Lit Riffs

by Matthew Miele

  KING HEROIN

  nelson george

  I’m a world of power and all know it’s true Use me once and you’ll know it, too

  “King Heroin”

  James Brown

  What you are about to read are excerpts from the memoirs of a man who calls himself Edgecombe Lenox aka Edge aka King Heroin. As comical as the name might strike some of you, Edge is not a jokester. He is a man who takes himself very seriously and you should as well, because in the seventies he was the biggest, smartest, most successful heroin dealer in Harlem, New York, which made him one of the biggest drug kingpins in the country. In the thoroughfares of the city he was called Mr. Untouchable because the authorities, try as they might, failed repeatedly to convict him.

  When I was on the street, there was a kind of style, a kind of cool, even grace, you won’t find anymore. It was in the way we spoke. The way our threads lay, the way we hung and laughed and made things happen. All that style has been replaced by a lack of brotherhood that disgusts me. It’s like the world has no center anymore.

  I know I sound nostalgic and old. Maybe even silly. But I know what we tried to do. We tried to impose order on the street without having to hurt people—though we always kept our options open. It’s the difference between a .45 and an Uzi. We never sprayed a street indiscriminately; we aimed precisely, we took out who needed to go and let civilians live in peace. After all, they were our customers. If you weren’t in the game, you couldn’t be hurt by the game. Play at your own risk. You could have lived on 145th and St. Nick your own life and not been hurt by my people.

  Well, no. That’s actually a lie.

  No need to lie. Not now. We really went out of our way not to shoot civilians. We just destroyed the world around them, block by block, like a damn virus. I mean Harlem was crumbling when I came of age. All the families that could were running out to Long Island or Queens or Jersey. All the cops and the TA workers and the mailmen. Shit, half my lieutenants had houses in Englewood or St. Albans living that comfortable-ass Negro American dream.

  Harlem was left with nothing but poor people, sad people, and weak-willed suckers and people like me—pimps, thugs, jackleg preachers, crooked cops, and peddlers of narcotics. These two groups of people, prey and predator, victim and victimizer, working men and people in the life, were what Uptown was all about after the marching and protesting had died down. Those whom civil rights had helped were gone. For those who got left behind, there was me and my crew with cellophane bags of white powder to take your mind where your body couldn’t afford to.

  When a junkie shoots up, his blood slides into the needle and is visible as the dope heads into his system. The needle and the vein become one milky, red-tinted substance, a new thing that bonds them together. That’s how my business worked. We commingled with the streets. We took over corners. We bogarted buildings. We owned police precincts. We injected ourselves into everything that linked Harlem to the rest of Manhattan.

  We ran Harlem because we could. There was no master plan. At least not at first. Not overtly. Not like we blueprinted it one night at Jagazzy’s. I think there was some racial pride involved. The Irish and the Jews and the Italians had all been sucking brown people’s money out of Uptown since before Duke Ellington opened his jar of pomade. So we were just asserting our ethnic rights.

  But I’d be lying a bit again. All that makes me sound like some damn nationalist on a soapbox in front of Micheaux’s on 1-2-5. Like behind all my dealing was some submerged political agenda. Power to the people! Free Huey! We shall overcome with a brick of China White cut with baking soda in the hand that wasn’t giving the black power salute.

  Fuck that. We were criminals.

  Now I can say that. I don’t have to act righteous anymore or justify myself like I used to. I ruled Harlem because it was there to be taken. I didn’t do it for black people or “the movement.” At the time I would not have admitted that. I would have quoted Malcolm or the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. I would have painted my organization in the bronze hues of salvation and empowerment. I would have given donations to Operation Push and even them Tom-ass niggas at the NAACP. And, like half the people from my generation, I would have been full of shit.

  Back then, everything we did could be explained by the struggle. You see, I preached discipline and force, and we enforced with cruel brutality. Even selling dope was a way, perhaps, to punish our weak-minded. If they were sad enough to buy my shit, should they survive? Jerry Butler sang, “Only the strong survive,” and that, beloved, meant me and mine.

  You know, we never made anyone buy our product. We set up shop but never bought ads. No billboards. No newspaper ads in the Amsterdam News. No jingles on ’LIB. We just made it available and the customers—the silly, stupid, and needy—lined up twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and sometimes twice on payday.

  IN THE YARD

  Every day I saw my tortured children. Man-children with eyes that surveyed the yard as if it were a street corner to capture. Most of them had bulked-up shoulders hunched like rottweilers as they strutted like streetwalkers. I would have liked to have had a hand in raising them. I could have brought them up like all the ones I once loved and schooled. I could have given them some class and some discipline to go along with all that heart. Yeah, these new jack, hip-hop, jiggy young ones got heart for days. If I’d had niggas like these back in the day, things would have ended right. I truly believe that.

  In a way I did raise them, I guess. I laid the foundation in the dope game that they’ve been following for twenty-odd years. They followed my path, straight from the concrete heaven of Lenox Avenue to the concrete hell the Feds built out here in Marion, Indiana. Yeah, we all ended up in the same place—might any way—but I know I could have changed the journey for all of us.

  About once a month a newbie would stroll by my bench, acting like he didn’t give a fuck. Some even stepped to me, trying to treat me like some crusty, old man not be respected, who had no knowledge of crack, the chronic, or that E shit they fuck with now. But I knew that they knew and they knew I knew what they didn’t. Sometimes it would take time—but then we had plenty of that—before they broke down and asked to hear what only I could relate. They’d finally acknowledge that while there were many a serious motherfucker in that gray steel Midwestern hell, there was only one who’d had the president of the United States drop a dime on them. That’s why they sought me out. I’d been that dangerous—I’d been that large. That’s why I was the only Edgecombe Lenox.

  THE BODIES OF BOYS

  juliana baggot

  Me and Crazy Janey was makin’ love in the dirt singin’ our birthday songs

  “Spirit in the Night”

  Bruce Springsteen

  I didn’t love the boys then the way I love them now, their lean hips, their hairless, muscled chests, their necklaces—a lot of Italian horns bobbing in the dips of collarbones—their loping gaits, their swelling pricks, their soft wet lips, and teary eyes, some were already deeply sentimental. Then I loved them with deep primal biology; I loved them because of an internal bent, a moist yearning imprinted heavily on my genes, perhaps passed down through my mother, stunted (and fattened, too) by her need for romance. I loved them like we were a country at war, like I was a bullet-wounded nurse, and sometimes I was compelled by a sweeping maternal drive. I had no choice. But now, bodies, bodies, boys, they are the home of my youth. Not a row house in Asbury Park, but the bodies of boys, sprawled out, adoring, that’s the place I was raised.

  I’ve tried to convince myself that collegiate academia is more like rock and roll. I don’t get up in front of my students like some old crank in a mustard-crusted cardigan arm-flapping, a chirping prattle, memorized book dust. No, I’m the kind of professor always trying to reveal our dirty little secrets in something other than fat-headed lingo. For example, the first day of class, Feminist Studies, entry level, I gave a talk on Self-Esteem Warfare. Michael Hanrahan was just another student, seco
nd row, halfway back, a boy, unusual, yes, in a class always dominated by brassy young women. I started with: Self-Esteem Warfare was a plot hatched by the mediocre minds of desperate, well-intentioned high school administrators. Until this point, they had been alternately bawling and shrugging in the face of calamity: the deterioration of society via the loose morals of high school girls wearing frosty lipstick, bicentennial tube tops, MIA dog tags, and tight jeans. The notion is this: girls have sex with boys because girls lack self-esteem and are seeking approval and love that is insufficient in their lives. In other words, we ached for our daddies. Freudian Theory had made its glorious way to the masses—I do not recall for them Mrs. Glee with the rub-rub of nylons as she patrolled the halls; the eggy Mr. Flint picking at the dismal sour creep of his boxer shorts; the breathless tenacity of them all, charging to catch us, electrified by their own urges, really, for each other, for us, our then beautiful bodies, rubbery and buoyant.

  Boys have sex because it feels good. There’s no stopping them. And, here we have the most logical example. Who could have stopped Michael Hanrahan, the boy who came in so very late each class that I told him I needed a written explanation? His car skidded across a thin plain of water, smashed into a telephone pole. He died driving too fast in the rain, his dick hard. And no one could have stopped him. It would have been un-American to try. (Maybe if he’d been relieved … maybe if there’d been a bullet-wounded nurse beforehand to tend to him.)

  The administration set out to cure girls of their tragic flaw, this weakness not for pleasure or even an inevitable biological yearning, but for acceptance. It was a nationwide call to arms, but I focus on New Jersey, specifically Asbury Park. (No one this far north knows Asbury Park, the ghetto on the Jersey shore, boarded-up casino, The Adriatic with its old regulars in fishing caps, listening to lounge music under leaky skylights, the minigolf course overgrown except for patches of indoor/outdoor carpet, hotels looking like Eastern Block old-age homes, the old Tilt-A-Whirl, the abandoned fun house, auto body shops, auto parts, paint shops and detailing, signs like “New Jersey’s Hottest Nite Spot,” closed, the old Greek statue: the Patriarch of Eternal Graces or is it Infinite Love? All I know is the adult-movie theater thrives and the ocean is the ocean, big wide blue, the widest eye.)

  I don’t tell my students that I’m talking about one girl, like me. I don’t even say: We will call her X. I don’t render my large mother or my witless father, or Mrs. Glee and Mr. Flint, deflated by another ball-busting school year, hunched over their gardens, hosing down their cars, because it’s summer. But nearly the end of summer. Because isn’t it always the end of summer? Isn’t there always a mist on the beach, a huddle of kids, arms stiff, hands in pockets. And girls, like X, like me, dumpling-eyed with ringing hips and punching hearts, strung out on screaming guitar and growling motors, aching. (My ass remembers the hot hood of a car.) And, the truth is, let’s set it straight, I was confident enough to get it. Weren’t there other girls who sat in their bedrooms, damp and listless?

  I tell them that not all sexually active girls lacked self-esteem. The prior argument, even as historically recent as the fifties, was that a girl shouldn’t have sex because of biological consequences of pregnancy, of which she alone had to bare the brunt. My mother and father know this argument too well. My mother told me that she knew of a girl who’d gotten rid of a baby before she showed. She could have done that, but didn’t. She would stroke my hair, me, her baby, and say, “Look, here you are, the joy of my life.” But it never rang quite true, her soft sack under her chin wagging, not quite.

  The pill did away with this argument. And a new one had to be fabricated. Self-Esteem Warfare was dirty pool. It allowed judgment not just on a girl’s abilities at self-restraint. No, it gave the girls sticks and asked them to poke at each other’s soul. Are you insecure? It asked. Do you like yourself? Are you some sad, lost girl that we should all feel so very sorry for?

  I’ve gotten drunk with the other women in my department. After a meeting, we went out for drinks, under the guise of bonding. And I gave in, drank too much, told sordid tales.

  Things that I don’t think of now, or try not to—driving someone’s Camaro into a chain-link fence for love. Little stories that end: You know how that goes, followed by a semicircle of silence and blank stares. And a mousy cardigan picked up the slack by telling the story, so boldly, of the first penis she ever saw. When she was a freshman at Williams, a frat boy whipped his out on a fire escape at a party. She got so flustered she cried. I don’t belong here. The other women cheer her on. They leer at the boy, now a man somewhere in an easy chair. How could he? Men are savage, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t miss my daddy. I would like to admit to nothing short of perfection: our cheeks were pink, our knees like wax fruit never bruised. Our mothers chirped like birds and our fathers kept map-folded handkerchiefs in their back pockets. But Asbury Park wasn’t short on grim reality. Some people develop a split personality; I developed a split landscape, shrugging off the boardwalk, worn and rotting, held together by rusty nails that could slice open feet, the roller coaster’s click, click, click and its labored whining motor, its seat belts frayed and busted, the gray, sickened ocean and wheezing gulls, for the terrain of boys. The administration was right. I was lacking. Things like love were insufficient. But this is always true. It’s the human condition.

  Wasn’t it true for Michael Hanrahan? His handwritten note appeared in my mailbox: Dear Professor, I’m in love with you. I find it hard to come to class on time because I get nervous and pace and loose track of time. Sincerely, Michael Hanrahan.

  Loose track of time, maybe that was it, that alone. If time is a track, it is loose. His beautiful slip, loose, it’s why I asked him the next day to come and see me after class, in my office. Humans are weak. It isn’t Asbury Park’s fault, is it? Even though we all know that a town can rip the bones from your back. And my back was weak, ironically. I was that girl in the brace. Stiffened in a case, I wasn’t allowed to slouch unless I slipped out of it, out of the house, into the night.

  And I did. I don’t recall names. I’ve worked hard not to recall names. I don’t go back. Funerals are the only exception—my mother’s enormous casket, the men staggering, legs stiffening, under its weight. I don’t carry yearbooks in a box when I move.

  Let’s call him D, that first boy. I remember our radio-lit bones, our pearly oils, how the car, sealed shut, filled with steam so like a bathroom pumped with hot shower water I could only think of my mother, her big body, sausage-taut, rocking me on the tub’s edge. It’s what you do with a child suffering midnight croup. I don’t have children, but I know this much. Each cough clanged my ribs, my own voice was an animal bark and moan. Slowly my throat opened again, my body went slack with something near sleep, my hand a tiny pink star on her large sagging breast covered by her thin nylon nightgown. The car was hot like that. I cried out urgently. We both eventually relaxed, a cooling sweat. I rested my hand on the doll-hat nipple of his tan chest, a cure. It was the end of summer, like it is now. It began to rain, like it did when Michael was driving too fast. He wasn’t going home.

  No one rushes home. He was going somewhere else.

  D drove me home past unwashed churches, seam-rusted silos, a man caught in his headlights, shoveling a raccoon from the roadside. I stood in front of my house after he pulled off. Our house tilted forward, an errant tooth in the row, because my fat mother sat nose pressed to the window, staring out at the street; this was somebody’s idea of a joke. During the day she could look out on the kids with broomstick handles and halved tennis balls, and in the evening the dim, red-fringed windows of the lantern-strung Chinoiserie, where couples leaned together in the dull glow. I was fifteen. (I absorbed her desire.) She’d been waiting for me, dimpled, pale arms perched in an open window. But when I arrived, her face slid inside. She wouldn’t ask about the night. She was a nervous woman. (One night, she put her head down on her arm on the sill and her heart stopped, a dead muscle.) What could
she have said? I was late. Shouldn’t she have said something?

  The basement’s bare bulb shined through the window wells; and the dark house, belly-lit, seemed to hover just above earth like a spaceship. My father lingered underground, wide fingertips running over the greased gears of other people’s clocks and toaster ovens, a side job. Through the open upstairs windows, where curtains billowed like veils, I could hear my mother from their bed, calling his name, calling. But he didn’t come. And then her face appeared again in the window. An urgent whisper, “What the hell’s amatter with you? Why aren’t you coming in?”