The Lotus Crew

by Stewart Meyer

  JJ was snapped out of his study hall dream-reading session by a sharp, obtrusive voice. A subtle bark, if there is such a thing.

  “Reading Coleridge, are you, John Jacob?”

  Lazy eyes looked up into the face of none other than Mr. Fob, a stiff disciplinarian and renowned imposer of sophomore English. JJ had recently concluded it was not the material that was dead but the delivery boy.

  “Yesssa,” JJ let out, perched over a copy Kubla Khan, propping the lids open.

  “You look very tired, John Jacob. Are you getting enough sleep these days?”

  “Yesssa.”

  “Well, see that you’re alert for my class. You are among my brighter students, and I expect your performance to reflect that fact. Say, are you high on something?”

  “Noooosssa!”

  Mr. Fob did not look convinced. “John Jacob, if you allow yourself to use narcotics, you will be betraying the natural gifts God gave you. No one on drugs ever amounted to anything. You’re not sheltered. You should know that.”

  “Yessssa.” Shit, good thing Mr. Fob hadn’t laid his sound on Coleridge, or there’d be no Kubla Khan.

  Mr. Fob sat down, making his bulky form ridiculous by squeezing it into the undersized seat. “Please roll up your sleeves for me, John Jacob,” he barked softly, eyes knowing and smug. He wrinkled his face like a jewel appraiser. “I’ve seen needle marks. If you have none I’ll apologize, but—”

  “Yesssssa.” JJ, eyes painfully wide open, rolled up both sleeves of his cotton pastel-blue shirt. The arms were spanking clean, and he turned them over slowly so Mr. Fob could verify this. JJ never hit his arms. Like wearing a sign for the heat. As juicy as those lines were, he let them be.

  “Well, they look clean to me,” Mr. Fob said astutely, eyes straining through Coke-bottle wire rims. “But that doesn’t mean you haven’t taken pills or drunk something.”

  “Noooosssa. Jus’ no sleep las’ ni’. I was playin’ basketball an’ the guys aks me t’ hang out’n sing late. We was hittin’ fows an’ bows all ni’, sa. Dass all.”

  “Well, all right. Your eyes say something else, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Say, are you in the glee club?”

  “Ohh, noooossa. I c’n on’y sing fows an’ bows wi’ m’frien’s. I don’ likes t’be singin’ nothin’ else.”

  Mr. Fob’s exasperated sigh marked the end of the conversation. He rose to his feet, shook his head, and went on to educate someone else.

  Not Too Long Ago, N.Y.C.

  T LIT A THICK REEFER of golden-red Jamaican and looked out the window at a perpetually teeming Sheridan Square. He hadn’t been out of the joint long enough to adjust to having so many options and didn’t know what to do first. He was about to throw on his jacket and take a walk when the buzzer sounded. That was rare. The bell plate downstairs was a dummy. In order to ring you had to remove the plate and connect two wires underneath. It was either Alvira or one of the Rastas bringing him some cake from the ganja shops. Praise Jah. He glanced at a mirror that afforded full view of the front stoop. It was Alvira.

  T clicked into his business personality as he buzzed the door open. Mr. Sparks waited for footsteps on the stairs.

  “Alvira, I thought you stepped out of the circle, m’man. You’re two days late.”

  “Yeah, I had a little blowout while you were gone, T. Figured I committed myself to being a good boy once we start, so I’d party one last time for—”

  “You have a habit?”

  “Naw. Didn’t run that long. Just three or four days. I feel fine, baby. I’m ready to go. You have the number set up yet?”

  T shrugged and passed Alvira the reefer. “You know what makes a pro in this business, Alvira?” he said with conviction. “A dealer does not use. That’s either a law of physics or it should be, dig?” Tommy’s sharp liquid brown eyes were fixed on his friend.

  Alvira had his own thoughts on the matter, but outwardly he agreed. He had no business contradicting T. When it came to the trade, T was usually right. Out of sheer respect for his partner’s financial expertise, Alvira nodded emphatically.

  “I remember a cool that worked for me years ago uptown, back when I was running that Doublesmile bag.”

  “Yeah, before you went to the can. That had to be three years ago.”

  “Yeah. So this cool would meet me once a week, and I’d pass him the medicine all bagged and ready. Fifties, with the Doublesmile logo stamped on each sealed quarter-gram bag. He’d hand me the cake from the last bunch, and I’d hand him the new material. I never once counted the cake, Alvira. It was always on the money. This was cookin’ for maybe six months. The two of us were splitting over four grand weekly behind this number, so I just assumed I was the best friend this cool ever had and he’d never fuck me over, you know? So one day I show and he’s got the shorts. Some riff about his wife’s sick and he dropped two grand on specialists. But while he’s talkin’ I can sense his condition. I figured he just had a little blowout like the one you’re talkin’ about . . .”

  Alvira flushed.

  “… So I told him we’d split the shorts and handed him his next week’s material as if everything was natch. I never saw him next week, Alvira. Never seen him since. Imagine blowin’ that kind of weekly turn for a lousy burn.”

  “Pretty shortsighted,” Alvira conceded.

  “Fuckin’ stupid is what it is. But when a man’s usin’ he’s not there anymore. You ask him a question and Jones answers for him. Tell him to expel Jones and he says, ‘What Jones?’ I been in the game too long for that sound, Alvira. I don’t want to hear it from anyone. Certainly not a friend.”

  Alvira’s eyes tightened. “If you’re worrying about me, T, I’m steppin’ out of the box. I know myself. If I say I’m gonna do it right, that’s what’ll happen. I didn’t try’n hide my blowout, and I didn’t do it on credit.” Alvira looked towards the door. “If I’m going to worry you let’s chill it out right now—”

  T put his open palm up in a bid for silence. “Don’t talk like that, Alvira. I set this up for the two of us, and that’s the way the play stays. I trust you. That’s rare on this planet, but I do. God knows why. Just an instinct, I guess. If I’m soundin’ down on you it’s because I know our friend Mr. Jones too well. I don’t want him workin’ against us. You’re gonna have to face some tasty schmooz in this game. Every time we re-up material we’ll have to sample it. Extreme caution is in order, or Jones will make his presence felt. Believe me.”

  “I hear you.”

  “This is a chance for us to take some real steps forward, Alvira. We’ll triple our cake on the first play, and you’ll get acquainted with my supply people so you can negotiate future buys without me. We’ll be sittin’ right if this goes down. Think about it.”

  “Oh, hey, I think about it all the time.”

  Alvira broke eye contact to rumble for a match. He lit a Three Castles and sat back, relieved that T had turned his attention to preparing another reefer.

  A slight tremble passed through Alvira, and he recognized the modulation of his system from opiated to mild yen. A gentle hunger, not a fierce need. Another few days and he’d’ve found himself in trouble.

  “Here, Alvira, this reefer’s laced with freebase. Should distract you from the blowout blues.”

  Alvira sat back comfortably in a soft blue chair by the window, dreaming about his first sniff in the school yard long ago. He’d felt better at once, as if some great abstract adjustment had been made. Boyhood chalk on the street for years. A lot of time had passed since he’d played handball on the factory wall, watching the workers perform their tediums through bleak dirt-smoked windows. Alvira swore he’d never end up like that. It’d be like doing time without a conviction.

  “Alvira, you seem miles away. Dreamin’ about all the cake you’re gonna make?”

  “Just dreamin’, actually, ab
out a pinch of powder to the wind on a gray afternoon years ago.”

  T knew the ritual. A pinch of powder to the wind for the souls who’ve slid into Endless Nod.

  in a dream …

  ALVIRA WIPES THE sediment of centuries off his clothes and steps into the girl’s chambers. Bare blue walls, a small functional bed, and, beside it, a tiny night table with a green-shaded copper lamp. Unseen radio plays rude-boy music in the distance. He lies on the bed with detached amusement, sinks into the comfort of sheets, female smells. Unfamiliar luxuries prevail. The girl is showering. Alvira sits and smokes a thick memory chip. The girl appears, a smooth graceful entity. Olive skin draped in a sparse towel. Dark eyes widen as he tears the towel off her cakes and pounces on the flesh cookies. Gobble gobble giggle giggle. Taste of girl dew as silver streaks appear on taut thighs.

  Later, he cradles the cool round balls of her ass and drifts off into lotus. First time in years he gets there without the powder. An energy coming through, dimly familiar but impossible to locate or trigger. Something from another lifetime. Before he was the Alvira Kid.

  The dark-eyed girl is Beauty. A glinting twinkle of pleasure in her attention causes him to pulse with anticipation. She who looks at him and perceives the tradition of kin that places him in space. Tensions ebb to spring breezes on female-scented sheets. This is before the inevitable face said, “Here’s some powdered cool, Alvira. Just add water and mix.” Before Alvira took a powder and woke up sleeping.

  Sweating limbs quiver in the cool room. The girl speaks for the first time. “I’ve come here, Alvira, to your Embryo Plaza, for one purpose. To expel me Chinaman before he eats your bones.” She opens a curtain. They are on Dumont Avenue in East New York, many years ago.

  “Expel on, Beauty. Me’n the Chink’re thick as thieves, but if I could dump the sucker … whew … Tell me about it while I taste your morning dew on my beard.”

  Her story, punctuated by wriggles, simple and clear. A drug dealer’s daughter, she would come to be his heroin.

  Eyes softly close. Her lips on his as sirens wail through arteries and conduits. Packs of wild dogs scurry through abandoned tenements. Smell of leather jackets and cheap wine in doorways. Distant blow-harmonies chime like voices playing tricks with the wind in the dismal alleyways and dank subway stations.

  “Step inside me, Alvira.”

  Girl goodness upon his tongue, dance the tarantella through a cool crack of moonlight. A golden glow deep inside expels the Chinaman. The creature under him—fruit of some higher being’s boredom—squirms gently under his weight.

  Petty virtues and sobriety can’t reach you here, Alvira. Step inside Beauty, where your solids turn to vapors.

  Arteries and Conduits

  THEY LEFT T’S JAGUAR on Third Avenue in a nice neighborhood so it’d be there when they returned, and took a battered VW bug down to the street. It was Friday, a busy time, and twilight was filling out rich and blue. A mild temperature and lack of precipitation gave the night a crispness Alvira found comforting. Almost felt like nothing could go wrong under such ideal conditions. But he knew the feeling to be without substance. A misleading calm prevailed as they descended on Alphabet City. The biggest smack emporium on the East Coast stretched before them as they drove through narrow bombed-out streets. Blacks, Latins, blancos, shadows in somber colors; lips tight and drawn down, eyes dead but active with the scuffle. Waiting, watching, copping, splitting. Lots of verbs on the street.

  “Alvira, you’ve heard of the Sun Belt, the Snow Belt. This here is the Dope Belt. We’re going to cross above the main action, then ride Avenue D into the thick of it,” T said, hands gripping the wheel. “We’ll be pretty safe inside but keep the windows up, just in case. Anyone gets in front of this car in a mean way is gonna have tire tracks across his forehead.”

  They passed rows of abandoned buildings thick with clusters of crew workers and customers. Hostile cautious eyes observed their every move. Blancos could only be doing one of three things here; copping, getting mugged, or making arrests.

  “I’m not worrying, T,” Alvira said with lazy unconcern. He had complete confidence in T’s ability to negotiate junk turf. Tommy’s instincts on the street consisted of a finely tuned receiver system refined by years of practice. In the old days almost all his scoring buddies had been mugged a few times on these very streets. Some slid around easy, befriending a crew worker, staying cool, avoiding the cops and muggers. But some had been cut, beaten, robbed, even killed, over a few bags of dope. There were gangs that specialized in ripping off whites who came into the neighborhood for drugs, and that was the only reason they came, so it was safe for a thief to assume that any blanco who looked even vaguely like a junkie would either have money or bags in his possession.

  That was only part of what was uncool about junk turf. The shooting galleries and scoring spots were in dingy apartments in abandoned buildings, set up so that you usually had to walk a few dark, crawling flights. Often someone was waiting in a corridor or apartment ready to tax the next pair of legs coming down the stairs. Nothing personal. Give up your dope or your life. Usually you scored on one flight and took off on another. Then, if you were lucky, you made it to the street again and got your ass out of there. If unlucky, you might end up stuck in an apartment with your money, watch, wallet, shoes, coat, maybe even pants gone. Not to mention your medicine.

  Years ago someone had tried to take Alvira off in a building on East Third Street. Alvira took a deep cut over his left eye before the sleazoid got an ice pick between the ribs for his effort. Alvira thought of finishing him off but took pity on the junk-sick slumbum as he lay squirming in his own blood. So he just kicked him in the face a few times, broke the fingers on his knife hand, and walked out of the building with the mugger’s bags as well as his own. For years Alvira’d chastised himself for not wasting the sucker. A citizen has a duty to rid society of elements that prey on the innocent. Oh, well …

  “Put that reefer out, Alvira!” T barked. “Our asses are on the line here. Aside from crooks and thieves we have to watch for the man. Rare they bother customers, but it happens. My parole officer would skin me for a pot pinch.”

  “I hear you,” Alvira said, rolling down the window just enough to dump the reefer. “I left my smoke in the Jag, T. I’m clean now.”

  “Cool. Now here we are, so watch what happens.”

  T pulled up on the corner of Eighth Street and Avenue D. Immediately two boys in green shirts and blue jeans approached.

  “Green Tape is on,” one of them said. “How many?”

  T slid the window down two inches. “Get us six bags of Green Tape, frien’ but make sure the bags are stamped and sealed. I know a dummy when I see one.”

  The boy’s eyes were pinned, reading them as he took the order and received the information that his customers were not new to the street and knew the score. He told them to wait a minute, then split into a basement ten feet away.

  “They work this corner in crews, Alvira. The Green Tape boys wear green shirts or caps. The Black Mark boys wear black caps. Those are the two main ops. Others come and go. Dr. Nova also works here from time to time, but they’re harder to spot. You have to know a face or go to their social club on Rivington Street where they’re covered and more relaxed. Dr. Nova puts out a better bag, but Green Tape is easier to score.”

  “A year ago this corner belonged to LaTuna,” Alvira reflected. “When you were in the can I scored here a few times.”

  “LaTuna is legendary lotus, Alvira. Best street bag in years. The crews that work this corner allow only bad competition. But LaTuna is around. Their headquarters is in Brooklyn, right over the Manhattan Bridge in a mostly Jamaican area. They’re covered over there, and nobody fucks with them. Over here they catch shit. Their main op now is to move into an abandoned building, set up their steerers on the street, and do business up towards the roof for a few days before movin
g on. Their steady customers seem to find them. They leave a touter at the old spot to hip regulars to the new spot.”

  Alvira knew the wrinkle. You scan for a familiar face, and the face leads you home.

  “Here comes our Green boy,” Tommy said.

  The runner bopped up to the driver’s side, his right hand in a tight fist.

  T let three crisp twenties slip through the vent window, but only after examining the stamp and seal on each bag. “Thanks, B,” he said. “If we like these we’ll be back.”

  “Aks f’René,” the slumbum said. “I always be here. ’Member the name. René treat j’ri’, poppa. These otha guys be passin’ dummies ebery chance dey get. I gib j’goooood shit.”

  “I hear you, René.”

  “Take care, poppa. Enjoy j’medicine.”

  T slid René an extra five and closed the window. The VW pulled away from the hottest curb in lower Manhattan and took D straight down to East Houston.

  “Now, Alvira, we’re gonna give these bags to Joey Giggles for analysis. I wanna know what’s sellin’ out there, and being that we’re the ones with the most to lose, the market research falls on our asses.”

  “Sounds cool.”

  “Say, notice how René looked at us. Checked us both good. He is in the business of remembering faces. Pop up in three weeks, and he’ll know you.”

  They drove back to the Jag, stashed the bags, went back to junk turf. “Next stop’s an abandoned building on Third between B and C. This is LaTuna, for today at least. No telling where they’ll open tomorrow. I hear they’re putting out a very good bag these days, but it’s not really the original people, so you never know. There’re a multitude of tricks. Powdered barbiturates and Valium, injectable methadone. Just don’t know what you’re getting, even after you shoot it. Giggles will have to do a breakdown of the composition.”