Cherry

by Nico Walker

  I said, “Hey, Mike.”

  He said, “Do you have a gun?”

  I said, “No.”

  He said, “FUCK.”

  I said, “What’s up?”

  “You don’t have a gun?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I just got robbed.”

  “You just got robbed?”

  “Yeah. Yer boy set me up.”

  “Just now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit, man.”

  “I need to get my car. I left my car there. You don’t have a gun?”

  “No. But I’ve got a bulletproof vest if you want that.”

  “I’m on my way over.”

  “I thought you didn’t have a car.”

  “I’m driving Rachel’s car.”

  “Oh. Okay. Yeah, I’ll be here.”

  Rachel was Mike’s girlfriend. They lived together. They slept in separate rooms though. Which I thought was odd. Rachel was the type of girl you wanted to sleep with. Maybe one of them had sleep apnea. I don’t know. But I felt bad about Mike. Mike was getting the treatment. The world was treating Mike like a fucking loser. And he was new to it so it was harder on him, harder on him than it was for the likes of…me. And I felt bad. I was the one who had put him on with Raul, and now Raul had robbed him. Raul was black and Mike didn’t like dealing with black guys. He didn’t like dealing with black guys because he thought that you couldn’t trust them; namely he thought that they would rob you. I said to Emily, “Mike’s coming over. He says he just got robbed. He’s got to get his car. I’m going to take him.”

  “What?”

  “Mike got robbed.”

  “By who?”

  “By Raul, I think.”

  “What a piece of shit!”

  “I’m not sure, but I think that’s what happened. Mike’s on his way. We’ll find out from him.”

  “He’s coming here right now?”

  “Yeah. Like he’ll be here in a couple seconds.”

  I went and got the bulletproof vest. It was in the closet on the stairs. An IBAS, ACU pattern. It had once belonged to the Ohio National Guard but it didn’t anymore. There was also a Kevlar helmet in the closet, but I thought that was probably a bit much.

  Mike was outside. Emily let him in. I said, “Mike, you alright?”

  He said, “Fuck no.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got fuckin robbed.”

  “I know. But what happened?”

  “Raul told me his boy wanted to buy an ounce of coke. I drove out to meet him and the motherfucker pulled a gun on me.”

  “Was Raul there?”

  “No. Just his boy.”

  “I’m sorry, man. That’s fucking bullshit.”

  “My car’s still up there. I have to go get it.”

  “Yeah, I got you. I’ll take you up there right now.”

  “Alright. You think I should wear that vest?”

  “I don’t know. Wear it if you want to. Let’s shoot up first before we go. Hey, Emily.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m gonna spot Mike an eighty. Don’t be mad at me.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Mike said, “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  And we shot up, all three of us did. We had to because Mike had just got robbed. He had got robbed for an ounce of coke and that was about an $800–$1000 loss. The least we could do was we could all get high. So we did. And I drove Mike over to where his car was. His car was parked outside some apartments. A blue Mercury. All the doors were open. This was just north of Mayfield on Coventry, a little short of East Cleveland. It was a pretty lame place to have to say you got robbed. This wasn’t exactly the Terrordome. Two young girls were jumping rope. Mike got out and hurried over to his car and we got out of there. Mike had the bulletproof vest on. We looked like some dorks. When we got back I fronted Mike another pill and he went home. I called Black and he answered. He said he had picked up something and I could meet him if I wanted. So I said I was on my way. I bought a gram. I didn’t bother calling Raul. I asked Black and Black said he hadn’t known anything about it. I didn’t believe him but it didn’t matter.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  In these years I didn’t sleep and when I slept I dreamt of violence. I dreamt of Iraq. I dreamt of movies I had seen. I would die in my dreams and not wake up. I’d be dead in my dreams and then die some more, and when I woke up I was tired. No matter what else, I was unhappy.

  Days came like dead moths on the bathroom counter. I got a letter from some people who said I’d fucked up school so bad that I had to give all the money back for the last semester. They said I had to give the money back right away. So I had no choice and went and saw my parents about it. They gave me money. Still I didn’t ever have money. I could get more money when school started up again, but I’d have to be real careful and I didn’t think I could be careful because there was always so much to do and I couldn’t get it all done and be careful.

  Emily said we should get a dog and we did. We went to the animal shelter in Brook Park and got a dog for $60. It was a girl dog; Emily named her Livinia. Livinia was a mix of some kinds of hounds and she had a brown-grey coat that shone and she was very timid so we felt for her. And we said, We will protect her and she will be fine from now on forever. Emily said we had to quit dope and I said I would quit dope and she said she would too.

  I went to the doctor, a psychiatrist. I told him I was fucked up. I had been to see a psychiatrist before. That had been at the VA, years ago, after Zoë left. I had seen this psychiatrist a couple months until one day I’d had to take Roy to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles all the way on the West Side because Roy was living on the West Side and I had forgot about an appointment I had till about half an hour before. I called the VA and they didn’t answer the phone so I left a message and said I had to cancel the appointment. When I called back to reschedule they didn’t ever answer the phone so I left messages for a while. It was three years. They still hadn’t returned my calls and Roy and I weren’t even friends anymore.

  Now I went to see this other doctor, Dr. Kaufmann. I could see him for free because the government was giving him money to study on people like me. He was over at the college hospital and he didn’t want me to say anything but tell him numbers and go home and write numbers down, one through ten, all hours of the day and night, write these numbers down and keep track of them like they meant something and I didn’t write the numbers down like I was supposed to and I felt like a goddamn criminal.

  When Emily went to detox I was supposed to not do heroin. I was supposed to stay home and get sick. Emily had signed up for the detox. James Lightfoot had told her about it. He had told Emily that there was a detox at a hospital downtown that was free the first time you went; the state of Ohio paid for it. So she went to the detox and I stayed home that weekend with the dog and the dog hadn’t been fixed yet and she was going around in a diaper and making sad faces because she missed Emily. And I think I meant to get sick. But I fucked up and shot dope all that weekend. James Lightfoot came over and we shot dope. James Lightfoot was still a friend of mine. He bought most all the weed that Emily and I grew and he’d track it out and sell it. Actually he was a lot of help to us sometimes; he was good at keeping up with things when he wasn’t too fucking strung out. But he was still undeniably fucked in the head with the sadness and had the death wish bad enough that it was a mistake to have him around when you were trying not to shoot dope. So what happened was James Lightfoot and I shot some dope and I didn’t get sick like I was supposed to have. This was more fucking up.

  I went Monday and got Emily from the detox. We stopped on the way back and bought some heroin. Things went pretty much back to normal and Emily was pissed at me because we were still on heroin and she said it was my fault.

  One mo
rning the landlord called and said he was coming over with an inspector from the city to inspect the house. Emily asked him when he was coming over. He said two hours. She said okay. The problem was the grow room. The plants were just beginning to flower. We had to tear them down. We had to take everything apart. There was nowhere to take the plants and they were too big and too many to hide, so I had to hack them into pieces and stuff them into garbage bags and put all the soil in garbage bags and stuff the garbage bags wherever they’d fit in the car while Emily was taking apart all the hardware. Then we took down the tent and scraped off the Mylar that was glued to the walls. It was a motherfucking disaster and it made it so we were even more fucked, but the landlord was none the wiser so there was that at least.

  Black went to jail. I was coming out of the psychiatrist’s office one evening when it was raining and I got a call from Raul. He told me. He said it was nothing major and Black’d probably get out on bail in a few days or maybe a week or two, but he said he’d sell me heroin till then if I wanted some heroin and I said I’d like to meet up with him right away. He had me meet him off of St. Clair. He was a while getting there. When he finally showed up it was almost ten o’clock. He said that he was sorry but he had been riding with his uncle and his uncle had got pulled over and the police had given them a hard time. I gave him some money and he gave me a bag of dope. The bag of dope was wrapped in a piece of white plastic torn off a shopping bag it looked like. I drove home.

  Emily and I were going to split the heroin up. I caught a smell off the bag of heroin and I told Emily and she smelled it too and we agreed that it smelled like Raul ate a lot of fruit snacks. After we shot the dope I called Raul. He asked what I thought of the heroin. I said the heroin was fine and I asked him if he always was going to stick the heroin up his ass before he sold it to me. He laughed.

  Dr. Kaufmann had made an appointment for me with a drug counselor at the hospital. So I went to that but the drug counselor’s office wasn’t well marked at all. So I couldn’t find it and I walked around the hospital in circles looking for it. When I found it I was 15 minutes late but it wasn’t my fault. They kept me waiting. Over an hour. Then I went through the whole thing with the nurse and she took my blood and asked me questions and she was very nice but the doctor, the drug counselor or whatever, was a dyed-in-the-wool motherfucker. I told him I didn’t have any confidence in Suboxones on account of they didn’t ever work on me at all. I tried them all the time. I’d get sick and I’d take a lot of them so as to not be sick and I could take four or even five, dissolving them under my tongue one after the other, and they wouldn’t help me for shit. I was telling the truth but he said I was a liar. He asked me what I was seeing Dr. Kaufmann for. I said I thought I was seeing Dr. Kaufmann for PTSD and he asked what could I have PTSD from and I said I’d been in Iraq. He asked me when. I said I’d got there in ’05 and left in ’06. He said the war had been over by then. So I left because I couldn’t stay there. And I remembered how when I was in Iraq I used to get chest pains. How I’d leave the wire all the fucking time and I started getting chest pains that would drop me to the floor like a heart attack and I couldn’t breathe, and then Shoo took me to see the PA at the battalion aid station, Captain I’ve-Forgot-His-Fucking-Name. And the PA—not a doctor, mind you, but he acted enough like one—wouldn’t see me and he told Shoo to tell me to come back at sick call the next morning. But I didn’t. I just had the chest pains instead. Normally I wasn’t around when they did sick call. Normally I was outside the wire maybe getting fucked up by a bomb or shot or something. I was nothing then and I’m still nothing.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  What ended up happening was Emily and I were fighting a lot. She was blaming me for everything that was wrong with her and I wanted her to shut up sometimes. We were both doing as much dope as we could get our hands on, and we would be high as shit and I’d nod out in my chair a little and drop lit cigarettes in my lap. Then she’d come downstairs with her video camera and start chasing me around the house going, Look at you! Yer so fucking high it’s disgusting! And I’d say what the fuck and she was high too and what did she mean.

  One thing really fucking us up was the Oxys were running out. Soon we wouldn’t be able to get them anymore. It wasn’t Big’s fault. Big would always get Oxys as long as they were making them. The problem was they weren’t making them like they used to. They had started making them so they were like hard rubber and you couldn’t crush them up, and if you did somehow, they’d gel up when you put water on them and it made it so you couldn’t shoot them. There were still some old ones going around but they were running out fast. Emily and I couldn’t do shit with anything we couldn’t shoot. Soon we were going to be stuck with just heroin, and Big didn’t sell heroin and we would be at the mercy of some dope boys, whom you couldn’t count on for shit, and we would get sick a lot more.

  School started in fall and I would go to class as much as I could because I had to and I had some luck with that. Emily always had to stay at school all day because she taught a remedial writing class for the undergraduates in addition to going to her own classes and her last class didn’t get over with until eight at night on Tuesday and Thursday. So I spent much of the days at home alone and not doing the things I was supposed to be doing. I’d get so depressed I couldn’t move. Emily would get to telling me I was a worthless fuck. And she was a cunt for that; but she had her reasons, I guess. All the same I didn’t like it and it didn’t help me.

  There was a girl in one of my classes and we had talked before and I knew some about her. I knew that she had a kid and that things were tough for her. She wanted me to help her get some heroin. I didn’t want to because she had a kid and all that. It seemed like the worst thing you could do, to give some kid’s mom heroin. But she asked me a few times so I brought her back from school one day and we got some heroin and we shot up in the kitchen and she said that she liked me and I said that I liked her too and that I hoped she’d find somebody who’d love her like she deserved to be loved. Then she kissed me. I’d been hoping she wouldn’t but I liked it. It was good to be kissed by her. It was good to be kissed by someone else. Her tits were hard and she pressed against me and grabbed my cock. I tried to take her pants off but she stopped me and said she was on the rag. I said fuck. She said, Let me lick it. I didn’t want that because I hadn’t taken a shower in almost three days and I hadn’t cut my pubic hair in a long time. I tried to take her pants off again and she said again that she was on the rag and she kept saying, Let me lick it. Then she got on her knees in front of me and started fucking with my belt. There was nothing I could do so I put my cock in her mouth. I could smell my cock and I knew it must have tasted real bad but what was done was done and I came and it came out real hard and some of it bounced off her teeth and went up her nose. She wiped the come off and said she had come up her nose and I felt good about that and bad about that at the same time. We didn’t say much after this and I drove her back to school. It was the last time we saw each other outside of school and when we saw each other at school after that we didn’t look at one another. And I felt bad about this and about how life was just slow death and getting your stupid cock sucked at random when you weren’t ready and how it was regrets and forgetting everything you ever had believed in.

  PART SIX

  A COMEDOWN

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  How do you get to be a scumbag?

  I got to be a scumbag because I needed money and because I was hanging around dope boys too much.

  The night wasn’t especially good. We drove around all night, Raul and Rider and I. We were looking for a certain car. We were going to rob the guy who owned the car. But we didn’t ever find him. We went to his house.

  Rider said, “He’s not here.”

  Raul said, “Are you sure this is his house?”

  Rider said, “I’m positive.”

  But he said it like he wasn’t positive.r />
  Rider had a scar, a crescent that traced the left side of his face. It wasn’t from an accident; someone had cut him. I bought heroin from Rider when there was nothing else. Rider was bad news. He had asked me if I could kill somebody for him. He needed me to kill somebody because he owed a lot of money and it was the best way to clear his debt. Rider was in trouble. He didn’t tell me that part. He just said I’d make 10 racks if I killed this guy. Anyway I’d said no.

  Rider was full of shit. He was the type who’d lie to you about what time of day it was and for no reason. He was the type to get people into fucked-up situations and hope that they’d perform miracles for him. Rider didn’t ever carry his own weight. But he was Raul’s boy. And Raul would believe him, like he’d believed him about this car.

  Eventually I got tired of it.

  I said to Raul, “This probably isn’t happening.”

  Raul said, “This is some bullshit.”

  Rider said, “Man, this nigga’s got at least a hundred racks.”

  But we were done listening to Rider.

  We dropped Rider off. I was burned out and I felt like shit. I hated the way I felt.

  I said to Raul, “What about the other thing? I can definitely do that.”

  He said, “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

  I said, “All you have to do is drive. I’ll do all the work.”

  He said okay.

  It was a quarter to six in the morning and I was about to be sick. I had no heroin and I had no money and I owed Raul $600. He didn’t want to front me anymore.

  I said, “You know I can’t do shit if I’m sick.”

  He had me take him to a trap house. He came out with a gram. He said that was it though. I dropped him off at his girl’s house. I said I’d call him in the afternoon. Then I went home. It was a quarter to seven. Snow was on the ground. It was old snow, dirty and iced over. Sometimes I’d forget what month it was.