The Fortress of Solitude (70 page)

Dose played the game for two weeks. The day he went AWOL he found his way to Hudson’s crackhouse within an hour of hitting the streets, radar working fine after building up his strength on NewGap meals. Invariably, those years, any town had its own microcosmic crackidemic: dealers, whores, every element that the rest of the country righteously decried as big-city symptoms were right up their armpit anywhere you troubled to look.

Indeed, it was in Hudson where Dose met with what he’d always consider his all-time-low glimpse of degradation. In the city proper it was not unknown to hear a dealer humiliate a desperate crackhead, one pleading for free rock:
Yo, you want a rock you could suck my dick for it
. If it was a cracked-out woman, the dealer might or might not be for real; if it was a man, it was for the laugh, to see the flicker of shame in the human skeleton before giving the charity or kicking him out. Nevertheless, however much debasement might be the real language of the encounter, garbing it in sex kept the players in that drama above a certain threshold, in the realm of greed, desire, human things. Dose understood this when he saw what he saw in Hudson: how much lower one human being could wish to take another.

“You need a rock, man?” the Hudson dealer had told the crackhead in question. “See that roach over there?”

Dose saw it, bigger than a roach in fact. A doleful waterbug, shining yellow-brown under a shattered sink. Dose saw the begging crackhead see it too.

“Eat that bug, I give it to you.”

The skeleton had reached for the waterbug, nabbed it, gulped. And been given his hit, to the cackling enjoyment of the dealer and others. Dose only turned his eye, bewildered at what had so suddenly been flayed from all their souls. They were each dead there in that paint-peeling room, and only Dose knew.

When Hudson cops caught Dose in a sweep they didn’t arrest him, only put him on a Greyhound back to the city. A month or two later, after his next city arrest, Dose sat on a Riker’s bunk and told the Hudson story. Incredibly, one of his listeners offered triangulation. They’d seen the same once, the eat-a-bug shtick, on a jaunt down in Florida.

All agreed: such grim hick shit would never go over here. New Yorkers had too much self-respect for that.

Lady’s.

That night in June in Barry’s front room was the first and only time Dose ever saw Lady out of her own crib. You’d be stretching to call it a party: Dose and his father, plus Horatio, Lady, and some skinny crabby other girl who struggled to keep her head up.

Dose had full-circled with Barry, to sharing the pipe.

If crackheads were an extended family, as hateful with one another as true relations, why exclude his father?

Smoke scribbled in the air between them, like exhausted language, Senior’s unmentioned name etched in fume.

Once in a blue moon Dose brushed dust off an album jacket and placed the tonearm over a groove Barry hadn’t aired in ten years—Esther Phillips, Donny Hathaway—treasures moldering in disuse. The evening when Dose met her, though, there in the half-light of Barrett Rude Junior’s parlor sarcophagus, Lady had already been at the old vinyl and made a selection—
Curtis Live
, “Stare and Stare,” “Stone Junkie,” Mayfield laughing in falsetto at his drummer’s stuttering breaks.

Lady featured the hugest capacity Dose had seen. He never knew anyone could smoke more rock than him, let alone a woman. She partied three, four days in a row, hardly nodded, and never more so than that first time, beginning after Barry kicked them out, four in the morning. Horatio and the floppy girl went up Nevins to the IRT, and Lady led Dose to her crib in the Gowanus Houses, a public housing apartment turned crack den.

Her true name was Veronica Worrell, though he never heard it from her lips. She offered what everyone called her: Lady. The name encoded her formal airs, a tinge of severity. She was nobody’s girl and nobody’s mother, but everyone’s Lady, well known as such.

If walking down Dean with her that night Dose might have mistaken what kind of pickup she’d made, what it was Lady had spotted in his eyes, seeing her crib dispelled any uncertainty. Her door opened to the Hoyt Street face of the projects, in sight of traffic, cars rolling by with the booming systems, backbeat rattling windows, the cops cruising too, ominously hushed in their Giuliani Task Force vans. Lady kept a lookout, a crackhead schooled in two hand signals, all they could keep track of: fist for a white man, or an unfamiliar black, a maybe-cop, open hand for a recognized customer or any obvious pipehead, too young or skeletal to be a threat.

He didn’t know it but Dose had come in for his last mission, homing like a pigeon.

The place was a factory geared for one purpose, support of Lady’s own habit. The volume of enterprise out of a three-bedroom public unit was staggering, a feat to make Henry Ford or Andy Warhol envious. Any space was rentable, not only bedrooms to girls for turning tricks, kitchen to dealers cutting up their shit, but closets for stashing quantities in transit, corridors and couches for slumping against. You might not sleep anymore—many didn’t. Dose couldn’t recall authentic sleep by the end of two months at Lady’s. But if you didn’t sleep you nodded, if you didn’t nod you rested with your eyes open. At Lady’s, you paid to rest.

Dose paid the only way he could, by bringing people back to Lady’s crib. If they bought product he was settling his debt. This was Lady’s specialty, her adding-machine brain. Even as she smoked more than he thought a human body could tolerate, Dose never knew her to drop a digit in her calculations. She’d tell him when he was ahead enough to earn a rock. Or more, ahead enough to be allowed to pitch some rock himself. He remade himself as an entrepreneur four or five times in his months under Lady, taking vials of product onto Hoyt or up to Fulton, to the Albee Square Mall, or just into the courtyard in the project’s interior. Then he’d fail, smoke it all, not be able to afford another vial, and when he’d nod he’d be in debt for the extent of wall he took up. It was a tough system, but fair. Nothing could be held against Lady, she was so obviously looking out for her people, the pipeheads. Nobody stole your shoes or your clothes when you closed your eyes at Lady’s.

This was the true love affair, Dose misunderstood no longer. Lady saw into his soul and found an appetite for rock there, all the way down to the bottom.

That was his last summer, a long nod against her corridor wall. And smoking until by arrest he was thinner than he’d ever been, maybe seventy pounds light.

Let’s get small, everybody get small.

That same June, on Smith Street, one measly block away, Sans Famille, the first of the area’s upscale French restaurants, opened its doors. The bistro drew a star from the
Times
, the first tick of Smith’s gentrification time bomb, precursor to the cafés and boutiques which would leverage out botanicas and social clubs, precursor to Arthur Lomb’s counterfeit Berlin.

Sans Famille’s busboys and dishwashers weren’t unwitting of the action on Hoyt. More than a few made their way to Lady’s threshold on their city-regulated ten-minute breaks.

Once he proved himself untrustworthy for taking vials on the street, Dose accepted his obvious fate, the slot for which Lady might have pegged him the moment they met. He ran her door. Not the lookout window, he’d not plummeted to that ignoramus level. He was a dealer still, just one trusted to go no farther than his hand could reach through the security-chained door. Money in and product out, Dose touched it all as it passed and kept barely anything.

He unchained the door for the cops when they came. They came just in time. He was going to die if he kept Lady’s pace.

The gun was nobody’s in particular, hidden in a drawer, but it stuck to him. Dose had to be philosophical. It was in the nature of an arrest situation that a floating gun attached to the individual bearing a manslaughter rap.

He’d been six months at Riker’s and was up to a hundred and thirty pounds when he pled out and was moved upstate to Auburn, then Watertown.

Auburn.

His first tour, Dose had been prodigal, an advance man for a generation destined inside. Now it wasn’t just Riker’s which brimmed with faces from the neighborhood or the yards. It was the big upstate houses like Auburn, too, as though the system was inadvertently reassembling the city and its factions here, 1977 trapped in the amber of incarceration. Writers were reunited with their crews, none having seen each other since back in the day, since they’d spun from teenage affiliations into lives more burdened and serious. Yet those adult lives seemed stripped away by their failure. What remained were thirty-year-old teenagers joshing in prison:
Ho, shit, man, it’s you! This my boy Pietro, from DMD!
Or:
Damn, I used to see your shit on the 6 line, you were with Rolling Thunder Crew, right?

Lines of enmity dissolved. Any connection was a good one, here in the woods. Dose met a couple of boys from a once-upon-a-time-terrifying Coney Island gang. Some summer ago, Dose and two others from FMD had gotten on the Coney crew’s bad side by making a dumb mistake: they’d tagged inside a bunch of apparently clean D-train cars in a yard’s dim moonlight, using black ink from heavy-flowing fat mops. When the trains ran the next day, Dose and his mates saw with horror what moonlight hadn’t revealed: the D-train interiors had already been covered with the Coney Island crew’s clunky tags in pink ink. Black now overlapped the pink everywhere. How to explain the pink hadn’t even been
visible
? Impossible. They thought Dose had deliberately backgrounded them. Dose spent that summer watching over his shoulder for the Coney gang, marked as prey.

Now it was all hunky-dory, good for a laugh. Dose was one of the famous names, so the Coney crew recalled the incident as evidence they’d once been significant writers.

Dose was ambulatory history, and brothers wished to claim some for themselves.

“Yo, Dog, you remember me? I wrote
Kansur 82
, you used to background me all the time.”

“Sure, sure, I remember you,” Dose would say, if he was in a generous mood.

Other times he’d withhold the glory of being linked to his name, just to see their frustration: “Why would I trouble to background you, blood? What was you to me?”

“I was a toy, I know—you was right to go over my tags.”

Dose would deny it, tormenting their minds: “You claiming you got up somewhere before me?”

“You used to go over me!” the younger writer would insist.

“Nah, man. You used to go
under
me.”

Surgery.

Of course it would be Horatio, clownier than ever, who turned up in Auburn’s visitor’s room talking around the subject, not saying what he meant. Barry was illing—well, Dose knew that already. No,
truly
illing, like in the Long Island College emergency room a couple of times. His father
needed
Dose now, in some way Horatio wouldn’t explain. Dose agreed without understanding what he’d agreed to.

A week later he was escorted to Auburn’s infirmary for consultation with a surgeon who acted like Doolittle among the savages, brow furrowed in reproach even as he spoke at moron rpm. Did Dose grasp what he was offering? Yes, sure, though he hadn’t until then. There was no certainty it would work, Doolittle warned. Tests were required, to check the match. His and his father’s candidacy had to be examined. Dose, old hand in passivity by now, submitted to three weeks of fluid donations, spinal, bile, and shit. The results: Dose was a hundredth-percentile shoe-in to rescue his father’s putrefying blood.

Doolittle, chafing at being instrument of a back-channel exception, prison strings pulled by Andre Deehorn and others in the Philly scene, advised Dose against the procedure. The kidney could fail within five to ten years—that was a
successful
outcome.

Dose would have given heart, or hands, or eyes.

Recovery took six days in Albany Presbyterian Hospital. Dose and his father lay in side-by-side narcotic slumber, with a holstered guard in the room patently thrilled with the assignment, full of
Playboy
dreams of nurses.

The day before he was returned inside, with both Dose and Barry up and running, having demonstrated renal function to Doolittle’s satisfaction, the four of them—son and father in cotton pajamas, and Horatio, and the guard—escaped through fire doors to the hospital’s roof.

There they smoked a joint Horatio’d smuggled in, conducting their own tests on that new kidney—what else was it for?

There, as they squinted in the glare off Albany’s toy skyline, his father’s fund of disappointment was proven bottomless. Barry could help himself to Dose’s extra kidney and still not meet his eyes.

When he learned how famous the organ donation made him at Auburn, Dose wanted no part of it, and requested the transfer to Watertown, to finish his bid in anonymous peace.

Watertown.

Dose shed it all. No jailhouse artistry, he’d left that behind years back—a million guys could execute the graffiti style now. He had no illusions about stockpiling cigarettes. Old-school eminence held nothing he wanted, it signified zip to the time he had to do, played no real factor in the endurance of the mind. Claiming this or that alliance outside—
Yo, I know that dude, younger brother of Fitty Cents, that nigger’s King of Wyckoff Gardens, he gonna set me up when I’m sprung
—looked thinner every day. Duck ensnarements and arrears at any level, this was Dose’s campaign. Beguiling COs was of use only if you wanted something a CO could give you. They could give you nothing. A protector like Raf mattered only until you understood there was nothing to protect.

Invisibility, intangibility, Teflon eyes.

Yet he had one last error of affiliation in him.

Robert Woolfolk was the same hectic proposition he’d ever been, only stretched and torn by fifteen years more on the street and inside. Gold-toothed, arm-crook scarred from vein hunts, one ear nipped, Robert staggered on, decades beyond adventures that ought to have been his finish if he hadn’t had so many lives, like Wile E. Coyote still climbing out of the crater and dusting himself off, rubbing his hands and grinning in conspiratorial glee. You wanted to put the man to bed.