We were finally there. But I was still back in the supply room.
I can still remember the warmth at the back of Kina’s throat; the Snoopy painted on each fingernail looking up at me as she held me tight, her mouth moving forward and backward like a well-oiled machine. She was reminding me of my prom night, and her prom night, and the way her mouth felt just like bona fide pussy when I was inside of it.
My fingers found their way through her (obviously dyed) fire-red hair. Her eyes were closed, like a monk in meditation. I ignored the first fist that came against the door. I was so close to getting there. Looking at her, on her knees in front of me, made me wonder what the blowjobs might be like in heaven. I came, just as the door opened, the bullet swallowed by my baby with impeccable technique. It was like a reunion. Jacob and Rory, both in cuffs, Medscar looking like he just got caught with his dick out, and me and Kina with my … well, you get the picture.
Jacob and Rory had apparently walked their entire stash right up to an undercover Capitol Hill cop. Of course, they couldn’t even get in the squad car without putting me and Medscar’s name into it. But as it turned out, the cops only came after me.
I was just another page. He was our supervisor, which gave him deniability. Two white boys selling drugs equaled someone more experienced on the next level up, which equaled me, the black dude from the wrong side of the bridge. The only card I had in my pocket was that it was my word against Jacob and Rory’s. In my defense, there wasn’t a second out of place on my time card. Plus, there wasn’t anyone else to ID me as the top man.
So the worst thing they could do was fire me. I was pretty sad about it, mainly because I’d gotten to like being legit. I liked the check with my name printed on it every other week. But I didn’t belong on Capitol Hill (or at least not at that low-ass level). They took my page jacket and my ID and told me that I couldn’t come on Capitol grounds again, not even for a tour.
The train ride home was no different than on any other day. I didn’t like the way I went out, but I was also looking forward to getting back to Garfield Terrace. Rico always had work there for me. No jackets and ties, no IDs and Capitol cops. There was only one thing I was really good at.
The trailer had one of those cheap locks on the door handle. You know, the kind you can do in ten seconds with some of those little screwdrivers. It was dark inside. The flickering blue light through the outer window was coming from a TV. I was about to knock when the door came open. The man standing there looked like Lil Wayne if Lil Wayne was forty, white, and had a ten-year-old for his tattoo artist. Were the five hairs at the bottom of his chin supposed to be a goatee?
“He must be Gary,” the guy mumbled. “I’m Jeremiah.”
“How you know he ain’t Gary?” my driver demanded.
Jeremiah smiled enough for me to see in the dim light. “I just know,” he said, welcoming us in.
The chemical smell was everywhere, like those Korean nail shops in the mall. It didn’t give me a headache though. Just this dull feeling. I felt like the temperature was dropping a degree at a time. In five minutes I was going to be able to see my breath.
Jeremiah flipped on the light and we saw that we weren’t alone. There was a pair of teenaged kids, a girl with dark rumpled hair (and a pair of double Ds) and a white boy with a blond buzz cut and a tattoo of Optimus Prime on his left forearm. They continued to snore like there wasn’t a bright light and three people standing over them.
On the other side of the room, a woman old enough to be somebody’s great-grandma was asleep in a green recliner that looked older than she was. There was a double-barrel shotgun propped up against the wall behind her, the barrels pointing at the floor.
“So how you wanna do this?” Jeremiah asked.
“We only got a two-seater,” Gary shouted. Jeremiah and I both gave him that Don’t wake up the kids look. Then again, it wasn’t like it mattered.
“Where you got it at?” I asked.
“It’s back here in the bathroom, brother.”
“I ain’t your brother,” Gary yelled.
Jeremiah chuckled as we started to follow him. “I wasn’t talkin’ to you, big boy.”
There were about five feet between us and the bathroom. I was holding a .380, my favorite piece: light and compact, but accurate as hell. I put my fingers around the grip. 11.85 ounces. Less than a pound.
The tub inside of the bathroom was small. It was the only detail I could make out before the action. Jeremiah’s eyes met mine over Gary’s shoulder. The stiff-neck movement that was supposed to be a nod was all I needed. There was a single shot before Gary fell forward, his corpse tumbling directly into the tub, as we’d planned. The other players came in from the living room. The old woman and the MTV kids had given the best performances of their criminal careers.
Gary would have said that we deserved “one of those gold things they give for actin’.” Comments like those would make it hard for me to actually miss him.
I told you about my cousin Meechie and all that he meant to me. I told you what I went through when that asshole gunned him down in front of the strip club over that broad with more stretch marks than a bag of rubber bands. I just didn’t mention that Gary was the one who did the gunning. I volunteered to do the business; Rico and I came up with the plan.
Jeremiah and his crew had gotten on Rico’s payroll making D.C. bodies disappear out in the country. The drug shit was just a bonus for them. Those Pentecostal sellouts who gave us the info were Meechie and my cousins. They’d even sponsored us back in the day to keep us out of juvie for a summer or two. They knew DCPD would never think to go body-searching way out in Osito.
Everything I’ve told you is true, even the meth. Rico is the bank for one of the biggest meth holds in the area. But he knows better than to bring that white-boy shit any closer to the city than it needs to be. I ended up getting back into business with Medscar. But this time he was smart enough to run it all through the boys in the mailroom. My old boss, out of appreciation, pays for my golf lessons at the course uptown.
They say that God has a reason for everything. Maybe that’s why I lost that job on the Hill two days before Gary got Meechie. Gary had been my muscle on and off for years. He would have walked anywhere I told him to.
“Anybody else you need to vanish, playboy?” Jeremiah asked, pouring bleach into the bucket of cleanser next to the toilet.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said.
“What’s next?” the ancient woman asked as she leaned against the wall outside of the bathroom, leaning on that shotgun as her cane.
“I’ll let you know the next time I’m through,” I said as I started past them. No goodbyes. No last words. It was done.
I could see my breath hanging in the air as I walked through the living room and out the front door. The moon was big and brown in the sky. This was the kind of night where all kinds of things come out of the woods, and out of me. They chase each other in the shadows, a game of chess played up above and down below. The moves almost always come from somewhere else. We’re just here on this rock to make the moves.
KENJI JASPER is the author of four novels, including Dark, a Washington Post and New York Times best seller, and Snow. He is also coeditor of Beats, Rhymes and Life, a collection of critical essays on hip-hop culture. His writings have appeared in Newsweek, the Village Voice, Essence, and on National Public Radio. His latest release is Inter-Course: Moments in Love, Sex and Food. A native of Washington, D.C., he currently lives in Los Angeles.
amp is the first word
in amphetamine
by joseph mattson
I was awakened at six a.m. after a long night of serious drink chasing down seven days of too much speed. Anvil head, brain ready to splatter, body wrought with ache and despair. Wanting nothing more than some shut-eye, against the ghostwhite face of an unforgiving, barbaric narco-crash, I was brought back to the shock of life by a telephone call from an LAPD detective looking for my best friend.
“No,” I croaked into the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Yes, hello, yes.”
“Is this William O’Sullivan?” His tone had the seriousness of a doctor with very bad news.
“This is he.”
“This is Detective Roy Mendoza of the Los Angeles Police Department.”
I looked at the clock, the numbers blurry and hopeless. I began to sift through the bitter fog of my consciousness, trying to piece together any broken frames from the grim cinema that had been the past week.
“My lawyer’s name is …” I said by instinct, but gravity stopped the sentence as I fell headfirst into the closet door, catching the corner of my right eye socket on the knob.
“I’m looking for Jim Grace,” he said.
“Jim Grace?” He and I had parted just hours before. But Grace would take a bullet before doling out my telephone number to the police. My paramount amigo—a true brute hero, rare and holy in the order of what is sacred. Sacred in the sordid world of those who walked our line.
“He’s not here,” I said.
“I figured. It’s just that I can’t … get through … to him.”
The way he said it—get through—made me nervous. I noticed blood draining from the spot on the side of my face that took the doorknob. “He’s not … here,” I said, adding my own emphasis to see what kind of level Detective Roy Mendoza was on. I’d vicariously become a seasoned veteran in playing blue-boys and criminals, cops and fuck-ups—mostly in the shadow of Jim Grace.
“We tried his phone, but it’s a dead end. Perhaps we have the number wrong.”
“Look, Jim Grace and I share a mutual distaste for the telephone.” I scrounged the floor like a suckerfish, looking for something to compress the wound, the red now rolling down my neck and soaking into my white A-shirt, my face already swollen from the indulgences in modern chemistry, unable to sort out the pain.
“It’s in his and your best interest to get back to me. May I give you a few numbers, in the event that you see him?”
“All right, Detective Mendoza, give me the numbers.”
“Call me Dozer.”
“Dozer. Yeah.”
I took off the shirt and clamped it against my eye, stumbling like a drunken, bucking mule through the house until I found a roll of duct tape. I tore off a long piece and wrapped it around my head to hold the makeshift bandage in place. Then I crawled back to bed.
“He’s just pissed because I have a pair of his wife’s panties.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Long story. Another time. Help me with this,” Jim Grace said, wrangling a huge yellow tent, trying to stuff it into a little nylon bag. “I’m thinking about taking a trip.”
“Good God, you didn’t lay a cop’s wife?”
“Shit no. Although she is quite a dish. But I hate that bitch. His wife ruined my life.”
“Jesus …” I mumbled.
“Forget it. I don’t have time, nor do I want to explain. Dozer—fuck. He lives perpetually in the past. It’s just sad. Two percent?” he asked, handing me a quart bottle of milk.
“Thanks.” I grabbed the thing.
“Coat the stomach.”
“Grease,” I swallowed, “the wheel. Where do you keep them?”
“Keep what?”
“Them. The underwear.”
“Underwear?” Grace asked, as if there had been no mention of women’s underthings.
“Mrs. Dozer’s panties.”
“Oh, those. In the freezer.”
“Freezer? Why for?”
“Why what? Why not?”
“Keeping a cop’s wife’s dandies in the freezer is rather creepy.”
“You got a better idea how to preserve them?”
“Preserve …?”
“What happened to your face?” Jim Grace asked, as if he’d just noticed it.
“Roy Dozer beat the shit out of me trying to get your phone number,” I said. “Why do you need to preserve them?”
Grace lost color in his face, then it returned to its regular bluish flush. “He went to your house?”
I didn’t like the way it sounded, in on the kill, same as the cop. Or was I just paranoid, askance from becoming a consistent dope-huffer? Jim Grace was possibly the only person I trusted in this old, bad world. “No, he didn’t come to my house. I got coldcocked by the closet doorknob.”
“Oh. Put some steak on that thing.”
The flashing thought of a cool, thick cow shank slapped against my head, the iron scent of bovine blood and juices sopping my cheeks, dripping slowly down my face, made me feel chilly comfort in addition to horrible nausea.
“Are you coming with me? Jeez, these things. They come in these little yellow bags and once you take them out it is damn near impossible to get them back in.” Jim Grace started punching hell into the tent, shoving his foot in, trying his damnedest to make it fit. “You want a Tecate?”
“Yes. What’s it for, anyway?”
“Limes are in the fridge.”
“What’s the tent for?” I asked.
“Pico-Union.”
“Pico-Union? You turning vagrant or something? What do you need a tent for to go buy speed?”
“Man, how deep in are you?” he asked.
“How deep in are you?”
“Deep? This is just in case,” he said.
“Just in case what? In case we wander into the imaginary gnome forest behind the Food 4 Less, or decide to make a nice little home under the freeway overpass?”
“You smartass. It’s to throw them off. You never know when the eye is out.”
“Well, it’s not like we’re going to buy crack,” I said.
“Man, fighting with doorknobs really fucks up your brain. You’re not thinking right at all. We have to expect that they are always looking. We have to be safe, and we need to blend in.”
“Blend in? How are we blending in lugging around some huge tent in the middle of the day down in some poor-ass neighborhood with barely any grass to even pitch the stupid thing?”
“That, my friend, is exactly how we blend in. If we were hauling a tent trying to score, say, near the Arroyo hills or Griffith Park or Runyon, we’d be done for. There are reasons to have a tent around those places and we’d be worked over like two-dollar strumpets. But they aren’t looking for anybody camping down by Pico-Union. There is no reason for it, precisely why we’ll blend in. The obvious becomes the unobvious.”
He had me. Drug rationale. Still, it was a little extravagant.
“Still,” I said, “it is a little extravagant.”
“Bah. Stay here if you want. I’m going to do this thing.”
Don’t go to Pico-Union.
Not because of the general odds of being caught in gang-war crossfire, or because it’s one of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, policed by the notoriously corrupt Rampart Division, beset by crime and hopelessness, but because the best shit is down there, and by best, I mean worst. The kind of wicked stuff that simulates ecstatic invincibility to its most superlative, supernova echelon—while swiftly as a calculating eagle it grips in its icy talons your heart, your skull, still pumping, pumping and gritting the amp dance, and carries them off for the final sacrifice. Harv holds there. He’s a rich mother, playing both sides of the border, he knows the game. He deals two floors subterranean in a squalid slipshod tenement built into a small slope, keeping south of the radar, and also has an estate in the Hollywood Hills, a mile above Franklin. But hell. If you’re going to go get drugs, then really go get your drugs. Have some guts about it. Forget the Hollywood Hills. Go to Pico-Union.
Here, you don’t have to deal with the crummy debutante princesses hanging around Harv’s Hills house, the ones who mistake speed for even more ego and pageantry than they were already bequeathed from their knotty-assholed, smug Black Beauty–gulping Industry parents before them. The cycle, it just does not end. Not only those godforsaken women who drape themselves ridiculously all over the plac
e, but worse, their Chauncey boyfriends who can’t even hold their drink, let alone their amphetamine. The only thing worse than people who call the stuff “spizz”—naïve fools who can’t come to terms with what they’re doing and try to sugarcoat it as if it were kiddy candy, when it is exactly what it is: speed—are the inane, rich parasites who try so hard to be “down” by snorting with the proletarians, when what they really should be spending their easy money and family handouts on is holy pharmaceutically clean Dexedrine and Methedrine, or just go the other way and score some pure pressed opium, or, if they must go up, unadulterated Bolivian cocaine at the very least. Leave me and my drug of choice in peace. For my money—if I had any—I’d stick with the program.
Harv must’ve been up in the Hills, and Nettles, his skeleton wife, wasn’t keeping shop down at Pico-Union, which meant she probably found out that Harv was banging some Westside Debbie back at the ranch. None of his “lieutenants” were there either. Nobody answered. Normally, someone is always there.
By this time we’d caught the urge and were facing irate collapse, due to expectation.
“What now?”
“I have to piss,” Jim Grace hissed, and stormed off behind the tenement.
I leaned against the building, nauseated by the idea of going up into the Hills, when I heard a fiery “Hallelujah!” burst from the urination.
“Look at this,” Grace said, returning. “Perfect.”
“Your fly’s down.”
“Thanks. Okay, so check this out …”
The Speed Chronicles Page 7