The Cocaine Chronicles Read online

  Yeah right. How was he going to do that? If he didn’t have any money now, he wouldn’t have any in the morning. He came over and searched near me and around the bed. It wasn’t next to me. I learned quickly that it was one of the first places they looked. They had just given me the money no longer than six hours ago. I guess they had smoked up the little cash they already had. Which meant if he found the money, I wouldn’t have any for tomorrow or the next couple of weeks when somebody got paid again. He found it in the little chest on my dresser.

  “I’ll give it back to you in the morning,” he said as he left the room and turned off my light, as if I would be going to sleep anytime soon. I lay there and worried about food and eating for tomorrow. I had to get hunger off my mind. When I finally fell asleep, it seemed like it had been two minutes before the alarm clock went off. I hit the snooze and went back to sleep. This repeated five times. I finally woke up an hour later. I knew even if I missed first period, I would have to make it to my next class because we had a quiz that I couldn’t make up.

  After I got dressed, I looked for my dad. Like always he was nowhere to be found. My mom was in the kitchen. She pressed her blackened fingers on the stove looking for crumbs, little rocks or anything that was round and white. I made some toast so I wouldn’t starve for the whole day. I didn’t say a word as I tried my best to maneuver around her.

  “Where Ronnie at? I gotta go to school.”

  “He’ll be back soon.”

  Denial. I knew better. I took my time to eat and looked for some loose money around the house. I found fifty cents in the big couch. Beatrice saw that and had a slightly jealous look in her eyes. What the hell could she smoke with fifty cents? I went outside to see if I could find my dad, Ronnie. He was in the driver’s seat of our van. At that moment I wished I wouldn’t have talked so much in drivers ed, stopped procrastinating, and got my license sooner.

  “You gotta get to school?” he asked in a mumbled, half-sleep voice, without turning his head at all.

  “Yeah, I’m late, but I gotta go to second period, at least.”

  “I’ma have to give you that money this afternoon,” he said, still looking straight ahead like he was unable to move his neck in either direction.

  He drove like I was Miss Daisy. It took at least thirty minutes to get there when it should only take fifteen. I went to the attendance lady to get a tardy note. She knew my name, homeroom number, and grade by heart. Sometimes she would already have my note ready for me when I got there. I was there in time for the quiz I didn’t study for. Nobody could convince me that I got anything less than an A, though.

  During our nutrition break, I bought a Snickers from the student store. I was … kinda hungry.

  “How was Mr. Springsted’s quiz?” my friend Jessica asked.

  “Pretty easy. Make sure you know about the Great Depression. Dates, how it affected minorities, shit like that.”

  “You think you did good?”

  “I don’t know, maybe a B. Hopefully. I didn’t study.”

  “You said the same thing last time and got an A.”

  “I was lucky. Hey, you got some money I could borrow?” She looked at me and hesitated. She was going to say no. I could see it in her eyes. She must have been thinking about the money I already owed her.

  “I’ll give it back, I promise. I left my money at home today. I’ll pay you back with all the other money I owe you.”

  “I only got a dollar to spare,” she said while handing me the money.

  “That’s cool. Thanks. I’ll pay you back tomorrow,” I said, knowing she would forget. She always did until I asked her for some more. The bell rang. “I gotta go to class, you know how Mr. Gordon is about people being late.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll see you at lunch.”

  “All right.”

  “Good luck on that quiz,” I had to yell at her down the hall.

  “Thanks.”

  Mr. Gordon was known for not letting people in the class if they were tardy. You would have to wait in the hallway with all the other late people and not make too much noise. He would be madder if we made noise in the hallway when he was ready to let us in. He would ask us why we were late, then give us a lecture on why we shouldn’t be late. Then, of course, there was the embarrassing walk back into class with the whole room watching. Later in the year I would learn to stay by the room during break. For now I had to damn near run to the class all the way on the other side of the tiny elementary school that they turned into a high school and packed us in like sardines.

  Lunch took too long to get here. I always got hungrier when I thought that I might not be able to eat for the rest of the day, and a dollar wasn’t gonna cut it. When I got through the crowded hallways to the place where my friends usually ate, they were almost done.

  “How the fuck y’all get y’all food so early in that long-ass lunch line?”

  They all laughed. They were something like little girls when I cursed. Coming from families with more money than mine, they were sensitive about that stuff. So cussing was always the fastest and easiest way to make them laugh.

  “Why you always cuss so much?” April said.

  “’Cause I can.”

  “Does your mom know you curse like that?” Erin asked, wiping cream cheese off her fingers.

  “I cuss in front of her.”

  “She does,” Keyona said.

  “You bad,” Erin said.

  “Y’all didn’t answer my question. How did y’all get y’all food so early?”

  “We got out of art class early,” Erin said.

  “One of y’all got some money I can borrow?”

  “You ain’t got no money?” Keyona asked.

  Obviously, I almost said with attitude. Why would I ask them for money if I had some? “I left my money at home.” They were silent. “If each one of y’all give me a dollar, I will be able to eat.” Still, nothing. “I’ll pay y’all back tomorrow.”

  April gave me a wrinkled dollar out of her tight jeans.

  Erin gave me four of the six shiny new quarters she had.

  Keyona, reluctant to give me anything, asked, “Are you going to pay me back tomorrow?”

  “I will.”

  She turned to her purse so no one else could see and pulled out a crisp dollar bill.

  “Thanks, you guys. I’ll give it back,” I said, not knowing if I could live up to that promise. I would definitely have to repay Keyona tomorrow. I went to the lunch line and saw Jasmine and Jessica—the Big Ballers, even though they wouldn’t admit it. They had the best cars in school. I would trade shoes with them any day. I had already asked Jessica for some money earlier. I had to figure out a way to ask Jasmine for some money without Jessica getting mad.

  “Jasmine, can I borrow some money?”

  “I just gave you some money earlier.”

  “A dollar? I can’t eat with a dollar.”

  Jasmine pulled out five dollars and handed them to me.

  “Thanks, I’ll pay—”

  “Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. It’s all good.”

  Good. I could pay back cheap-ass Keyona and eat tomorrow, and my parents wouldn’t know that I had some money.

  After school I went to basketball practice. If I didn’t eat lunch today, I probably would have passed out.

  “Point guards lead from the front.” My coach yelled at me because I was the last to finish the suicides. I hated being a point guard because I was lazy. My coach was right, though. I was the leader and shouldn’t be last. We had to do three sets of suicides today because two people were late and one person on the team couldn’t come. We ran most of the time during practice. It was more like a track team than anything because our coach was not a basketball coach. So we ran, rarely ran plays out of his store-bought playbook, and almost never scrimmaged.

  Basketball was my form of meditation. I got a chance to clear my mind and foc
us strictly on the game. I didn’t have the energy or time to think about the bad things that were going on in my life. I didn’t think about school, stupid high school boys, or my home life. I didn’t have to think about being scared to get a drink of water in the middle of the night because my dad might be in his paranoid state and try to stab me, his own daughter, because he thought I was trying to get him. I didn’t have to think about my mom taking back the lunch money she gave me because they spent the rest of hers. I didn’t have to think about my little brothers and sister who might not be safe.

  After practice Erin got picked up, while April, Keyona, and I caught the bus. I knew I didn’t want to go home this early.

  “April, can I go to your house?”

  “I don’t care,” she replied.

  At April’s house I would be able to eat real home-cooked food instead of Top Ramen. When I got there, I had to wait for her to eat before I did. I couldn’t just raid the fridge like I wanted to. We ate baked chicken, fried okra, and rice. I always waited until the last possible moment to go home, sometimes missing the last bus and spending the night over there. I didn’t want to go home, not tonight.

  “April, your friend can’t spend the night again,” I heard her mother whisper to her through the paper-thin walls. I made sure I made the bus that night. I guess I wore out my welcome. Instead of saying Welcome, it says Well … I guess you can come.

  It was piercing cold high in the mountains where April lived. The always gloomy and foggy city didn’t help either. April, fortunately for her, was immune to the cold. The bus was fifteen minutes late, and I didn’t get home until 1:30 a.m.

  My mom seemed like she hadn’t moved since morning. Still trying to pick up rocks. My dad, on the other hand, was in motion. Slow motion. He had his favorite knife in his hand, creeping around the house like a scared zombie. There was no use in talking to either of them. I had a little money so I would be able to survive another day. I took a shower and tried to hide the money somewhere no one would look. I had to find a good hiding place through trial and error. This time I simply kept it in my pocket and buried my pants deep in my dirty clothes bin. I went to sleep without even thinking about homework. I had more important things to worry about. It was 2:15 a.m. and I went to sleep as soon as my body touched the bed.

  There was a knock at the door. Then a jingle and she was in. I gotta fix that door! I looked at the clock and it was 4:58. She turned on the light and began searching. Why did my mom have to come in tonight? I knew she wouldn’t be afraid of a teenage girl’s dirty clothes bin.

  “You got some money?” she asked while searching me, the bed, and the mattress.

  “NO! Ronnie took my lunch money yesterday.”

  “He did?”

  “I didn’t even get to eat,” I whined, trying to make her feel bad. After ten minutes of searching, she gave up, only glancing at my dirty clothes. With her brain in this state, she wouldn’t be able to remember what I had on today. She turned off the light, as if I would be going to sleep anytime soon, and closed the door.

  I would survive another day.

  DETRICE JONES was born and raised in San Francisco. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a degree in African American studies. As a student Detrice worked as Managing Editor of NOMMO, UCLA’s African people’s student-run news magazine. The story in this volume is her first published work and is based on her own life experience. Jones is currently living and writing in Los Angeles.

  a.k.a. moises rockafella

  by emory holmes II

  I.

  You said I could have water. I want some water,” Fat Tommy said again.

  “You can have water, Moises, after you tell us how it went down. That’s our deal,” Vargas reminded him.

  Fat Tommy didn’t understand. He wanted some water. Why these other questions? Why this Moises shit? He wasn’t goddamn Moises anymore. That shit was dead; done. Why didn’t these pigs believe him? He felt so sorry for himself. None of it was his fault. It was the Colombians and that goddamn Pemberton. He was the bad guy. If they want their devil, there he is. But don’t expect Fat Tommy to commit suicide and snitch. That shit was dead.

  Fat Tommy was having a really bad day. His big shoulders slumped. His money was gone. His business was gone. His high was gone. And the cops weren’t buying his story. He laid his arms tenderly across his knees. He tried to sleep, but the cops kept butting in. He narrowed his eyes in the harsh light and squinted down at his arms. Still, he had to admit … he certainly was well dressed.

  “Don’t give those white folks no excuses, Tommy,” his wife Bea had advised. “We ain’t gonna get kilt over this asshole.”

  Bea had borrowed her mother’s credit card and bought him two brand-new, white, long-sleeved business shirts from Sears for his interrogations and, regrettably, for the trial. That was such a sweet thing for Bea to do. Buy him new shirts that the cops would like. He loved his Queen Bea—she had been his sweetheart since grade school, way back when he was skinny and pretty. Bea was sexy, street-smart, and loyal to him. After he’d knocked her up, twice, he had started to hang with her, help her with his sons, and had grown to love her.

  Gradually, she had encouraged him to develop his unique sartorial style: his dazzling jheri curl (forty bucks a pop at Hellacious Cuts on Crenshaw); his multiple ropes of gold, bedecked with dangling golden razors, crucifixes, naked chicks, power-fists, and coke spoons; his rainbow collection of jogging suits and fourteen pairs of top-of-the-line Air Jordans (and a pair of vintage Connies for layin’ around the pad). He had restricted himself to only five or six affairs after they got married. The affairs were mostly “strawberries”—amateur ho’s who turned tricks for dope.

  Getting your johnson swabbed by a ’hood rat for a couple of crumbs of low-grade rock—not even a nickel’s worth—wasn’t like being unfaithful, he figured. It was medicinal; therapeutic; a salutary necessity—more like a business expense. Like buying aspirin or getting a massage on a high-stress job. But that was all past—the whores, the dealing, the violence, the stress. He had resolutely turned his back on “thug life” six months ago, when he realized that a brother, even an old-time G like him, was vulnerable to jail time or a hit—after he had experienced the deadly grotesqueries in which Pemberton was capable of entangling him.

  So, hours after that goddamn murder, months before he knew the cops were on to him, he’d flushed the bulk of his street stash down the toilet—1,800 bindles—and thrown away most of his thug-life paraphernalia, even his jack-off books, Players and Hustlers mostly, and his cherished Big Black Titty magazines, and faithfully (except when the Lakers were on TV, or Fear Factor, or The Sopranos) got down on his knees and read the Bible with Bea and promised to her on his daddy’s life, and on his granddaddy’s soul even, he wasn’t going to disappoint her anymore. No more druggin’, no more whores, no more hangin’ out. No more street. Swear to Jesus …

  “White folks like white stuff,” Bea had explained that morning before he surrendered himself. They were in the bedroom of their new Woodland Hills bungalow, and Bea was standing behind him on her tiptoes and pressing her breasts against his back as they faced the dresser mirror. “They like white houses, white picket fences, white bread, and white shirts,” she added grimly, peeking over his shoulder to admire her husband and herself in the mirror.

  They both looked so sad, so pitiful and wronged, Bea thought. And all because of that shit-for-brains Pemberton. Fat Tommy thought so, too. Recalling those poignant scenes on that morning, he remembered that they’d both cried a little bit, standing there perusing their innocent, sad, sexy selves in the mirror. Little Bea had slipped from view for a moment as she helped Tommy struggle out of his nightshirt and unfastened for the final time the nine golden ropes of braid that festooned his massive neck, and then his diamond earring. Bea tearfully placed them in a shopping bag of things they would have to hock. She slid the voluminous dress-shirtsleeves over his backswept arms. Then her beautif
ul, manicured hands appeared, fluttering along his shoulders, smoothing out the wrinkles in his new shirt.

  When Bea was satisfied with her effort, she slipped around in front of him and unloosed his lucky nose ring, letting him view her voluptuous little self in the lace teddy he’d bought her for Mother’s Day, but which she had seldom worn. Then, while he was ogling her melons, she seized his right pinky finger, whose stylish claw he had allowed to flourish there as a scoop for sampling virgin powder on the fly and which he had rakishly polished jet black, and before he could stop her, she deftly clipped it off. Fat Tommy shrieked like a waif.

  “It’s better this way, Tommy,” Bea assured him. She carefully placed the shorn talon in a plastic baggie. It resembled a shiny black roach; but for Fat Tommy, it was like witnessing the burial of a child.

  “I’m keeping this for good luck,” she told him, and stowed it in the change purse of her Gucci bag. She patted his lumpy belly, which protruded out of the break in the shirt like a fifty-pound sack of muffins. Then Bea buttoned the shirt and put on the new hand-painted tie with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s image on it that she’d had a Cuban chick she met in rehab make specially for Tommy. She cupped his big pumpkin head in her hands. She had paid her little sister Karesha fifteen bucks to touch up his jheri curl. The handsome thick mane of oily black locks cascaded sensuously, if greasily, down his forehead and neck.

  “Try to stay where it’s cool, so the jheri curl juice don’t drip on your brand-new shirt, baby,” Bea said in a sweetly admonishing tone.

  “This new ProSoft Sport Curl Gel don’t drip like that cheap shit, baby,” Fat Tommy explained. “It’s deluxe. I gave your sister two more dollars so she would use the top-drawer shit. I want to make a good impression.”

  “I know you do, baby. But you’re gonna have a hard time keeping it up in the joint … I don’t think you—”

  Her husband had stopped listening and Bea stared once more into his eyes. Fat Tommy was such a big baby. Standing there he reminded her of a favorite holy card she’d cherished those two years she went to St. Sebastian’s Catholic school before she met him. St. Sebastian, sad and pitiful, mortally wounded, innocent and wronged, pierced with arrows. She kissed him lightly on his shirt front and pushed him backward onto the edge of the bed.