Dope Sick

by Walter Dean Myers

  I picked up my son, and it was like picking up what my life was supposed to be about. I really wanted to say something cool, something we would talk about down the road, but nothing came. I just held him and breathed in his smell and felt him moving in my arms as he was stretching himself out.

  “Hey, little man,” I said.

  “Hey, Daddy,” Lauryn said in a baby voice.

  God, I loved that woman so much.

  Then we slipped into a kind of dream, not a complete thing with pictures from magazines or talking about if the curtains in the living room should be the same color as the walls—not that kind of dream—but just talking to each other about what we were going to be doing. Like doing it was a done deal. Then her mama started talking to her about what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

  “She said I got to think about the baby too,” Lauryn said.

  I didn’t talk on the fact that her mama wasn’t putting me in the picture. I was still hoping that things would come around somehow. Then her mama brought this older guy around and tried to hook him up with Lauryn. Her mom said he was a friend of hers from where she worked at the supermarket. But Lauryn peeped her program right away. She ran the whole thing down to me as we sat in Mickey D’s down from the Magic Johnson theater on 125th Street.

  “He’s thirty-eight years old!” Lauryn was teary eyed and her lips were tight. “He come telling me he’s from Barbados. As if I’m supposed to be impressed.”

  But Lauryn wasn’t just mad, she was crying, and I knew that as foul as the crap her mother was putting out was, it made some kind of sense to her. The thing was that I didn’t have no comeback except saying that the dude was old and that he had to be lame if he was wanting to hook up with a woman he didn’t even know who had just had somebody else’s baby. What I couldn’t say was that I would take care of her better than he would.

  What he had going on was he had a job. He managed the produce section in the supermarket.

  I think, in my heart, that if Barbados boy had asked Lauryn to marry him right then and there, her mother would have said no. What that witch really wanted to do was to get me out of the picture.

  “Hey, let’s you and me get married and just see what happens,” I said.

  “Did you bring the ring?” she asked. She looked away.

  I started to say that I didn’t have a ring with me, but I knew she wasn’t listening. She had thought it all through before we had met this time. She figured I might ask her to marry me, and knew I didn’t have the money to buy a ring or hook up an apartment.

  “So what you going to do?” I asked her when we reached her apartment.

  “Keep on keeping on,” she said. “Nothing else to do.”

  She was crying when she was going into the building. I remember saying good-bye to her after the door was closed.

  I didn’t want to do no dope. I just wanted to get myself together and take care of my business, but the shit was calling me again. When I hit the block, I knew what I was going to do. I copped two hits and took them home.

  “You were good with Lauryn’s crying?” Kelly asked.

  “Yeah. I knew she was on edge, but I thought I could handle it,” I said.

  It used to be just when bad things happened that I needed some light, but it was getting to where when I seen good things going down, it was the life I wanted happening around me and me not getting to it that weighed on me, pushing me down into the dark hole that seemed like the only place I knew—sitting on the toilet cooking the hit and feeling sorry for myself.

  “How you handle it?” Kelly asked.

  I didn’t like to shoot in my thigh because sometime it didn’t take if you wasn’t right in the line. I told myself I needed some time to think, to clear the funk out my head so I could make a plan that was righteous for me and for Lauryn and the baby.

  “How you handle it?” Kelly asked again.

  How I’m going to tell you something when you can’t understand it, man? You ain’t been down where I live, how you gonna know what trying to get up means? How you gonna know that?

  “How you handle it?” Kelly asked.

  “I went to 125th Street and looked at some bassinets, because Lauryn said she wanted one for Brian. She said it had to be either white or blue.

  “We have two models.” The sales clerk looked Spanish. “This one is $64.99, and the one with the wheels is $84.99. Both come in pink, blue, or white, and both have wheels, but the $84.99 is expandable. So you don’t have to lay out money for a crib in six months. Also, the mattress on the $84.99 is supposed to be better, but to me it doesn’t make any difference. Babies like firm mattresses.”

  I told her I’d have to ask my wife and she said that was a good idea.

  I had been thinking about showing up, knocking on the door, and then, when Lauryn’s mother started talking about how I couldn’t come into her house, just leaving the bassinet and walking away. Then I would know that Lauryn would be putting my baby into the bassinet I had bought for him. But I didn’t have no $84.99 and I didn’t have no $64.99. All I had was a lame excuse.

  I went uptown to the corner. The usual dudes were there. I saw Skeeter and asked him how he was doing. He said he was doing all right. Skeeter was okay. He let me cop four bags for $35. He knew that sometimes you need a break.

  “Yo, Lil J, why you doing drugs?” Kelly asked.

  I looked over at him and he was still watching the television. On the screen I was in my building going up the stairs. I looked like an old man, pulling myself up like I was dead tired.

  “You been hiding under a rock or something?” I asked Kelly. “You don’t know why people use drugs?”

  “I ain’t talking about people,” Kelly said. “I’m talking about you. Or don’t you even think about it?”

  “No, I think about it. I think about it a lot. You know, some people go through life and all they got to carry is what they got in their pockets. They got a bill to pay, or they got some problem they need to make a decision on. It’s not all that heavy. And what I got to carry ain’t all that heavy either. But you know, I ain’t got no strength. It’s like everybody is stronger than me. So they pick up their load and move it at least a little. Me, I don’t move it none, man.”

  “You moving it better when you high?” Kelly asked.

  “No, but it don’t weigh me down so much. When I come down off my high, I see I ain’t been nowhere, ain’t made no progress, and I just get ready to do it again.”

  5

  KELLY TURNED DOWN THE VOLUME and I could hear the street sounds better. The tires made a hissing noise, and I thought it might be raining. I was hoping it was raining. Maybe everybody would just go home.

  “So you want to change having the baby?” Kelly asked.

  “What?”

  “You talking about how bad the baby made you feel, right?” Kelly asked. “You wanted your girlfriend to get rid of it so you and her could just do what you needed to do.”

  “Don’t be putting words in my mouth, man. If I had a job, even a piece of a job like that fool her mama wanted her to hook up with…” I was still mad about her telling me I couldn’t come into her house to see my son. “Maybe I would like to change the way Lauryn’s mother treated me. If she had treated me decent, things might have worked out.”

  “How you gonna change what somebody else is thinking or what they do?” Kelly asked. “You talking about you didn’t have a job, but the bottom line is you’re the one that was—what you call it?—broke down?”

  “Broke sick,” I said. “Hey, get the television back on the street. You think they’re going to search all the houses?”

  “How I know?” Kelly looked at me like he was mad or something.

  “You sitting there acting like you know so much,” I said. “I should just kick your butt to see what you made of. You probably a punk.”

  Kelly giggled like a damn girl, and that got me mad. I told him not to be laughing at me. “I don’t like people playing me.”r />
  “You want to get high?” Kelly asked.

  “What you got?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to know if that was what you wanted. I know you get high when things don’t go your way.”

  “You got a bathroom up in here?”

  “Right down that hallway, left side,” Kelly said.

  The hallway was kind of dark, but I found the bathroom. It was one of those old bathrooms with a light on the side of a cabinet over the sink. I turned it on and closed the door. I was flat-out tired and feeling five kinds of terrible. My stomach was getting queasy, and my arm, which had been hurting on and off, was hurting even worse.

  I just had to pee, but I was so tired I needed to sit down. When I went to undo my belt, I got a sharp pain in my arm. It made me want to cry. Not the pain, but just the way my whole thing was, like, falling apart. Some guys my age was away at college, or working or training in the army. Here I was in some tiny-butt bathroom trying to get my head together and rapping to some weird sucker that I didn’t know what he was, let alone who he was.

  Sitting on the little toilet with one arm shot up was stupid. I thought about what would happen if I heard the police running around outside. The Nine was still in my pocket, and I gripped it, but I couldn’t use my left arm at all and I had to let the Nine go to get my johnson inside the toilet seat. It was like the whole world was clowning me.

  When I finished peeing I got up, pulled my pants up, and noticed that my left wrist was swelling up. I thought maybe I was getting blood poisoning. If that happened, it didn’t matter what the cops were doing, because I was going to die anyway or have to give myself up.

  It come to me that maybe Kelly had a cell phone, and he could be calling the cops. Maybe he had even split. I started to run out, then just stood and leaned on the sink. It didn’t make a difference anymore. Nothing was making a difference.

  The cabinet over the sink had a mirror. One corner was messed up, as if maybe there had been a fire and it had got burned. I looked at myself in the mirror. My hair wasn’t combed, my skin looked ashy, I looked ugly. Black and ugly.

  I turned the light out and went back out toward the other room. Kelly was still sitting there, but I didn’t know what he had been doing when I was in the bathroom.

  “Hey, Kelly, you got a cell phone up in here?”

  “Yeah, you got somebody to call?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you call your boy Maurice?” Kelly said. “See if he got that job?”

  “He’s asleep now,” I said. “Anyway, I know he didn’t get it.”

  “I think he got it,” Kelly said.

  He said it cold, like he knew what he was talking about. But it was more than that—it was like he was putting his mouth on me, saying I was definitely wrong for splitting from the line at Home Depot.

  “I couldn’t get that job,” I said. “I didn’t want Maurice to know it.”

  “Why couldn’t you get it?” Kelly asked. Same voice. Flat. Cold.

  “’Cause they check to see if you got a record, and I might have one,” I said. “I’m not sure, but Maurice is my boy and I didn’t want him to know I been in jail.”

  “For selling drugs?”

  “No, for trying to be somebody besides me,” I said. “One time I was almost where I am now—”

  “On this block?”

  “No, man, don’t be stupid,” I said. “You know, not the outside of me, but inside. The way I feel and stuff, and the way things were going down. It was like, every way I turned, I was getting some heavy grief and I didn’t see no way out of the situation. So, and this probably sounds a little stupid to you because you ain’t into nothing, I decided to go down a different road. It was like, who I was—me—didn’t have a way to make it. So I decided to be somebody else.”

  “Somebody else? How you going to do that?” Kelly turned and looked me up and down.

  He hadn’t really turned to me before, and where I was sitting I couldn’t get a good look at him. But when he turned, I saw he was younger than I thought he was. That was a little disappointing. If he had been older, it would have been right that he knew stuff.

  “That’s just the way it was,” I said. I was back in the chair. My arm hurt when I put it on the armrest. It was getting stiff, too. “Look, I ain’t got no more time to waste with you.”

  “Yeah, you do,” Kelly said.

  I didn’t know what he meant by that. I got up and went over to the window and pulled up the shade a little. There was only one police car and a dark van on the street.

  “You thinking they waiting for daylight?” I asked.

  “They probably waiting for you to show up,” Kelly said. “But they don’t know you in here, or else they would be coming in looking for you. So you might as well hang here until it’s clear.”

  “I can’t see the whole street from here,” I said. “How I know if it’s clear or not?”

  “Maybe you can change something that will clear it up,” Kelly said.

  “I can’t change nothing and neither can your dumb ass,” I said.

  “You just told me you wanted to change who you were,” Kelly said. “Something about being somebody else and how it got you in jail. Didn’t you say that?”

  “I should cop some sleep,” I said. “You don’t know how tired I am.”

  “And everything is supposed to stop and wait for you to get some rest?” Kelly asked.

  “Shut up.”

  We sat quiet for a long while. From the street I could hear car horns every once in a while. Kelly was kind of slouched down in his chair. I wondered how tall he was. He was thin, like me, and he sounded like he knew something about the street, but he was different, too.

  When he was facing away from me, he looked regular, square shouldered, a little thin, not too strong. But when he moved, it was like I needed to pay attention, like something was going on. I thought of dudes who could play ball, who could lift their game into some other level that I didn’t know about. That was Kelly, lifting his game even as we talked. I was hanging on. But I was afraid to let go.

  I hadn’t talked about trying to be a different person before, but I had thought about it when I was down in Texas. I had thought about it and it made sense to me even though I didn’t think it would make sense to anybody else. I wondered if Kelly could dig where I was coming from. He was changing a little. When I first got into the apartment, he was calm, and he seemed okay but not really friendly. Now he was getting irritated, like he wasn’t really feeling me.

  Sometimes I could put my thoughts into words and sometimes I couldn’t. I thought if Kelly would ask me some questions, maybe I could answer them, but he wasn’t asking.

  “You know, right after it got really warm, in May, I got called down to the office in school,” I started. “Mr. Trager, he’s like an assistant principal, started running down my school record. He’s all like, ‘You’re failing this and you’re failing that,’ and talking about how was I going to get on with my life and whatnot. I had heard all this before. I told Mr. Trager that he didn’t know what my life was going to be like because he wasn’t me. He didn’t have no crystal ball to look into the future.

  “To me this was same old same old. Some teacher or some principal talking me down and shaking his head or some woman teacher pushing my grades across the desk and asking me what I thought about them. And what I was saying to myself was the same thing I was saying to the people at the school. You know, just the way you could be sitting on the stoop and some suckers come flying down the street on a drive-by and waste you, or a brick could fall off the roof and kill you, something good could happen, too. Maybe you could hit the lottery or come up with a really great rap CD and go flashing through the rest of your life.

  “People want to look at you and see your whole future laid out the way they know it, and I was saying that didn’t happen. People aren’t born with I’M GREAT! flashing on their foreheads. Anyway, when Mr. Trager gets down to the bottom line, h
e says to me that there wasn’t any way that I was going to graduate. He started talking about how it wasn’t the end of the world and that if I stayed in school another full year and worked hard, maybe I could graduate then.

  “You know, that really messed with me. Because all the way up until then I was saying nobody could say this and that about what was going to happen, but now Mr. Trager was saying exactly what was going to go down. And when he said it—just laid it out like that—he was saying what I knew deep inside all the time.”

  “That you weren’t going to graduate?” Kelly asked.

  “No, more than that,” I said. “I knew my program wasn’t making it. You know, all these teachers be sitting in front of you talking like they’re schooling you about where you are and where you’re going, and you know better than they do. All you got to do is walk around and see what everybody who looks like you and lives around where you living is doing and see they just like you and they ain’t going nowhere. And when you looking at television or seeing people who getting it on big-time and you see what they got going for them and then look at your hand and see you ain’t got nothing, you know? That’s the thing people can’t see when they’re explaining to your butt what’s going on and how you messing up. They can’t see that you knew it long before they did.”

  “And so what did you do?” Kelly asked.

  “I said the hell with it,” I said. “If I’m going to be pushed off the sidewalk, I might as well step on off. You know what I mean? Stop pretending something good was waiting around the corner and be what everybody expected me to be, which was another throwaway dude. So when Rico told me he was going down to Houston to see his cousin and asked me if I wanted to go with him, I said I’d go.”

  “You were down with Rico even before you and him got messed up with the cop thing?” Kelly asked.

  “No, I didn’t dig Rico at all because I knew he was foul,” I said. “But if I was all mapped out to be foul, too, I might as well join the other side.”

  “Be somebody different?”