We dropped some money on the four-top. Scott stood and put some green in, too. A few of the drinkers at the tables and booths were checking us out with anticipation, waiting to see what we would do.
I already knew we weren’t going to do a thing. Paddy’s face had gone pink and he was just standing there, swaybacked, staring at his shoes. He was a pale-skinned strawberry blond who could have been handsome if his features had been hooked up better. I couldn’t say what made him unattractive exactly, but there was something off about his looks. Scott called him an inbred Redford.
The three of us walked out, slow enough to salvage some dignity. But we kept moving, and we didn’t give any more lip to the little doorman with the hair plugs. I locked eyes for a moment with the guy in the booth. He didn’t smile or anything, and he wasn’t gloating about us getting tossed, either. He handled it all right. It was us that came off looking like assholes.
Out in the lot, walking toward Paddy’s T-Bird, Scott said, “Say good-bye to Kildare’s, boys. We’ll never drink in there again.”
“No loss,” said Paddy. “We’ll just drink at Garner’s.”
“Aye, Garner’s,” said Scott. “I don’t think so, lads. The Guinness is too cold.”
“Big college smart-ass, now.”
“How green was my valley,” said Scott, with a lilt.
“Fuck you,” said Paddy.
“Suck what? ” said Scott.
They went on like that until we dropped Scott at his father’s house on Gabel. I didn’t get in on the conversation. I was too busy thinking of my next bump.
Paddy left rubber on the street, hard to do with that heavy car, as we drove away from Scott’s. He said that he was tired of Scott, how he wasn’t the same since coming back from that fancy school, how he only tolerated him ’cause Scott and me went back to elementary, all that.
“I ain’t goin drinking with him again,” said Paddy.
I didn’t comment, thinking that they would kiss and make up and we’d be up at Garner’s or someplace like it the next week. But it turned out Paddy was right.
We picked up a six of domestic in Four Corners and cracked a couple of cans straightaway. Both of us had a terrific thirst. Paddy drove down University Boulevard, then cut a left onto Piney Branch Road and took it to New Hampshire Avenue. We listened to a tape Paddy’d made, a balladeer named Christy Moore. He had a nice voice, with those whistles and pipes and shit like that in the background, but it sounded like something my father listened to, Vic Damone with an accent. I really thought Paddy had taken this Mick thing too far.
I saw where he was going as he cut up New Hampshire. They had garden apartments up along there where I’d heard you could cop. It was just above Langley Park—not as dangerous as Langley with the El Salvies and those crazy-assed Jamaicans, but still kinda grim. All varieties of Spanish here and a lot of blacks. Not that I was scared of ’em or nothin like that.
Paddy turned into the parking lot, found a spot, and cut the engine and the lights. We sat there killing the rest of our beers.
“Who we gonna see?” I said.
“Some girl,” said Paddy. “This guy I know at work hooked it up.”
“You don’t know her?”
“It’s just a girl. Don’t worry, nothing could happen. I called her before I met you guys and she said it was cool. She sounded all right.” Paddy grinned. “I bet she’s fine, too.”
The way he said fine, like “foyne,” I knew she was a black girl. Paddy had a thing for black chicks, though I don’t think he’d ever had any. Except for that one time, when that girl down at Benny’s Rebel Room jacked him off for forty-five bucks.
“What’re we getting?” I said.
“An eight ball.”
“Shit, Paddy, c’mon.” I had, like, sixteen bucks in my wallet, and next to nothing in the bank.
“I got you, man.”
So he was dealing. Small-time, but there it was. That’s how Paddy always had coke. It was the first time he’d let me know, even if it was in a backdoor way. Because I was still high and feeling bold, it excited me some that he had let me in on his action. Also, I was a little bit scared.
“This your regular connection?”
“Nah, uh-uh, he’s out of town. This is a one-time deal.”
I looked up at the apartments and the grounds. Some of the balconies were sagging, and fast-food trash was strewn about the lot. “Maybe we oughta wait until your man gets back.”
“You wanna get high, don’t you?”
“Well, yeah.” I was at that stage; I was hungry for more.
Paddy threw his head back to drain his can of beer. He lofted the can over his shoulder. It hit some dead soldiers on the floorboard and made a dull metallic sound. I killed mine and dropped the can between my feet.
We got out of the car and walked across the lot. There were a couple of guys wearing mustaches, sitting in a black late-model Ford parked nearby. Their heads were moving to music; the bass was up so loud I could hear it behind the closed windows of their car. I didn’t make eye contact with them or anything. I figured they were doing some blow. Hell, everyone was rocking it back then. They were a little old for it, but it wasn’t any business of mine.
We went up a stairwell, one of those open-air jobs with cinder-block walls. Paddy stopped on the second-floor landing. It was dark when it should have been lit. Then I saw the busted-out lightbulb hung in a cage. I wondered if the girl dealing the blow had deliberately broken the light, made it so you couldn’t see her apartment too good from the parking lot. Paddy knocked on the door, waited, then knocked again.
In a little while, a girl’s voice came forward, muffled over some music that was playing inside the apartment. Paddy put his face close to the door and said his name, and also the name of his coworker at the body shop. The door opened, and Paddy stepped inside. I followed him. The girl stepped back against the wall to let us pass.
The girl was black, on the short side, with all the woman parts in place, including her black girl’s onion. She wore Jordache jeans and a jean shirt unbuttoned kinda low. I could see one of her tits hanging in a loose white bra. She caught me checking her out as I squeezed by. She didn’t seem to care. It was hard to read anything in her hard, unfriendly face and dark, almond-shaped eyes. I didn’t say “hey” to her or smile or anything like it. She took a deep cokehead’s drag off the cigarette she was holding and closed the door.
Paddy put out his hand. “C’mon,” said the girl, ignoring his gesture. We followed her down a short hall.
The music got louder as we walked. It was rap music, some black guy shouting over hard chords of electric guitar. We entered a living room/dining room arrangement, two small rooms, really, separated by nothing, where all the curtains were drawn tight. The place stunk of cigarettes, and smoke hung in the room.
A light-skinned black dude sat on the couch, dragging on a smoke, jonesing for the nicotine like the girl. On the table before the couch was a mirror holding a largish mound of coke heaped beside a single-edged blade. An ashtray sat beside the mirror and was filled with butts. The dude raised his head as we came into the room and sized us up the way guys do. The way he looked at us, you could tell he wasn’t too impressed.
Another black guy, darker skinned with ripped arms, sat at the dining room table. He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt to show off his guns. He was rapping along to the guy shouting from the stereo. There was a large amount of cocaine on the table, along with a scale, a big mirror, some blades, plastic Baggies of various sizes, and Snow Seals. The Snow Seals were real, the pharmaceutical kind, not just paper ripped from magazines and folded to size.
The coke was a mountain. I mean, it was Tony Montana big. I’d never seen so much shit before in my life.
A stainless-steel pistol, a short-nosed revolver, sat on the table. The guy touched the grip, turning it just an inch so that the barrel pointed our way. He looked at us, and his eyes were laughing and bright. As the voice came from the stereo, he kep
t his gaze on us, and shouted along: “It’s like that, and that’s the way it is.”
It’s real clear, even today, what I was thinking: You just got your life started, and this is how you die. All you want to do is get your head up, nothing more than that. You walk into the wrong apartment, there’s guns, and you fucking die.
“You got it?” said Paddy, to the girl. I had to hand it to him. He was acting pretty cool. Knowing Paddy, he was trying to keep himself together to impress her. For a guy who got no play, Paddy was an optimist. He always thought he had a chance.
The girl went and turned down the stereo to almost nothing. The guy at the table kept rapping to the song.
“An eight, right?” said the girl to Paddy.
“That’s right, baby.”
I was thinking, Nah, don’t go there, Paddy. Don’t put on that bullshit black-talk of yours, not here. But she didn’t even blink. She went down another hall and into a kitchen that was visible through a cutout in the dining room wall. I watched her ratfuck through the freezer.
The guy at the table stopped rapping and said, “Y’all want a taste?”
Paddy smiled friendly and put up his hands. “That’s all right,” he said. I’d never seen him turn down a blast of coke.
“Ain’t like I’m asking you to drink out the same bottle as me.”
Paddy chuckled unconvincingly. “It’s not that. I just don’t want any right now.”
“Well, I’m a little surprised, ’cause you look like a pro. Don’t you always check out what you’re buyin?” The guy glanced at the dude sitting on the couch, then back at us. “C’mon over here and give it a road test.”
Paddy shrugged and moved over to the table. I stayed where I was.
The guy at the table dipped a blade into an open Baggie that held some coke. I wondered why he didn’t take it off the Everest that was in front of him. He dumped some powder off the blade and tracked out four thick lines on the mirror without giving it any chop. He handed a short tube of plastic, the cut-down barrel of a Bic pen, to Paddy.
When Paddy leaned over the table to do his lines, his four-leaf clover pendant fell out of his shirt and hung suspended between the zippers of his Members Only jacket.
“Irish, huh?” said the guy.
Paddy said, “All the way.” He did a line and made a show of rearing his head back to take it all in.
“They call me Carlos. What do they call you? ”
“Paddy.”
“No last name?”
“O’Toole.”
“Wow. That damn sure is Irish.” Carlos’s voice was almost musical. “Been to the motherland?”
“Not yet.”
“Tell the truth, man: that can’t be your real name, right?”
“I changed it,” said Paddy, real low. The room was quiet, but you could barely hear him. He bent forward and quickly snorted the other line.
“You’re like, fake Irish, then. That’s what you tellin me?”
Paddy cleared his nostrils with a pinch of his fingers. His eyes narrowed some as he straightened his posture. “I’m Irish.”
Paddy said it real strong, like he was looking to make something of it.
“All the way,” said the guy on the couch.
Carlos looked Paddy over real slow. Then Carlos smiled.
“Plastic Paddy,” said Carlos. The guy on the couch laughed.
Paddy’s face grew pink, like it had gotten at Kildare’s. The girl came back through the hall with a Baggie in her hand and stood near the table. The cigarette still burned between her fingers; it was down to the filter now. Paddy turned to me, his face flushed, and held out the tube. I waved the offer away with my hand.
“Take it,” said Paddy. He sounded kinda mad.
I was frozen. I didn’t want any coke. I was thinking of my parents and my kid sister. I just wanted to get outside.
“What’s the matter with your boy?” said Carlos. “Can’t he find his tongue?”
“Give it to me,” I said to Paddy. The sound of my own voice was a relief. I walked a few steps and took the Bic from Paddy’s outstretched hand. I did the lines fast, one right behind the other, and dropped the plastic tube on the table.
“Here you go, ace,” said the girl, speaking to Paddy. She handed him a Baggie that I guessed she had gotten from the freezer. I could see grains of rice in there with the coke.
“This from the same batch I just did?” said Paddy.
“Yeah,” said Carlos. “It’s good, right?”
Good. It wasn’t even close. I knew right away that this shit was wrong. A curtain had dropped throughout my body, and everything had gotten pushed down into my bowels. I was speeding without the happiness, and I had to take a dump. This was bullshit coke. They had stepped all over it with baby laxative and who knew what else. Paddy had to be feeling the same way I was. He knew he was getting ripped off. It was like the guy was asking, “You don’t mind if I fuck you, do you?”
But Paddy didn’t complain. He reached into his jeans and pulled out a roll of bills. He handed the bills to the girl, who counted out the money with dead eyes.
“Ain’t you gonna weigh it out?” said Carlos, chinning in the direction of the Baggie. “I got a scale right here.”
Paddy didn’t answer. He rolled the Baggie tight and slipped it in the inside pocket of his Members Only.
“You just gonna eyeball it, huh? ” said Carlos.
“Let’s go,” said Paddy. He turned and began to walk. I followed him back down the hall toward the front door. We heard the guy on the couch say, “Plastic Paddy,” in the voice of a game-show host, and then all of them laughed. I didn’t care because it looked like we were going to get out of there alive. But I know Paddy must have been hurting inside, ’cause they’d ripped something out of him. Also, it was the second time he’d been shamed that night.
We took the stairwell down toward the lot. As we crossed the sidewalk, Paddy said, “Fuckin niggers,” and right about then the guys I’d noticed in the Ford came out of nowhere, holding guns on us, shouting at us to lock our hands behind our heads and drop to the asphalt and kiss it. I went down shaking, seeing other men running around in the dark, hearing their adrenalized voices and the screech of tires and the closing of heavy car doors.
As I hit the ground, I lost control of everything and crapped my pants.
You know all those cop shows on TV, where the detectives convince the suspect to talk before the lawyer arrives? It’s bullshit, the worst thing you can do. My father always told me that if I ever got jammed up just to keep my mouth shut and wait for the guys in the suits. Also, ’cause he figured I’d get DWI’d someday, he told me to refuse the breath tests and keep my piss inside me. Judging from what happened to Paddy, I don’t think he ever had any guidance like that. Plus, they gave him some court-appointed attorney who didn’t help his case. My lawyer was a heavy hitter, a friend of my dad’s, and he did me right.
Paddy did a few months’ detention up at Seven Locks, and I got a community service thing where I had to wear a jumpsuit and pick up trash in Sligo Creek Park. Also, I was required to attend these classes at an old Catholic school on Riggs Road, where some horse-faced guy talked about the evils of alcohol and drugs, one night a week for six weeks. It was me and a bunch of losers, alkies and spentheads who’d flip the teacher the bird behind his back when they weren’t drawing sword-and-sorcery artwork in their notebooks or scratching their initials into their desks.
You’d think it was lucky we walked into that bust before something worse happened to us. That I might have looked around me in that rehab class, checked out the company I was keeping, and realized that I needed to turn my life around. But I guess I wasn’t that smart.
Soon after those classes ended, I started doing the occasional blast on weekends again, telling myself it was recreational. Then, big surprise, I began to hunt for it during the week. One night I got drunk and wanted it so bad that I went into a rough neighborhood down in Petworth, off Georgia Avenu
e in D.C., where this guy in a bar had told me I could cop. I bought a half from some hard-looking black dudes and got knocked out with a lead pipe by the same dudes while I was walking back to my car. I woke up at the Washington Hospital Center, my face looking like a duck’s. I never did another line. My father said that I had to fall down and hit my head to find out I wasn’t normal, and I guess he was right.
Paddy went away after his jail time, to Florida or some shit, and after that I lost contact with him completely. Scott had this theory that Paddy had flipped on Carlos and them and was probably too scared to stay in Maryland. As for Scott, him and me drifted apart.
I saw them both at the twentieth reunion for my high school, held a few years ago at some hotel up in Gaithersburg. Scott was heavy and bald and on his second wife. He mentioned his law firm and something about a new model Lexus he had his eye on. He didn’t really need to boast like that, ’cause I could tell from his suit that he had done all right. But I noticed that most of the night he was standing by himself. Nobody from our high school days seemed to recognize him. Scott had money, but he didn’t have friends.
I caught glimpses of Paddy during the evening, standing near the cash bar or hanging around the buffet table, where most of the food had been picked clean. His image was fuzzy—I was too vain to wear my glasses to the reunion—but I knew from the way he was standing, swaybacked like he’d always been, that it was him. When I’d try to catch his eye, though, he’d look away.
Our paths crossed in the bathroom later that night. I was taking a leak in the urinal when Paddy walked in. I got a good look at him while I zipped up my fly. He was wearing an ill-fitting suit, and a hat sat crookedly on his head. The hat was one of those plastic derbies, green and covered in cellophane, with shamrocks glued underneath the cellophane. Like something you’d win at a carnival. Paddy’s face was puffy and there were gray bags under his unfocused eyes. He leaned against the wall and looked me up and down.
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