White Out (16 page)

“Bet you get more than I get slinging for Red, man.” He lit a cigarette. He had “Carey” tattooed in Chinese restaurant letters down the back of his left forearm, “Rolls” tattooed down the back of his right. “I worked it out. If you add up all the time I spend waiting on the damn corner and helping move the stash and shit, it works out to about eight dollars an hour.”

“Yeah,” said Funboy, “but you also get crazy free red tops, man.” He laughed. “I work 24/7 and
all
I get is free red tops. You’re eight dollars an hour ahead of me.”

“If y’all be lovin’ those red tops, then why the fuck,” a low booming voice uttered, “is you here then?” The enormous man shuffled in and sat heavily down on the couch. He tossed two white paper squares on the coffee table. They landed on an open porno mag, next to a pair of nunchaku, an overflowing ashtray, a fork sticking straight up from the wood, an open box of Domino sugar, and a Polaroid picture of a baby with an open mouth. A pit bull was chained to one of the table’s frail legs. Four or five pairs of new-looking Nikes lay scattered around the floor.

“Cool, Howard.” Tony scooped up one square, tossed me the other. A chain hung from the ornate wooden mantle. The apartment, overlooking Druid Hill Park, had some nice plasterwork on the high ceilings. Probably built in the twenties. Now this was the worst neighborhood in Baltimore. I didn’t want to be here, but it was late, and all the drive-through raw spots were closed.

“If you gettin’ all them red tops,” Howard repeated, “what you come see old Howard for?” He grabbed an inhaler off the table and started hitting it. He probably weighed four hundred pounds. Tony picked up the Domino sugar box and poured a little sugar into his palm. While Howard continued to wheeze and pump the inhaler, Tony took a wad of tinfoil from his pocket. He unfolded the tinfoil and gently tapped some yellowish powder on top of the sugar in his hand. Using his index finger, he mixed the powder in with the sugar. I stared.

Howard recovered. His eyes were watering.

“I think I seen you in that movie you was talking about. Wasn’t your hair a different color then?” He stared at the girl sitting next to me. Sara. She was cute, with milky skin, a lithe gymnast’s body and bright dyed-red hair. I met her through Funboy. She smiled at Howard. “Uh-huh.”

Tony held his palm full of sugar and yellow powder out to the dog, who began eagerly snuffling at it. Howard looked over with molasses eyes. There was no yellow in the white at that distance.

“Toss me that box,” Howard ordered. I passed the sugar to him, leaning over Sara. He poured out a handful of sugar and tossed it in his mouth.

“I seen lots of movies, you know,” Howard said. “I love movies. I’d like to direct. I think I’d be real good, ’cause I know what people like. What was it like acting in the movie, baby?”

“Wow, it was
so
awesome!” She sat straight up like an alert schoolgirl, an enthusiastic smile on her face.

“Some people think all movies is the same,” Howard said. “Wai-Chee, my nigger down at the video store, don’t know. ‘It’s the girls, Howard, not the director.’ But you know when he comes to order new ones, he be asking me which ones and shit. I love a good director. I spot ’em in the first shot. I like the way they be getting them in position, not just any way, but like a statue.” Howard demonstrated, shifting his grotesque bulk, arching his back, and opening his mouth in fake ecstasy. “You see, baby, what I like to see is when the girls—what the fuck is wrong with my dog?” The pit bull was snuffling and foaming. Funboy stood up.

“I just
loved
doing that movie,” Sara said loudly over the dog. “At one point, they made me close my eyes. I wanted to keep them open, but they thought it would be more passionate.” Howard lobstered over to his foaming dog. The dog made a wet inside cracking noise and lay still, breathing slow and rough.

“Did he eat something? Did y’all see him eat something? Did he eat something up off the floor? Did he eat some dope off the floor? I know didn’t no dope do this.”

“Ain’t no fucking dope on the floor,” Tony drawled. He rose slowly.

“Yeah, ain’t no dope on the floor, Howard.” Funboy pushed his long blond hair out of his blue Nazi eyes. “Where is the dope, by the way, Howard?”

“It’s not on the floor,” Tony said. He pretended like he was looking for it. “I just don’t see it on the floor. Gotta be somewhere else. Where you keep all the dope, Howard?” Sara lit a cigarette and stood up with smiling eyes. Howard seemed oblivious, still crouched over his dog, fat belly flopping, muttering. He was all over, shapeless fat poured over five or six square feet. Funboy moved out into the hall.

“Where the hell you going?” Howard turned and stood up like spilled water poured back into a glass. Phantom guns moved outside the dark windows. Tony was whispering into his cell phone.

“Nowhere, Howard!” Funboy said in a high-pitched schoolboy’s voice. “We just gotta go now.”

I stood up, clutching the white square of paper. It was more like a lump. My hands had sweat right through it. Howard turned, wheezing. Tony closed the cell phone.

“Get at you later, Funboy. Peace, Mike, Sara. Howard, I’ma chill for a minute. You look hungry. You want some more sugar?” Earlier that day, Tony had performed a little rap for me. He said he kind of practiced rapping while he stood all day on the corner of Edmondson and Denison. “Niggers got to not see me / Niggers be turning up casualties,” Tony rapped. He’d laughed, showing white teeth. He had a white heart too. Funboy said he had a serious habit, kept alive by multiple wires going multiple places. One lay sparking in the dog’s throat. Tony was going to chill for a minute. I was kind of excited to leave.

Out in the car, as Sara, Funboy, and I sped away, I really let Funboy have it.

“What the hell was that about, Funboy?”

“Nothing, man.”

“What do you mean, nothing? What did Tony do? What is Tony going to do? Did you know he was going to…to fuck with Howard’s dog?”

“He was just playing with the dog.”

“Oh, that’s just bullshit.” The whole situation was sour to me. I wondered if I had committed some kind of crime just by being there. I wondered who Tony had called, what he was doing now. “What if something happens to Howard? Will I be connected?”

“Everyone’s connected to everyone,” Funboy replied.

“Come on,” Sara said. “Be serious. Mike’s scared.”

“I’m not scared!”

“Look,” Funboy stifled a yawn. “Who knows what Tony’s got going? Stay out of it. It’s between him and Howard. And maybe Red too. Just forget about it.”

“Well, I’m never going back there,” I said. “Safety is rule number one with me, Funboy. Remember that.” From now on, it was strictly drive-through dope shopping. After two weeks, I was beginning to realize I could no longer blindly go wherever Funboy led.

“Hey, don’t order me around,” he said. “You’re lucky I cop for you. Most people I cop for give me four or five vials. You only give me one and sometimes none. You don’t have any fucking money, so quit acting like I work for you.”

He paused. “We’re friends.”

He was right. I didn’t have any money. The first time he’d taken me to cop I’d given him sixty dollars, the second time twenty, and then I was broke. We had nothing in common. Did just not giving him money make us friends?

“We are friends,” I said.

“That’s precious,” Sara said. I looked at her. The passing streetlights fell on her bare arms. I felt the square of dope in my shirt pocket. Right then I had a lot of needs, but also a lot of ways. I confess plainly that events have controlled me. I wasn’t 100 percent sober, either.

We pulled up to my apartment building. Right across Charles Street from the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins. Apartment 606. “It’s kind of bare,” Sara said. She had a tattoo on her lower back and she’d been in a porno, but I could tell the rubies in her earrings were real. Funboy said she only dated rich guys. I’d made an effort to act superior, but my car was a cold fact, and my cheap bare apartment was another. I was a little worried that she’d bail when she realized I was just a broke grad student. She didn’t.

I was feeling kind of excited. I took out the white paper square of dope and looked at it. It was a white tunnel. At the far end of the white tunnel, I saw the white cloud from the afternoon on Chip’s roof. The cloud spooled out into the room. There were a couple lit candles. Funboy passed out on the couch. Sara and I crouched under a candle. I spread open a book on the eighteenth-century painter Fragonard and showed it to her.

I was obsessed with the French master. The luxury of ancient Europe. I’d been dying to tell Sara about him. It would impress her. It would bring us closer. Something Howard said had reminded me. The book was open to a full-page color image of
The Swing.

“Is this what you study in grad school?” she asked.

“No. I just like it.” The pink dress of the girl on the swing spread out like a rose. Her shoe flew off, revealing her naked foot. Her lover crouched below her on the grass, his thin arm pointing at the center of her spread dress. Behind her stood another man, pulling the ropes that moved the swing. Sara’s lazy finger swirled down the girl’s rose spirals.

“Look at their faces.” Fragonard’s round, open-mouthed porno faces. Pasted on the bodies like a fish’s fake eyes. Fake openings. Fake shock. Blood and feeling ran smoothly under those faces, finding their real openings below. Their real faces: the girl’s rose center, the man’s jutting arm, the servant’s tense rope-hand. Sara’s shocked mouth O’d open. The servant’s hand pulled down on the rope hard. The girl’s naked feet turned in opposite directions.

Sara’s naked foot rose from the floor, pointed up at Funboy’s open mouth. His closed eyes. His sleeping arm hung over the couch, pointed into Sara’s center. My tense hand pulled down on the rope hard. The girl’s head went back on the swing. Behind her stood another man.

“Can you look at me when you do that?” White tears ran up her rose face. My body turned white in her fake shocked eyes. Sara reached over my chest to pick up her earrings, carefully placed inside her tiny shoe. She turned her head and fastened them. Funboy made snoring noises like a dog snuffling sugar.

“Those rubies are beautiful,” I said. She gave me a funny look.

“They’re totally fake.”

I looked at them more closely. She was right. They weren’t even red. They didn’t even have any facets. They were pink plastic dots.

CHAPTER 8

W
hen I woke up, Sara was gone. A brief note and a twenty-dollar bill for her share of the drugs. One o’clock. It was a Sunday in September. I stretched and yawned. The yawn went on, my eyes were a little watery, but otherwise no symptoms. I’d done dope two days in a row, not three. I walked into the apartment’s other room.

Funboy was snoring and snuffling, his arm hung over the couch.
Probably hasn’t slept for days
, I thought. He looked awfully thin, stretched out in the daylight. I’d have to remember to get him to eat something. It was a little chilly in the apartment. It could still get pretty warm during the day, but the humidity was gone. The air was getting thinner. The day’s heat hung in it like oil in water. Before something disappears, it separates from the things around it. I opened the blinds. The sun’s heat pulsed in the cool room.

I gently pressed Funboy’s shoulder. He turned and coughed, and sat up. He was only twenty. “Whoa,” he said. He sat up, rubbing his eyes. He was shivering. He reached under the couch’s cushion, took out a wadded-up sock, unrolled it, took out the half-empty vial, and started looking for his works.

I never met anyone who said they liked Funboy, and it seemed like most people in Baltimore knew him. I was alone with Tony for exactly two minutes the day before. Funboy had gone to the bathroom. “Dude’s a lame,” Tony said. Even Funboy’s mother, who I would meet in Canton later that year, didn’t like him. “Let me ask you something, Mike. Why the hell do you hang out with Scott?” My friends from New York, who I introduced to him when they visited, didn’t like him. Chip asked frankly if he was retarded. Funboy would rip me off six or seven times, but it was never for that much. I kind of felt like I deserved it. I ran into him twice after I got clean too. I think I was the only one who liked him.

He’d had his leg broken. There were knife scars on his side and his arm. His nose had been broken. He’d been to juvie and then to jail. He’d been an addict since he was fifteen. I started doing dope when I was twenty-one. In the middle of getting high, in the middle of the night, I often felt as if I’d forgotten something important. Funboy didn’t. His arms looked terribly thin in the sunlight. His eyes were empty. There’s nothing to be done about that. Compassion does not restore a human form to those who have lost it. Everything living dies, everything changes.

And things aren’t as bad off on their own as I used to think. It’s insane the way some people try to turn their memory into a hospital for every sick thing they’ve ever seen. I know better. I’m not a safe place even for something as desperate as Funboy’s thin right arm, with the small knife scar, the smaller burn mark, and all the tiny track marks. But if he’s still alive somewhere, and needs some help…

“Howard’s dope is pretty tight,” he said. “He gets it from the same place as Red.” He wiped his nose and looked around with slow eyes. In some ways Funboy was like a blind person. His eyes always pointed in a different direction than his body. He stood up and walked toward the door, eyeing the couch. He was humming the tune to “I Like It Raw.” The tune only had two or three notes. The tune wasn’t the point of that fucking song.

“Shut up, Funboy!”

“Damn, Mike, what are you so pissy about?” I guess I’m just sad.

When we got outside, Funboy looked lovingly at my dirty Grand Am before getting in.

“I love this car, Mike. It’s the only place I feel safe sometimes.” I nodded, not knowing what to say. I guess I loved it too. Two years later, I would take fifty or sixty pictures of that car with Cat’s camera over the course of an autumn. I found a pile of them when I was cleaning out my apartment after I got clean. No people in the pictures, just the car. Under sunlight, in the rain, parked under trees or streetlights.