White Out (3 page)

“Where do you think you’re going?” He’d never spoken to me like that. I thought he understood. There was a sheet stapled to the window. Fathead’s gun lay on the table next to his empty syringe. I thought he understood. I wasn’t serious. Well, maybe I was serious. But I wasn’t serious.

“I gotta go teach, Fathead, it’s almost one and I gotta teach at one-thirty.” Moving slow, he half-stood up out of his seat and threw his fist into my face. I stumbled back against the wall. I didn’t feel anything but there was blood on my hands when they came away.

“You’re high, you’ve been doing dope here, it’s my dope, I haven’t been paid for it, you’ve been stealing from me.” Fathead spoke the truth. No hand raised against him would prosper.

“Now, if you want to leave, you can tell me where this piece of shit,” he jerked a thumb at Dom, “has stashed the dope. ’Cause I know it’s here.”

This was a Bible situation. If I stuck by Dom’s half-assed story that the dope had been stolen I risked getting caught up in his inequity. Or I could rat Dom and Henry out right in front of them. An eye for an eye.

“It’s in the closet in a hole in the floor under a coat,” I said. Henry started honking and gabbling. Dom stared down.

“I wish I was dead,” he said. He didn’t say it to anyone in particular.

“Well maybe we can see about that, Dom.” Fathead stood up. “You can go, Mike. You’re a real friend. A real creature. Here,” he tossed me a vial.

“Wow!” I said. “Thanks a lot, Fathead! You’re awesome!”

Henry was whimpering at the table. I don’t know what he was whimpering for. Fathead didn’t kill either of them, not that day or that week. Dom would live for another four whole months, and I heard it was just an overdose that killed him. Natural cause. And Henry would have been the first to agree that if Fathead had shot him dead on the spot, he’d be doing him a real big favor. “Wow! Thanks a lot, Fathead! You’re awesome!” You could say what you liked about Henry, but he was no idiot. He had a good head on his shoulders. He knew he needed a hole in it. He’d tell you.

But maybe I was being callous. Maybe Henry was whimpering because the white light was starting to dim in him, and with Fathead about to take all their dope and pistol whip them both, he wouldn’t be able to score for hours, maybe not all day. Maybe he felt the squittering devils already dipping their fingers into his spine, the rats sniffing at his phantom arm. Henry told me once that when he went through withdrawal he felt it like rats chewing on his missing arm. He was probably lying. But he had every right to sniffle and whimper. No dope was a whimpering problem. A crying problem.

Plus Henry was superstitious like Fathead. He thought nothing changed when you died. When you were dead you didn’t stop needing white tops. You just stopped being able to get them.

But I had one, and now I had to go. Part of being a graduate student is being a teaching assistant and teaching a section of one of the big lecture courses. I couldn’t afford to miss another class. People might think I was irresponsible. I was worried. But I had a vial.

As I drove I thought lazily about turning my car into the oncoming traffic. Bang! Lights out. I wasn’t superstitious. I thought it was all over when it was all over. Bang! I thought this about every six seconds. Bang! I didn’t even really notice it. Just background noise. Just inside talk. And I had a vial. I looked in the rearview mirror. My lip was swollen, there was blood on my teeth, and I was getting a black eye. I smiled. I had a vial. I peered at it. Maybe twelve solid hours of white time. Plus the four still left in me. It gave me confidence. Bang!

Three minutes. I parked illegally and ran into the building, clutching my book and notes. Nancy saw me, blanched, “Mike what happened to you?” “Later,” I mouthed. I hated her. I passed Todd; he looked stunned. “Later,” I mouthed. I hated him. I had a vial. Standing outside my classroom, I took a deep breath. I hated Jason. I hated Mandy. I hated Cash. I hated Dave. I hated Eva. I hated Mom. I hated Charlie. I hated Jenny. I hated Chip. I hated Funboy. I hated Andy. I hated Steve. I hated Ashley. I hated Cat. I rubbed the vial in my pocket while I recited this little prayer. I felt better. I opened the door and went in. The room of whispering students fell silent.

“Are you OK?” one shocked girl asked as I opened my book and arranged my notes. There was a little blood on my notes. I didn’t know the girl’s name. I didn’t know any of their names, but I got by with pointing. I looked out at the class. One kid had a smirk starting, but the rest looked anywhere from shocked to scared. Pussies. What did they have to be scared of?

“Your teacher is a hero,” I announced. I waited for a second. “I was showing my friend from out of town—a woman—around Baltimore when a black man ran up to her and grabbed her purse. I grabbed it back and he hit me several times in the face. He also hit my friend. This made me very angry. I hit him back, he fell to the ground, then I stood with my foot on his neck until the police came. I told him if he moved I’d push my foot down.”

The evidence of violent struggle was all over my face and my shirt. Most of them had probably never seen a black eye before. They’d all seen the impoverished black people of the city. The class of white and Asian kids smiled and clapped.

“You
are
a hero,” one girl said.

“I had my foot right on his neck,” I said. I was a great person. I was glad Fathead had punched me. I would let him punch me every day for a vial like that. Every minute. I was glad I was a hero. I was glad I hated everyone. I was glad I had a vial.

Two in the morning. My eyes were open staring at the ceiling. Dry shocked eyes. Cat slept beside me. The hero story wouldn’t work on her. I told her I’d walked into a door. She didn’t believe it. I didn’t care. I’d gone to bed at eleven, as I did every night, and I’d do my best to sleep until eleven the next day. Cut down on awake time. Cut down on dope consumption. Cut down on expenses. Cut down on problems.

But it was only 2:00 a.m. and I was wide awake.

Almost every night, I would awake in terror. Covered in sweat. 2:00 a.m. The clear spot in the center of the white wheel. The eye of the rotating white storm. I saw everything clearly at 2:00 a.m. Tomorrow I’d wake up and do the tiny bit left in the vial. This would give me maybe two hours of white time in which to get eighty dollars and cop more. Yesterday I’d done the same. There had to be some mistake. The day after tomorrow I’d do the same.

If I took any longer than two hours to score in the morning the devils would dig their claws into my spine. It would definitely take longer than two hours. This could not be right. This was my fourth relapse. Tomorrow the police might stop me again. I might overdose again. I was going to have to steal every dime Cat had. For starters.

Sometimes, when I woke at 2:00 a.m., I’d get up and write a note to myself in big bold letters and leave it where I’d see it first thing in the morning. “No Dope!” “Don’t do it!” “Call rehab!” “My life matters!”

But I didn’t write anything that night. Yes, I saw everything clearly. But this wasn’t the one moment of clarity that changed everything. In white time nothing happens only once. Everything that happens, happens every day, happens again and again, has always happened, will always happen.

CHAPTER 2

T
he phone woke me up. I turned over and lifted my head a few inches off the bed, looking around. A little pile of white dope lay on my dresser. The tiny white wheels of tricycles spun inside the white grains. One of Cat’s socks on the floor. Tick, tock. The phone rang. I was like a map of Iraq. A curious, impersonal hate knotted and unknotted itself in me. I giggled when I thought how all this might be affecting someone else. Me, you. We’re all connected. The phone rang.

I picked up the phone. I was connected to Henry. His unreal peeled voice. I said his name and he answered me Henry style.

“I can’t get anywhere and I can’t go anywhere,” he said. It’d been a few weeks since the Fathead episode, and I’d kind of stayed away.

“Why the fuck—” I whispered.

“I got to get a ride.” It sounded like he was crying. No not crying. Honking. The mournful honking of one-arm Henry. Henry was his own thing. Like birds. I imagined hundreds of him, honking sadly.

“I got to get a ride,” he said, practically.

“Uh.”

There was something wrong with the dope on my dresser. I’d copped it in Druid Hill two days before. It worked, but it made me sick. I’d been lying on my bed, alternately using and puking for two days. Lose-lose situation. Sick from the bad dope, or sick from no dope. Right now I was in between. The nausea was receding and the withdrawals were starting. I looked at the little pile of white dope on my dresser with love and hate.

“Can you pay me?” I asked.

“Sure, I’ll help you out, Mike, just swing on over to Dom’s and scoop me up.”

I got up unsteadily on my loose, bloodless dope legs and went on out and over. If I could get some dope that didn’t have poison in it that would be good. And if I couldn’t I would still have the bad dope. And that would be good.

No one was at Dom’s when I got there. I looked up at the sky. It was October. I looked uncertainly into the clear sky, my eyes widening and narrowing. Like standing too close or too far from someone’s face. There were a couple kids sitting on the curb smoking cigarettes.

“Hey, you waiting on Dom and them?” one of the kids asked me.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“They be back soon.” The kids smirked at each other. They were maybe fourteen. I looked down at my dirty jeans.

“You kids like Cash Money Records?”

“Hell yeah we like Cash Money,” one kid said.

“I like them too,” I said.

Cash Money was the hottest rap label that fall. Juvenile, B.G., the Hot Boys. They invented the term
bling-bling.
That term has been misunderstood. For the Cash Money Hot Boys, money was a way of disappearing, not a way of showing off. They sang about money that blinds. “Tell me what kinda / Nigga got diamonds that’ll bling-blind ya?”

Cash Money sang about imaginary gun-diamonds, diamonds that shut everyone’s eyes. Imagine walking onto the street with money so strong it blinded motherfuckers. The people staggered around with burnt-out eyes and I walked free in the shining world. It was invisibility music, better than tinted windows.

“Hell yeah, we like Cash Money,” one kid said suspiciously. “But we ain’t wanna buy no stolen CDs.” I had about thirty or forty stolen CDs and a stolen electric guitar in my trunk. I casually popped it open and pulled out a new Cash Money hit,
Tha Block Is Hot.
I tossed it to the kid.

“I said I ain’t wanna buy no CD!” he said and caught it. He balanced the disk case flat on his palm. The rappers’ faces on the cover disappeared in the sun.

“I’m giving it to you,” I said, closing the trunk. “I’m an A&R rep for the label. I travel around to find out what’s hot on the streets. Then I go back to Cash Money and they read my reports, and modify their raps accordingly.” They stared at me.

“Look, I write reports on the real street feeling. Cash Money changes their raps based on what my reports say. So when you see me talking to Dom, or Henry, or you, it’s not for fun. I’m using this shitty little car so I don’t draw attention.” I was telling that shitty little story to disappear a little. Big lies like that made me feel a little more see-through.

“You met B.G.?” the kid asked suspiciously.

“Sure I met him. He has a platinum syringe, with little diamonds on it.” I was going to say he had a working gun carved out of a single enormous diamond but I stopped myself. But then I said this.

“You kids know what grenades are?”

“Duh.”

“You know the difference between a live grenade and a dead one?”

“Yeah.”

“Well one time I went up with B.G. in his helicopter, and we flew around New Orleans, all high, just tossing live grenades out the goddamn windows.”

Just then Henry and Dom shuffled around the corner. Every event in this book is true. It happened. Here comes Dom and Henry rolling around the goddamn corner.

And if you had been up in a helicopter that minute, you could have gotten all three of us with one grenade. Sitting ducks.

I’ll be your little spy. I’ll set them up, you knock ’em down.