by Don Winslow
Which isn’t that high a bar to clear.
When Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl, she saw her daddy in every man on the sidewalk, on the bus, every man who came into the restaurant where her mommy worked.
Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? she’d asked her mom until her mom got tired of hearing it and told her that her daddy was in heaven with Jesus and Jacqui wondered why Jesus got him and she didn’t so she didn’t like Jesus very much.
When Jacqui was little she stayed in her room and looked at picture books and made up stories and told herself stories, especially when Mommy thought she was asleep and brought home some of the men who came into the restaurant where Mommy worked. She’d lie in her bed and make up stories and sings songs about when Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl.
She wasn’t so little, she was nine, when Mommy married one of the men who came into the restaurant where she worked and he told Jacqui he wasn’t her daddy, he was her stepdaddy, and she told him she knew that because her daddy was with Jesus and he laughed and said yeah maybe, if Jesus is holding down a barstool in Bay Ridge.
Jacqui was eleven the first time Barry asked her if she was going to grow up to be a whore like her mother and she remembers that he pronounced it “who-are,” like “Horton Hears a Who-Are,” and Jacqui would go around the house muttering I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. Barry’s an asshole, one hundred percent. And one time he heard her and smacked her in the face and said You may not love me but you’re sure as shit going to respect me and her mother sat there at the kitchen table and did nothing. But then again she did nothing when he hit her and called her a who-are and a fucking drunk and Jacqui would run and hide in her room ashamed she didn’t do anything to stop him. And when Barry stormed out to go to the bar, Jacqui came out and asked her mother why she would stay with a man who was mean to her and her mother answered that someday she’d understand that a woman has needs, she gets lonely.
Jacqui didn’t feel lonely, because she had books. She would shut herself up in her room and read books—she read all of Harry Potter and the idea that they had been written by a woman led her to go to the library and find Jane Austen, the Brontës, Mary Shelley and George Eliot and then Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch and poems by Sylvia Plath and Jacqui decided that someday she’d leave Tottenville and move to England and become a writer and live in a room of her own where she didn’t have to block out the sounds of shouting and crying and hitting outside the door.
She started listening to music—not the pop shit her few friends listened to but good shit like the Dead Weather, Broken Bells, Monsters of Folk, Dead by Sunrise, Skunk Anansie. She bought an old guitar at a pawn shop, sat in her room and taught herself (in both literature and music Jacqui is an autodidact) chords and started to write songs when Jacqui was little (C), when she was little (F), when Jacqui was a little girl (C).
Jacqui is playing her guitar one afternoon when her mother is at work and Barry comes in and takes the guitar from her hand and says This will be our secret, our little secret, I’ll make you feel so good and lays her back on the bed and lies on top of her and she doesn’t tell her mother and she doesn’t tell anyone This will be our secret (D), our little secret (G), I’ll make you feel so good (Em) even when her mother says I can tell you’ve been having sex you’re a little whore who’s the boy I’ll have his ass thrown in jail and Barry keeps coming into her room until one day one early morning she hears her mother screaming and runs and sees Barry hunched over on the toilet and her mother screams Call 911 and Jacqui walks slowly to her room to get her phone and sings This will be our secret (D), our little secret (G), I’ll make you feel so good (Em) before she punches in the number and by the time the EMTs get there Barry is dead.
By this time Jacqui is in middle school, smoking a little weed, drinking some beer, some wine with her friends but mostly she stays in and reads or plays guitar, discovers Patti Smith and Deborah Harry, even Janis Joplin, writes songs with sardonic lyrics This will be my secret / My little secret / I killed my stepfather / Passively aggressively / And it makes me feel good / So good and her mother says she needs to get a job to help out so she becomes a barista at Starbucks.
Jacqui gets good grades in high school, almost out of spite because she hates high school and everything about it except study hall. Her grades are good enough to get a scholarship, but not good enough for Columbia or NYU or Boston University and there’s no money to send her anywhere she wants to go and she’s never going to live in England and be a writer and have a room of her own and her mother wants her to go to cosmetology school so she can make a living but Jacqui holds on to a shred of dream and enrolls at CUNY Staten Island.
It starts with pills.
She’s a freshman at CUNY, living at home with her mother, and it’s Christmas break and someone offers her some Oxy and she’s a little drunk and a lot bored so she thinks what the fuck and downs it and she likes it and the next day she goes out and gets some more because if you can’t find pills in Tottenville your seeing-eye dog probably can. They’re selling it in schools, on corners, in bars, shit, they’re even selling it from ice cream trucks.
The pills are everywhere—Oxy, Vicodin, Percocet—everyone is selling or buying or both. For Jacqui, it takes the edge off, the edge off having no fucking idea what she wants to do with her life, the edge off knowing that she was born in Tottenville and is going to live in Tottenville and die in Tottenville, working minimum-wage jobs no matter what degree she gets from CUNY. The edge off keeping the secret that her stepfather had turned her into a matinee.
The pills make her feel good and she doesn’t have a drug problem; what Jacqui has is a money problem. Not at first, when she was doing a little Oxy on weekends, not even when it was a pill a day, but now it’s two or three at thirty dollars a pop.
Some of the money she gets from her job at Starbucks, then some from her mother’s purse, sometimes she doesn’t need money at all if she wants to fuck guys who have pills. Fucking is nothing, she’s used to lying there letting a man fuck her and it might as well be somebody who can get her high if he can’t get her off.
Jacqui is basically high her second semester of college, then all summer, and then she kind of stops going to class her sophomore year as she goes from a 3.8 GPA to Incompletes, and then she just gives up the sham and drops out.
She drifts into working and getting high and fucking dealers and then she meets Travis.
Who turns her on to heroin.
It would be easy to blame him—her mother certainly does—but it wasn’t really Travis’s fault. They met at a club, one of those grungy coffeehouses where the neo-Kerouac crowd hangs out and plays guitars, and Travis had just been laid off from his construction job—he was a roofer—because he’d hurt his back and couldn’t really work and his disability ran out.
That was Travis’s story—he started taking Vike for the back pain—prescribed by a doctor—and never really stopped. On the age-old theory that if one was good, fifteen is better, Travis started chucking pills like M&M’s.
They were both high when they met but it was like—
BAM.
Love.
They fucked in the back of his van and Jacqui got off like she’d never gotten off; he had a long skinny dick like his long skinny body and it touched her in a place she’d never been touched.
It was Travis for her after that, and she for him.
They liked the same art, the same music, the same poetry. They wrote music together, busked together up in St. George for people getting off the ferry. They were having a blast, but it was the money.
The money, the money.
Because they had a habit together, too, a habit that cost up to three hundred dollars a day, and that was just unsustainable.
Travis had the answer.
“H,” he said, “it takes less to get you high and it costs, like, six or seven bucks a hit.”
Instead of thirty.
But Jacqui was afraid of heroin.
“It’s the same shit,” Travis said. “They’re all opiates, whether it’s a pill or a powder, it’s all the fruit of the poppy.”
“I don’t want to get addicted,” Jacqui said.
Travis laughed. “Shit, you’re addicted now.”
Everything he said was true, but Jacqui argued she didn’t want to use a needle. Cool, Travis said, we can just snort.
He did it first.
It really got him off.
He looked beatific.
So Jacqui snorted and it was so good, so good, so good. Better than anything, until they discovered smoking the shit, which was so much better, better, better.
Then one day Travis said, “Fuck this shit. Why are we messing around? It’s so much more efficient to shoot it, I’m not letting trypanophobia get in the way.”
Trypanophobia, Jacqui thought—the fear of needles.
They both loved words.
But she didn’t think she had a phobia, she thought she had a reasonable fear—needles gave you hep C, HIV, God knows what.
“Not if you’re clean, not if you’re careful, not if you’re . . . meticulous,” Travis said.
At first he was, using only fresh needles he bought from nurses and guys who worked at drugstores. He always swabbed his arm with alcohol before he shot up, always boiled the heroin to get any bacteria out.
And he got high.
Higher than Oxy, higher than snorting or smoking, he got mainlining-in-your-blood, in-your-brain high. Jacqui was jealous, felt left behind, earthbound while he flew to the moon, and one night he offered to shoot her up and she let him do it. Stuck a needle instead of his dick in her and it got her off more than he ever did.
Once she did that she knew she was never going back.
So you can blame Travis all you want, but Jacqui knows it’s her, it’s in her, the heart and soul of an addict, because she loves it, loves the H, loves the high, it’s literally in her blood.
“You’re too smart to be doing this,” her mother would tell her.
No, I’m too smart not to, Jacqui would think. Who would want to stay in this world when there’s an alternative?
“You’re killing yourself,” her mother would wail.
No, Mom, I’m living.
“It’s that rotten bastard’s fault.”
I love him.
I love our life.
I love . . .
It’s two hours later when Jacqui looks at her watch and thinks, Shit, I’m going to be late.
She gets out of the van and walks to CVS this time because she likes to switch it up. Goes into the restroom, locks the door behind her, takes some shampoo from her purse and washes her hair in the sink. Dries off with paper towels, and then puts on eyeliner and a little mascara and changes into her work clothes, reasonably clean jeans and a long-sleeved plum polo shirt with a name tag on it.
Back in the van, she rouses Travis. “I have to go to work.”
“Okay.”
“Try to score for us, okay?”
“Okay.”
I mean, how hard can it be, Travis? It’s easier to find H on Staten Island than it is to find weed. It’s everywhere. Half the people she knows are users.
“And move the van,” Jacqui says.
“Where?” Travis asks.
“I dunno, just move it.”
She gets out and takes the bus to the Starbucks on Page Avenue. Hopes the manager doesn’t see her come in five minutes late because it would be her third time in the last two weeks and she really needs this job.
There’s the Verizon bill, gas money, food money and she’s up to fifty bucks a day now just to stay well, never mind get high.
It’s like a train that just keeps picking up speed.
There are no stops and you can’t get off.
Keller steps out of the Metro at Dupont Circle sweating.
The Washington summer is typically hot, humid, and sweltering. Shirts and flowers wilt, energies and ambitions flag, blazing afternoons yield to sticky nights that bring small relief. It reminds Keller that the nation’s capital was actually built on a drained swamp, revives the rumor that old George chose the location to rescue himself from an ill-advised real estate investment.
It’s been an ugly summer everywhere.
In June, a radical Islamic group called ISIS emerged in Syria and Iraq, its atrocities rivaling those of the Mexican drug cartels.
In Veracruz, Mexico, thirty-one bodies were exhumed from a mass grave on property owned by the former mayor.
The Mexican army fought a gun battle with Guerreros Unidos and killed twenty-two of them. Later, a story came out that the narcos had actually been taken into a barn and executed.
In the post-Barrera era, violence in Mexico has just gone on and on and on.
In July, a group of three hundred flag-waving, sign-wielding protesters chanting “USA, USA” and screaming “Go home!” surrounded three buses full of Central American immigrants—many of them children—in Murrieta, California, and forced them to turn around.
“Is this America?” Marisol asked when she and Keller watched the news on television.
Two weeks later, NYPD cops on Staten Island put a black man named Eric Garner in a lethal headlock, killing him. Garner had been selling illegal cigarettes.
In August, a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, fatally shot eighteen-year-old African American Michael Brown, triggering, as it were, days of violent rioting. It reminded Keller of the long hot summers of the ’60s.
Later that month, potential presidential candidate John Dennison—without a trace of evidence, never mind actual proof—accused the Obama administration of dealing guns to ISIS.
“Is he insane?” Marisol asked.
“He’s throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks,” Keller said.
He knows from experience—Dennison has thrown some mud at him, too. Keller’s advocacy of naloxone prompted the barrage.
“Isn’t it a shame,” Dennison said, “that the boss of the Drug Enforcement Administration is soft on drugs? Weak. Not good. And isn’t his wife from Mexico?”
“He’s right about that,” Marisol said. “I am from Mexico.”
The conservative media picked it up and ran with it.
Keller was furious that they’d brought Marisol into it, but he didn’t issue a response. Dennison can’t play tennis, he thought, if I don’t hit the ball back. But he brought another attack on himself when he said, in response to a question from the Huffington Post, that he basically agreed with the administration’s review of maximum sentences for drug offenses.
Pathetic, Dennison tweeted. DEA boss wants drug dealers back on the streets. Weak Obama should say, “You’re fired!”
Which apparently is a catchphrase Dennison uses on his reality TV show, which Keller has never seen.
“B-list celebrities go around running errands for him,” Mari explained, “and the one who does the worst job every week gets fired.”
Keller doesn’t even know what a “B-list celebrity” is, but Mari does, having become shamelessly addicted to Real Housewives shows. She informed him that there are “real housewives” of Orange County, New Jersey, New York, Beverly Hills, and that what they do is go out to dinner, get drunk, and call each other names.
He was tempted to suggest Real Housewives of Sinaloa—a few of whom he’d actually known—in which they go out to dinner, get into arguments and machine-gun each other, but wisely decided to leave that one alone—Marisol can get very protective of her American pop culture.
On a serious level, his efforts to move DEA toward more progressive policy positions is running into resistance inside the agency.
Keller gets it.
He was one of the original true believers, a real hard-liner. He’s a hard-liner now on the cartels that bring heroin, coke and meth into the country. But he’s also a realist. What we’re doing now isn’t working, he thinks; it’s time to try s
omething different, but it’s hard to sell that to other people who’ve also spent their lives fighting this war.
Denton Howard picks up Keller’s statements like rocks and throws them at him. Like Keller, he’s a political appointee, and he’s lobbying inside and outside DEA, making sure that potential supporters on the Hill and in the media know that he disagrees with his boss.
It gets out there.
Two days later, Politico comes out with a story about “factionalism” inside DEA. According to the story, the agency is splitting between a “Keller faction”’ and a “Howard faction.”
It’s no secret that the two men don’t like each other, the story reads, but the issue is more philosophical than personal. Art Keller is more liberal, wants to see a relaxation of drug prohibition laws, reduction of mandatory sentences and more focus placed on treatment than prohibition. Howard is a hard-liner on prohibition, a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” conservative.
Factions are forming around the two positions, the story goes on to say:
But it’s more complicated than a bipolar political struggle. What makes it really interesting is what might be called an “experiential divide.” A lot of the veteran, old-school personnel, who might otherwise support Howard’s more hard-core stance, don’t respect him because he’s a bureaucrat, a politician who never worked the field, while Keller is a veteran field agent, a former undercover, who knows the job from the street up. On the other hand, some of the younger personnel, who might otherwise be sympathetic to Keller’s more liberal positions, tend to see him as something of a dinosaur, a street cop with a “shoot first, ask questions later” history who lacks administrative skills and tends to spend too much time on operations to the detriment of policy.
It might all be a moot point, anyway, decided not in the halls of the DEA but in the voting booth. If the Democrats win the next presidential election, Keller is almost certain to keep his job and will in all likelihood move to dump Howard and purge his faction. If a Republican candidate takes the White House, Keller is almost as certainly out the door, with Howard taking his desk.