Dope Sick (2 page)

“Take back the day that cop was shot,” I said. “Just that one day.”

Kelly turned and shot a quick glance in my direction. Then he clicked the remote again.

THE DUDE CLICKED THE REMOTE
,
and all of a sudden I was seeing myself on the screen. It was like I was in my own head again, looking out of my own eyes at the world. It was weird, but like I couldn't turn away because it was me all over again, me outside of me digging on what was going on in my head. I seen the door to my room at home and my moms looking in and talking to me.

“Lil J, you 'wake?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you go down to the clinic for me?”

“What time is it?”

“When it opens.”

“What time is it?

“I don't know.”

I turned and looked at the small red alarm clock on the dresser. Seven o'clock. I swung my legs over the side of the pull-out bed and sat up. I put my elbows on my knees and rested my head in my hands.

“Lil J, can you go for me?” Mama's voice was flat, raspy.

“Yeah, Ma.” My mouth felt as if it was lined with dirty cotton. It was Wednesday, and I was supposed to go downtown with Maurice to look for a job.

I heard water running in the kitchen and hoped Mama had put on her housecoat. She was getting careless about things like that and I didn't like it. It was worrisome. What I wanted to do was to get some money together and send her down to Grandma Lois in Curry, North Carolina. The last time she had been down there, she came back looking good and feeling good for the first time.
Grandma Lois didn't allow any drinking, and Curry was such a two-stick town, you couldn't get anything else.

I got up and went out to the bathroom. Mama had her housecoat on. She had already put the water on and was shaking coffee from the can into the percolator. She looked at me as I went through the kitchen.

“What you doing today?” she asked.

“Maurice heard about jobs coming up at Home Depot,” I said. “We going down there and check it out.”

Mama grunted in reply.

I sat on the toilet. I liked to see my black thighs against the white porcelain. It was the one thing that Mama did that was cool, was to keep the bathroom clean. Other than that she was always too sick, or too drunk, to take care of any kind of business. When I was small and we were living on 147th Street, she used to tell me how her main chore as a kid was keeping the bathroom clean.

“Your grandma Lois used to say, ‘Girl, that
bathroom so clean, I need to ask your permission to use it! '”

Grandma Lois had her thing together. It was a church kind of thing, but she had a lot of pride, and it hurt her to see Mom, her only daughter, get knocked around. When Grandma Lois had the chance to go down to Curry, she thought hard and long about leaving Arlena, but in the end she knew she wasn't doing her any good in Harlem, so she left, hoping to build up something down in North Carolina that would make Mom want to join her.

I washed up and thought about what I would tell the people down at Home Depot. First thing I would have to do is lie about my age. I would say I was nineteen so they wouldn't ask me nothing about why I wasn't in school. I had my fake GED in a plastic sleeve along with my Social Security card. I thought about saying that I'd taken some time off after high school because I was thinking about joining the army, but then I thought that probably wouldn't work.

Home Depot was the joint. I knew if I could
cop a job with them, I could get my thing together. Maybe I would find another place for me and Mama or even convince her to go down to North Carolina. I knew she didn't want to go down with nothing in her pockets.

“I don't want nobody feeling sorry for me,” she said. “They can think what they want, but I don't want to be explaining nothing to nobody.”

I could dig that. If you had some money in your pocket, you could walk on your own side of the street and let people walk on they side. If it went down correct, I could send her some money every week and then she wouldn't have to ask for nothing. That's what life was about, being able to take care of your own business.

“The clinic opens at eight thirty,” Mama said. She was sitting at the table, making a circle with her fingers around the flowered coffee cup. She had nice fingers, long and slender. If she had had her nails done, they would've looked good.

“You got pains in your stomach again?”

“It's just nervous,” she said. “You look like you
going to a funeral in that white shirt. Is that new?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Told you I got a job interview.”

“Well, you should get it, as fine as you looking today,” Mama said. She had a smear of something white on her cheek.

“You coughing again?”

“You a doctor now?” she answered, smiling.

“Doctor Dance,” I answered. “Yo, that's hip.”

The coffee she made was way too weak. I needed something strong in the morning.

“Where your prescription?” I asked.

“It's on the refrigerator, in the bowl,” she said. “When you coming home?”

“Depends on how long the interview takes,” I said. “They ain't in a hurry, 'cause they got their job already.”

Mama said she really needed the medicine because she had run out, and I said I would be home as soon as I could.

The prescription was for painkillers. I went into the bathroom and looked through Mama's
little lineup of plastic containers. I thought I had seen some of the pills she was looking for and found them. I opened the childproof container and dumped the pile out in my hand. There were eight pills left. I put four in my pocket and took the others out to Mama.

“Where were these?” she asked.

“On the second shelf,” I said.

I watched her take two pills with coffee and put two back in the container for later.

I was supposed to meet Maurice on 125th Street and St. Nicholas. We were thinking on going over to the Home Depot interview together. I wanted both of us to get jobs, but I still hoped that Maurice didn't look too much better than me.

I was glad I had spent the money for a new shirt even though it had left me with less than three dollars.

Maurice was five nine, two inches shorter than me, but broad. We had talked about going into the army together and maybe going to Iraq.

“You don't hear nothing much about guys going
to Iraq unless they get killed,” Maurice said. “You ever notice that? You hear about guys being on trial or guys being blown up, but you don't hear anything about guys fighting their way out of a trap or taking a hill or anything like that.”

“It ain't that kind of war,” I had said.

In the end we had both decided not to join up. I didn't mention nothing about how maybe the army wouldn't take me because of what had happened down in Texas. I didn't want Maurice to know about that.

We had checked each other out and said we was looking good, and then we had walked over to where they were having the interviews.

“Man, please don't tell me that's the line for the job interviews,” Maurice said, looking down the block. “Just don't tell me that.”

It was the line. It stretched a full half block down from the store, and more people were coming every moment.

“How many jobs they got?” I asked.

“They said in the paper they had six openings,”
Maurice said. “My mother said they probably had about ten or twelve, but this is stupid. Look, that dude even got his dog with him.”

I felt sick. I had really been hoping for the job. I looked over the line and knew it wasn't going to happen. There were young men, old men, women, Spanish, whites—everybody was out looking for some kind of work.

“I can't cut this,” I said to Maurice. “I'll come back later.”

“I'm gonna hang.” Maurice shrugged. “I don't have nothing better to do.”

I told Maurice I was going to get Mama's prescription filled and would be back later to see how the line looked. I remembered that Rico had called me last night and asked me if I wanted to run some work. I had said no, putting all my hopes on the Home Depot gig, but that looked like a bust. I hoped I had some minutes on my cell, and called Rico.

“Yo, man, that thing still going?” I asked when Rico answered.

“Yeah, it's still on,” Rico said. “Where you at?”

“A Hundred and Twenty-fifth and St. Nicholas, outside the church.”

“Okay, I'll be there in ten minutes. Hang loose.”

I knew that Rico was a stone viper, but sometimes he came up with some crazy money. He was steady dealing weed, Girl, or anything else he could get his hands on. He also had a hundred-dollar-a-day jones he had to support.

I went down the street to a little candy store and bought a bottle of soda. I took two of the pain killers I had brought along and tried to think what Rico sounded like on the phone. If Rico was right, far enough away from his first hit of the day to have his head straight but not pushing so close to the next hit that he would be dope sick, everything would be cool. I had seen Rico dope sick a bunch of times, licking his lips, acting all jumpy, his eyes darting around as if he was a wolf looking for some sick animal to jump on.

Rico wasn't somebody you could rely on and he had messed me up before. But just the way Rico
got dope sick, the way he turned into something that wasn't good to see, I was getting broke sick. I was tired of walking the streets with nothing in my pockets, and nothing coming down the way. When Mama got her check, she gave me what she could and sometimes I got some pickup work, but that hardly paid enough to eat on. I could work a full day and come home with less than forty dollars. If I couldn't find no pickup job and Mama didn't have no money, then there wasn't anything to do except stand on the corner wishing I was somewhere else or home staring at the stupid crap on television.

Rico's ten minutes stretched into a half hour. I was about to call him again when I saw him coming up out the subway.

“Yo, man, what's happening?” Me and Rico bumped fists.

“Nothing, man,” I said. “What you got?”

“I got a run for Dusty Phillips,” Rico said. “Three loads. That's a hundred for each load.”

“Where we got to take it?”

“Across from Marcus Garvey Park,” Rico said. “No problem.”

Yeah. No problem. I knew there was always a problem. Dusty wouldn't be sending out runners and spreading his money if there wasn't any room for some fuckery. We went up the street to Dusty's place and I started talking about the Yankees. Rico was always tripping, and I needed to see how far gone he was already. He seemed sharp enough, so I started to chill a little.

If everything went down right and I copped a full Benjamin and a half, I would split over to the Home Depot line. I'm good with some cash in my pocket, so I could go into the interview feeling righteous and looking confident. I could look the Man in the eye and say I wanted the job and could handle anything. And that was the truth when my life was on the money. I wouldn't be just another broke-sick fool begging for a slave.

I let my mind go free, even as I was talking to Rico about the Yankees. Rico was getting on the Yankee infielders for not hitting more home runs.

“If you making big bucks, you need to be getting big hits,” Rico was saying.

Yeah, all that was good. But I didn't dream about making big money. I just dreamed about getting a decent crib for me and Mama, a steady job, and, most of all, not being broke sick.

Dusty Phillips had some hard-ass people working for him, some ugly mothers who look like they went to their first communion in them orange jumpsuits prisoners be wearing. He operated from the back of a ninety-nine-cent store. They hardly had anything in the store, and everybody in the neighborhood knew not to go in there. Once in a while they got a legitimate customer and were nasty enough and scary enough to discourage him from coming back.

Dusty used to be called Blinky when he was a kid growing up on 116th Street because he had a nervous twitch and his eyes looked a little off. It was like he was trying to look at you, but his eyes kept moving away from where you were. When he got older and fought his way big-time into the
game, he told people to call him Dusty, and after he shot a guy who called him Blinky, everybody else got the picture.

We got to his joint and Dusty looked me over like I was something that stunk bad. He asked Rico if I was all right, and Rico said I was.

“Y'all meet this white boy at two o'clock. Give him the dope and make damn sure the money you get from him is correct. Then you get that money to me by three this afternoon.” Dusty's voice was high and he talked fast. “If my money don't come back correct, everybody is going to be sorry. Anything I'm saying is confusing you?”

“No, man,” Rico said. “I'm hip.”

We got the dope from Dusty, all wrapped up in a plastic sandwich Baggie, and took it to Rico's pad on 135th Street across from the House of Prayer for All People. As soon as we were inside and had locked the doors, Rico took out the bags of heroin and counted the glassine envelopes in each one. Then he opened a bag, sniffed it, and passed it to me.

“We can tap this nice,” Rico said.

“You don't be tapping Dusty's stuff,” I said. “You ain't stupid. If the white boy don't buy it, what we going to do, take it back to Dusty all tapped out?”

“Yeah, you're right,” Rico said. “But we can tap a buzz, right?”

I thought that Dusty knew that Rico would tap the loads, taking just a little bit from each bag for himself. But if the dope was as good as everybody said Dusty's stuff was, it would probably be all right. What I didn't want was Rico getting high and blowing the whole deal. And what I definitely didn't want was to mess up completely and get Dusty on our case.

I watched while Rico tapped a few bags from each load, enough to make a half bag for himself. We had an hour to go before the drop, and I figured that a half bag wouldn't mess with Rico's head too much, seeing that it was a long way from his regular eight-to-ten-bag jones.