He remembered the dealers on the Boardwalk in Regent Park, how they carried around fisted wads of twenty-dollar bills, how his cousin Kipp kept a roll of red fifties down the front of his pants, with one or two halos of brown hundreds layered between them, like the rings in a tree that denoted an exceptional season. After all this time, those spools of money were still the largest he’d ever seen, had access to. And it was just the kind of money he needed to make now.
So Steven found himself walking in the general direction of his old home, passing haunts that had changed, and haunts that had not. It was 1984, the name of a famous book, he’d heard, about authoritarian figures watching you as unwaveringly as the camera in The Quiet Room, as the ghost cars that cruised the perimeter of the Boardwalk. And because this was his first night AWOL, when more than ever, the surveying eyes of Toronto would be on the lookout for him, he decided to take to the back alleys.
Steven loved alleyways, loved how they were made up of the parts of people’s lives that were most hidden, most indicative, most real. The only cars that were parked in them either gleaming-new or corroding-old, tiny mouths of rust around wheel wells flaking open like cold sores; televisions with imploded cathode-ray tubes and screens a spiderweb grey, spun around the point of impact; broken umbrellas pressed flat on the ground, tattered and bat-winged into a sprawl like the fossil of a pterodactyl stretching out into mudstone; and brick walls frosted with the acrylic of vandalism, graffitists with their strange hierarchy and one-upmanship, spray paint cancelling certain designs while others were left expressly untouched, framed by signatures and symbols encroaching with tentative caution.
Steven crossed Parliament and into Regent Park and had soon found someone he recognized to bring him up-to-date. He learned that his aunt and uncle had moved away (probably for the best, as he’d intended on pounding at their door the first time he passed by, giving them an earful, maybe more). Of the two cousins he revered most in the household, Natalie—of past Sunshine Girl fame—had become a prostitute and rumoured heroin addict, while Kipp, quite the reverse, was cleaner than ever and had ambitiously moved up in the world. Leaving his small-time dealings and corner-store robberies behind, he’d gained himself the reputation as the savviest mover of handguns in underground Toronto. By Regent Park standards, he was rich.
Kipp was glad to see him, reaching up to ruffle his hair when he opened the door, pulling him inside. As they caught up and reminisced, they were both careful not to broach the topic of his aunt or uncle or the fact that Steven had been committed after they’d outwardly rejected him, beginning a long list of tribulations that also went unmentioned. References to the past were kept nostalgic and fleeting. Besides, the present was much more interesting. And as if reading Steven’s mind, Kipp handed him a bottle of Moosehead, walked to the window to steal a look outside, and started talking about the entrepreneurial mood in the streets, how, these days, and in only the last few months, the opportunity to make big, big money had sprung up out of nowhere. Steven chuckled, pried the cap off his beer, and listened like a fox to a rodent under the snow.
It had come in from Los Angeles, and had swept across the continent as fast as cars could drive. It was a drug that hit hard, didn’t last long, and every first-time buyer became an instant regular customer. It was essentially cocaine, but instead of needing a laboratory, dangerous reactions, and chemists to produce it, anyone with access to coca bushes, baking soda, and water could do the trick. The water inside caused it to sizzle and “crack” when you lit it, hence lending it the name that most people had adopted. And as long as you didn’t screw up like his sister Maya, he’d warned, and start smoking it yourself, you could be a rich man in no time. Kipp weighed out the look on Steven’s face, then picked up the phone. “I know a guy who just got a ton of the shit. Start you out.” He dialled a number, ear to the receiver, stole another glance through the window. “Hey, Stevie,” he said before the person on the other end had answered. “Need a place to stay till y’get settled?”
It was better money than he’d ever hoped for. Supply could barely keep up with demand, and people naturally trusted him, many of them remembering his face and name from the days he’d run errands for Kipp. He soon acquired the reputation of being a “smart kid,” someone who steered clear of the hard stuff and had a commercial edge, someone who was either going to become a formidable presence in Regent or find a way out of it.
By the time his eighteenth birthday came around, he had a coil of bills so thick he’d stopped counting them, roughly dividing it into thirds, carrying two on his body and stashing one in his room at Kipp’s place. However, as good as things were going for him, the scene had its drawbacks. Crack was everywhere, and everyone was smoking it, a constant burnt-candy smell wafting between the walls and blocks of the housing complex, puffs of sweet-plastic smoke rising from corners where kids were crouching in the dark, glass pipes hovering close to their lips, having just bought a “twenty” from him. Twenty bucks for a half-gram enveloped in Saran Wrap, ripped away and lit up every few minutes to maintain the effect, which would, at most, last a half-hour, only to find them strung out, open-mouthed, and frantically looking for more. Or ways to get more.
He sometimes traded it for sex but was famously choosy with whom he made this arrangement. One of the girls he slept with surprised him one bright winter afternoon with yet another drawback. She’d just heard his family name for the first time. “Steven Greig, eh?” She looked him over impishly. “How much you wanna bet I know all about the first time you got laid,” hands on a set of bony hips, “Steven Greig.”
“Yeah?” he said with little interest really, reaching into his pocket and producing a “forty” for her, as agreed. She told him how she knew Kirsti Farley, how they’d become good friends after he “left” the neighbourhood. Kirsti had talked fondly of him, said they’d both been at the wading pool when someone got shot there, that they ran away and hid together, said she’d lost her virginity to him before either of them had hair below the beltline.
Steven nodded, asked how she was doing now, where she was, in Canada, the world.
She rubbed her cheek, “Well . . . last time I saw her she was talking shit. Smokin’ lots and had, like, this great idea to like, pretend to hook. You know? Like, agree on a price with the guy, get the cash beforehand, as usual, but then, like, pull a knife or something, tell the guy to get out of his car, then drive a few miles away, and like, dump it and walk off. Said she did it once, and it worked like a charm, so . . .” she finished, seemed about to leave, find a warm corner to smoke in.
“And?” Steven asked, holding on to her arm.
“And nothing.” A shrug. “Haven’t seen her since.” She pulled her arm out of Steven’s grip and walked away, across an empty courtyard, over compressed snow and fairy rings of dog urine. He watched her knock on a door, exchange a few words with the fat man who opened it, and disappear inside.
It got him thinking, all these unhappy endings. Maybe it was time to go, take what he’d managed to save and run. Make do. Make it make do. Because, though he’d always known that the world in the inner city was in a state of constant and varying decay, it occurred to him for the first time that, possibly, he had no choice but to decay a little along with it. Maybe the easier money was to make, the more, somehow, it cost.
That night, he promised himself he’d leave in a week or two. Swore to it, honest to goodness, once and for all. But then came the evening he was walking back from the Boardwalk, turned a corner, heard a thump, felt nothing, no pain, no panic, just a slow and slothful writhing to wake up, lying face down on a frigid sidewalk with the biggest headache of his life. His pants were still undone, and he didn’t have to feel for the hidden wads of cash on his body to know they were gone. Furious, he almost told Kipp about it. But in the end refrained, knowing that, if he did, someone, somewhere, would have been shot, probably killed. No, he had to keep looking ahead, far ahead. And he had to stay focused on that place—wherever it was—t
hat place with a lake by its side. So, with a strained and less-than-stoical resolve, he used the last third of his savings to buy as much “cornbread” as he could get his hands on. Then got back to work.
Only now he was more cautious of where he walked and dealt, and less cautious of who he sold to, even dealing to one of the local prostitutes who everyone else who was working a corner refused, on account of her being pregnant. It seemed absurd that drug dealers should have ethical inhibitions, but they did. And it was for that very reason that Steven went out of his way to sell to her—it was a matter of principle.
Because if there was anything he detested, it was how, when one human being held something that another desperately wanted, they acquired an instant self-righteousness. He’d seen it living on the streets; the ridiculous things people did with the homeless, crazies, drunks, and addicts who were begging there, middle-class men and women delivering a sanctimonious speech while handing down an apple or a half-eaten sandwich, explaining in a sympathetic voice that they weren’t giving money as they feared it would be spent in the wrong way. He sometimes daydreamt of the perfect reaction to this, picturing himself dangling one of those good people’s paycheques in his hand, miming that he was just about to hand it over, saying, “Now, you poor misled thing, I want to give you this, but I’m pretty sure you’ll spend it on wrongful things, on things that won’t nurture you or fulfill you in any way, but will empty you instead—like an Audi, or needless renovations, or manicures for your lawn, your nails, your Chihuahua.” His eyebrows raised piteously into a sloping capital “A.” “Okay?” Then he’d place their cheque in his pocket, hand over some food stamps instead, pat them on the brow with condescending benevolence, and prance away with an air that was so self-satisfied it would look like he was floating.
In Steven’s mind, he sold crack to a pregnant woman because it was ethical, because it was her choice to make and not his, or anyone else’s for that matter. However, such progressive thinking also had its drawbacks. In mid-July 1985, her water broke, and knowing she would have to go to the hospital and through the double ordeal of childbirth and withdrawal completely on her own, under duress and in pain, she stumbled out onto the Boardwalk to find a little peace and euphoria to inhale just before the ambulance could take her away.
It was a mess. Seeing her, people who normally stayed away from the brazen and troubled youth came out of their houses and crowded around, the skin of their bare arms representing every shade in a caramel rainbow, Irish descendants, Sri Lankan immigrants, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Vietnamese, Philippine, Indian, Jamaican, Somali, Congolese, their languages washing into one another, making the same urgent observation that no one seemed to really understand but Steven. Sirens undulated, became swollen, grew closer from two directions. The prostitute screamed. The throng pulsed with the sound of her voice. Some men ran to help guide the ambulance to the scene while two women moved in closer, touching her belly, her back. She shoved their hands away, faltering onto the cement now, her mini-skirted legs straight out in front of her, filmed over with the glistening of amniotic fluid speckled with blood capillaries, like black lint on a pink sweater. She held her head, quivered, seemed about to scream again. Someone shawled a thin blanket over her shoulders, which she tried to shirk off but didn’t succeed. The bleat of a siren close by, doors slamming shut, a white-uniformed man muscling through the bodies for a preliminary assessment of the situation, then back out for the stretcher, clearing people away.
What happened next happened fast. Steven mumbled a demand to someone standing beside him, took their pipe, un-Saran-Wrapped a rock from his pocket, then straddled her from behind, squatting, hands out in front of her face—and lit it. She knew what to do. The crowd did not. When the paramedics parted the mob, they paused to gawp at Steven in the same way that everyone else was. No one was able to speak. He stood up, pocketing the spent pipe, meeting their eyes. Were it another time in his life he would have happily spat onto the ground at their feet, but now, all he could think to do was turn around, pull the hood of his hoodie over his head, hands in the kangaroo pocket at his belly, and slink into the afternoon streets.
He saved manically for the two months following this, talked less, thought more. He thought of the people in the asylum, of the families in the baroque suburbs that he’d briefly been a part of, of the pushers and gunrunners around him, of the pregnant prostitute, of Kirsti, of Sam. And he wondered, maybe there was no such thing as “getting out.” Maybe everyone was living in a kind of institution, just like the asylum was, where the fodder was feeding the stock feeding the fodder. Maybe everyone was festering in their own self-inflicted wounds.
Then the opportunity of a lifetime landed in his lap. It presented itself one commonplace morning after he’d groaned out of bed and was walking into his living room, adjusting his testicles deep in his jockey shorts. He stopped, standing there looking at a man with a handgun raised up at him, a revolver. He was checking it, winking an eye through the holes of the cylinders as if Steven were the sun, rotating it full circle, deliberately, steadily, like a sundial in time-lapse photography. When he was satisfied, he set it back in its housing with the dark of his hand.
“That’s the kid you should talk to,” said Kipp, delicately gesturing for Steven to take his hands out of his underwear.
“Y’don’t say.”
“Got my word. But ask around if y’like. He’s sound.” Kipp looked pleased that Steven’s hands were now in his armpits, forearms across his chest. “Stevie, this’s Brice. Brice needs to move some shit.”
Brice then explained his predicament. He wasn’t from around there, was just passing through in fact, had heard Kipp’s name from a few different people, and needed to buy some guns. He also needed to unload a bulk of crack he’d fortuitously come into. And fast, before he started crossing borders. When he said the weight and price—no haggling tolerated—Steven could barely believe his ears, trying to shift coolly, still standing around in his underwear. Okay. Deal. Brice wrote an address on a ripped corner of a flyer and told him to be there at nine that night, sharp. He bought three handguns from Kipp and, before closing the door, addressed Steven once more, leaning on the doorknob in his stylish clothes, his shirt a faded pink, hair feathered, a sapphire-coloured stud in one of his earlobes: “See ya t’night then.”
This was it. Steven could resell the shipment to the guy who normally supplied him and in this one transaction make enough money to leave the inner city for good. He counted his pennies and was short four hundred and eighty dollars. He borrowed five from Kipp and waited for the sun to rise through the smokestacks, leisurely arc over the wires, and ebb behind the apartment blocks.
It wasn’t ideal that the address was in the Jane and Finch area, the traditional rival of Regent Park, but he doubted it mattered much. He was meeting someone who had nothing to do with the city, knew nothing about the squabbling of adversary neighbourhoods, the politics of local demographics. He took the bus, even paid, and arrived early, more excited than nervous, rubbing his hands together as if he were cold. And when he walked into the apartment and got a sense of the general atmosphere inside, any apprehension he might have had thinly slipped away like sweet-plastic smoke. This wasn’t a drug deal from the movies with shootout potential; it was real life, with real synthesized music from a ghetto blaster, real middle-aged men sitting comfortably around a table who were benign-enough looking to be real store owners and restaurant proprietors. They looked so respectable, in fact, that he doubted any of them even lived there. They were the kind of people who had houses, and in nice neighbourhoods. Green ones. Kind ones.
Business first, they exchanged merchandise for money, Brice counting it cautiously and Steven taking a good whiff of the drugs, which smelled and looked exactly like the stuff perpetually jammed under his fingernails from cutting it. Done deal, duffle bag in hand, standing a bit gawkily, they asked if he wanted to stay for a drink, somebody pouring a glass of amber fluid from one of the three bottles on th
e table, lighting a cigarette. The liquor looked expensive.
Steven glanced at the door, back at the table, down at the bag in his hand. He felt light, calm, like he was about to go on his first-ever holiday, already packed and ready. He hadn’t had much to celebrate in his life, but he certainly had something now.
“Sure.” He found himself shrugging and sat down beside the most taciturn of them all, the duffle on the floor beside him, leaning against his foot.
“Bourbon?”
“Sure.” Steven had only ever heard of bourbon before, never seen it, tasted it, smelled it: a smell of perfumed honey, he noticed, now that he was swishing it around in his glass.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
“Chin.” Clink-clink. Clink.
And it even tasted good. Velvety and smooth, a welcomed warmth slipping down the walls of his esophagus, wetting the membranes. A second sip. Conversation rolling along easily. Cigarette offered. Thanks. Lighter sparks. A third sip. One of the men starts telling a long joke about a crocodile in a bar, which even turns out to be funny. Laughter. A fourth. The man to his right sidles closer. Steven eyeing him. A fifth. Slower now. The sixth more syrupy than the others, while a fuzziness rises from the miniscule hairs that cover his body, pushing through like dandelion heads above the grass and blossoming across his skin. He finds himself struggling to keep his eyes open and has the sensation that he’s gyrating with a kind of elasticity, like his head is a bowling ball slotted onto the end of a car antenna, slowly tipping over, a tug-of-war against gravity, where gravity is sure to win. His hair eases onto the tabletop, ear to the cool Formica surface. Laughter swells in the muted background like sirens. There’s a hand on his lap, sliding up his leg. He feels the bowling ball of his head becoming heavier. Pressing into the table now. Sinking into it. Someone else’s hand is in his hair. On his scalp. Which is imbedding itself deeper into the Formica where it’s—all. Suddenly. Black.
Believing Cedric Page 15