Deviant Behavior

by Mike Sager

  “And check this out,” Seede said, “we’ve got two more years before the kid is even out of diapers.”

  “When’s the last time you had sex?”

  Seede looked at him.

  “I can’t ask?”

  “I’m embarrassed to say.”

  “How bad can it be?”

  “Nine weeks. The first weekend in October, a Saturday night. We got a room at the Hotel Washington.”

  “Did you go to the roof bar?” Freeman enthused. “I adore the view from there.”

  “Yes, yes. We went to the fuckin roof bar. And to the restaurant. To the tune of a hundred bucks.”

  “You got off cheap.”

  “No shit. She still isn’t drinking. She’s still breastfeeding—a topic, I might add, that we spent most of the evening discussing: her problems doing it, the advantages of doing it, when she should stop doing it. Have you ever noticed how women are obsessed with breastfeeding? It’s like they carry these cumbersome flesh sacks around with them their whole lives, and then, when they finally get a chance to use them for something, they can’t seem to put them down.”

  “The breast is an amazing organ,” Freeman said wistfully.

  “The point is: why the fuck do I have to drive six blocks and pay for a hotel room—and for parking—so I can have sex with my own wife? It’s not enough that I pay the mortgage and all the bills?”

  In the light of the streetlamp, Freeman could see tears welling in Seede’s brown and bloodshot eyes. “Good Lord, Jonathan. I had no idea.”

  Seede took another drag. “Well, that’s how it goes in Breederland, my friend. You serve at the pleasure of the queen. Then she eats you.”

  “Yo, Seede.”

  Below them, on the sidewalk, a homeboy named Kwan. He was eighteen years old, almost too pretty for a male, with fawn-colored eyes and long lashes, wearing a knee-length, overstuffed down parka. In the style of the day, the merchandise tags were still dangling from the eyelets of his brand-new Timberland work boots.

  “What up?” Seede asked, slipping into the local dialect.

  Kwan spread his arms, offering himself as his response.

  “Impressive as always,” Seede said.

  “You holdin any dat sinse?”

  “What—so you can roll it up in one of them stanky blunts?”

  Kwan raised his chin, playing at being hard. “You holdin or you ain’t?”

  “Come by tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? Shit. Don’t know if there be no tomorrow.”

  Seede came down the stairs, followed by Freeman. He put his arm fondly around the teenager’s shoulder. Beneath his puffy coat, Kwan felt small and insubstantial, bringing to Seede’s mind a toy poodle. “So what are you doing right now, homey?” Seede asked. “You wanna join us for whore patrol? You live in the neighborhood. It’s your civic duty to volunteer.”

  Kwan wriggled out of Seede’s embrace. “Ho patro? What dat?”

  “Come on,” Seede cajoled. “We’ll have a few laughs.”

  Kwan backed away from them slowly, his hand held out in front of him with the thumb and first two fingers extended—a make-believe handgun. He held the gun high and sideways, his elbow winged out, like all the gangstas in the movies. The previous year, the murder rate in Washington was number one in the nation. There was no telling what it would have been if the gang bangers ever learned how to aim properly.

  “Tomorrow,” Kwan insisted.

  “Ring the basement door,” Seede said. “And bring me something large. None of that pebble shit this time, okay?”

  6

  Jamal sat in the driver’s seat of his Lincoln with a steno pad and a pencil nub, doing a little figuring.

  Twelve days earlier, his bottom wife, his main woman, had been arrested and charged with solicitation. Debbie was currently incarcerated in the DC Women’s Jail, awaiting trial, facing a mandatory minimum sentence of ninety days. Every night, when he dropped her off on the Strip, he always said the same thing. Pay attention out there. Five years together, he must have said it roughly fifteen hundred times by now. Pay attention out there. Don’t get popped. Debbie would be turning twenty-eight in April. She’d been working the streets—in LA, Vegas, Atlantic City, and now DC—for more than a decade. She’d been talking a lot lately about squaring up with Jamal, getting married, leaving “the life” behind. Deep down, Jamal couldn’t help but wonder if she’d gotten herself busted on purpose. There was no other good explanation. He’d been sitting across the street watching—he could see it coming, like a train wreck in slow motion. The trick was sandy-haired, wearing earmuffs and a trench coat, a muffler tied jauntily around his throat like a K Street lawyer. The giveaway: he’d approached Debbie on foot. Most of the white tricks were afraid to leave their cars. No matter how drunk or puffed up they were, you could always sense it, you could see it in their eyes: terror. He’s in a dicey neighborhood, cops everywhere, looking to do something illegal and immoral, something his wife would divorce him for in a heartbeat. He’s pulling over his car, he’s dealing with a woman, possibly on drugs, who is desperate enough to parade around in a bathing suit in subfreezing weather in order to sell her pussy. The law of supply and demand is in effect: she has what he needs. What he obviously can’t get anywhere else.

  Undercover cops are not afraid. You can see it in their eyes too: the agitated gleam of a true believer who is mucking about in sin.

  Roughly calculated, Jamal figured Debbie’s arrest and conviction were going to end up costing him more than fifteen thousand dollars in lost earnings and expenses. Subtracting her customary days off—every Sunday, the first three days of her menstrual periods—she would be missing about seventy-five nights of work, an average of two hundred dollars a night. He’d already laid out $550 as a retainer for the lawyer; more would be due after the trial, which was really just a formality anyway, given her prior arrests and the mandatory sentence. Not to mention the thirty dollars a week he was putting in her jail canteen account for snacks and sundries, and the cost of stamps so she could write him every day in her rounded, backhand, little girl cursive, the envelopes sealed with SWAKs and hearts and ILYs. Before mailing the stamps Jamal spritzed them with his Drakkar Noir cologne, as he had the photo she requested—Jamal in his younger days, shirtless at Virginia Beach. She’d be showing it off to the other hos in the joint, he figured. Maybe one of them would want to get with him too.

  Shaking his head over the figures like a shopkeeper come upon lean times, Jamal dropped the pencil into one of the compartments of the drink caddy, stashed the steno pad in the glove box with his Webster’s. You’ve been down before, he reminded himself.

  A little more than five years ago, Jamal Alfred had been living in the suburbs with his wife and daughter, employed full time as a day-shift security guard at the Naval Ordnance Station at Indian Head, Maryland. He’d gotten the job through his military connections—he’d done two tours in Vietnam, army infantry, down and dirty. He shipped out in June 1970, assigned to a forward base. His first day in-country, hooked up with his unit, he was standing around smoking a cig when one of the corporals asked him for a light. Jamal dug into his pocket, clicked open the Zippo his brother had given him before he left, rolled the flint wheel … CRACK! A sniper’s bullet split the air. Jamal felt it sizzle past his ear. The corporal crumpled to the ground at his feet, the back of his head a mess of bloody pulp.

  Shaken, Jamal was removed to a tent, given a joint for his nerves. Life went on. Weeks passed. He became accustomed to the routine—the night patrols, the C rats, the trips to the whore house in the village, the bodies, the gore. No matter what they were doing, morning till night, he and the fellas were always smoking joints. Drugs were cheap and plentiful in the Nam, guys were generous—never once was Jamal asked to buy.

  Then came the monsoons. The enemy launched an offensive. Cloud cover was thick; there was no air support. The entire base was pinned under fire. Nobody was sharing any drugs. Jamal became ill with flulike symptom
s—runny nose, chills, a deep soreness in his joints. He asked one of the older guys should he go see the doc. Dude laughed. There was heroin sprinkled in those joints.

  Dope sick and enraged, embarrassed by his own guileless stupidity—he had, after all, grown up on DC’s notorious Fourteenth Street Strip, the son of an old-school pimp—Jamal demanded the name and location of the dealer. He went to his hooch, grabbed a pillowcase and his .45 sidearm, breached the barbed wire perimeter of the base, low-crawled into the jungle, through enemy lines. As directed, he followed a meandering stream for five clicks, came upon a village. At the fourth hut he gave the mama-san the pillowcase and a wad of cash. He gestured with the gun: fill it up.

  Jamal stayed high for the rest of his tour. Then he re-upped for a second tour, with a special dispensation that he didn’t have to return stateside in between, as GIs were normally required. Given the cost and purity of the junk in Vietnam, the elephantine size of his habit, he knew he couldn’t afford to go home.

  After the second tour Uncle Sam wouldn’t let him stay any longer. He thought for a while about moving to Thailand as some of the guys were doing—back in America the antiwar movement was coming to a crescendo; there were stories about hippies spitting on returning vets. Compared with a cheap and bottomless supply of heroin and pussy in Bangkok, the decision seemed pretty much a no-brainer. But then he got the news of his brother’s death. His father was already gone. Things at home required his attention. He flew back with a six-month supply of the purest Golden Triangle heroin he could find, imported specially from Bhutan. When his stash was nearly spent, he had a little going away party for his habit. Then he locked himself in a motel room in southeast DC and kicked cold turkey, the most brutal week of his life.

  Discounting his intermittent insomnia and frequent nightmares—and his curious need to keep at hand an envelope containing old photos of his long-time drug dealer, his buddies from the squad, two of his favorite bar girls, and his collection of enemy ears, arrayed on top of a desk, that he had acquired in combat over the course of his two tours, three dozen or so unmatched curls of desiccated human flesh—the next six or seven years of Jamal’s life passed in relative calm. He met a fine, light-skinned sister at a disco in Georgetown. They married, bought a house, brought a daughter into the world. Then one night Jamal was having a few drinks at the local tavern with some of his fellow security guards. All of them were vets. All of them, like Jamal, saw a VA shrink at least once a week. When you go to war, something innocent inside of you breaks. Like your cherry, you can never get it back. Toward the shank of the evening, one of the guys took him outside to the parking lot and gave him his first hit of freebase cocaine.

  By the time he hit bottom, Jamal had lost eighty pounds and his job. The bank was foreclosing on his house. His wife’s Toyota had been repossessed. His checking and savings accounts were empty. His gas tank was empty. His daughter needed three hundred dollars for a school trip to New York. He had four dollars in his pocket.

  And so it was, on that fateful day in 1987, that Jamal took one last heroic hit of rock cocaine and jacked off to a porno. Afterward he flushed his crack pipe down the toilet, swallowed a few Valium, went to the closet, dug out his best suit—a gray worsted-wool pinstripe from Men’s Fashion Depot. He put his last four bucks into the gas tank of his aging Ford Bronco and drove toward DC, heading for the Fourteenth Street Strip, a place to which he’d promised himself he’d never return.

  He drove around the Strip a few times—a few laps around the track, as they used to say. Things had changed some, but not so much. The What’s Happenin’ Now had become the Moulin Rouge; the Blue Mirror was a pizza joint. The Strip itself had expanded somewhat both north and south. The residential part was a lot nicer; some of it had been expensively renovated. To his surprise, he saw that Cornbread and Killer Joe—contemporaries of his father—were still working, as was his old buddy the Donut Man, who sold crullers, condoms, and other sundries out of his station wagon near the all-night People’s Drugs.

  Jamal parked his Bronco on a dark corner beneath a ginkgo tree. He crossed the street, walking tall and casual through the gridlock, rolling his shoulders as he moved, hitching his step just the slightest, like his father used to do. He made a beeline for a tall white girl. She was apple-pie pretty, a little on the plump side. As his father liked to say: Get you one with a lil meat on her bones. The skinny ones is mean.

  By dawn the next morning, when he dropped Debbie off at the Capitol City Motor Lodge and paid her first night’s rent, Jamal had enough money in his pocket for his daughter’s school trip and several new outfits to go with. By the end of the month his house was safe; he went shopping for his first previously owned Lincoln. For a time he even had his wife convinced that he’d gotten his old job back, albeit on the night shift.

  Now, on this cold December night in 1992, he was comfortably ensconced in the creamy leather interior of his third Lincoln vehicle, a burgundy Mark IV, nearly new, only twenty thousand miles on the odometer. Out of the corner of his eye he detected a familiar movement.

  If anything was signature about Salem, it was her walk—a graceful, long-legged gait that put one in mind of a giraffe running in slow motion. She crossed the street about a half block south of the Lincoln, her pace a step faster than usual, her head of spiky blonde hair held averted, as if she believed that not looking was nine-tenths of not being seen.

  Opening his door, Jamal unfolded his six-foot frame, turned to face Salem over the roof of the car. She was sporting the new outfit he’d bought her that afternoon at the Prince George’s County Mall—white leather miniskirt, black fishnet stockings, and a black-and-white ruffled blouse, hitched down off her shoulders like a punk rock Daisy May. He put his fingers to his mouth and whistled a distinctive blast, high-low, two sharp tones.

  Busted, Salem turned and waved in his direction, un-abashed, her manner that of a country matron who’d just spotted an old friend at a steeplechase.

  Jamal frowned and pointed emphatically to the passenger side of his car. Salem had been with him for ten days. She was a strange girl, not at all the kind of ho he was used to. Sometimes it seemed like she was doing nothing but running game. But then he’d check her trap and find two or three hundred dollars. Something was different about this one. He just hadn’t figured out yet what it was. And he probably never would—right now, he had enough on his plate. All these girls were twisted in some way or another or they wouldn’t be hos, a lesson he’d learned pretty thoroughly a couple of years back, when he and Debbie had tried to expand the business, taking in four additional wife-in-laws at one time. Now, with Debbie in jail and the others long gone, his life in the suburbs just a memory, Jamal knew he was lucky to have come across Salem when he did—a fine lookin white girl with low mileage who was willing to pay five hundred dollars up front to get with him.

  Salem jerked open the back door and climbed inside the Lincoln.

  “I thought you were going on an all-night date,” Jamal admonished.

  “Dude never come back around the corner to pick me up.” Though her skin was a milky shade of bluish white, Salem talked like she was black—a tall, white-blonde, peaches-and-cream type, overdubbed with Queen Latifah. She nestled into the plush leather, brought her knees to her chest, revealing a hint of white panty. “It cold, Jamal. Can we please go home?”

  “Where’s your coat?”

  “I lef it at the bar. Ella say Pam took it home wit her.”

  “Girl, I paid good money for that coat. What do I have to do, sew name tags in your shit?”

  “May I get a cigarette, please?”

  “You already smoked that whole pack?”

  “I got friends, you know. They smoke too. You got any condoms in the car?”

  “Tell me you don’t have any condoms.”

  “I’m out.”

  “Then take five dollars and go get you some from the Donut Man down there by the drugstore. Tell him I said what up.”

  “You got fi
ve dollars?”

  “Now I know you fuckin with me.” Jamal cracked a smile. “Why don’t you just go on now and be a good ho and make me some money.”

  She looked out the window. “Leave me alone, Jamal. My tummy hurts.”

  “You said it ain’t your time for another week.”

  “This skirt too tight.”

  “The skirt I just bought? Why you insist on buying a size two if you don’t wear no two?”

  “I do wear two.”

  “I tole you to try it on. I tole you: Try that shit on. All clothes ain’t made exactly the same. Different manufacturers use different measurements. Don’t you—”

  She leaned up over the front seat. “Can’t you just carry me back to the hotel and I’ll change real quick?” She batted her long lashes. “Please?”

  Jamal addressed her with a level voice, a teaching tone, like a parent to a child: “Listen good now, baby. I got a way to solve all your problems, you hear? I got just the solution you need.”

  Annoyed: “Can’t I jus go back and change?”

  He gave her a look: Don’t even try that shit on me. “This is what you need to do. You need to go to that corner over there and pull over a trick. You get into his nice warm car. And when he asks you for a blow job, you bat those big blue eyes at him, just like you did to me. You give him your real nice smile and you tell him, ‘Please mister, it’s cold outside.’ Tell him that your skirt is killin you, that you’d really appreciate it if he’d take you back to your motel room so you could change. Tell him for three hundred dollars, you’ll show him a really good time.”