The Cocaine Chronicles

by Gary Phillips

  “Look,” I said, “I have a hundred bucks in my pocket. Just take it.”

  They looked at one another and laughed.

  “He thinks we want money,” Baines said.

  Nicole reached down and held up my chin. “Look at this picture,” she said.

  I looked at the snapshot she thrust at me. A young blond woman with a nice face, a cheerleader’s freshness, but with slightly big teeth. The photo looked to be several years old. The woman seemed vaguely familiar.

  “I don’t know her,” I said.

  “You fucking liar,” Nicole replied. “She met you in that same bar two years ago. Her name was Gail. Gail Harden.”

  I tried but I couldn’t quite recall her. Still, there was something—that overbite.

  “You remember her, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “There’s some mistake. I never knew her.”

  She kicked me in the ribs with her high heels. I groaned, shook my head.

  “You were all she could talk about. Roger, the ad genius. Roger, who made love to her for five weeks. Roger and she were going to get married.”

  “Married? No. No way I ever told her that.”

  “Then you do admit you knew her.”

  Now I remembered. Two years ago. I had just gotten back from the Hamptons and wasn’t quite ready to give up my good times. She was sitting in the Head one evening, just before it got dark, dressed in this pretty little flower-print gown. She just looked so young and summery. The perfect way for me to launch back into work.

  “Okay,” I said. “We went out for a few weeks. Three, maybe four times, but that was it. And I never promised her anything …”

  “Bullshit, you gave her coke, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  Now it was Ronnie’s turn to kick me in the ribs. I groaned and thought I could feel my organs leaking blood.

  “Okay, I did. So what? Everybody does a little toot or two. C’mon. It wasn’t like it was her first time.”

  “No, but it was the first time she’d fallen in love. Then you dumped her. She called you over and over, begged you just to call her back, to be her friend.”

  “That’s not how it works,” I said. “When it’s over, it’s over. I didn’t want to lead her on. I never promised her anything. You bring her here and ask her in front of me. You’ll see.”

  “That would be kind of hard,” Nicole said. “My sister went home to Minnesota and hung herself. She left these poems all about you.”

  She dumped a book that looked like a journal in front of me. It fell open and I saw poems written in colored inks. The kind a junior high school girl might have written.

  “No, that’s a lie,” I said.

  She stuck another picture on the floor. A police photograph of Gail hanging from an attic beam. She had on that same summery floral dress. She had long, beautiful legs, like her sister’s. Suddenly, I didn’t know why, I began to pray, “Oh God, God, God … You can’t blame that on me. She must have been unstable to begin with, right? She must have been crazy.”

  “She loved you. You turned her onto drugs, made her crazy for you, then you dumped her. You murdered her, as surely as if you’d kicked over the chair she stood on.”

  “Who are you, her brother?” I said, crying.

  “No, I’m Nicole’s husband, asshole. We planned this for a long time. We were going to invite you out to dinner with us … but you turned the tables on us. But it doesn’t matter. You can just as well drink your dessert right here.”

  He pulled two small vials out of his big Burberry coat. One red, the other blue.

  “See these?” he said. “One works like battery acid. The other will just make you violently ill, but you might survive. We’re going to give you a chance. Drink either one, then wait five minutes. You’ll know. They’re both bad, but the poison makes you start to bleed from your ears, nose, and asshole. The other one will only destroy most of your intestines.”

  “Bullshit. You’re nuts. I’m not drinking either one of them,” I said.

  “If you don’t,” Nicole said, “we’ll knock you unconscious and pour the one with the poison down your throat.”

  Up until that point I’d been scared but somehow numbed by the whole thing. I mean, there was an air of unreality to the whole strange affair thanks to the coke, but it was rapidly wearing off.

  “Which one will it be, Rog?” Baines said. “The red bottle or the blue?” He put them close to my lips; that’s when I began to scream.

  “Help me! Help, they’re killing me!”

  “Wrong answer,” he said, slamming the gun butt down on my head.

  I came awake in a white room, my stomach burning, my throat scorched by fire. I tried to talk but it felt as though someone had used a flamethrower on me. Then I tried to move my arms, to signal somebody for help, but I was strapped to a gurney, like a madman. That made sense because I was a madman, a madman burning alive from the inside out.

  I thrashed my bashed-in head from side to side, looking for help, making dying-bird noises.

  Suddenly, the white curtain flew back and there was a tall woman who looked like a doctor peering down at me through thick glasses. Behind her was … Wease. My coke dealer.

  “Weease,” I croaked.

  “Keep calm, Mr. Deakens,” the doctor said.

  “Gonna … Gonnaa … die,” I croaked. “Poisoned.”

  Wease moved forward.

  “No,” he said. “They pumped your stomach. You’re gonna make it, Rog.”

  “Besides,” the doctor said, “whatever you drank wasn’t poison. It was a habanero pepper drink. It only feels like it’s going to kill you.”

  I fell back on the gurney and shut my eyes.

  “What the fuck you drink that stuff for?” Wease said.

  “Made me,” I croaked.

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know. People … met at the Head.”

  Every word felt like someone poking barbed wire into my throat.

  “Oh, the chick at the end of the bar and the big guy in the coat?”

  I nodded, a bilious stream of liquid fire coming up my throat and nose.

  “The police are going to want to talk to you, Mr. Deakens,” the doctor said. “And you too, sir.”

  She glanced at Wease, who furtively looked away from her into the hall.

  “Hey, I was just in the ’hood and heard a scream,” he said. “I don’t need to talk to any cops.”

  Before she could say another word, Wease was out the door. Guess he wanted to get rid of his stash before the Village cops came.

  I started to give a little laugh, but the pepper drink came up inside me again, and I fell back, gagging, choking, and generally sounding like a guy with throat cancer.

  The doctor put a needle in my arm, and right before I fell asleep I thought of the damnedest thing. Not the way they’d tricked me, not the way they’d beaten and humiliated me, but instead I thought of Nicole’s kiss. The softness of it, the perfection of her flesh. How I was sure, so sure, I loved her. How even now, after all this had happened, I wanted to kiss her again. Absurd as it was, it was almost a happy memory, and I’d have been content to go out with it, but right before I lost consciousness I saw the sister, Gail Harden, hanging from the rafters, and I wanted to die. Just let me go to sleep, God, and never wake me up again.

  I was weak as a kitten when they let me out of St. Vincent’s the next day. Two detectives, Barrett and Strong, came to see me, and I managed to whisper the whole damned story to them. About halfway through I broke down and said, “Maybe it would have been better if they had finished me off.” Strong, a big guy, with a mobile, sympathetic face, put his big hand on my shoulder and shook his head.

  “You can’t think that way,” he said. “Girl kills herself, could be a ton of factors.”

  “Yeah, but I was the main one,” I said.

  The two cops looked at each other.

  “You got your house key?” Barrett said.

  I fished
into my pants. It was gone.

  “Maybe we better take you on home,” Strong said. “Let’s call for the wheelchair.”

  We were a block away from my place at 77th and West End when I saw a lamp and clothes, my clothes, spread all over the street. Mostly underwear and mismatched socks, a few old paperbacks, a pile of CDs.

  I followed the cops to my third-floor walk-up and saw the front door lying there, half torn off its hinges. Inside, it looked like a hurricane had swept through the place. My Eames chair was smashed, “Murderer” was written all over my paintings. The silverware was gone, the lava lamp I’d kept around for laughs, smashed. Books, records, CDs, all smashed into a thousand pieces.

  In the bedroom, a strong box I kept far back in the closet was gone. Which meant so was $10,000. Somehow I didn’t mind.

  “They got you good,” Strong said.

  “We’re gonna dust this place,” Barrett said.

  “Fine,” I said. “That’s great.”

  I picked up an overturned chair and sat down in the midst of all the debris. It was like I was the emperor of some Third World country that had suffered a coup d’état.

  During the next few hours, more police came …

  The cops made calls on their cell phones. Pleasant technicians came and did their work, just like on television. People were sympathetic in my building, but there were no witnesses.

  I went to the precinct and ran through mug shots until my eyes were red, but found no one who looked like either of them.

  In the coming days I felt strangely disassociated, out of my body. And then that phase ended and I began to feel a monster depression, as though I had a thousand pounds of fat hanging off my frame.

  I dreamed constantly of Gail Harden. It was as though the photograph had come to life. I saw her doing a lot of coke, getting wired out of her mind, then stepping on a chair, putting the noose around her neck … and then swinging to and fro, while outside the snow fell silently over Minnesota.

  Night after night the same images. And every time I saw her I fell deeper and deeper into the snow outside her house. I was caught in a snowdrift and my blood and bones turned to ice.

  I tried to forget it, her, I tried to forget Nicole’s kiss—the first kiss I’d ever been really struck by … Zing went the strings … of the murderer’s heart.

  But it was no use. I felt the kiss on my lips, and saw the vials of poison in front of me, one blue, one red.

  I’d always thought I was strong, very strong. But I knew now I was weak, nobody could be weaker than me.

  I made it down to the Head and spent 500 bucks on coke, thinking that it was the only thing that would pull me out of it.

  Every day I snorted the shit just to get out of bed. Every afternoon, every evening, and every night.

  But the images of Gail Harden wouldn’t go away. If anything, the coke made them stronger.

  I lay in bed at night, my nose running, my head pounding, listening to Billie Holiday on an old CD. That’s when I started to hear it in the kitchen. A sound, like a chair being moved. I leapt from my bed, made it out there, but I was too late. She had hidden. In the closet, in the pantry, in my filthy little toilet. I couldn’t see her, but that didn’t matter, I knew she was there. Gail Harden was coming back.

  How I wished it was Nicole.

  At some point Barrett and Strong caught up to me. I was walking down West End, going nowhere, when they pulled up in their Cavalier and beckoned me to get in.

  I did as they said. Nowadays, I did as anyone said.

  “How you doing?” Barrett asked.

  “I’m Mister Wonderful,” I said.

  They looked at one another and smiled.

  “Well, maybe you’ll be doing better when you look at this,” Barrett said.

  He handed me the photograph of Gail Harden. Hanging around. Still dead.

  “Yeah, what of it?”

  “It’s a fake,” Strong said. “Well done, but a fake. Been Photoshopped.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. What’s more, there’s no record of any Gail Harden committing suicide in Minnesota during the past three years. The whole thing was a hoax.”

  “Take a close look at the photo.”

  I did.

  “What do you see?”

  “I still see Gail Harden hanging … very dead.”

  “No, you see Nicole Harden hanging there. Wearing a blond wig.”

  “No,” I said. “I slept with Gail Harden and I’d know …”

  “That’s right,” Barrett said. “You remember anything about her?”

  “She had a very … shy kiss.”

  “She coulda faked that,” Strong said. “What about her body? Any distinguishing marks?”

  I thought for a second, then: “A cat. She had a cat face tattooed on the inside of her left thigh.”

  “Right, and what about Nicole? She have one, too?”

  “I don’t know ’cause she made me take my clothes off first.”

  The two detectives looked at one another and smiled.

  “Of course she did. She didn’t want you to see her naked. They couldn’t have pulled the ‘dead sister’ act on you if you had seen the cat on her thigh.”

  I stared down at my feet. There was so much I wanted to tell them, but they wouldn’t have listened.

  Finally, I looked up.

  “But why?” I said. “Why did they go to all that trouble?”

  They looked at one another and shrugged.

  “A game,” Strong said. “Basically, the two of them are con artists, set up lonely guys, steal all their money. But these two, when they pick out a mark, they like to make it a little more dramatic. Like it’s a movie. Or reality TV. It’s no fun unless the vic really suffers. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know, all right. I know just what you mean.”

  “Yeah,” Barrett said. “You know the show they had on a few years back where the guy thinks he’s an action hero in a movie but everybody else knows he’s a schmuck? That kind of thing. No offense intended.”

  I laughed at that, and felt small, the incredible shrinking schmuck.

  “We’re getting more bizarre crimes than ever these days,” Strong said. “It’s not enough to rob and beat a guy, you gotta fuck with his mind, too. Everybody wants to direct.”

  “Oh,” I said, realizing how lame it sounded.

  “So make sure you change your locks and watch out for strange women wearing wigs,” Barrett said.

  “You bet,” I replied. “Thanks for coming by.”

  “Bet that’s a load off your mind,” Strong said.

  “Yeah, it sure is.”

  “You want a ride somewhere?” Strong asked.

  “No thanks. I’ll walk.”

  I climbed out of their car, gave a little wave goodbye, and headed down the block. They made a U-turn and cruised up West End.

  I had only walked about two blocks when I started laughing. They were good guys, if a little rude. They’d probably seen the desperation on my face, noticed that in the past week I’d lost so much weight that my pants fell down on my hips, like I was some cholo wannabe. They could tell by the hollow look in my eyes. They knew how to read the signs. That was their job.

  So they’d cooked up that story about how Gail Harden was really Nicole, how Ron and Nicole were just fucking with me because they were evil gamesmen. How it was all an offshoot of reality TV. But in the end, nobody was really hurt.

  Hey, no harm, no foul, right?

  But I knew better. They’d have to do a lot better than that.

  Gail Harden was dead, all right. How did I know? Because she was living there in my apartment. Of course she was. Only it might not have been Gail. It might have been Nicole. Gail, Nicole … one or the other was hanging over the pipes.

  I know. I know. You think I’ve gone nuts, that I’m unsettled by what happened to me, but I say you’re wrong.

  And how do I know?

  Well, I found
her that very same night, hanging from the pipes in my kitchen, turning north, south, east, and west, and all the time, whispering, “When will you admit it, Rog? When will you finally admit you love me?”

  I cut her down, washed her face, cleaned her rotting flesh. But it was no good, she got up in the night and tied herself back up there. She was a real Johnny-one-note. The same lame riff over and over again. Whispered and all noose raspy.

  “When will you admit it, Rog? When will you finally admit you love me?”

  “When you can kiss like your sister,” I said.

  But she didn’t laugh.

  It took me three days to finally get it. She was right, dead right, if you will. I was living in denial. She was my own true love. My only true one. Gail or Nicole. Nicole or Gail. Didn’t really matter how you named it.

  Thursday, I cut her down for the last time and told her the words she died to hear.

  “I love you, baby. How can I not love the woman that died for me?”

  Now, when it gets dark, we sit there in my kitchen, drinking white wine, snorting Wease’s good white powder until our noses bleed. I tell her not to worry, not to fret, because at last I’ve learned how love chooses you, not the other way around. You think you’re in control, but oh baby, that’s the greatest illusion of all. So I tell her I love her … Gail, that is. Or is it Nicole?

  Sometimes her ghastly face changes and I just can’t tell.

  But whatever, whoever, these days I’m straight and true.

  No more fucking around for this guy.

  When I go to work now I speak only when spoken to. When I have my lunch, I eat alone. When the workday’s done, I stop to see the Wease and come right home.

  And trust me, I stay there until it’s cutting time. Then my girl and I kiss, hug, drink our wine, and do a little blow.

  You wouldn’t believe the things she says, the worlds she knows.

  And at last, when black night looms over the unreal city, we cling to one another just like all the other desperate, wired lovers, in my warm and blood-red bed.

  ROBERT WARD is the author of nine novels, including Four Kinds of Rain, which was nominated for the Hammett Award in 2006; Red Baker, which won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction; and, most recently, The Best, Bad Dream. Ward has published fiction and journalism in Esquire, GQ, the Village Voice, Sport, Rolling Stone, and New Times. For television he has written and produced Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice. He is the father of four boys and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, radio producer Celeste Wesson, and his son, Robert Wesson Ward.