Dope Sick

by Walter Dean Myers

“Yeah. Because the old me was always hoping that things would work out while the new me was dealing with the truth. What threw it into gear was when he said he was going to Houston, which was the same week my class was graduating.

  “What I found out was that there were a lot of guys not graduating. Some of them were going to the graduation and walking up on the stage like they were getting their diplomas, but all they got was an envelope with a note telling them to call the administrative office in three days. I found that out later.”

  “So you went to Houston?” Kelly asked.

  “I went to Houston with Rico. We took the Hound from Port Authority and it took a while, but Rico had some dope he was taking down to Houston for a dealer. You know Rico, he’s tapping all the way, snorting and drinking that energy drink and goofing on the other passengers. One of the drivers was hip to what we were doing and told us to get off his bus, so we had a two-day layover before we rolled into Houston.

  “Meanwhile, I’m checking myself out because I had never used this much dope before. But I kept on telling myself that I didn’t care. I knew I cared in a way, maybe even cared more than before, but back when I was telling myself that nobody knew what my life was going to be, I was telling myself that I didn’t know the real deal about where my life was going and all.”

  “Riding that fantasy thing,” Kelly said.

  “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it was hope, or maybe one of those make-believe sets like you see in video games. You can make your own thing up. Anyway, we hit Houston and I was expecting something grand. Parts of the city were cool, but then you go to Chinatown—actually it’s mostly Vietnamese—and then you get to their low-rent housing and it’s the same as anyplace else. There’s a lot of Mexicans in Houston, too. You ever been there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you know what I’m talking about,” I said. “Rico’s cousin put us up for a few days while Rico took care of his business. He picked up some nasty Brown Girl and actually mailed it back to New York, which I thought was cool.”

  “He mailed a girl back to New York?”

  “No, a brick of brown heroin,” I said. “That was what he was supposed to be in Houston for, to get some Brown Girl for Dusty. But then we ran out of money because Rico was shooting up all the stuff we had brought down to sell and lost a bunch of money gambling. Then he said we could do a stickup to get the money to fly back to New York. I was scared but I went for it.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess I wanted to be like Rico,” I said. “He was steady hustling and not worrying about nothing. If I could be like him, then it would be cool.”

  “Instead of being like you?”

  “You slow, but you catch on after a while, right?”

  Kelly smiled. I liked that. That was the first time I seen him smile, and I felt a little better. He didn’t say nothing else for a while, and I thought maybe he was thinking he shouldn’t have smiled. Sometimes when dudes smile a lot, people think they ain’t hard enough to pull their weight and try to punk them out. I didn’t want Kelly to think that I was like that, so I was running hard.

  “So his boy, maybe it was his cousin, I don’t know, told him about this little store we could hit on the highway,” I said. “You know, when you get five minutes from downtown Houston, you ain’t nowhere. I mean you ain’t nowhere. They don’t even have sidewalks in some of the places, and no buses or anything go there. You got to be driving.”

  “You drive?” Kelly asked.

  “No, but this guy drove us and parked outside near the highway when we went in,” I said. “The plan was that me and Rico was going to go in, with Rico pulling a thirty-eight he had borrowed to keep everybody covered while I took the money.”

  “And you just wrapped that around your head like it was nothing?” Kelly asked.

  “I was nervous, but I was telling myself that I was hard enough to get over,” I said. “I didn’t want to be no thug, but I didn’t see nothing else coming my way. It wasn’t right or nothing, and I didn’t want to hurt nobody, but…it was like being a thug and doing the thug thing was better than being me and standing on the corner with all the other beat-down dudes being thugged by the system.”

  “How much did you get?” Kelly asked.

  “Nothing. Rico was high by the time we got in the place. I had snorted a quarter bag just to get my nerves together. I walked in first, and then Rico came in and had the gun down by his side,” I said. “He must have had his finger on the trigger, ’cause soon as he walked up to the clerk it went off. Bang! There were two customers in the store and one of them was a cowboy or something. They say he messed with cattle. He punched Rico in the back of his head with his fist and Rico went down fast. The guy jumped on Rico and got the gun. At first I started easing toward the door, but I seen his cousin, who was scoping the whole deal through the window, take off in the car. I was the only other black dude in the store, and the guy behind the counter pulled a gun and pointed it at me.

  “The cops came and got me and Rico and put us in the back of the police car. They asked us who we were and where we lived. I heard Rico give out some phony name and say he was from Chicago. I told them my name was Jimmy Alexander and I was from Chicago too. They took us down to the police station and put us in a cell with two Spanish dudes. They must have told them something, because as soon as the cops left the cell, they beat the crap out of us.

  “I told them I was sixteen and Rico said he was nineteen. I got to go before a juvenile judge, and she asked me a bunch of questions about what I was doing with my life, and didn’t I want to be a decent human being? I was real ashamed, but getting the beat-down told me right then and there that ain’t nobody cared about how I was feeling. I got sentenced to a hundred and eighty days. I didn’t know what was happening to Rico and I didn’t care.

  “They asked me a lot of questions about how I was brought up and whatnot, what my father was like. They told me I was a ‘child in need of supervision’ and I thought they might let me get into the wind instead of going to jail, but that wasn’t going to happen.”

  “So you were in jail for six months?” Kelly asked.

  “Unh-unh, for a hundred and twenty days, because I got some time off for good behavior. They don’t play in Houston. You do what they say and when they say it. Every time you walk outside your cell, you got to have your hands behind your back like you handcuffed even though you’re not,” I said. “And the dudes in the center—man, you got some lowlife people in them jails. A lot of gangbangers thinking they maybe should shank you to make their reps, or shank you because they think you said something that disrespected their gang, or maybe slice you in your face just to break up the day.

  “You know, they say that juvenile centers ain’t as bad as an adult prison, but it was bad to me. What they do, the way they treat you, you don’t feel like a people, I mean like a person. That sounds stupid, huh?”

  “How did you feel?”

  “You feel like…you could be like an animal or something. Because when you’re a person, you can do something that you want to do. Maybe you can’t do everything, but you can do some things. And you think about it, an animal—say he a pet or something—got to eat what his owner put down on the floor. And that’s what we had to do. We had to eat what they give us. We got franks and beans and a lot of green snap beans, which I don’t like, and a lot of Jell-O and cereal and eggs. You could be hungry at the center but you didn’t look forward to eating. You could be tired, but you didn’t want to lie down on that bunk they gave you.

  “Before I went there, I had thought about what I wanted to be. You know, it was like a future thing—but they take all that out of you,” I said. “What you start thinking about is what you is—what you are. What I’m saying is that if you’re a human being, that’s supposed to mean something. I mean something different from a dog or a cat or a rock. But sitting in that cell—they called it ‘quarters,’ but it was a cell—I was thinking on what I was and how I wasn’t a dog. Y
ou hearing me?”

  “I’m hearing you,” Kelly said.

  “When I got out, I was on the same bus coming back into Houston with this white girl from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She said her name was Sabrina, but after a while I didn’t believe anything she said. She was like one of those white girls you see on television been abused. She was real smart, she could have been a doctor or something, because when we got back into Houston, she showed me how she could walk into a drugstore and steal stuff to get high on right off the counter. She knew the name of everything they had in the drugstore and how to fix it up to get a buzz. One time she even took me into a grocery store and got some nutmeg and we messed with that.”

  “You liked her.”

  “No, I wasn’t feeling her, but I could see where she was coming from,” I said. “The drugs were putting her in another place. She didn’t need to think about what was really on her mind. Plus she taught me a lot of stuff. She could look you dead in your eyes and be robbing you blind at the same time. She didn’t mean to be so cold, but that’s the way it turned out for her. She taught me how to cop from drugstores—mostly pain medicine and stuff for colds—and how to use it to string out your jones so you could handle it.

  “Sabrina was okay. Kind of like me, feeling throwed away, and her being throwed away and us seeing each other and knowing what was going down. It’s like you ain’t in the world everybody is talking about, the one they got on television and in the newspapers. You in another world where you ain’t supposed to get over, you just lucky if you get by.

  “We hitchhiked together until we reached Pennsylvania; then she went her way knowing I was out there keeping on keeping on, and I kept going my way knowing the same thing until I got back to Harlem.”

  6

  “YO, KELLY, YOU WATCHING the street?”

  Kelly got the television back onto the street. I tried to watch how he did it, but he was too quick. We looked at the monitor, and there was still just one police car and a van.

  “Then what happened?” Kelly asked. “After you got back to Harlem?”

  “Kelly, why you got this setup?” I asked. “What you into? You a cop or something, right?”

  “How’s your arm? You haven’t been mentioning it lately,” Kelly said.

  I hadn’t been thinking about my arm, but soon as Kelly asked me, I kind of grabbed it. It wasn’t hurting. My fingers moved good when I wiggled them, and the swelling was down some.

  “Hey, Kelly?”

  “What?”

  “I’m a little scared of you,” I said. “You know that?”

  “You scared of everything you don’t know about, right?” he said.

  “I guess.”

  “You just getting in deeper and deeper, huh?” Kelly hunched his shoulders and rubbed the back of his neck like he was getting tired.

  “I wasn’t trying to,” I said. “It’s like a old movie I saw one time. It was hot and I couldn’t sleep and I put the television on and this flick come on about people looking for gold in Africa. Something like that. One guy fell into some quicksand. As long as he didn’t move around, he went down slow. Soon as he got to move, he started going down faster. That’s how I feel sometimes.”

  “Sound like you feeling sorry for yourself,” Kelly said.

  “Hey, I’m the one in this skin looking out,” I said. “I might be feeling sorry for myself the way you said, but I’m the one being messed over, right?”

  “Ain’t you messing over yourself?”

  “Does it matter? Does it really matter if it’s some white dude downtown or some brother on the corner or me all by myself if the result is the same?” I asked. “Does it really matter?”

  “Yeah, it does,” Kelly said, looking away from me. “’Cause if it’s somebody who ain’t in your skin, you don’t feel the punches when you fight back.”

  “Whatever. You think it’s going to be safe for me to split once it gets light?” I asked.

  “It won’t be light for a while,” Kelly said. “Go on with your story.”

  I didn’t feel like going on with it. Kelly was right when he said I was feeling sorry for myself. I knew that. That’s why it was better sometimes just not to feel anything. I didn’t know why he wanted me to go on, either, but he did.

  “When I got back to Harlem, I fell into my old place. My moms was glad to see me, but she was looking bad, stringy and skinny. She asked me where I had been and all, but she wasn’t acting like she was missing me, more like she was mad that I wasn’t there. She was coughing and spitting up stuff. It was kind of disgusting. She was on Medicaid and taking all kinds of pills. I scoped her pills, and from what Sabrina had taught me, I knew I could get a buzz on from what she had. She had them time-release capsules, and I took them apart and cooked them up and went for the line. I didn’t worry about OD’ing on painkillers, so that’s why I went for the line instead of just skin popping.

  “I looked for a job and got back into the same old routine. Once in a while I found some pickup work. They started a new company where you go to this office and they send you out here and there to work. Whoever you working for don’t pay you, they pay the company and then the company pays you. It’s crappy, but it’s some pocket change.

  “I could also sell some of my mom’s pills downtown on Forty-Deuce. Sometimes on Sundays when there was a football game, you could sell pills to the guys going to the game. I guess they go over there and drink they beer and take some pills and enjoy themselves. You could sell more pills when the Jets were playing than when the Giants were playing. That was funny, but everybody knew it.”

  “Your mama know you left tonight?”

  “No.”

  “You want to call her?” Kelly asked.

  “You got a…? Yeah, you do. No, I don’t want to call her. I don’t know what to say to her.”

  “She might like to hear from you,” Kelly said. He handed me a cell phone.

  I wanted to peep Kelly’s faves in case he was a cop. He could have had Homicide or Detectives listed. I didn’t, because the brother had me scared. I dialed home and waited for four rings before I heard Mom’s voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Yo, Moms, me, Lil J.”

  “Where you at? The police been in here looking for you. You didn’t shoot no cop, did you?”

  “No, but I got to get my stuff together so I can prove it,” I said. “How you doing?”

  “Boy, my nerves is gone! Those cops were so nasty. They tore up the place looking for you. Took all my dishes out the cabinet and put them on the floor. Now how you going to be in there?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be all right.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m at a friend’s house, but I can’t tell you where.”

  “One of the detectives gave me a card with a number to call so you can give yourself up,” Moms said. “But I don’t trust them cops. I think you should wait until you can get you a lawyer to go to the police station with.”

  “You hear anything about the cop?” I asked.

  “You mean the one that was shot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They had his wife on television talking about how they needed to get the animals off the street,” Moms said. “What’s your number so I can call you back?”

  “I got to go,” I said. “I’ll call you later.”

  I hung up the phone.

  We didn’t have nothing to say for a while, and then I realized my arm was beginning to hurt again. This time the pain got bad faster than before.

  “Kelly, what you think is going to happen if I just give myself up?” I asked.

  “You mean, just give up and be like Rico?” he asked.

  “What? No, I mean give myself up to the police.”

  “You’ll think about it for a while,” Kelly said. “Then you’ll remember what it was like at the juvenile center, and what everybody said jail was like and how long twenty-five years is….”

  On the screen I saw mysel
f on the roof landing again. I saw my face all twisted up and ugly and I saw myself lifting the Nine to my head.

  “Yo! Stop it! Stop it! Please!” I was begging him. “Please stop it, Kelly. Run it back some more, man. Please.”

  “Where you want me to run it back to now?” Kelly asked.

  “Did I tell you I was a rapper?” I asked. I was scared and shaking. “I was rapping strong, Kelly. I could really rhyme.”

  7

  There’s two kinds of rules

  Rules for the man

  And rules for the fools

  The rules for the fools ain’t nothing but tools

  To lock away the black man’s mind

  So when he finds he down with a frown

  Looking up from the gutter

  All he can do is stutter and thinking

  That’s where he belongs and stinking

  Like a piece of week-old meat

  In the super ghetto of defeat

  And when he fails to make bail

  And ends up in jail with homies for roomies

  Rhyming “doing the time”

  With “doing the crime”

  He’s figuring that’s the ghetto theme

  Instead of a scheme

  Punk-tuated in some light bling-bling

  And the same old thing except the

  Chains is nine-karat gold

  And the brother’s been told

  They about bravery instead of slavery

  So when the brother comes in stumbling and humbling

  He thinks he’s getting a fair deal

  While the real deal is that he’s just getting the fare

  To whatever lockdown need some new bodies.

  But the game is over

  ’Cause Cellblock Four is taking over

  And just like these words are being spoken

  We know the rules are made to be broken

  Yeah, yeah, the game is over!

  They don’t want us to use the N-word

  So we’ll be the triggers, but know what we mean

  ’Cause we’ll be on the scene

  Shooting off more than our mouths