Heroin Chronicles

by Jerry Stahl

  First things first, I handed over the cash to Johnny Gato, who pocketed it and went around the side of the house and came back with a cardboard box. He was poking holes in the side with a folding Buck knife.

  “How far you going with him?” Johnny asked.

  “To Marina del Rey.”

  “This should be okay then. But maybe we’d better tape the box.”

  “Nah, we can just weave the flaps. He won’t be able to get out.”

  “Dude, they’re pretty strong,” cautioned Johnny Gato. But as we put the duck into the box, it settled right in and grew still. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, sounding awfully unsure.

  But now that I had my dope and felt it weighing down my pocket like a two-ton anchor, I wanted to get home, get high, and put the week behind me. I was antsy and needed to go.

  “All right, man, I’m gone. Tell Rose thanks for the birria. You boys stay out of trouble,” I said. Everybody was used to my quick exits after I copped and they barely looked up from their game of dominoes.

  “Just go through the side yard,” said Johnny, and slapped my back again.

  I walked around the house and into the front yard. I could see that Junior and Angel hadn’t washed the truck. “Dude, you didn’t give us enough time to even get started!” cried Angel.

  “Don’t worry. You still get paid … but next time I’m here, you give me a wash, right?” I said, and handed them each ten dollars.

  “What’s in the box?” Junior asked.

  “One of Jorge’s ducks.”

  “Good luck with that,” said Angel, and made a mock Catholic blessing.

  Smart-ass kids, but they were entertaining.

  I should have shoved the duck into the bed of the truck, but I didn’t want any accidental escapes, so I placed it on the bench seat instead. I walked around to the driver’s side, got in, and drove in the direction of the freeway.

  Everything was cool until I popped in a Captain Beyond cassette tape as I hit the 605 on-ramp. The duck didn’t dig the noise and got agitated. Even after I turned off the music, it only got wilder.

  “Shut up, Quacky!” I said as I knocked on the side of his cardboard prison with my fist. That was a mistake that only made the duck more determined to get out.

  Once its beak pushed through the cardboard, followed by its head, the duck saw its new surroundings and didn’t like them. A tremendous ruckus kicked up as it started flapping its wings, kicking its feet, and pitching a fit. This was a dangerous situation. I kept looking in the rearview mirror to make sure I hadn’t picked up the Highway Patrol.

  There was no shoulder on the 605 on which to pull off. I took the transition to the eastbound 60 toward Los Angeles as the duck managed to get one twitching wing out of the box. I knew there was a shoulder dead ahead so I eased over and stopped. The duck did not, and kept up its fury of hisses, quacks, and near convulsive efforts to escape. I set the emergency blinkers, got out, and walked around to the passenger side. As I opened the door, Quacky finally burst from the box and shot toward the first avenue of escape it saw. All I could do was get out of the way. Well, fuck him, I thought. He could take his gimpy webbed foot and the rest of himself down to the San Gabriel River that lay right below us.

  I tried for a minute to shoo the duck over the bridge and into the river, but realized I presented a target of suspicious activity to anyone passing by. Best to let nature sort it out. I got back in the truck and merged into traffic. I looked in the side mirror and saw Quacky take a short and panicked flight right into the front grille of a Mack MH Ultra-Liner. There he stayed, pinned to the chrome like a figurehead on an old-time seagoing freighter. As the rig passed, I gave a solemn wave to poor Quacky. I muttered a quick prayer of thanks that no cops had seen me and continued my drive back home to hearth and high.

  There wasn’t anything else I could do … except to make sure to always tell young Jorge that his duck was doing just fine, strutting in the garden, eating snails, and living the waterfowl high-life.

  It made the kid happy.

  ERIC BOGOSIAN wrote the plays and films subUrbia and Talk Radio (in which he also starred). He often acts on stage and screen, last appearing on Broadway in Donald Margulies’s Time Stands Still. His most recent novel is Perforated Heart.

  godhead

  by eric bogosian

  A strip of white light falls across a man seated in pitch-black, holding a microphone. He speaks in a slow, deliberate voice with a New Orleans accent.

  The way I see it, it’s a fucked-up world, it’s not going anyplace, nothing good is happening to nobody, you think about it these days and nothing good is happening to anybody and if something good is happening to anybody, it’s not happening to me, it’s not happening to myself.

  The way I see it, there be this man, some man sitting in a chair behind a desk in a room somewhere down in Washington, D.C. See, and this man, he be sitting there, he be thinking about what we should do about crime rate, air pollution, space race … Whatever this guy supposed to be thinking about. And this guy, he be sitting down there and thinking, and he be thinking about what’s happenin’ in my life … he be deciding on food stamps, and work programs, and the welfare, and the medical aid and the hospitals, whether I be working today. Makin’ all kinds a decisions for me. He be worrying about how I spen’ my time! Then he lean back in his ol’ leather chair, he start thinkin’ about da nukular bomb. He be deciding whether I live or die today! Nobody makes those decisions for me. That’s for me to decide. I decide when I want to get up in da mornin’, when I want to work, when I want to play, when I want to do shit! That’s my decision. I’m free. When I die, that’s up to God or somebody, not some guy sittin’ in a chair. See?

  I just wanna live my life. I don’t hurt nobody. I turn on the TV set, I see the way everybody be livin’. With their swimming pools and their cars and houses and living room with the fireplace in the living room … There’s a fire burnin’ in the fireplace, a rug in front of the fireplace. Lady. She be lyin’ on the rug, evenin’ gown on … jewelry, sippin’ a glass o’ cognac … She be lookin’ in the fire, watchin’ the branches burnin’ up … thinkin’ about things. Thinkin’. Thinkin’. What’s she thinkin’ about?

  I jus’ wanna live my life. I don’t ask for too much. I got my room … got my bed … my chair, my TV set … my needle, my spoon, I’m okay, see? I’m okay.

  I get up in the mornin’, I combs my hair, I wash my face. I go out. I hustle me up a couple a bags a D … new works if I can find it.

  I take it back to my room, I take that hairwon. I cook it up good in the spoon there … I fill my needle up.

  Then I tie my arm [caressing his arm]… I use a necktie, it’s a pretty necktie, my daughter gave it to me … Tie it tight … pump my arm … then I take the needle, I stick it up into my arm … find the hit … blood …

  Then I undoes the tie … I push down on that needle [pause]… and I got everything any man ever had in the history of this world. Jus’ sittin’ in my chair …

  [Voice lower] I got love and I got blood. That’s all you need. I can feel that blood all going up behind my knees, into my stomach, in my mouth I can taste it … Sometimes it goes back down my arm, come out the hole … stain my shirt …

  I know … I know there’s people who can’t handle it. Maybe I can’t handle it. Maybe I’m gonna get all strung out and fucked up …

  … Even if I get all strung out and fucked up, don’t make no difference to me … Even I get that hepatitis and the broken veins and the ulcers on my arms … addicted. Don’t make no difference to me. I was all strung out and fucked up in the first place …

  Life is a monkey on my back. You ride aroun’ in your car, swim in your warm swimming pool. Watch the fire … I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all. Just let me have my taste. Have my peace. Jus’ leave me be. Jus’ leave me be.

  [Turns in toward the dark]

  JERVEY TERVALON is the author of several books, including the novels Serving Monster and Dea
d Above Ground, and coeditor, with Gary Phillips, of The Cocaine Chronicles. He is currently directing the Literature for Life project. Literature for Life is a new kind of forum: part literary magazine, part educational resource center, part salon. Writers, journalists, artists, and educators come together to ignite young minds while celebrating the diversity of Los Angeles.

  gift horse

  by jervey tervalon

  Heroin didn’t blow up in the neighborhood, not like red devils and weed. We held out for rock cocaine to go insane and then we burned shit up until there was nothing left to burn. But heroin did make a run at us—one fine spring the white devil drug appeared with the help of a banged-up Nova turning the corner, tires squealing as it fishtailed along Second Avenue and the fool at the wheel with the big afro flung a brown bag out the window, and then a roller took the turn French Connection–style, and should have caught that knucklehead in the Nova before the next corner, but he drove like a nigga who had nothing to lose but doing life.

  I sat on the porch with Sidney sitting across from me with his nice-ass leather jacket on, sipping a Mickey’s Big Mouth; ignoring my comic book–reading pootbutt ass like I was invisible. I knew he was waiting on my brother to make a run for weed or red devils or whatever. I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t have a spare word for me, and I didn’t mind because I hated motherfucking Sidney. He wasn’t obvious about being a dick to me except for the time he broke my finger because I made the mistake of trying to save a seat on the couch. Should have figured that he’d ignore my hand and flop down, and yeah, he broke my little finger and I knew he didn’t care even with all those fake apologies to my mama. Sidney and my brother just kept watching the Rams while I had to go to the hospital to get a splint. He was my nemesis, though it wasn’t much of a contest with me being fifteen. I couldn’t hang with just throwing a punch at his smug face. Jude, my brother, didn’t have a high opinion of me, saying I started shit and pissed people off so I shouldn’t be expecting him to have my back.

  The roar of the big engine of the roller drifted away and my attention turned to the brown bag at the curb. Sidney gave me a sinister grin and sauntered over to it, hiked his pressed jeans a bit, glanced about as though he was daring the police to roll up on him, and nonchalantly picked it up and returned to the porch. He examined the contents of the paper bag; about a hundred little baggies with powder inside.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “What’s what?”

  “What’s inside the baggies?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and walked away like he was on top of the world, and Sydney always looked like he was on top of the world.

  Though I hated him, I couldn’t help admiring his style. He didn’t fight, or carry a gun, he never engaged in open hostility. He won a lofty position in the neighborhood because of his ability to get along with anybody who was worth anything to get along with, and his ability to make everybody trust him completely, except for me, and I didn’t count. Once they trusted him, Sydney would get in on what was good, and leave the rest. He had a great talent that made everything work; he talked better than anybody and he knew everything. He knew how to sell drugs in such a way that he never seemed to be dealing, and thus, he had an understated pimp-splendor thing happening. He rode a tricked-out metallic blue chopper with an airbrushed image of a flying saucer hovering over Los Angeles on the gas tank; and this was before his heroin windfall.

  Sidney’s dealings were all undercover except for Leslie, the sheboonie up the street who wore curlers, slippers, and a matching bathrobe. Youngsters thought she was an ugly-ass woman until you saw her up close and you realized she was a dude who wanted to be an ugly-ass woman. He would show up at Sidney’s door, which Sidney told him not to do—who really wanted a sheboonie coming to the house?—early in the morning to get some stepped-on baggies of powder, because even though I didn’t know a thing about heroin, I knew that Sidney would toss in all kinds of shit to stretch it and keep that money flowing. Leslie shared her heroin with Norman Zerka, the dude who was so light-skinned that even with his lame afro, no one was sure if he was black or not. Norman took to living with Leslie because he liked that heroin high and he even left Bernadette, the woman who was supposed to be his wife, cause she couldn’t afford to keep him stoned like he wanted to be. I didn’t mind Norman cause he was polite, and didn’t break my fingers. He always had hot shit to sell, nice bikes he would jack at UCLA from the white boys, but people who knew better wouldn’t buy his magic television, like my mother did. “I can’t pass up this great deal,” she said, and Norman, polite as always, brought back her change for a ten, and sold her this really new-looking, all-white and shiny, tiny television that my mama placed in the kitchen so we could eat dinner and watch Alfred Hitchcock movies. But Norman wasn’t really selling the hot television, he was renting it. Within a week, he sneaked in the house and stole the television back and sold it to somebody else.

  Sidney, who had already been the king of the neighborhood, and now seemed to be king of the world, lived exactly like he had lived before, but with more aplomb. One sunny afternoon, he was holding court under the big pine tree. He sat there on the fire hydrant, a six-pack near his feet, with most of the fellas in the neighborhood laughing at his jokes and drinking his Heinekens.

  “I don’t know about you knuckleheads, but I’m going on vacation.”

  “Where to?” Henry-Hank, the neighborhood’s handsome idiot asked.

  “Amsterdam.”

  Everyone nodded as though they knew where and what he was talking about.

  “You can smoke weed in coffee houses. Police don’t fuck with you and the women are cool and don’t mind taking care of you.”

  Who could argue with Sidney’s success? He had a plan, and the funds to pull it off. I imagined myself kicking it with beautiful blond women; then I shook that nonsense out of my head. That was a mistake; suddenly they noticed me, particularly my brother. Usually, he was too high to care.

  “What you doing here! Take your ass home. Hang out with Googie, somebody your own age,” he said.

  I shrugged and walked away, making a slow meandering circle and ending up exactly where I had been in the first place. Then, as if by instinct, the fellas uprooted themselves and ended up at my house. As long as my mother was at work, the fellas—an ever-changing number of brothers who would hold sway on the lawn or in the living room, smoking weed and watching sports, or drinking beer on the beautiful Saint Augustine grass that my dad had planted before he and my mother divorced—kicked it at our house. I listened to them argue about the Lakers and the Rams, and I even heard an argument about whether or not H.P. Lovecraft was racist. Then Henry-Hank appeared, agitated as Lassie with an urgent message.

  “Sidney is passed out, facedown in the ivy in front of his house.”

  Weed and beer might make you mellow, but everybody was now alert and hustling to Sidney’s house.

  Henry-Hank was right; there was Sidney, facedown in the ivy, looking stylishly dead.

  Jude squatted next to him and shook his shoulder.

  “He ain’t dead, he’s passed out.”

  Jude and Lil’ Dell lifted him up and walked him up the steps and knocked on the door.

  Mrs. Green opened the door and for a moment was shocked, but then she looked so angry that it didn’t seem she cared that her son was right there, drooling, head lolling about.

  “What did you do to my boy? Did y’all get him drunk?”

  Jude, never too quick on the uptake, just shook his head. “I didn’t get him drunk.”

  “Well, he’s drunk; he’s even pissed on himself.”

  “Like I said, we didn’t get him drunk.”

  She opened the door and Jude and Lil’ Dell dragged him to the couch and tossed him on it.

  Sidney wasn’t much good for anything after that. Every day he was fucked up, passed out on somebody’s lawn or porch, or maybe unconscious in the backseat of somebody’s car. I got to wondering about heroin then, how somebo
dy as social as Sidney would decide to leave what he was behind, and become something else altogether: a straight dope fiend. He stopped selling weed and red devils and he certainly wasn’t going to be selling his stash of heroin; he was running through it like Halloween candy.

  Mrs. Green came home from work one day to see all the furniture turned upside down and ripped apart; nothing was stolen as far as she knew other than the cute little television Sidney had picked up for her from Norman Zerka. But Sidney knew what had been stolen—the basis for his economic existence and his happiness—and he was right out on the street looking for it.

  Sidney, possessed of super ghetto cool, walked around the neighborhood in such casual good humor that if you didn’t know him you’d think he was on top of the world. And despite Sidney having been robbed of his livelihood, his mother kept him in spending money, a whole lot of spending money, because she made serious cash running the Department of Recreation and Parks for the city of Los Angeles. Sidney began buying beer for anyone who wandered onto the corner under the big tree. He let Henry-Hank have a Heineken, even Googie. I could have had one myself, but I didn’t like the taste of beer and didn’t want to be beholden to Sidney. All the generosity was not how I knew Sidney to be. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why; he needed information.

  It almost looked normal around the neighborhood with Sidney back on his throne passing the joint around like how it used to be done before the heroin descended upon Second Avenue. He just took it when the running joke got to be asking him if he had any red devils, and he’d just shrug, smile broadly, open his arms, and say, “Wish I did,” or, “Red devils, me?”

  A week or so later, Sidney getting ripped off was history, and he was ready to make his move. Googie told me Sidney had showed up at his window, rapping on it just loud enough not to wake his daddy. In a few minutes Googie stumbled outside buckling up his overalls.

  “What it be like?” Googie asked, trying to sound hard and hiding how excited he was to have Sidney, even in his fallen state, blessing his house with his presence. Sidney sat on a wooden picnic table, near the patio, smoking a square. He offered Googie one, and Googie wanted it, knowing that he couldn’t handle it, even a menthol. He reached for it and Sidney yanked it away and laughed.