The Cocaine Chronicles Page 22

  She wore all black, tight wool skirt and a sweater that looked good on her, but she kept her arms crossed, probably remembering how much I liked her small breasts.

  I don’t think she ever smiled. Talked to me about some issues, bankruptcy, insurance policy. Nothing I was interested in. I was interested in her, but that was dead.

  I was dead to her.

  She took it personally, like I had rejected her for cocaine, but it wasn’t like that.

  How did she ask it?

  “How could you be so fucking stupid? Getting yourself arrested buying crack on the subway?”

  I shrugged. I guess if it was the first time, she might have been able to excuse it, but it wasn’t.

  To this day I don’t know how stupid I am. I don’t think I’ve plumbed the depths of my stupidity, and when I do, I plan to get back to her. I’ll have charts and graphs, a PowerPoint demonstration.

  I ruined my life, I know that, last thing I wanted to do was betray her, but I was good at that, too, excelled at it, even.

  Asha, the woman who ran the halfway house, realized I could cook South Asian. Being Gujarati she was surprised that I made a better bhindi, spiced okra, than her mother. She discovered that I could stay in seclusion in a sweltering kitchen cooking up meals for the dozen or so losers that lived at the halfway house. I labored away in silent grief, working with old vegetables, day-old bread, not much meat, which pleased Asha because she didn’t like the smell, some chicken, beans, lots of beans. I came up with meal after meal through backbreaking efficiency and invention. When I wasn’t cooking, I cleaned. I scoured that kitchen, boiled water, added cupfuls of caustic soap, cleaned the filthy ceiling, cleaned everything. Made it spotless, and kept it that way as long as I was there, my six months climbing out of the black hole of my life.

  Cooking and cleaning and not thinking was a meditative balm. I hated when thoughts would slither in on their own and have their way with me. Grief caught me slipping, I needed to see her. Thought of leaving, blowing the whole thing off, my contract with the halfway house staff, to make a run to see her, force her to listen to me.

  I’d go to prison, and I had sense enough to know I didn’t want that. Maybe I might have tried, maybe prison would have been worth it, if I got her to listen to me, but in reality I had no words left to beg with.

  I was out of prayers and I was sick of lighting candles to the saint of hopeless causes.

  She was gone, maybe here, probably some other city.

  “It’s for the best,” my caseworker said, when I confessed why I wouldn’t talk in therapy.

  “It’s not about the drugs. It’s about losing my wife.”

  “Drugs are why you lost her. You drove her away.”

  I cried then, in front of that fool. I stopped talking to him after that. Before, I felt like maybe he was okay.

  I was wrong.

  Up until that moment, I didn’t want to do cocaine again. I really was through with it.

  Then the cravings started.

  I knew she wasn’t coming back, but that fiction kept me alive. Kept me thinking it was the drug. The drug did me, and not me the drug.

  He ruined that conceit, better than therapy ever could.

  Trying to avoid contact with my fellow losers at the halfway house, I took to mincing garlic like garlic would keep everyone at bay, like they were all vampires. I guess we are, vampires that suck smoke instead of blood. It worked, everyone kept their distance, except for Asha. I was her reclamation project and she tried to draw me out. I accepted her good attentions, but I didn’t want to be drawn out or in, or anywhere. I wanted to stay lost. Alone would be good, but I couldn’t expect that. I had to get with the twelve-step program, show requisite progress to get these people out of my life. Still, Asha was pleasant and charming, with big luminous eyes that were easy to look into. Good thing she didn’t go for men, because our friendship would have been much more complicated. Finally, I explained a little about myself, and so when she came into the kitchen with this look on her face, I knew I had probably said too much.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You. I read about you.”

  “What? That I’m a fuck-up? You already knew that.”

  She shook her head.

  “Yeah, I made a mess of what most people think was a promising career.”

  “Don’t you miss that life? Running that restaurant, cooking?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I do.”

  “My girlfriend works for this famous entertainer. She says he needs a chef.”

  I raised an eyebrow, in spite of myself.

  “I wouldn’t get past the interview,” I said.

  “She’s crazy about me and listens to what I have to say. If you’re interested, you’d have a shot.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I replied, without a hint of enthusiasm. I wondered why she wanted to go out of her way for me, she was smart enough to know I truly was a fuck-up. It had to be her nature, trusting and giving, and maybe a bit naïve, coupled with being smart about people and hard-nosed about the everyday affairs of running the halfway house. I guess that’s what you need in order to be in her line of work, skills that contradict each other. Strange how a woman, young and attractive, would choose social work; running a halfway house must be like hanging around unflushed toilets all day, when she could choose so many more attractive occupations. Maybe she wanted to be a Hindu Mother Teresa, and if she could drag me back to respectability, she’d be one giant step closer to sainthood.

  Sometimes I think I hear him calling, a sibilant whisper from a satin-lined oak coffin hidden below the sub-basement in a tomb so cold he’d be able to see his rancid breath if he actually had breath. “Living food, that’s what I’m feeling,” he says.

  Because he’s feeling it, I’m feeling it, and that’s why I’m drinking that Santa Ynez red, and I’m liking it more than I should.

  Backsliding.

  No more of this drinking after work, getting silly, having flights of fancy that do me no good.

  I’ve still got to deal with living food, no matter how silly it is to consider cooking without fire an earth-shaking invention. Really, you’d think most reasonable people would agree that cooking is a good thing, a good invention, and we should feel good about it. Maybe Monster remembered something about predigestion in high school biology and it confused and disgusted him. Probably, though, it’s the influence of a gastronomic guru who put him on the road to bliss through the chewing of fresh bark. Who am I to stand in the way of his path to enlightenment?

  Monster is a freak, a freakish freak, maybe a child-molesting freak, but he’s not a creature-feature villain, no matter how much red wine might insinuate that.

  No.

  He’s a self-invented American, freakishly fascinating in his attempt at reinvention, and because of it, his self-invention, his desire to live like something out of a cautionary tale of how outrageously famous people go wrong, makes him unique, unique as crazy wealth and an addiction to television can make you. I bet as a kid he rushed home to watch Dark Shadows with a chaser of The Brady Bunch, which explains some of it—the blond children running around like chickens shooed about by giddy parents. Really, it’s not Monster or the kids I wonder about, it’s the parents. What must they be like? What do they want for themselves, for their children?

  Monster bait.

  I’m sure they have lawyers on speed dial, ready and waiting for something actionable. Maybe that’s Monster’s real value: pulling back the curtain on the banality of human perversity. Give somebody like him enough money and power and what gets revealed?

  He’s fucking crazy, but it’s okay.

  Everyone here knows it. It’s common knowledge living up here on the mountain. When will the townspeople realize what’s up and break out the torches and pitchforks and march on Monster’s Lair? Isn’t it inevitable?

  I have another glass of wine and try to return my attention to the task at hand—planning Monster’s meals for the wee
k. I figured when I first saw him that the last thing he would be concerned with is eating, figuring him as a man who lived on meth and Twinkies and maybe Diet Coke, because these folks bathe themselves in Diet Coke. For a man over six feet, he must weight 120 pounds, and that’s if he hasn’t evacuated his bowels.

  Considering what he wants to eat, he’d be better served by hiring a botanist than a personal chef.

  Living food isn’t something a cook makes. No, give a kid mud, wheat, water, and whatever, and let him go at it.

  But I’m a professional, and if that’s want Monster is into this week, I’ll give it to him straight, with a sprig of fresh rosemary on that sunbaked gluten ravioli.

  Breakfast: Oatmeal with coconut milk and raisins.

  Snack: Cracked-barley porridge with fresh strawberries.

  Lunch: Vegan, sunbaked pizza with three kinds of tomato and Mexican salt from Oaxaca.

  Snack: Fresh greens in a lemon sauce.

  Dinner: Veggie sushi.

  Snack: Unsweetened cider.

  That’s what my life is now; feeding Monster shit he calls food.

  If I had more integrity, if I had that kind of character, I’d get my ass off of the mountain, face the consequences, and preserve my dignity.

  Fuck yes. The first step on the road to recovery is to know yourself. I’d best start whipping up some sun-baked potato pancakes for Monster’s snack, or find a crack pipe; maybe both if I know me, and I do.

  JERVEY TERVALON was born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles. He is the author of five books including Understand This, for which he won the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voice’s Award. Currently, he is the executive director of Literature for Life, an educational advocacy organization, and creative director of the Pasadena LitFest. Tervalon’s lastet novel is Serving Monster.

  disco zombies

  by gary phillips

  Wild Willie stumbled backward, knocking against the rickety kitchen table, sending the two plastic bricks of coke somersaulting to the floor.

  “Goddammit, Spree, pay up.” Wild Willie wrenched hard to get the six-shooter free from the other man’s grasp.

  “Fuck that, Willie!” Spree Holmes blared. “I did.” He had both of his hands clamped around Wild Willie’s gun hand, his fingers tugging on the barrel of the revolver, even as Willie beat the shit out of his arm with his free fist. “You fuckin’ reneged, man,” he added, gritting his teeth.

  Holmes sprung from a tiptoe position so as to maximize his weight bearing down on the heavier but flabbier Wild Willie. It worked, and the two went over and down onto the worn linoleum. They slid against one of the lower cabinets, busting off its handle.

  “Shit!” McMillan hollered from the doorway, ducking and diving beneath the wind of the Samurai sword Crider swung at the top of his thinning hair. McMillan flopped onto his stomach in his vintage Hawaiian shirt atop the ratty shag carpet. But for once he wasn’t worried about keeping his clothes neat. He twisted around onto his back, kicking and flailing his legs like an angry turtle, just as Crider chopped at him with the blade. A piece of the heel of McMillan’s two-tone shoe was sliced off and he instinctively shut his eyes as if he’d been gored in the heart.

  “Ugh,” Holmes grunted after Wild Willie yanked the gun free. He’d been partially straddling him but flung himself side ways as the other man righted the piece. Desperate, Holmes reached out and latched onto anything he could off the counter. With brutal force he slammed alongside Willie’s head a glass container used with a blender. Its impact caused Willie’s shot to be misdirected and singe past Holmes’s head—but not into it.

  “Motherfucker,” Wild Willie swore. A thick piece of glass was embedded in the meaty part above his eyebrow, and he had no choice but to grab for it to relieve the pain. As he did so, Holmes shoved the heel of his hand into the shard, driving it deeper. Willie’s legs twitched in agony as he tore off another blast at Holmes’s chest.

  In the dining room McMillan keenly registered the shot but was concentrating on throwing a porcelain statuette of a trumpet player he’d plucked off a shelf with as much shoulder as he could put behind it.

  “You throw like a little girl,” the silver-toothed Crider taunted. A cut had opened up on his face as a result of the miniature musician hitting him. He was on one side of a round dining room table and McMillan opposite. Crider held his gleaming sword in both hands, the bulk of it poised over the table.

  “Which you want to lose, man? Hand or ear?” Crider made a quick back-and-forth with the steel, letting it whistle in the stifling air of the little house.

  “You ain’t man enough to take me without your chop suey prop,” McMillan said, inching to his left.

  “Come on, I’ll make it nice and clean and fast.” Crider made a vicious swipe that caused McMillan to tense but not be so stupid as to start running and get the back of his neck severed.

  Holmes and Wild Willie tumbled out of the kitchen, entangled. When Willie had shot at him the second time, Holmes was in the process of lowering his upper frame, and as the bullet funneled into the bone of his shoulder blade, his momentum carried him forward and he’d rammed into Wild Willie’s chest, stunning him. Battling tears and doing what he could to ignore the stars exploding behind his corneas, Spree Holmes had pressed the fight, knowing if he let up, the next shot from that old Colt would blow his guts out.

  Instinctively, Crider bounded over to the wrestling forms to give his homeboy Willie a hand. He turned to refocus on McMillan, who was now pushing the dining room table toward him. Crider dodged to one side but McMillan followed his movement and upended the table onto the swordsman’s feet.

  “Bastard!” Crider yelped. He got his left foot free but the right, in its snakeskin boot, wasn’t so easily extricated. McMillan held onto the edge of the table and lifted it up quickly and then brought it down again on the right’s instep. Crider gritted his teeth and wielded the blade toward McMillan’s hand. The other man lunged out of the way and the sword sliced into the table’s rim and held fast.

  McMillan laughed and, putting effort behind it, shoved the table, sending Crider into a wall as he attempted to free his weapon. “I got your girl,” McMillan said, and plowed a fist into the opposing man’s nose as the sword came loose.

  At that same moment, Holmes and Wild Willie were digging into each other’s faces with their fingers. Holmes’s thumb was gouging into the corner of Willie’s mouth. The latter shifted and bit down on that thumb like it was fresh steak.

  “That ain’t gonna help you, Willie,” Holmes said, leveraging forward and causing Willie’s head to rattle against the doorjamb. Willie reached for the six-shooter, which was now lying on the kitchen floor, but Holmes wasn’t about to allow that to happen. Holmes took hold of what material he could of Wild Willie’s T-shirt and, jerking him up, head-butted him, opening the gash wider over Willie’s eye.

  “Ke-rist!” Wild Willie screamed, and tried to scurry away. Holmes was on his feet and stomped on the escaping man’s side like he was a bothersome cockroach. He then pressed the barrel of the gun onto Willie’s thigh and shot him.

  “That ought to slow you down,” Holmes said over Willie’s whimpering.

  Behind him Crider had his sword but was keeling over from a rocking blow delivered via the dining room chair hefted by McMillan. The chair was rusted metal tubing and a torn leatherette-covered seat, but it served McMillan well as a shield. Like a lion tamer from an old Saturday morning serial, he had it up and was using it to fend off the blows from Crider’s sword.

  “Put it the fuck down,” Holmes ordered.

  Crider and McMillan both turned and stared. McMillan then grinned broadly, stroking his goatee with his long-nailed hand. “Shoot him,” he said.

  The Colt in Holmes’s hand didn’t waver, even though the burning in his shoulder intensified.

  Crider made a guttural sound and pivoted toward Holmes. The sword was at his side, the blade pointing outward—a Mississippi Samurai in pointy-toed cowboy boots
and worn Lee jeans.

  “I’m not fuckin’ around, Crider.”

  “Smoke his ass,” McMillan repeated. He still held onto the chair.

  Crider cocked his head to the side, waiting and wondering. He grasped the sword by two hands on its hilt.

  “Get the shit,” Holmes said.

  “On it.” McMillan scooted into the kitchen, not letting go of the chair until he was in the other room. Wild Willie was curled into a fetal position and moaned softly, his leg leaking profusely.

  “Something broke?” McMillan teased cruelly, as he scooped up the two keys of flake. “Or is it indigestion from trying to cheat us, you cheap fuck?” Spittle dotted McMillan’s graying goatee. “Huh, Willie, that it?” He leaned over, feigning like he was listening for a response.

  “You …” the man on the floor began.

  “You what, you fuckin’ Shylock.” McMillan planted his two-tone Nunn Bush shoe in Willie’s stomach, making him wince and gurgle crimson. “You gonna try and play us, man? After the business we done together, making your own thirty-percent-state-disability-retard-self phatter than you deserve to be?”

  Holmes called from the dining room: “Come on, let’s hit the road!”

  “Yeah, yeah. Can’t have no more fun.” He kicked Willie in the ribs, a bone giving way. As McMillan started to walk out, Wild Willie suddenly gyrated his body and reached for the exiting man’s legs. McMillan reacted but still got tangled up as Willie continued to paw at him, and he fell forward.

  Holmes knew better than to be distracted by his partner going timber. The problem was McMillan whirligigged his arms to stay upright, causing Holmes to reposition himself, and Crider took his opening.

  There was a flash of silver and the sword swiped downward at McMillan’s tilting head. “Oh, fuck me,” the goateed man exclaimed and put a hand to the side of his head.