The Cocaine Chronicles (12 page)

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 man- aged 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.

part iii

the corruption

Guy Dill

KERRY WEST
, a welder by trade, is a writing tutor for the University Writing Center at California State University, Los Angeles. West’s only published works, other than “Shame” in this volume, are two short stories that appeared in Los Angeles City College’s
Citadel.

shame

by kerry e. west

N
icole
!” Lorna shrieked at her twelve-year-old daughter.

“Get in there and feed the babies.” This was actually more about getting the kid out of the room than anything else. Nicole wordlessly tromped into the bedroom knowing quite well what we were up to.

Lorna whipped out the mirror and razor. Uncle Jeff pulled out the crank. I watched with impatient fervor. The three of us were like slobbering dogs, intent on a single-minded endeavor: a good, harsh toot up our sniffers. And any thoughts of what may have been wandering through the mind of the young girl in the other room were obliterated by this urgent social priority. Hey! Whadda-you-want? We were addicts. We just needed the kid
out
of the room so we could guiltlessly burn out our nasal canals—as if Lorna really gave a shit anyway.

“Where’s the key, Mom?” came Nicole’s raised voice from within the bedroom; it was a voice with nuances that often seemed matured years beyond what should have been normal for a twelve-year-old. The voice was unemotional and businesslike; she stolidly had the household routines down. It always impressed me how reserved Nicole remained around her mom, but then in her mom’s absence she would instantly revert to her independent, playful, but far from naïve self.

“You don’t need the key. Get them food
now
, and keep it quiet!” Lorna hollered back; she had a scowl on her face with tension lines wrinkling the corners of her eyes. Lorna, with the character natural to a screaming banshee, gave a daunting performance of stern parental control, and Nicole, and her two-year-old and three-year-old sisters, usually obeyed.

Lorna turned back to the main issue at hand and began to chop. She paused a second to brush back a long, light-reddish lock that had annoyingly fallen forward from behind her ear and into her face. She continued:
chopchopchopchopchopchopchop
. . . for a
long
time. Actually, it was only for about half a minute but, eager as I was, it seemed an eternity. She drew out some lines. I remember looking at her pale-skinned, freckled face, the matching flesh on her big-boned arms, and I remember thinking what a large girl she was. Oh . . . I don’t mean corpulent; I mean hefty and muscular.

She certainly had no beauty to speak of, and I possessed no sexual desire for her. She’d’uv probably kicked my ass if I’d tried anything anyway. Lorna proceeded to nostrilize the glittering powder and passed the mirror to Jeff.

Now, the family’s Uncle Jeff was a precious find. He was a pleasant guy. He was cultivated. He was the most delightful druggie you could ever hope to know—should you wish or
need
to know one. His tamed soul made him an incessantly jolly man, content to live out life with a fresh blast every ten minutes. Very unselfish guy, too, and I don’t mean this just because it was
his
stash we were doing up in the living room. He just liked sharing in good company; this, regardless of the enhancement to supply-and-demand that was bound to result. Jeff was a lofty six-foot-two, plump, and he supported a tarnished-silver, longhaired Genghis Khan moustache that flowed around and down the sides of his mouth. And his nose was large and red with a straw stuck up it.

He finished and passed the mirror to me.
Finally
. The line was smaller than I had hoped for.

“Say, Lorna? Did you get your check yet?” I asked conversationally as I bent over the mirror, inhaling, then releasing a sound wave apposite of relief, “Ahhh.” I was hoping she’d be able to pay her part of the bills, or at least some of her part—I’d been having enough trouble with “unpredictable” utility disconnections.

I had been renting my guesthouse to her. It was not really a large enough dwelling for her family, but they managed. Lorna slept on the living room couch, and the girls used the only other available room as a bedroom. What had become a real problem, though, was that Lorna never used any of her welfare check for rent or utilities. Never. She always got over on me somehow. It wasn’t until years later that I was able to understand how she suckered me into accepting them as tenants in the first place.

She answered with an arrogant grin, “No. But I’ll let you know when I do.”

As usual, this predictable answer caused my anger to flare up for a second. I thus found it necessary to promptly establish some priorities and said to her, “Cool. Can I have another line?”

So there it was. It was a situation that was more costly for me than if I’d lived alone on the property, a situation superseded by the delicious incentive that their Uncle Jeff was a darn good connection, one I didn’t want to lose.

Anyway, good . . . we did another round. When my turn came, I snorted
hard
so as to lay down a thick and speedy blanket over those vast reaches of my nasal canals that may have yet remained untainted—this time,
Wow
! Satisfaction guaranteed, let-me-tell-you. Graciously, I then excused myself to go out into the yard to give my van one of its meticulously scheduled oil changes.

Minutes later—lying out there under my van—the shit
really
kicked in. My teeth clenched and ground against themselves. My periphery narrowed; my concentration pinpointed heavily on the task at hand. And then my heightened ambition sensed all the cruddy grease clods encrusting the van’s underside. Sidetracked now, I grabbed the first purposeful utensil within reach—a screwdriver—and began arduously scraping away all the caked-on deposits from the bottom of the engine. This single-minded contagion spread and I started on the frame. Next would be the transmission. So there I was an hour and a half later, still frenziedly preparing for an oil change, when Nicole and her baby sisters came barreling out through the side door of their bedroom. Uh-oh! They looked to be on a mission.

The girls, all blondes looking nothing alike, were pretty much a riotous bunch. Whenever those three erupted into the yard, the three-year-old, little curly haired Autumn, would break into a full and flashing smile the moment she’d see me, gleefully calling, “Kee-ee. Hi, Kee-ee.” That seemed to be the extent of her vocabulary, to which I’d be required to reply, “Hi, Autumn.” She’d return with, “Hi, Kee-ee.” To which I’d again reply, and so on and so on, until I was the one to give in to this contest.

Then, in her usual waddling fashion, followed the youngest:

scraggly haired Jessica. Jessica, always with a variety of purplish sores on her face and arms, never uttered a word. Two years old and she still wasn’t able to talk at all. Well, she’d come stumbling out the door with her giant, wide-open eyes, taking in the whole yard, giggling frantically, and acting like a million Christmas gifts were now hers to ransack. She always seemed infatuated with the world, always tagging along behind Autumn, emulating her every move.

And finally, of course, there was the preordained babysitter, Nicole. Nicole could be a handful of monkey business if she wanted to be. But during “business” hours she had an absolute yet incredibly compassionate ability to keep her sisters in check. When Nicole spoke, the little ones would listen acutely, earnestly falling in before her like her own private little army, an integrated machine tuned to her every command. It always seemed to me that the two younger ones might have thought
she
was their mother, as well.

Now Nicole, despite all the responsibility that her mother would lay upon her, naturally needed her own diversions and wouldn’t hesitate to seize any opportunity that allowed her to sway from everyday procedure. Such it is that she would offer to assist in
my
chores whether I needed help or not. I think this finagling may have been a perfect excuse for legitimately disobeying her mother:

“But he needed help, Mom,” she’d always plead, all the time knowing I was too soft to favor a contradiction.

Anyway, the three girls inevitably found my prone body hiding under the van. And Nicole leaned over to offer her assistance but I turned her down. I mean, after all, an oil change is a one-man job, isn’t it? So Nicole let her sisters help instead. And
boy,
did they help. Autumn came over to one side to distract me, “Kee-ee. Hi, Kee-ee.” Jessica stole a socket wrench from behind me and ran. Shoot! Now I had to get out from under and chase down the tool. Meanwhile, Autumn was left wide open to take off with the filter wrench. Here things got tricky. Since Autumn had a head start before I’d returned from tracking Jessica—and you can bet she went in the opposite direction—this gave Jessica all the time in the world to take her pick of the rest of my tools while I was off stalking Autumn. Apparently, all this was quite entertaining for Nicole, for she simply sat quietly on a bench giving me sweet, wide grins as I darted hither and thither.

You know? I’d almost swear under oath that since the two younger ones were so verbally limited, they all used telepathy to gang up on me. Can you not help but love such shenanigans? The ultimate joy of this world should be nothing larger than kids having a real ball.

Later that night there came an aggravated banging on my door. I answered in irritation, becoming delighted as soon as I saw whom it was. “Hi, Jeff! Come in.
Come in
.”

He entered looking more than a little concerned and told me straight out, “Lorna just got popped after she came over to cop some shit.”

“Oh, man! What a hassle. How she gonna get out?”

Jeff, already motioning for a mirror, replied, “Not a problem, I bet. They’re probably going to let her out on O.R. in the morning. Right now, man, I need to check on the kids.” His mind spaced for a second, then he began crushing the small rock he’d pulled out and asked, “Know how to change a diaper?”

I looked at him dumbfounded. I didn’t
even
want to touch that one. And I think neither did he, judging from his expression. So, with that startling revelation in mind, we both saw the highly fitting rationale in reinforcing the stamina of our polluted bloodstreams.

We did so and dispatched the mirror.

As we walked over to the guesthouse, we consoled each other with the fact that we could always ask Nicole to do the diaper thing if need be. When we neared the door, Jeff called to Nicole to open it. She did; she had a cheery grin and let us in. An Olsen twins video was on the television.

Jeff spoke despondently to his niece: “Nikki . . . your mom’s in jail.”

“I know,” she said brightly. “She called and told me.” Nicole was definitely not upset. She almost seemed exuberant. Perhaps the evening was running more smoothly for her without her mother’s interventions. Either that or Nicole had simply lit up to the fact that her Uncle Jeff had arrived. She utterly adored her Uncle Jeff.

He was much like a father figure for her, yet she never gave him reason to reprimand her. He was stern but kindly, and perhaps devoted more time to Nicole than did anyone else. Lorna, on the other hand, couldn’t, for she was a very busy woman; busy tweakin’ around the clock just as most the rest of us were.

“Nikki, did you eat dinner? Did your sisters get fed yet?”

“Yes, Uncle Jeff.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re in their beds.”

Then Jeff turned to me, an unsure gaze in his eyes, and said, “I’d better check on them,” and I followed him while Nicole indifferently went back to sit in front of the television.

We passed through a doorway draped over with a heavy woolen blanket, and I realized I hadn’t been in this room for quite some time. As we drew back the blanket, an appalling odor woofed out to slap us startlingly in the face. It was very dark in there, too dark to see. Jeff felt around for a light switch, found one, and snapped it on. The two of us, blinking vacantly as our eyes adjusted, froze for an instant, horrified as the sight before us materialized. We both quickly glanced to check each other’s reaction, reactions that were meaningless in light of what we were looking at. We again peered back into a room neither of us had seen since the day Lorna moved the kids into it.

The room was a shambles of microbe-ridden rubbish heaps. Stuffed animals and rumpled clothes were strewn everywhere, with the majority of them heaped in a pile on the floor of the doorless closet. Under this bedlam lay a mishmash of kitchen knives, a hammer, a shower head, waterlogged toilet paper, paper clips, the closet door, you name it. The room’s only decoration was another heavy, brown blanket nailed over the solitary window and feces-smeared walls. In one corner on the floor was a rancid pile of loaded diaper bundles. Out of the corner of my eye those bundles appeared to spasm when we first turned on the light, but it was just the cockroaches trying to take cover. There were only two pieces of furniture: a playpen and a small crib. I saw no bed for Nicole.

Autumn sat on her rump in the playpen, grinning and staring at us but saying not a word, not even a single “Kee-ee.” With her were a couple of mangled toys, a pillow, and a dirtied dinner plate. Her hands, mouth, and blouse were mottled with food. There was no way for her to stand erect—covering the top of the playpen, secured in place with padlocked motorcycle chains, was a section of wrought-iron fence.

Jessica was asleep in the crib, which had a thick-corded fishnet draped over its top; it was pulled taut down the sides and tied off underneath. Movement was limited. For Jessica, sleep was likely a blessing. Her restriction didn’t seem as severe as the playpen situation until Jeff pointed to the soiled colorings of the sheetless mattress; it seethed with soggy patches of some weird dark and moldlike growth. I only then began to relate the sores Jessica always bore to the meaning of “crib rot.”

Suddenly, Jeff directed a blaring roar at the other room, which startled me and woke up Jessica: “
Nicole
!” He paused to swallow for control and then continued angrily, “What have you done here?

Unlock this playpen
now
.”

And I heard the meek reply from the other room, “I can’t.

Mom has the key.”

We stood there a moment . . . bewildered, to say the least.

It was then that a large assortment of envelopes partially covered by a ragged jacket and several tiny socks strangely summoned my attention. I moved sulkily over to them and apathetically brushed aside the jacket with my foot. The items seemed vaguely familiar. I stooped down for a closer look. Behold! What did I find but . . .
my mail
? Here were the unopened phone and power bills that I had sworn to the utility companies—after several disconnections— I never received. And I began to see the logic: If I didn’t get the bills, Lorna couldn’t be held for what she owed. I cursed out loud, already raging beyond forethought for the younger presence in the room.