“Ireland. Love to go there. Wonderful golf courses, I’ll bet,” he says.
“Oh yeah, great courses, Royal Portrush, great views of Scotland,” I say.
“How long do you intend to stay in the United States?”
“We’re here for a few months.”
He stamps the passport, smiles. I smile back. Walk off.
The luggage rack. The automatic sorting machine in the airport has misplaced about a third of our flight’s luggage. “Teething troubles,” a harried airport official says, trying hard to placate the potential lynch mob. But we get our rucksacks with no problems.
The customs desk. A blue form. We have nothing to declare, although I do have a lunch box filled with needles that I’ve marked “Diabetic Syringes.” I’d been concerned that this was far too obvious and customs was going to confiscate it and figure out I was a user or something; but we walk through the channel and no one says a thing. I could have brought the bloody heroin. Typical.
Outside. Christ, it’s hot. A cloudless sky. Three in the afternoon. One hundred degrees, says the temperature gauge above an ad for a bank. So many commercials. Even on the taxi. We get in the cab.
“We need a hotel, not too expensive,” I say before John can speak.
“It needs to be downtown, but not the Brown Palace, or the Adam’s Mark, cheaper than that,” John says, reading from Lonely Planet USA.
The taxi driver turns around. He’s an older black man with a gravelly voice. “I know the very place, boys,” he says, driving off.
“How come it’s so hot, didn’t it snow just a couple of weeks ago?” John asks incredulously.
“That’s Denver,” the driver says, laughing. “We get over three hundred days of sunshine a year. More than Arizona. Sometimes it snows at night and by lunchtime it’s gone. The traces of that big snowstorm we had a couple of weeks back, gone in two days. Year’s been real bad for weather. Need rain, we’re in the middle of a big drought.”
He’s not kidding. I look out the window. Yellow and brown fields, an unforgiving sky. No animals. In fact, from the highway it looks like it’s semidesert. The city, a line of big buildings and then the mountains. A punchy, aggressive sun.
Most people don’t know Denver. Maybe they came skiing here once, or went to a conference. Drove in from the airport, stayed downtown, went to the mountains. Maybe they live here in the white ’burbs. But even they don’t know it. They don’t know the Denver of Kerouac and Cassidy, of the hobos getting off the freight trains at the biggest intersection in the West. They don’t know because the bums have been pushed off the streets, the downtown has been regenerated, lofts, wine bars, trendy eateries and coffeehouses instead of dive bars and diners. John Elway’s toothy grin on the posters for his auto dealerships. But the old Denver still exists out on Colfax Avenue where they never go. Or on Federal or in the black section north of the city center.
Colfax for us. Desperate-looking motels, armored liquor stores, Spanish restaurants and bodegas. Prostitutes, pushers, hangers-on at the corners. What are they selling? Is everyone still on crack in this country, or is heroin coming back?
We turn on Broadway past two of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen. One is a tall windowless slab the color of baby puke, the other a demented Lego assemblage of blocks and pyramids.
“Art museum and library,” the cabbie explains and then stops at a place called the Western Palace Hotel 1922—pink and flat with a swimming pool. It looks slightly rundown and cheap. It’ll do. The Denver city center is about half a mile down the baking white strip of Broadway.
We pay the driver and remember to tip him 15 percent. Get our bags. Walk to the front desk.
“This is so cool,” John says.
I look at him. I’m sweating, jumpy, in no mood to talk.
I’d woken early, gone to the beach. Injected myself. Gone home, spent two hours packing and hiding my drug paraphernalia. It took an hour to pick up John and get to the airport, Facey driving slowly and carefully in his Ford Fiesta. Facey still too embarrassed to talk to me following the Land Rover incident even though I’d forgiven him, for if not him, who? They would have found me. Anyway, that long airport drive. Then a two-hour wait to go through security, then an hour-long flight from Belfast to London, then a five-hour wait at Heathrow to board our flight. A ten-hour flight from London to Denver. Three hours getting our bags and going through customs and the ride here. Its been twenty-four hours since I had a fix.
The hotel lobby exudes desperation and a hint of better days. The harsh setting sun streaming in through venetian blinds and illuminating an enormous cracked mirror above a chipped art deco check-in desk. A man at the desk reading a comic. An image of ourselves on a black-and-white security camera monitor. A dead or hibernating cactus plant. Dust vortices in the strobed sunlight. Tiles missing from a checkerboard floor and, on an orange sofa, a hatchet-faced old man with a portable oxygen tank. He and the desk clerk both smoking.
“Careful you don’t blow yourself up, old timer,” John says cheerfully to the old man.
“What’s it to you, shithead?” the man replies, incredibly slowly.
We go to the desk and the clerk gives us a room. We pay up front for a week. He doesn’t ask to see our passports or tell us the hotel rules or anything. He gives us keys and motions us upstairs. He’s reading Justice League of America.
The stairs, a long line of identical rooms. The key.
The door. In. Broadway out the windows. Hot, clogged with traffic.
“Shit, there’s an air conditioner,” John says enthusiastically.
He drops his stuff, runs to the AC, turns it on. By the time we’ve done a very quick unpack, the room is twenty-five degrees cooler.
John cannot contain his excitement.
“America, bloody America,” he says.
“Yes.”
“I mean, Jesus Christ, it’s America we’re talking about here.”
“I know.”
“You’ve been, but I haven’t. I always wanted to come. Did you see the bikes? On the ride in I saw two Harleys and an Indian. An Indian, can you believe it? And the cars, the cars are bloody huge. It’s just like Starsky and Hutch or—”
“John, listen, I need to score some ketch.”
John shakes his head.
“No. No, no, no. Come on, Alexander, couldn’t you use this as an opportunity to go cold turkey?” John asks. An excellent question.
I stare at him.
“No,” I say.
“Alex, if you—” but then he stops and sees the state I’m in. Shaking, pale, trying to keep down my meager stomach contents.
“Alex, ok, look. I can’t convince you?” he says.
“No.”
“Ok, if you really insist on going, go. Look, and score me some pot as well, ok?”
“Maybe. John, you’re what they call an enabler.”
“Sure. Just don’t get arrested”
“If I do, I’ll tell them you put me up to it.”
* * *
Heat. Sun. I walked down Broadway. Wide streets, flat pavements, ramps on the sidewalk. I found Colfax again. A lot of pedestrian traffic. Roasting, too, my beard itched. The Capitol Building. A statue of a Civil War soldier. The Ten Commandments.
Homeless people, desperate people, alcoholics on the sidewalk.
Ah, a scumball bar.
The bar, dark, smoky. Sun like laser light through cracks in the paint of the blacked-out windows. Very American. Budweiser signs, Coors signs, a pool table, strange things on tap. People on their own staring at shot glasses, hugging their beer. No women. Is this the right place?
Barkeep. Black guy, forty-five, bald, big strong hands that looked like they could wring your neck.
“A beer please,” I said.
“You got ID?”
“What?”
“ID.”
“What for?”
“Are you from out of town?”
“Yes.”
“You have to be t
wenty-one to drink here.”
“I’m twenty-four. Must people think I look older,” I said.
“I don’t give a shit, you got ID?”
“Uh, wait, yeah, I got my passport.”
“That’ll do, let me see it.”
I showed him my passport, he looked it over, I don’t how he read it, so dark in there.
“You from England?”
“Yeah.”
“Tourist?”
“Yeah.”
“Been to Denver before?”
“No.”
“You’re too late to ski,” he said, his face contorting into a disconcerting chuckle.
“I don’t ski.”
“What type of beer you want?”
“I don’t care.”
“Coors ok?”
“Yeah.”
The barman pulled me a Coors and set it down.
“Three dollars,” he said.
I gave him a five and as I’d seen in the movie, I left a dollar of the change back on the bar.
“Tourist, huh. I was born here. Native, very rare. You know what the first permanent building in Denver was?”
“No.”
“A bar,” he said with satisfaction.
“Really?”
“Yup, you know what the second was?”
“No.”
“A brothel.”
“Fascinating.”
“You know that TV show Dynasty?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s Denver.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
I finished the beer and bought another. I was getting increasingly anxious. It’s not that I needed a hit, I told myself. I just wanted one. The bar began to fill. A few more desperate types but also a party of college students. Four guys, two girls. Maybe they would know. The guys all had buzz cuts and were well muscled, they actually all looked like undercover cops, so maybe it wouldn’t be too clever asking them. It would have to be the barman. I cleared my throat.
“So,” I said, “I hear there’s a big drug problem around here.”
“You heard that?” His face frozen, revealing nothing.
“Yeah.”
“Huh.”
“You know, pot, smack, that sort of thing.”
“Is that a fact?” he said, giving me a quizzical look.
“It’s what I heard.”
He wiped the bar and served a customer at the far end. Obviously thinking something over. Clearly, I was from out of town, he had seen my passport, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t a sting operation. Suspicious, but not a sting.
“Bar tab’s twenty bucks,” he said, coming back to me.
I owed him nothing, I had paid and tipped for each drink. I took a twenty from my wallet and put it on the bar. He lifted it and put it in his pocket.
“I heard,” he began slowly, “I heard that the biggest problem with product was behind the Salvation Army shelter on Colfax and Grant. That’s what I heard. I heard, you should say Hacky sent you.”
“Hacky sent me?”
“Hacky.”
I left the beer, grabbed my baseball hat, practically ran out into the dusk. I went east. Night was falling fast and there were many more prostitutes out on Colfax, skinny black and Latino girls who looked as if they were about fifteen. Most of them on something. Crack, presumably. They were wired, nervous, looked for vehicle trade. Pimps on the corner, big guys, little guys, enforcers, all of them obvious, unconcerned about peelers or being seen. I found the Salvation Army hostel and walked around the back. Garbage, a small fire. A dozen men drinking from brown paper bags. Older guys, mostly white.
First character I saw, old for his years, pale, thin, drinking vodka. Rotted gums and teeth, horrible smell.
“Listen, I need to score, Hacky sent me,” I said.
The man looked at me.
“You want the kid. Are you a cop?” he asked.
“No.”
“Better not be a cop.”
I shook my head, what would he do about it anyway? Breathe on me?
“Hey, kid,” he yelled, “guy wants to book you.”
The kid came from out of the shadows. He really was a child. Maybe sixteen years old. Spanish, obviously, well dressed in jeans and a black cowboy shirt. Walking slow, smoking a cigarette. Was he the dealer? If so, why was he hanging out with a bunch of indigent white guys three times his age?
He came over.
“You’re no cop. I know all the cops.”
“I know. Hacky sent me.”
“Hacky sent you?”
“Yeah.”
“What you want?” he asked, suspicion flitting around his eyes.
“Ketch, I mean, horse, smack, heroin.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know, a few grams, seven good hits.”
“What you talking about? Where you from?”
“Ireland.”
“Where’s that at?”
“England.”
“See your money,” he said, the light gleaming on his smooth baby-face cheeks.
I opened up my wallet, he looked at me. His face had a scar under the chin. I stroked my beard nervously. He took out five twenty-dollar bills, put them in his pocket, said nothing, walked off to a door, went inside. I waited for about ten minutes. Had they stroked me? Was I ripped off? It would be the easiest scam in the world. Who would I complain to? I didn’t care about the money. I wanted the goddamn heroin. Let them rip me off, just give me the bloody ketch.
The sun disappeared behind the mountains and I stood there watching the oblique light illuminate the vapor trails of airplanes flying west.
Venus came out. The sky turned a deep blue.
From the Colfax side of the alley a homeless man shambled over to me with a brown paper bag.
“This is for you,” he said.
I opened the bag, inside was a plastic bag containing a white powder. Easy to get bait and switch in a situation like this, so I opened the bag, tasted the heroin. Milky, acidic, the real McCoy.
“Where’s this from?” I asked the homeless man.
“I don’t know,” he answered. I wanted to know where the heroin had originated—Burma, Afghanistan, South America. I wanted to know its purity, but the man was drunk, he knew nothing, just the fall guy on the outside chance that I was a peeler. I put it in my pocket and jogged back to the hotel. Night. Almost no pedestrians. I took a shortcut through the grounds of the state capitol, no one paying me any mind at all.
When I slid back into the motel room, John was asleep and the place stank of shampoo and hair conditioner. John washed that long mane of his twice a day.
“Who the hell is that?” he muttered from the bed.
“Me.”
“Did you get your ketch?” John asked from under the covers.
“I did. No pot, though.”
“Shit, ok. Was the guy trustworthy? I mean, you’re going to shoot that stuff into your veins. Did he look trustworthy?”
“He looked fine.”
“Ok, then it’s your life.”
“It is.”
I took out my syringes. I went into the bathroom and brought out my spoon and the distilled water. I took the heroin out of the plastic bag. I sieved it through my fingers. I boiled it in the spoon. Injected, drew it in, saw there was blood, I always find a vein first time, always. I injected myself.
A weird hit. A deep high.
I lay down on the bathroom floor. Goddamn, this stuff was purer than the gear that made it to Ireland. Wow. Everything that was hurt in my body disappeared. My thoughts became clear. The shower curtain, the tiles on the bathroom floor, the cream-colored ceiling. The traffic on Broadway. The fan from the AC in the bedroom, the bathroom pipes. One irritation. Helicopter, probably from the TV news. In Belfast there are no civilian choppers, all belong to the British Army. A copter is an ominous sound meaning trouble. I had to get rid of it. Blend it into the cars, pipes, air conditioner. Going, going, gone.
; Noises, absence of pain.
Until you take heroin you don’t know how much pain there is in your body. Most humans just get used to it. With heroin every little ache disappears. Every ache of body and spirit. The wound of memory, the fear. That nagging fear that never quite goes away. For how can you live happily on Earth, knowing that your consciousness will be annihilated along with everything else you cherish? All the matter in the universe will someday decay into random photons and neutrinos. Diamonds are not forever. Nothing is forever. All the works of man will be lost in the Heat Death of the universe. Doesn’t that make everything pointless?
The girl is dead? We are all dead.
Heroin relieves you of these thoughts. And it was heroin, after all, that had saved my life. But for heroin I would be dead in a ditch somewhere in Ulster. Rain on my beaten body.
But I was smarter than them. Maybe not smart. But smarter than them.
The cars. The fading light. The airplanes. Men yelling. A fat June night. An urban symphony. A heavy overcoat of emptiness. I drift on an air bed over the ocean of eternity. On the infinite nothingness of a black sky.
The list of a diesel engine. The air horn of a freight train. Vehicles. Voices. A TV in another room. A breathing city. We are clawed by the past. I have read up on the history of this town. I think of the Spanish, the gold rush, of hard-faced Denver men throwing the bodies of the Indian women and children into Sand Creek. I think of Oscar Wilde at Denver’s Union Station. The golden spike. Walt Whitman’s beard. A father’s tears.
A beautiful girl in an orange sari, beaming from a photograph.
Everything eased….
Later.
Denver ketch.
The purest heroin I’ve ever had. Enough to make you become an addict. Lying there. Floating. Remembering the poet Novalis. “Inward goes the way full of mystery.” I don’t even have to take heroin now. Now I’m out of Ireland. I don’t even have to take it. I could be free of it. It has served its purpose. It’s been my shield. Like the beard, like the skinny stoop and the broken voice.
No reason now. Yeah, I’ll stop, quit. Solve the murder. Save myself. Yes. Thoughts. Coming down from a deep high. Heroin doesn’t end like anesthesia. The world slides you out.
Not today, though.
John shook me.
“Up, you bastard.”
“What time is it, you dick?”
Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) Page 8