Dope Sick (10 page)

Kelly clicked the remote and I saw the street below. There were cops everywhere. Some were dressed in SWAT gear.

“Not the street,” I said. “Show me on the roof landing.”

“That's where you want to be?” Kelly asked. “You ready to throw it all away?”

I didn't say nothing, just looked at the screen. After a while Kelly had the picture. I was sliding along the wall as I was going up the staircase. I looked hurt. Maybe it was my arm hurting, or maybe I had been shot again. I couldn't tell. Then there was me sitting on the roof landing. My face was twisted and my eyes looked so dark. My hand was trembling as I lifted the Nine.

“Stop! Stop it!”

“
THIS IS GETTING TOO HARD
for me,” I said. “You okay, man, but looking at myself on television—checking out my life—is hard. I don't see nothing that good about it.”

“I saw a guy on
Cops
one time,” Kelly said. “He was half drunk and walking up to the police calling out, ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!' and pointing to his chest.”

“He was ready to give up the struggle,” I said.

“I didn't think he really wanted to die. He just wanted to keep telling himself that it didn't make a difference so he didn't have to do nothing about his life,” Kelly said.

“Who you to be judging people?” I asked. “They don't show your picture on no magazine covers.”

“I'm hip. You need a soda or something?”

“You got some sodas up in here?”

“In the drawers under that closet,” Kelly said.

Sometimes Kelly seemed okay, but I didn't trust him completely. Why didn't he tell me about the sodas before? I almost didn't even go for it, but then I wanted a soda bad.

The closet was built in and the drawers were on the bottom. I opened the closet doors first and looked in. Nothing. The right-hand drawer was tight, and it hurt my arm trying to get it open. But there, like Kelly had said, was a cardboard container with six bottles of soda.

“You want one too?” I asked.

“Yeah, okay.”

I took out two sodas. They weren't cold, but I was still looking forward to something to drink.

“Where's the opener?”

“I don't have one,” Kelly said. “You can open them in the bathroom. There's a nail on the back of the door.”

“You ain't even got an opener,” I said. “That's weak.”

“I manage,” Kelly said. “And you don't have to drink the soda if you don't want it.”

I went back down the hallway toward the bathroom. There was a noise and I froze. I could hear something scurrying across the floor. Rats. I held my breath for a moment and then went into the bathroom. There was a nail in the back of the door. I thought about somebody coming in to take a bath and hanging their robe on the door. With the smell and the rats, the building had probably been empty for at least a year. I wondered how long Kelly had been up in there. As far as I was concerned, he could have been crazy. On the other hand maybe it was just his get-over. A lot of homeless dudes were living in abandoned buildings. Most of them had strung some wires up to telephone poles for electricity. That's what Kelly had probably done.

I messed around in the dark until I got the bottle top against the nail and pulled it down to open the bottle. Then I did the other one and took them both out to Kelly.

He was watching the street below. It was morning, and down the street there was a television truck with its high antenna.

“After a while something else is going to happen and all this is going to quiet down,” I told Kelly. “Then they won't even remember who I am.”

“Who are you?”

“You know who I am.”

“I know your name,” Kelly said. “But who do you see when you look in the mirror?”

The soda was piss warm, but it was good. I didn't realize how hungry I was. “Hey, Kelly, you got any bacon and eggs?” I asked.

“So who you see when you look in the mirror?” he asked again.

“Who I see?” Kelly was drinking from his bottle, and I could see the light from the television along the glass as he lifted it. I turned and saw the shades, and they were light. “Sometimes I don't see nobody,” I said. “You know, you got to be something first, and then you see what you're being. Like, say a roach crawl across a mirror.
He don't know he's a roach. I don't even know if a roach can see.

“When I was a kid I used to look at myself in the mirror all the time and pretend I was a superhero. Sometimes I would be G.I. Joe, and sometimes I would be Batman. Then one time I had a bad day—I was still a kid—and after that I had trouble seeing myself.”

“What happened?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know or you don't want to deal with it?” Kelly asked.

“Same difference, ain't it?”

Kelly clicked the remote. I saw a playing field, and then there was P.S. 125 on 123rd Street. The class was sitting at their desks, and when I saw Anita Vega, I knew I had to be somewhere in the class.

“You getting excited, Lil J?” Kelly asked.

“Yeah, man, you got the thing back on the day. I was kind of cool then. I remember my mother was talking to my father the night before. She told him
it was going to be my birthday, and he said he would come by after school and pick me up and take me out for some pizza. I was real excited about that.

“That teacher, that's Miss Petridis. She had the best third-grade class in the school. Every day she spent fifteen minutes talking about something in American history, and each of us had to write down two things that were special about the day.

“We were studying about the Revolutionary War and how brave all the American soldiers were. If you raised your hand in class when Miss Petridis asked questions, she would give you a gold star on a card at the end of the day. The card would have your name on it and the date. I was thinking that I would raise my hand a lot and get a gold star to show my father when he picked me up.

“Miss Petridis had a DVD about the war. She even let us boo the bad guys. You know, those were the redcoats.

“‘It's like the Red Sox,'” she said. ‘Every true Yankees fan hates the Red Sox, and back in the days of the Revolutionary War the Americans who
were fighting for their freedom were called Yankees.'

“You can see how she had everybody in the class all excited. I could almost feel like I was standing up in the boat with George Washington waiting to cross the Delaware. I wanted that gold star real bad, but I thought I had messed up when I had one more question even though she said we was going on to silent reading. What I asked her was were there any Americans still around, and she gave me this funny look.

“‘Class, can we tell Jeremy where the Americans are today?' she asked.

“As usual, Sarah's hand went up. ‘They're still at Valley Forge,' she said.

“Miss Petridis laughed and explained how we were all Americans. That made me feel proud and everything, but none of the pictures she showed looked like me or any of my friends.

“There's me on the corner waiting for my father. I didn't know he was going to bring Eddie. Eddie is his other son. He's a little younger than
me and he used to be skinny, but now he's kind of cut. When he showed up with Eddie, I was disappointed. Eddie had something with him in a box and he brought it to the pizza place.”

An image of me and Eddie sitting at the table in the pizza place. My father was talking on his cell phone and Eddie and I were eating pizza. The pizza was okay, but it wasn't nothing special, because Eddie was there and he lived with my father. All the time we was eating, I thought that maybe Eddie had a present for me in the box he was carrying. When me and him finished our slices, my father told him to show me what he had in the box. It was a trophy he had won playing basketball in the Biddy League.

My father didn't say nothing about my birthday, and I figured he had just forgot about it.

“Then he took me home in his car. He dropped me off right in front of the house. When I went upstairs, I was kind of down. I still had my card with the gold star in my pocket, and when I felt it, I took it out and looked at it. Then I looked in
the mirror to see if I could look like an American. When I was looking at me, I didn't think I looked like an American or nothing else. That's why I say you got to figure out what you about first and
then
look in the mirror. You know what I mean?”

“You have any trouble opening the soda?” Kelly asked.

“Why you going there?” I asked. “What you care if I had trouble opening the soda? You drinking, ain't you?”

“You got any money?” Kelly asked. “I could go out and see if I can get us something to eat.”

“I ain't hungry.”

“Yeah, you hungry,” Kelly came back. “You just more scared than you hungry. You scared if I go out I might turn you in. You scared if I go out I might not come back. You scared to be alone with that gun. You scared of the remote. You scared to look in the mirror. Lil J, what you ain't scared of?”

“So you the big-deal encyclopedia brother,” I said. “You need to be walking around with a cape and an outfit with a big EB on it so everybody know
you got all the answers. Yo, Kelly, you got ears, bro, but you don't hear all that tough,” I said. “Everything that's me ain't all my fault.”

“That's the deal,” Kelly said. “You got to find a way to make your life all your fault.”

“No, man, what I got to do is to get through today,” I said. “And if you don't know what that's about, then you probably ain't black enough, or ain't poor enough, or ain't been beat down enough to get next to it.”

I COULD FEEL MYSELF GETTING
mad, wanting to go upside Kelly's head. And I could hear myself thinking that my mad wasn't working with him. It didn't make no difference to him, but it was making a difference to me. He had been talking to me all night and listening to me and showing me things about myself that I didn't even know. Now it was morning and we was sitting being quiet with me out there on the edge like I always was and him sitting in that chair looking away from me, his shoulders kind of slumped forward, looking smaller than he should have been.

“Yo, Kelly, I ain't really trying to play hard,
man,” I said. “But I thought you were digging where I'm coming from.”

“You want me to dig it or you expecting me to bust out with some applause?” Kelly asked.

“Just understand, man.”

Silence. I thought I could hear his breathing, but I wasn't sure. From somewhere I could smell bacon cooking. A picture came into my mind of some woman making breakfast for her boy. I was thinking the boy was happy.

“Can you get my mother on the television?”

“Probably won't come in clear,” he said. “You ain't really thinking about her, are you?”

“Yeah, I am,” I said. “But let's check the news first.”

Kelly clicked the remote and there was a man, a woman, and a little girl standing in front of some microphones. The sound was down low, and I asked Kelly to make it a little louder.

I watched as the woman started crying and the man next to her put his arm around her. The little girl leaned against the woman and put her face against her side. A caption appeared under the picture:

It made me feel terrible to see her crying and I started crying, too. It was just so hard to figure that I was part of this whole scene, and yet, there it was. It was me. Like Kelly said, it had to be somebody's fault, and if it was about my life, then I had to make it my fault.

The news switched to a tornado in Tennessee and Kelly clicked the remote again. The picture came in black and white with only a touch of color, like it needed adjustment. There was somebody laying on a bed, face to the wall. On the little night table there were some pill bottles. Mama. I couldn't tell what pills they were. I knew I had taken some
of her pain pills. She wasn't moving.

“She okay?”

“What you mean by ‘okay'?” Kelly asked.

“I mean…you know…she ain't moving,” I said.

Kelly didn't say nothing. We watched my mother for a while. For most of the time she was still, but then she moved her arm and wiped at her face. At least she was alive. I put my head down in my hands. I didn't want to see her anymore.

“You need a hit?” Kelly asked. “I could go out and find something in this neighborhood.”

“Fuck off.”

“Don't you want to stop feeling bad?” Kelly went on. “Ain't you dope sick? Don't your nerves feel all jagged and messed around? Don't you want to get away?”

“Away from this place? This raggedy apartment?”

“No, I mean, away from you,” Kelly said. “Isn't that what you're running from?”

“You were talking about me changing something before,” I said. “Me changing one thing in
my life. What happened to all that talk?”

“You are changing things,” Kelly said. “You changing that woman's life. You changing that cop's life. You changing your mama's life. Don't you want a hit so you can nod on out of here?”

“No, I don't,” I said.

“That's good,” Kelly said.

“Yeah, but it's a lie. You probably know it's a lie too. I want a hit so bad, I feel like my head is screaming for it. Nothing sounds better than being away from this mess. Nothing sounds better right now than getting higher than the hole I'm in. I know you can't imagine it, but I can almost feel it. Even when I'm getting nervous, cooking up the hit, I start to feel better. And when I do the hit, and my face is all flushed and the tingling in my fingers has started and then there's nothingness like I didn't even weigh but an ounce and the world is floating, drifting away from me. Then I feel human.

“Kelly, you can't tell me nothing about getting high, man,” I said. “I know every hit is steady downhill and all the things that can happen when I'm using. But with that stuff in me I can shut out
the voices that say
Wrong
and
You ain't nothing
and
You ain't going nowhere
. When I'm straight, I can't keep them voices out my head. But when I'm high, I don't hear no voices. Nothing putting me down.

“You talking about what I see when I look in the mirror, and I'm telling you I don't see nothing, but you don't know how that feels. You can't get there; right?”

“You want another soda?” Kelly came back.

“What I really want is to be away from here,” I said. “Away from your warm soda, away from this stink hole you living in, and away from all you running your mouth. You can talk 'til you turn blue and it don't make no difference 'cause the real deal ain't different. Look at me, man. I don't need no true. I need some
different
.”

“Yeah, could be. But everything you reaching for ain't really different. You know what you said just now?” Kelly turned and looked at me. “About how when you get high, you get all flushed and you feel so light and the world is floating away?”

“Yeah, I know what I said, and I know what I feel,” I said.

“Good, because that's just the way dying feels, too,” Kelly said. “And when you get to that point—when you know you dying—you're going to feel just as sick and disgusted with yourself and you'll be wishing just as hard that you made something of your life, that you created something. Maybe something small, like a relationship with you and Lauryn and Brian. Maybe something even smaller, a way to get to know yourself enough not to mind looking in a mirror.”

“You don't know what dying is about, Kelly,” I said. “You ain't that damn smart.”

“Don't bet on it, Lil J,” he said. “Don't bet on it.”

“It don't bother me that much if I'm not thinking about it,” I said. “Maybe I'm getting used to it.”

“Yeah, that's funny, huh?” Kelly clicked to Oprah's show. “Something hurts you real bad and you get used to it. Like being hurt becomes part of who you are.”

“Sometimes I sit and watch television when things go wrong,” I said. “Or I play video games. You know, take my mind someplace else. Remember that white girl I told you about? Sabrina? She used
to say that for her television was like methadone. You couldn't really get high, but you could, like, walk away from the stuff that's messing with your mind.”

“So you chilling out with Oprah?” Kelly asked.

“I didn't ask you to put Oprah on,” I said. “You turned her on. Why don't you get back to the street?”

Kelly pointed the remote at the screen, then stopped and threw it to me. I went for it with both hands and got a sharp pain in my left arm. The remote fell and rattled across the wooden floor. I realized I had been holding my arm against my side the whole time. When I tried to move it, even a little, it hurt like hell.

“You got anything for pain?” I asked Kelly.

“No.” A little sharp answer, like he was mad or something.

I picked up the remote. There were numbers on the bottom half, from zero to nine, and I thought they must have been for the different channels. Above that there were four colored buttons, red, green, yellow, and blue. The red button had two
arrows pointing to the left. The green had one arrow pointing to the left, the yellow had an arrow pointing to the right, and the blue had two arrows pointing to the right. On the very bottom there was a button with a black square in the middle of it.

“Which buttons should I push?” I asked Kelly.

“Try them,” he said.

I thought about him showing the picture of me on the roof landing. One time I had had the Nine up to my head and my eyes squeezed shut. I didn't want to go back to that. If the buttons with the two arrows made things go fast-forward or fast-backward, I wouldn't know what to do if I came on that scene again.

“What happens if I mess up?” I asked Kelly. “Get on something I don't want?”

“Isn't that the way things go?” he asked. “Sometimes you do all right and sometimes…sometimes you don't.”

I stood up and started toward Kelly to give him back the remote, but got this real cold feeling. It was like there was something between me and him that kept me at a distance.

“Why don't you take the remote?” I asked. “You know how to use it.”

“I'm not the one that needs to be changing, Lil J,” Kelly said. “You've been talking about how you need to get in some better place, and how your dope is getting you so you don't feel the weight anymore. You're tired of being blown around by whatever stink wind that comes along. You don't need to be lighter and you don't need to deal with the wind. You need to be the wind. Take the remote.”

“No, I can't,” I said. “I'm too scared, Kelly. No lie. I can't do it, man. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

Kelly put the remote down on the arm of his chair.

“I think you are sorry,” he said.

“You mad?” I asked.

“Just tired,” Kelly said. “I been up awhile.”

He clicked the remote and I could see the street again. The television news trucks weren't there anymore, but there were a lot more cops. We watched for a few minutes, and I thought about asking Kelly to switch to a news station, but I didn't.

I was tired and my arm was hurting bad again.
This time it was like a throbbing pain. I looked at my hand and it was swollen pretty bad. It didn't make no difference if I could get out of the building, because I needed to get to some kind of hospital.

“Kelly, I need to get this over with,” I said. “Can you call the police with your cell? Tell them I'm up here and I want to give up?”

“You do it,” he said. He laid the cell phone on the floor and gave it a push with his foot.

“You know I'm not that bad a guy,” I said. “What you think? You think I'm going to be in jail for the rest of my life?”

“How I know?”

“You can look at it on your television,” I said. “That's how you know. The same as you been doing all night long!”

“No, Lil J, what's going to happen to you depends on what you going to do, not what's on the television,” Kelly said. “And right now what you doing is sitting there waiting to see what everybody else is going to do. The cell phone is there if you want to call the police. Pick it up. Or if you think you bad enough, grab your Nine and shoot your way out.”

I couldn't see myself in jail for the rest of my life. And if Rico got over with his story, I might even get the death penalty. And I knew in my heart that I didn't want to shoot anybody or get shot up myself. Everything that happened started going through my head, and it was just as clear as it was on television. I thought about me and Rico at Dusty's place, tapping the bags of dope, going to meet the guy who turned out to be a cop, and the shooting.

We had gone back to Rico's and I remembered being so shook up I couldn't think straight. Rico was talking some crap about how the cop thought he was slick and I kept asking him if he had shot him or just scared him.

“Yeah, I capped the sucker!” he had said.

I went into the bathroom and threw up. What I wanted to do was to beat Rico to a bloody pulp. But then I remembered the guns were still on the table and…
Shit!

“Kelly, suppose Rico switched guns?” I said.