Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  “ ‘No,’ I tell him.

  “ ‘No you don’t remember, or no they weren’t working?’

  “When I say, ‘No they weren’t working,’ he tells me to take a second to think about it. What you have to understand, guys, is that this is a good man. A decent, moral human being who’s lost two decent, moral human beings, and he wants to protect as many people as possible now, people above and below him. And that’s natural, in my opinion. That’s why we go into this job, to protect as many people as possible. And really, when it comes right down to it, if I can keep a brother away from the wolves in Internal Affairs, then that’s what I’m going to do, ten times out of ten.

  “I ask Landry what does he want me to tell them, and he says, ‘If you don’t remember, I want you to say you don’t remember. There’s nothing wrong with that.’

  “He didn’t have to say, ‘No one will trust the testimony of a cop who was blotto drunk on the job.’ But he didn’t say, either, that by protecting our butts today we might be jeopardizing the lives of future uncles, who at the very least should expect to have working kel-mics. But that’s all theoretical, you know? And this is a real person standing over me on the stoop, saying, ‘If you don’t remember, you don’t remember,’ and I dropped my head between my knees, which I guess he interpreted as a nod of acceptance, which I guess it sort of was.

  “He asks if he can get me anything and I tell him a bottle of water. Ten minutes later this pretty blond patrol brings me a warm can of Diet Pepsi that’s probably been sitting in her squad car all day. I popped the tab so she wouldn’t feel offended, but I didn’t drink any of it. I wasn’t even thirsty. The whole reason I wanted the water was to wash off my face. I had this crazy thought that my wife was going to show up and I didn’t want her to see me with Barnes’s blood all over my mouth.

  “Later, back at the rumpus, Landry pulls the buy board off the wall. He dismantles it in front of us, gets rid of the Polaroids and everything. Okay, well, that’s a nice gesture, but now what? Because we are properly traumatized, let me tell you. Dudes are bugging out, so a couple days later Commissioner Kelly gives every undercover in the department—Firearms, Narcotics, whatever—he gives every uncle an opportunity to flip over to investigator, no questions asked. Now, I don’t think the Big Bosses really thought that one through. Because what happens is pretty much every uncle abandons ship. Almost all these guys, they had become undercovers in the first place so they could get to investigator one day. And even if you wanted to stick around, your wife was going to make you switch, or, like me, you got divorced. So now the department’s all out of uncles, and the only people buying drugs are the drug addicts. Unacceptable, right?

  “So the department reaches out to you guys. The replacements—and I don’t mean that in a bad way. You’re just the next wave is all. And now here we are, déjà vu all over again. Five years pass and none of you have heard these stories, so the Big Bosses figure, ‘Hey, let’s get some buy boards back on the walls, what’s the worst that can happen?’

  “I’m just telling you, God forbid, if I get killed from all this crazy numbers-chasing? The one-upmanship? Not a single Big Boss is allowed to come to my funeral. No one above sergeant. Not Prondzinski, not Nielsen, not Captain Morse, none of them. I’m serious. If any of those snakes gets within three hundred feet of my casket, I will hold each of you responsible and haunt you all for the rest of your lives. Remember that. It’s gonna be some idiot drug dealer that pulls the trigger, but it’s the department pushing us in front of the gun. Just saying. God forbid.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Unable to see clearly, unable to breathe deeply, Janice woke up on a white leather couch. Her nose was congested, her eyes inflamed and leaking water. A rancid fuzz coated her tongue. Mister Maplewood—an obese orange tabby cat—sat atop her chest, crushing her, pawing at her blouse as if kneading dough. The good news: he belonged to Fiorella, which meant Janice hadn’t accidentally fucked a stranger last night, and, even more important, her gun would be locked up inside the apartment’s safe. The bad: she was allergic to cats. She sat up on the couch, to try to get some air into her lungs, but the inertia-prone Mister Maplewood clung to her by his claws, disengaging himself only when she let loose a fantastic, head-clearing sneeze.

  “God bless you,” said a tiny voice.

  With her vision still bleary, she rubbed at her eyes—the very worst thing she could’ve done—until she could see the outline of Fiorella’s nine-year-old son, Hector the Magnificent, magician/superhero. He stood in the living room’s entryway wearing his beloved Superman costume, the cape more orange than red, hand-sewn by Vita as a replacement for the original, which he’d lost on what Fiorella called a disastrous horse-drawn-carriage ride through Central Park. His head turned to watch the cat gallop past him toward the back of the apartment.

  “What are you doing up so early?” Janice asked him.

  “Couldn’t sleep.” Like so many children of police officers, he had the haywire hair and shiny eye baggage of the apprentice insomniac. “Bad dreams.”

  “I get those, too,” she said.

  “I tried to tell Mama, but she wouldn’t wake up.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” she said. She swung her sweaty legs off the sticky couch. Normally someone who slept in the nude with an eye mask and earplugs, she had—thank God—kept her shirt on, matted now with dander, and her underwear, but her wool-felted pencil skirt lay crumpled on the carpet. Her purse strap curled out from under the coffee table. She pulled it toward her to check the time, but apparently her phone battery had gone dead. Of course it had. She squeezed her saddlebags, hating herself. She hated everything, everywhere, except for these eye-rubs, which felt amazingly good and for which she’d suffer all day. “Mama and Aunt Janice had a rough night catching bad guys,” she told him. “But we’ll get her up real soon, okay?”

  “She was all cold,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her mouth was full of upchuck.”

  Janice ran past him. Still in her underwear, she burst without knocking into Fiorella’s room, where the bedsheets were crumpled but empty. Thick curtains on the windows made it difficult to see. The room might’ve smelled like upchuck, just as he’d said, but she couldn’t tell with her nose stuffed. A humidifier puffed steam into the room. She stepped closer, hunched over, for some reason afraid to make a sound. She worried Fiorella had rolled off the bed at some point in the night and got herself trapped on the floor, wedged between the box spring and the wall. A clown jumped out from behind the door. It wheeled toward her, quickly through the darkness, with its pasty skin and green hair and bloodied lips, and it rose up into Janice’s face and said, “Boo.”

  She staggered away, screaming, until she hit the edge of the mattress and fell backward onto the bed. Hector’s cape trailed behind him as he vaulted into the room. He, too, was screaming, but with laughter, like the clown, whose face was softening into a thick rubber Joker mask. The body beneath it belonged to Fiorella. Already dressed for a day of meth clinics, she wore a white Mets jersey, number 13, yellow under the pits, and acid-washed jeans with a pair of guns—her own and Janice’s—holstered to the waist.

  “Yes!” she cried. “Oh man, Itwaru—you shoulda seen your face.”

  “I could’ve attacked you!”

  “Oh yeah,” Fiorella said, gesturing to Janice collapsed across the sheets. “You was all ready to bust out your jujitsu moves.”

  “Did I do good?” Hector asked.

  “Jesus Christ,” Janice said.

  “Hey, no cussing!” Fiorella told her. “I don’t want you teaching my baby boy no bad habits.” She tried poking Janice in the ribs but kept getting her hand slapped away. “Hey, but I bet you’re not hungover anymore, am I right? Huh? Huh, huh, huh? Am I right? Man oh man, Itwaru, your face is like covered in hives. You want some Benadryl?”

  One question at a time: did she still feel hungover? Yes, as a matter of fact, she did, maybe worse than be
fore. And no, she did not want a Benadryl. Well, actually, yes, she did want a Benadryl, but with her four-buy ultimatum she couldn’t risk its drowsy-making side effects. A lint roller, though, would’ve been great. And maybe an EKG machine. A couple of Advils. Before leaving the room, Fiorella tossed the Joker mask into Janice’s lap, and Hector, who surely sensed time running short, followed his mama out into the hall. She’d have to call a cab soon, to take her and Janice to the rumpus, or rather eight blocks away from the rumpus, outside A.R.’s Tavern, where they’d both left their cars, but in the meantime Fiorella was telling him to get dressed for school. He’d be waiting for the bus downstairs at Mrs. Bakkemo’s, she said, to which he responded that he’d spent all night at Mrs. Bakkemo’s. No fair. Nothing ever was. Janice lay back down across the bed and put on the mask. The only oxygen she could breathe in there was her own. Out in the hall, but sounding much farther away, Hector was asking if he could at least keep his Superman costume on under his school clothes. The humidifier’s puffing became harder to hear. Strangely peaceful inside this mask, Janice pretended she was dead, her go-to method for falling asleep. Down at her ankles, unseen, Mister Maplewood, who hated to be ignored, tensed his jaw, ready to chomp.

  The Flushing Hospital Methadone Maintenance Outpatient Clinic opened its doors at seven thirty in the morning for the usual motley of men and women in dress shoes, tennis shoes, flats, pumps, clogs, Uggs, stilettos, galoshes, wellies, high-tops, Timberlands, and Timberland knockoffs. A skinny young white guy had a jump rope tied around his raggedy loafer, to keep the sole from flopping away. Every time he took a step he had to pull up on the other end of the rope, as if he were both puppet and puppeteer. Surely a rubber band or some tape would’ve worked better, but maybe he liked the attention. Or maybe the shoe had fallen apart only moments earlier, on the cold walk over here, and he’d found the jump rope in a sidewalk garbage can. Hey. Whatever works.

  Heroin addicts, these men and women filed into the clinic every weekday morning for a prescription bottle half full—they might argue half empty—with enough liquid methadone to curb their daily cravings. Better a patch than a carton of cigarettes, the thinking went. Better a shot of opiates than a plunging needle. Back in the day, addicts were instead given a small white oblong pill. A nurse behind glass in a little prison of the clinic’s construction would ask for ID, fumble the card, look up names in the system, potentially order a urine test, pass back the ID card, collect the ten to fifteen dollars, root around in the register for change, pour out a little cup of water, slide the water and pill over to the patient, make the patient swallow it all right there, then ask the patient to open their mouth and say ahhhh. Needless to say, all that nonsense gunked up the cogs. Patients who braved the long lines went to work late, got fired, and returned to the streets with even more incentive to get high. But in a rare case of bureaucratic pruning, New York’s meth clinics adopted a grab-it-and-get-lost policy. Keep it moving, no more mouth checks. As a compromise to law and order, however, the clinics converted their meth into liquid form, which was theoretically harder to resell, especially since patients needed to present their empty prescription bottle the following day to re-up. A few old-timers with cast-iron stomachs downed their shots then and there, top o’ the morning to yis, but most brought it back home, where they could chase it with soda to wash out the medicinal cherry taste. Or they took it to work, to their cubicles and corner offices. But unfortunately there were some, because there are always some, who sold their doses outside the clinic to meth addicts unable or unwilling to put their name in the system. All liquid? No problem. Patients poured their doses into empty coffee cups. They doubled the ten dollars they’d just given the nurse and used the twenty to buy heroin from one of the many for-profit dealers stalking the sidewalk.

  With all that activity, the department’s Big Bosses assumed making buys here would be as easy as fishing with dynamite. Just show up and collect bodies. But meth clinics were a closed-circuit ecosystem, with hand-to-hand-to-hand-to-hands, from the nurses to the heroin addicts to the meth addicts to the heroin dealers. They all knew each other. Of course they all knew each other: like coworkers, they came to the same spot at the same time, every morning, Monday through Friday. Occasionally the uncles might get lucky and find someone who didn’t know any better—St. Michael, the patron saint of police officers, supplied them with a lemming-like stream of stupid criminals, fuck-ups guaranteed to fuck up—but even then they had only about five minutes before the word hit the wire and they got burnt.

  At the Flushing Hospital Methadone Maintenance Outpatient Clinic, it took less than thirty seconds. All the uncles had to do was step out of the car.

  “Hey,” said the guy with the jump rope around his shoe, “who called the cops?”

  They got back in the car. With that miserable prick Gonz riding shotgun, and Puffy sitting bitch between Janice and Richie the Receptionist, Tevis drove toward the next set, the Narco Freedom Clinic in Long Island City. The rest of the uncles—Fiorella, Eddie Murphy, et al.—were on their own respective meth tours, bouncing around Queens in unmarked Impalas that Janice imagined smelled exactly like this one, like a small and toxic distillery. Her stuffy nose provided only so much interference. Her stomach grumbled without hunger. At the rumpus she had pounded down two cups of coffee, but now in her hands she was holding an empty Dunkin’ Donuts cup, her prop for today’s role. Tevis and Gonz kept their own empty cups in the plastic holder beneath the radio, which had been turned off so the uncles could more effectively argue. Not about—are you kidding?—the efficacy of the methadone clinic system, or rehabilitation versus incarceration, or Clinton versus Obama, but whether Puffy should be allowed to piss into a plastic bag.

  “I’m telling you,” said Gonz in the interest of mayhem, “it’s not good to hold it. Really. That’s how people end up on dialysis.”

  “Dialysis!” Puffy pleaded.

  “Forget it,” Richie said with a cell phone against his ear, on hold with an office-supplies wholesaler so he could replace the buy board with a better buy board, a magnetic one in a more tasteful wooden frame. “It’s unacceptable,” he told Puffy. “Seriously, I’m dead ass here. Just … just think of something else.”

  Puffy, who misunderstood the suggestion, said, “I could go in the Dunkin’ Donuts cup, but I’m not sure it’d be big enough.”

  Claustrophobic, per usual, she powered down her window, but Tevis powered it back up from the front. No cool air allowed. They needed to look as sweaty as smack addicts when they reached LIC’s Narco Freedom.

  “Cup or bag,” she said, “either way, I’m a definite no.”

  Tevis also claimed to be a definite no, but then why’d he keep driving past all the gas stations? There wasn’t any time to stop, he said. The clinics shuttered around noon, but by nine o’clock most of the for-profit heroin dealers would have moved on to their second shift outside NA meetings. Tevis pushed the odometer’s needle past forty, as far as traffic would allow. After Narco Freedom, they would have to drive to the meth clinic at Elmhurst Hospital in the 115 Precinct, to appease Sergeant Hart and his investigators, who were all still annoyed she’d left the Martys’ apartment empty-handed. Usually urgency didn’t start building until closer to the end of the month, but with that nonmagnetic, aluminum-framed board hanging on the rumpus’s wall, everyone felt added pressure to clock out the day with a buy. After Elmhurst, they’d go to the Psychiatric and Addiction Recovery Services center in Rego Park. Then a storefront meth clinic on Archer Avenue. But hold up, one thing at a time: they needed to argue about the fastest way to get to Narco Freedom. Jump on the Grand Central Parkway, the most direct route? Or stay on Northern Boulevard, so as to bypass JFK traffic?

  It sounded like water spraying the shower curtain, Puffy pissing into that plastic bag.

  “Unacceptable!” Richie said.

  “Shh,” Puffy said. “You’re gonna make me spill.”

  It seemed silly not to at least take a peek. And there it w
as: circumcised, thin and long, without any stage fright. She was unimpressed by all this, but a part of her, a pinkie-size part of her, appreciated his willingness to treat her as an equal. Was that insane? Probably, but she grew up with a sister, no brother, spent half her life in a house with three women. She imagined that if she weren’t here in the car, there’d be four dicks in one bag, with Gonz potentially shitting into a Pringles can.

  “A satin finish?” Richie cooed into the phone. “Now is that on the whiteboard itself or just the frame?”

  Gonz also had his phone out, not to talk to anyone, but to take a picture with the camera. She turned away from them all to stare out the window. Go ahead and crop her out of this photo. Unseen, but close by behind Northern Boulevard’s billboards and gas stations, her father was probably standing on the artificial putting green in his auto-repair shop, practicing his stroke, a busy Big Boss himself. Up ahead, under a broken traffic light, an Indian patrolman blew softly on a whistle. He windmilled his arm with the listless energy of a cop out in the cold for too long. She thought she recognized him, or at least that big nose of his, from the Academy, or maybe the department’s Desi Society for South Asian American police officers, or maybe she just wanted to recognize him, or rather she wanted him to recognize her so she could give him a little flutter wave as they drove by. Make him wonder: Hey, what’s Itwaru doing in that unmarked Impala? How’d she get out of the uniform already? Because even with the stench of urine filling up this already cramped backseat, she still felt happier to be here and not there, her and not him, Patrol Officer Nobody who had nothing to look forward to all day except the possibility of catching a car without its tags, or a passenger littering out the window, as Puffy was asking her to do now.

  “What?” she said. “No, are you crazy? Get that out of my face.”