The Cocaine Chronicles Read online

  Before I could get my rap going, the layout, the proposal, two bulls charged in, hauled me out of the chair, slammed me across the table, the wine spilling into her lap.

  The cuffs on my wrists, then pulling me upright, the first going, “Game’s up, wise guy, you’re toast.”

  The second leered at her, spittle at the corner of his mouth, asked, “The fuck a looker like you doing with this loser?”

  And her body shaking, she stammered, “There must be some mistake.”

  The bulls laughing, one went, “Nickle-and-dime con man, penny-ante shit, never worked a day in his goddamn life, he’s going down, honey, hard. You wanna spread your legs, baby, least get some return.”

  They weren’t kidding about the hard bit. I got two years on that deal, fuckin’ credit cards. They call it white-collar crime, meaning they do not like you to fuck with their money.

  Did the max, the whole jolt. Never saw McKennit again, used my one phone call to try and reach her, heard, “This number is no longer in use.”

  Sent a letter, got “Return to sender.” Like the bloody song.

  So, so fuck her.

  The two years, in maximum-security penitentiary, trying to sidestep the gangs, the Crips, the neo-militia, the Brothers, the Mexs—motherfuckahs, would put a shiv in you for two bits or a pack of Camels.

  How I met Jimmy. Hooked up the first week, walking the yard, my hands in the pockets of the light denim jacket, a northeasterly howling across the stone, freezing my nuts off.

  Wasn’t one of those movie deals. He didn’t, like, save me from the white supremacists or prevent some buck from turning me out.

  Slow burn.

  A favor here, a nod there, a gathering of little moves, till we had the buddy system cooking.

  Guy could make me laugh, and on the block there wasn’t a whole lot of … what’s the word I want … heard it on Regis … or Leno … yeah, frivolity.

  He got early release, and when I finally got out, he was waiting in a Pinto, some speed, a six of Miller (ice cold), and a wedge, said, “Some walking ’round bills.”

  A buddy. Am I right or am I right? We had one album in the joint, belonged to Jimmy, Patti Smith’s Horses. Fuck, goes back thirty years. How old is that?

  Thing is, I flat out loved it, still do. The reason why, in this tomb hotel room, I have the new one, Trampin.

  Fuckin’ blinder.

  Dunno is it cos Jimmy’s dead, or the whole screwed-up mess, but the goddamn songs speak to me.

  You’re on the zillionth floor of the airport Marriott, with the sole view being the runways, planes moving 24/7, you better have something talk to you. I’m chugging Jack D., singing along to “Mother Rose.”

  And is this weird or what, I sound like Roy Orbison. My mom, when she wasn’t whining along to Irish rebel ballads, would play Roy endlessly.

  Man, I don’t know politics from Shinola, but Radio Baghdad, hearing that, watching CNN and the body count, I’m weeping like a baby. Like what? Some kind of loser?

  Loser? Me?

  Hey, shithead, look in the corner, see that hill of coke, the bag of Franklins? Who’s losing?

  My mom, her wish was to get back to Ireland, walk the streets of Galway, have oysters near the Spanish Arch, do a last jig in the Quays, but money, yeah, never put it together. So I’m, like, gonna make the pilgrimage for her—why I’m at the airport, got the documents, ticket, the whole nine.

  Only worry is the beer isn’t cold there. How weird is that? But hey, I’ll drink Jameson. A few of those suckers, I might dance a jig my own self.

  I rang a guy to offload the coke. Can’t really bring that shit to Ireland, and I’m worried he might sell me out, but we’ve done business before so had to tell him where I’m at, thinking maybe that was stupid, but I wasn’t focusing real hard when I dropped the dime.

  Gotta get my shit together.

  So I jump in the shower, blasting in the scald position, and I freeze. A knock at the door.

  The Sig is where?

  Think, fuck.

  Another knock. Louder. Insistent.

  And I’m stumbling outta the shower, hit my knee against the sink, that mother hurts, hobble to the bed, grab the Sig from under the pillow, shout, “With you in a sec.”

  Slide the rack, my voice coming out croaked, sounding like, “Wiv y’all.” Texas, right?

  I look through the peephole, and it’s the maid, fuckin’ room service. I shout, “I’m good, muchas gracias.”

  Hear, “De nada.”

  And the trolley moving on, oil those goddamn wheels. My body is leaking sweat, rivulets down my chest, back, thinking, Gotta … get … straight.

  Rest of the day is purple haze, must have ordered some food as I came to on the floor. It’s dark, the only light coming from the runway, throwing an off/on flicker across the wall.

  Half a turkey hero is on the floor, close to my mouth, smothered in mayo. The Sig is in my right hand and, yeah, my nose is pumping blood again.

  The carpet is, like, fucked.

  I have clothes on, 501’s, and, naturally, a white T with the bloodstained logo.

  Redemption Road.

  Almost illegible, it’s stuck to my chest.

  I get to my feet, stagger a bit, so do a quick hit of the snow to straighten out, no biggie. I’m sitting on the bed, waiting for the rush, the phone rings, I pick up, figuring reception.

  A voice goes, “You’re dead, sucker.”

  Things to do in Houston when you’re dead.

  I slam it down, hurting the palm of my hand.

  I’m waiting. Let ’em come. I’m, like, ready … ready-ish. I’d play Patti but I’m listening to every sound, for every sound … a 747 about to take off …

  Wonder where that’s bound?

  KEN BRUEN is the author of twenty-nine books. Three novels in his Jack Taylor mystery series have been adapted into films for television. The films based on his novels London Boulevard and Blitz debuted in theaters in 2011. Bruen recently received his second PhD, in Breton linguistics, and he currently lives in Tangiers. He has one daughter.

  beneficent diversions

  from the crackdkins diet

  by donnell alexander

  She 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 e
xperience 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 Crack-dkins Diet is that it only satisfies its adherents’ appetites for destruction. And what he really wanted was life.

  DONNELL ALEXANDER is a multimedia documentarian whose work has appeared in McSweeney’s, ESPN The Magazine, and on National Public Radio. The Ohio native’s best-known work is the short film Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No. Among his other works are the essay “Cool Like Me: Are Black People Cooler than White People?”, the 2008 tell-all Rollin’ with Dre (with Bruce Williams), and the memoir Ghetto Celebrity. He can be followed on Twitter @DonnyShell and lives in Los Angeles.

  poinciana

  by susan straight

  Why 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.