A. are easy. St. Louis is crazy—I mean, they mess with the actual words.”
Victor analyzed everything. Sometimes Glorette stared at his forehead while he was talking, at the place where his shorn hair met his temples. He kept it cut very short, and the hairline curved like a cove on a map. She had been to a cove once. To the ocean. With Victor’s father. Sere.
He’d seen her in the club. He thought she was twenty. He got her address. He’d borrowed a car, pulled up in front of her father’s house and leaned his chin on the crook of his elbow like a little kid. A little boy with an arm turtleneck. He told her, “I’m fixin to see this place California’s supposed to be. What they all talk about in Detroit.”
“What you think you gon see?” Glorette had watched the freeway signs above them, the white dots like big pearls in the headlights.
“Remember Stevie singing ‘Livin for the City’? Skyscrapers and everythang. I’ma see waves and sand and everythang. Surfers.”
“At night?”
“They probably surf at night.” He’d turned to her in the passenger seat. That car belonged to Chess. It was a Nova and someone had spilled Olde English in the backseat and the smell rose from the carpet sharp like cane syrup. “It’s an hour to the ocean and you never been there?”
Glorette had shrugged. She had felt her shoulders go up and down, felt her collarbone in the halter top graze the cloth. He had left a love bruise on her collarbone. He’d said her bones made her look like a Fulani queen. “I bet them sorry brothas call you a Nubian or Egyptian. Cause they don’t know the specifics. Huh?”
She’d touched cheekbone and collarbone and the point of her chin. But after all that it was the soft part they wanted.
No bones.
Sere took out the Cameo cassette from the old stereo and slid in an unmarked one. “Poinciana,” he said. Piano hush-hush and cymbals. Like rain on a porch roof and swirling water.
“It’s a hour I ain’t never had free,” she said.
Then, after they’d driven to the ocean and sat in the car looking at the blackness that was one with the horizon, a cold purple-blue blackness like charcoal, with the waves the only sound and then a splash of white in a long line as if someone were washing bleach clothes in too much detergent, Sere turned to her and he only wanted the same things as the rest of them.
Why have buttocks? What good were they? And hair? If Glorette’s great-great-whoever had been Fulani and had gotten with some Frenchman in Louisiana, why all this hair down her back? How was that supposed to keep her warm? Hair was fur. Nails were claws. Sisia was ready to kill some damn lion now that they were done with Lynn Win’s place. Glorette had gotten high off the fumes anyway, waiting for Sisia’s toenails to dry. Who the hell was she gon kill with them toenails? Lynn Win’s mother sat in front of the spa chair waiting for the next pedicure. The mother looked old but probably wasn’t. She wore knit pants like an old woman, and her hair was in a bun on her head. Black hair with gray threads shot through like moss.
All the blood moving through the pieces of their bodies. When she woke up at noon or so, the already-hot light streaming through the blinds like X-rays on her legs where she lay on the couch, she would see the tops of her feet smooth and golden, her toes dirty from the walking, but her skin still sleeping.
Sometimes Sisia spent the eighteen dollars on a pedicure so she could sit down for an hour, she said.
But Glorette didn’t want decals on her toes. She saved twenty dollars a day for Victor. For CDs and ramen.
The store was open. She went to the older mall with the Rite Aid and auto parts store. The lipsticks stacked in the bin like firewood. Hair color boxes always started with blond. Blond as dental floss and then about thirty more yellows. Saffron and Sunflower. Gingercake and Nutmeg. Black always last. Midnight.
Black hair ain’t nothin you could eat.
There were flowering plants in front of the drugstore. Her father always shook his head and said, “Anybody buy plant when they buy cough syrup don’t grow nothin. Put that tomato in the ground and throw water on it and wonder why it die,
oui
.”
She walked past the window of the auto parts store. When she was with Chess, she’d wander the aisles touching the oil filters like paper queen’s collars and fan belts like rubber bands for a giant’s ponytail. Chess fixed cars all day and loved her all night. But he had to love Marie-Therese and Niecy, too, and she told him, “Only me,” and he shrugged and said, “Only always too small. Only one dollar. Only one rib. See? I ain’t livin only.”