The Cocaine Chronicles Read online

  I don’t put much stock into the importance of dreams. I don’t believe much in symbols or hidden, subconscious meanings. In fact, I rarely ever remember my dreams. But this one is different. It’s the kind that seems so real that when you wake up, for those first few seconds, you’re absolutely certain it happened. That you were there. That you are there. In it I’m sitting at the edge of a dock looking out over the ocean, and beside me is a bottle of vodka. I know I’m not supposed to drink it. I know if I do I’ll erase all the progress I’ve made. That it’ll trigger the craving. And once the craving is on, I’ll be off and running—next stop, the dopeman’s house. But I pick up the bottle anyway. I uncap it. I raise it to my lips and drink, and I can taste it, I can feel it going down, the actual burning sensation in the back of my throat. This is where I wake up, flooded with guilt for having drank again, and then relieved, suddenly, when I realize it’s only a dream.

  Now the room is just beginning to grow light. Outside the sun is rising, and I roll out of bed. I go to the bathroom and douse my face with water. What happens next is totally out of character for me, but I get down on my knees in front of the sink. I place my hands together. I close my eyes.

  Part of me feels silly.

  Part of me wants to believe. In what, in whom, I have no idea. And the funny thing is, for me, it doesn’t really matter. It is after all the act, not the message, that ultimately gives form to prayer.

  JAMES BROWN is the author of several novels, along with the memoirs The Los Angeles Diaries and This River. He has received the Nelson Algren Award in Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has appeared in GQ, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Ploughshares. Brown teaches in the MFA program at California State University, San Bernardino.

  twilight of the stooges

  by jerry stahl

  So it’s 1980-something. I’m nowhere.

  Suzy, this older white lady I buy cocaine from, tells me she’ll give me a free gram if I help her do some.

  I say, “Sure, why not?”

  She says, “Exactly.” Then, before my eyes, she gets on her hands and knees on the cat pee–marinated shag carpet. She raises the salmon nightie she lives in, exposing a pair of sixty-three-year-old, weirdly hot, baby-smooth ass cheeks, which she introduces as Heckel and Jeckel’s albino cousins. Jiggling her cheeks the way body builders will jiggle their pecs, left-right-left, she makes them talk to each other.

  “Heckel likes to get spanked. Bad little crow!”

  “Jeckel, you’re such a freak.”

  After fifteen minutes, or maybe a day, Suzy pretends to get annoyed with her chatty buttocks. She tells them to shut up. As I zone in and out, grinning like I haven’t seen Miss Chatty Cheeks 5,000 times already, I am simultaneously wondering how long I can go without asking/begging/stealing another hit, and obsessing on the name of the guy who did Topo Gigio on Ed Sullivan.

  By the time I write this, I am acutely aware of how old remembering The Ed Sullivan Show makes me. Tennessee Williams routinely shaved a year off his age. When people caught him he’d explain that he didn’t count the year he worked in a shoe store. I sometimes think the same could be done with drug years. They don’t count. Though probably they count more. Like dog years. My liver, in point of fact, is well over a hundred. It sometimes forgets its own name and will doubtless be placed in a rest home by the time you read this.

  Suzy’s TV is always on with the sound off. After a while you begin to think the rays soak into your head and over the blood brain barrier with the rest of the shit you’re putting in there. Suzy resembles Miss Hathaway, Mr. Drysdale’s horsy secretary on The Beverly Hillbillies—if Miss Hathaway had been locked in a dark room and force-fed Kents, cocaine, and gin for twenty-seven years, while bathed in color Sony light.

  She reaches back and hands me a straw, a regular sweetheart. “Okay, soldier, pack some in there.”

  “In the straw?”

  “In my ass. Jesus! How dumb are you? Put some powder in the straw, put the straw in my ass, and blow.”

  “I’ve done worse for less,” I say with a shrug, trying to convey an emotion I do not even remotely feel. In fact, there is actual screaming in my head, a voice that sounds alarmingly like Jimmy Swaggart. (More TV-adjacent damage; I might as well be in the box, getting transmissions directly into my pineal gland.) I am never not awake Sunday morning at four, when Jimmy comes on in my neck of the world.

  Am I nervous or am I happy?

  Why are you staring?

  Fuck, HELICOPTERS!

  Right before I angle toward the target, I start to feel chiggers under my skin, and I fight the urge to scratch myself bloody digging them out. This is when I hear Jimmy Swaggart start speaking directly to me: “Hey, loser! You’re about to blow drugs into the anus of a woman old enough to be your mother. You know what Jesus says about that?”

  Happily, I am so cocaine-depleted I instantly forget that I’m aurally hallucinating, and that I itch. You don’t know you’re having a white-out until you come out of it. I just kind of blink to. I remember that I’m trying to keep my thumb pressed on one end of the straw while I slip the other end in Suzy’s pink O without spilling any coke. (Her sphincter, for reasons I can’t fathom, makes me think of a dog toy.) I hold my breath, mouth poised by the business end of the tube, the length of a TV Guide away from the bull’s eye. I have a weird pain in my spleen. Though I’m not sure where my spleen is. I just know it’s unhealthy. And I should go to a dentist, too. I can only chew with the left rear corner of my mouth.

  “When I say do it, do it!” Suzy says, and launches into some kind of Kundalini fire-breathing that expands and puckers her chosen coke portal. For one bad moment I am eyeball to eyeball with a jowly, Ray Harryhausen Cyclops, who won’t stop leering at me. Then I avert my gaze and take in the pictures of Suzy’s dead B-celebrity husband on the wall. The Teddy Shrine … That’s better. Suzy met her late husband when she was a call girl. (Many of her clients were half-washed-up New York stage actors.) In a career lull, Teddy appeared in a number of Three Stooges vehicles. But not, as Suzy would interject when she repeated the story—which she did no more than ten times a night—“the good Three Stooges …” Teddy made his Stooge ascendance in the heyday of Joe DeRita, the Curly-replacement nobody liked. “Twilight of the Stooges,” Suzy would sigh. “People even liked Shemp better than they liked DeRita.”

  Suzy worked a finite loop of peripheral celebrity anecdotes … Bennett Cerf liked to be dressed like a baby and have his diaper changed … Broderick Crawford liked to give girls pony rides. Goober from Andy Griffith was hung like a roll of silver dollars but had a dime-size hole burned in his septum. She also claimed that her apartment on Ivar, a cottage cheese–ceilinged studio a short stagger up from Franklin, used to belong to Nathanael West. I can still see her tearing up, missing a dear friend: “The midget from Day of the Locust died the same day John Lennon was shot.”

  I spent more time with Suzy than my own wife, which is a whole other story. After a certain point, junkies are rarely missed when they’re not home. (If they happen to have a home—as opposed to a place they still have keys to, from which they can steal small appliances.)

  A half-second before I think she is ready to blast off, Suzy abruptly turns around and chuckles. “I ever tell you how much Larry Fine loved his blow? The man was a hedonist … How do you think his hair got that way? He wanted to be the white Cab Calloway but it never worked out.”

  Luckily I don’t spill anything. Did I mention the white-outs? I did, didn’t I? Why am I telling this story? It’s not even a story. It’s just, like, a snippet from a loop. Like Suzy’s bottom-feeding monologues. I don’t have memories. I just have nerves that still hurt in my brain. Shooting coke does that. Even more than smoking it, when you fixed you could just wipe the inside of your skull clean as porcelain. Coke was about toilets and toilets were shiny white. Especially at four a.m. with the lights on and the bathroom door locked. Someti
mes the blood in your head would crash over your eyeballs and you’d just go blind for a while, but you wouldn’t notice till you could see again—when you came back and realized you were standing there, knuckles buckling, one hand propped on the wall, the other compulsively flushing and re-flushing the toilet, for the whoosh that could make you come.

  I’ve done okay since getting off all of it—the dope and the cocaine—but I still think, much as the smack destroyed my liver, the coke shorted my synapses. All systems will be firing and then, next thing I know, I’ll blink into vision again and realize I’ve gone blank. It’s not so much as if the power’s been diminished, it’s as if the power just suddenly … goes out. Can we feel anything as sharply as the absence of a specific feeling?

  What the fuck does that mean?

  What was I just talking about?

  Never mind. It’s not coming back.

  When I think about getting high, what I remember, viscerally, is not the dope rush—those faded years before I stopped the dope—I remember the coke hitting, that fork-in-the-heart jolt, like you dipped your toe in a puddle and tongue-kissed a toaster.

  Before the needle was halfway down, you could see God’s eyes roll back in His head.

  So I twitch back and there’s this gaping Eberhard Faber eraser-colored hole, two hummocky cheeks yanked open, scarlet chipped fingernails against baby skin.

  “Hey, Whitey Ford, throw the dart through the hula hoop, dammit! What’s the puzzle!?”

  So (first time’s always the hardest) with no further ado, I stick the straw into Suzy’s ass, careful not to inhale, and blow the Pixy Stix’s worth of flake into her alimentary canal, or whatever it is, and watch the teeny mouth shut tight around its deposit.

  Suzy squirms. “Unggghh-uhhhh … Oh God … NNNNNNGGGGGG!”

  Then she twists her head around, glassy-eyed. “I’m a regular Venus flytrap!”

  That’s when I realize I left the straw in her. I look everywhere but it’s gone. Sucked right up with the blow. Should I tell her? Would she get mad when she found out? What if she cut me off? Or was there some kind of ass-acid that could eat a straw to pulp—so she’d never know?

  Suzy mistakes my panic and paralysis for awe. “Impressive, right?” Smacking herself on the flank, she adds, “I used to smuggle guns for the Panthers in there. There’s a man named Jackson who could tell you some stories, if he was in a position to tell anybody anything.”

  Then she giggles, doing a little wiggly thing with her bottom. “A lot of guys paid a lot of money to be where you are right now! Now blow some more, Daddy. Blow! Blow! Blow!”

  I reload from a Musso & Franks ashtray full of powder and go in for Round Two. Her capacious anus quivers like some blind baby bird. And this time (with a fresh straw) I close my eyes, unload the blow, then quickly get up and weave into the bathroom to shake up a shot. I should put some dope in but can’t find it—and can’t wait—and before I have the needle out I’m on the floor, doing the floppy-fish. It takes everything I have to slap a chunk of tar on tin foil and take a puff to stop the convulsion. I make it back out to the living room. (Blinds always pulled, no day or night, like a one-woman keno lounge.) I never saw Suzy get off her couch to pee. I never saw her eat. I never saw her do anything but cocaine, generally up her nose—or, on special occasions, the odd ass-blow.

  Suzy didn’t geeze, she thought it was low class. She left the freebasing to her roommate, Sidney, a shut-in who could generally be found in his room, sniffing a pillow between hits. Sidney hadn’t left his room, Suzy liked to say, since The Rockford Files was new. His claim to fame was playing drums behind Lenny Bruce at a Detroit strip club.

  I didn’t have any money, so I would keep Suzy company. I never had to be anywhere.

  Suzy is still talking when I come back from the bathroom. She never stopped talking. It was not quite white noise. Suzy’s clients were a talk show host, a couple of soap stars, a slew of jingle musicians, one name actor who required oz’s mailed to him on the set, and my favorite, a TV evangelist famous for his high-rise hair and his multi-hour rants from a cowhide chair in Pasadena.

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  Suzy’s voice is jagged with pleasure. Her nose so permanently blown out she sounds like she’s just unplugged her iron lung. “You’re thinking, ‘Suzy musta stole the ass-blow move from Stevie Nicks.’ Well, you’re wrong, baby. It’s apocryphal. Stevie Nicks kept a guy on the payroll whose only job was to blow coke up her ass. Well, not his only job. His other job was to make sure she didn’t stop for KFC on the way back from a concert. She’d put a broken nail file to her throat if the driver didn’t stop for a half-dozen nine-piece boxes. She was a chicken hoover, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I know you know,” Suzy says, lowering her nightie, squirming with pleasure as she eases her behind back on the couch.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time Larry got Shemp drunk and they put a hooker’s eye out in Canter’s?”

  Only 5,000 times.

  “I never heard that one.”

  “Here, have some more.”

  Years go by.

  JERRY STAHL has written six books, including the memoir Permanent Midnight and the novels I, Fatty and Pain Killers. His nonfiction and journalism have appeared in Details, The Believer, the New York Times, and a variety of other places. Hemingway & Gellhorn, written by Stahl, premieres on HBO in 2012, and he is currently working on The Thin Man with Johnny Depp.

  chemistry

  by robert ward

  This is the story of how I, hardheaded and some might say hard-hearted, Roger Deakens, actually learned something about the highly touted, but seldom seen, spiritual side of life and found my own true love.

  My little tale begins in a bar, The Lion’s Head, my favorite old haunt, the great hang for journalists, novelists, village politicos, and the occasional famous actor from the Theatre In The Round, which was just down the street, on the other side of Sheridan Square.

  The dark, friendly dive where I met Nicole.

  She was trim-hipped, with shining black shoulder-length hair, and she stood between the service station and the last seat at the bar, my usual spot.

  I slid onto my stool and was immediately attracted by her perfume. Subtle, classy, a fog of desire. She had a long, sensitive, fine-boned face, and small pearl earrings. She wore a dark tweed business suit that accentuated her tight, athletic body. I ordered my usual, Scotch and soda, from Tommyboy, the 300-pound Yeats-quoting bartender, and tried to remember if I’d ever seen her in the Head before. I thought not, but there had been more than a few nights over the past six months when I couldn’t remember much of anything at all. No, I figured, she must be a new girl, probably worked in one of the office buildings nearby, perhaps one of the restaurants that had been springing back up after a few rough seasons.

  She sipped a glass of white wine, not looking at me at all, which was fine. I had plenty of time. That was my edge with women. I could wait them out. A lot of guys come on to every girl with the same kind of game-show-host jokes and fast riffs, but that’s not me. I’ve learned through hard-won experience that when you’re trolling for love, you’ve got to be “riff-specific.” Tailor each and every riff to the particular girl in question. That’s how you get them to fall in love with you, which after all is the ultimate goal. Or at least it was my goal. I never felt that it was satisfying to merely get them to undress, to open their beautiful legs. No, I wanted them to want me, to need me, to love me. I’m talking about the hurting kind of love, where they’d beg to see me the next day and the next and the next. They wanted to be my girl.

  But I didn’t want a girl. Not that way. Love wasn’t my thing, not back then. Not that I didn’t care about them. I did, like another man might care about a vintage car. I was a young man, the field was ripe, and I had become a connoisseur of hearts. Okay, technically speaking, I broke their hearts. But, come on, they loved it. Well, at least some of them did. O
r else why would they keep coming back?

  In those happy days, I liked to think of myself as an artist, an artist of seduction. An overblown, self-regarding epithet, to be sure, but I did have a more than modest talent for love. What were my talents? Well, first off, I could size up any woman within the first two minutes. Oh, what do we have here? Short, spiky hair, glasses, Levi’s … must be the intellectual type. The way to proceed here is to drop some little thing about a lady poet. I’m not talking about Sylvia Plath, for God’s sake. Even a frigging football lineman can quote something from Plath. She’s just another pop suicide now. No, with this kind of “sensitive rebel type” you have to mention a woman poet only women revere. Like, drop a nice line from, say, Mary Oliver. That’s the kind of poet close to a bright woman’s heart, the kind she’s sure that no man would even know about. Oh yeah, you lay a little Mary Oliver on her and she starts thinking, Wow, this guy isn’t bad looking and he’s so sensitive, as well. Maybe, just maybe, he’s the man of my dreams. Yeah, that’s the thing. You want to be her dream lover, you have to pay consummate attention to the details.

  But details aren’t the only thing. Oh no … You have to appear to be a fun guy, as well. Sensitive plus fun. If you’re too sensitive, after all, you might just as well be some kind of pushover. No, you have to show you’re a little dangerous, but fun-dangerous, not deadly dangerous. And what better way to show this than to have your ready vial of pure white cocaine with you.