White Out (21 page)

“Don’t even,” I said.

He shuffled over to the dresser and started doing magic tricks over the dope, honking softly, rambling.

“You shouldn’t just leave your door open, Mike…beautiful pile you got here…just a little too close to the edge of this dresser, huh…deep brown, huh…this is just going to blow away standing at the edge like that…not going to jump are you, little fellow…just let me help you there.”

He carefully adjusted the dope pile, moving it a little to the left, a little to the right. I thought I saw a straw between his fingers for a second and then it was gone.

The dope pile looked a little different when I finally got over to it on my bloodless brown dope legs. But I had to admit it was safer. Farther from the edge of the dresser. Henry was like insurance. Sometimes you have to pay a little to save it all. I looked at the smaller pile with love and hate. Henry excused himself and went to throw up in the bathroom.

“I didn’t leave my door open, Henry,” I said. “How did you get in?”

“It’s that nasty brown dope you got, Mike,” he said, sitting down heavily on my bed. “You shoulda told me but it’s OK. It happens. Damn Nazi dealers. Poison you to make a buck. The secret is to take it in little doses, just enough to hold off the jones, until you can get your hands on some good stuff.”

“I didn’t think you knew how to get to my place, Henry,” I said.

“Kurt dropped me off,” he said.

“For what?”

“You don’t remember?”

We stared at each other. I don’t remember. Then we were in the car. I was driving. We stopped at a nice brick house in Guilford where Henry scrambled up to the door and handed a bottle of Oxys to a nice middle-aged woman and then came back to the car with the money. Then we went to Edmondson Avenue and scored six red tops. I fixed in a gas station bathroom off Route 40 just outside of downtown. Little phantom mouths flowered around my neck, releasing ten thousand years of pressure in a gust of brown gas. I looked into the bathroom mirror through the brown mist and the condensation and the claw marks of devils and I smiled.

When we slid out the gas station east toward Fells Point, several seconds were missing from every minute, and five or six words were missing from every sentence.

“Ye—es.” Henry said.

The sun hung at the summer angle that turns the feelings of mortals away from the sadness of eventual death, toward the sadness of endless life. Squirrels, dogs on leashes, white ladies, pigeons, snitches, and stray cats moved or stood along the sides of the road as we passed.

“Roll it out,” I said to the wheels beneath me. “Roll it out.”

“The cap-ital of California is Sacramento,” Henry recited. “The cap-ital of Arizona is Arizona City.”

An unreal high had its knife at my heart, and when we went over a little bump it pushed in the tip a little. I thought,
Damn, there’s more to this shit than just how you feel about it.

“The cap-ital of Texas is Texas,” said Henry.

When we got to Dom’s, the door was ajar and we pushed on in. We were feeling a little like cowboys and a little like explorers. Relaxed like cowboys, but still looking for drugs, like explorers.

“Yoodle-ey-hee-hoooo,” Henry said into the bright heart-attack darkness of Dom’s place of residence.

“Up here, pardner,” said Dom with his voice.

We tramped slowly up the stairs. Henry went into the big open room at the end of the hall, while I swung into the bathroom. Dom was there, next to the mirror with his chin up, looking like he was shaving, unsteadily guiding a needle into his neck.

“Let me shed some light on the subject, Dom,” I said, pushing open the rag that hung over the bathroom window and revealing a neck that looked like a broken foot with the toes missing. “You’re going to kill yourself doing that in the dark.”

“I think I already did, son,” he said, pushing the plunger home. He straightened up, blinked a couple times, pushed the rag back over the hole, turned to me, held out his arm, and said:

“Shall we?”

“Such a gentleman!” I said, as he escorted me down the hallway.

Henry was sprawled full on the floor in the big room, with his head and face lifted politely and even elegantly up toward his approaching guests. He pulled himself up to a sitting posture as Dom and I took our seats on the floor.

“We’re glad you’re here today, Mike,” Henry said, “because today—”

“—is Henry’s birthday!” Dom said. They both beamed.

“Happy birthday, Henry,” I said.

“Got somfin’ for you, Henry,” Dom said. He turned behind him and rooted around in the pile of newspapers, empty cigarette packs, unopened condom packs, and gas-station hot-dog wrappers until he emerged with something long in a brown bag.

“What is it?” we breathed.

“A beer!” Dom unsheathed the twenty-two-ounce beer and placed it in the center of the room. We all craned over to look at it.

“A beer!” I said.

“A beer,” Henry said. “Look at that.” He looked at Dom, who turned shyly away.

“You shouldn’t have, Dom.”

“Well,” Dom mumbled, “I figured what the hell, a birthday only comes along once a year.”

“I guess it’s been so long I tasted a beer, I forgot what it tastes like!” Henry said. He picked it up gingerly by the neck in his single hand, and turned it a little in his palm. He did this by ungrasping his hand so the bottle would slip a little, turning as it slipped, then gripping it again. Grip, slip, turn, grip.

“Bud, too!” he said. “That’s a good brand.”

“The best,” I said. “Say what you like about Bud, it’s a very good beer. Everyone knows that.”

“They got all kinda ads and shit,” Henry said. “When’s the last time you seen an ad for Old Milwaukee?”

“I just thought that one looked nice,” Dom said. I could tell that now he was thinking maybe he should have got a forty, or even a six-pack. Maybe he was even getting a little sad about it. Henry looked at him.

“I just love it, Dom,” he said. “This is the best birthday present anyone has gotten me in as long as I can remember.” He paused. “Matter of fact, it’s the only birthday present anyone’s gotten me since…since I was a teenager.” Henry’s eyes were bright. He set the bottle on the floor and pushed it out to the center of the room.

“I want all of us to share it,” he said.

“No, Henry,” I said. “It’s your beer, you drink it.”

“That’s right, Henry,” Dom said. “It’s your birthday, this Bud’s for you.”

“No,” Henry said firmly, “everyone gets a sip.”

He nodded to me. I looked at Dom, who shrugged. I picked up the bottle gingerly and unscrewed the cap. Budweiser’s famous life-giving brown bubbles moved slowly behind the real glass. I sipped it, and as the potent warm juice dropped down my numb throat into my nonfunctioning guts I thought about beer. About how it was the universal beverage of good times and celebration.

I wiped my lips and passed it to Dom, who shook his head. I gave it to Henry. He drank deeply. Then set the bottle down and wiped his lips with the back of his uni-arm. He was smiling, smacking his lips. After a few seconds his smile disappeared.

“Beer sucks,” Henry said. “You gotta be a fucking retard to be a alcoholic.”

“No shit,” said Dom immediately.

I spit the piss left in my mouth out onto the floor.

Dom reached out with his huge bear arm and knocked over the bottle. The beer pooled out in long dirty streams collecting ashes and dirt and dried blood until the streams turned to black marks and stopped moving. We all started laughing. We laughed and laughed, sounding like vacuums trying to suck up tennis balls, laughing, laughing, our long dry tongues lolling back into our throats, laughing until the unabsorbed beer sprayed out of my nostrils and out of Henry’s half-toothless mouth.

When the laughter had died down and Dom had stopped talking and moving and almost stopped breathing collapsed in a pile in the corner—when that happened I leaned over to Henry, who was still smiling.

“Can I ask you a question, Henry?” I said.

“Anything, Mike,” he said. “It’s my birthday.”

“How did you get into my apartment today, Henry?”

Mrs. Nichols dies when I’m six. I look at the sky. The phone rings when I’m twenty-five, lying on my bed alternately sick from dope and sick from no dope.

Why did these things happen? What caused them? Did Mrs. Nichols’s death cause me to look up at the sky when I was six? Did my odd habit of staring at the sky when I was a kid cause me to become a junkie? And then, lying sick from bad dope, did my hate at that goddamn ringing telephone drop down through the past and kill Mrs. Nichols?

I’ll admit that these cause-and-effect chains are pure speculation. Does fidgeting cause arthritis? Sister Pancraceous fidgeted when she was a kid, then she got arthritis. You want to correct her? Punish her? A nice old lady like that? A nun, for God’s sake.

It’s not like anyone really knows for sure. Cause and effect is a famous mystery. One thing happens, then another. There’s an empty space between. No way to tell for sure. Connect the events as you like. Sister Pancraceous fidgeted, then she got arthritis. Simple as that, a straight line.

I prefer circles to lines. Mrs. Nichols’s death caused me to become a junkie, and my junkie hate came out of the future to kill her. She deserved it, in a way.

Sure, I want my life to look realistic, just like anyone would. But cause-and-effect questions don’t always have realistic answers. Think about it. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Dom or Henry? Life or death?

I had stopped working on my dissertation, but I still sometimes scribbled little bits and pieces before I went to sleep. Not about the big questions. Practical writing: “Don’t Do Dope Today!!!” “Dope Kills!” “Get Help, I’m Worth It!” I left these little notes for myself all around my apartment. I was like a slogan writer for D.A.R.E. I also wrote a poem around that time. I still have it.

CHAPTER 11

I
n Baltimore they call cops “knockers.” We had to watch out for the knockers. Cops dressed like junkies. Undercovers. They were hard to spot. I asked everyone I knew about their favorite way of detecting knockers. It was a survey.

“So how can you tell a knocker?” I’d ask.

“It’s easy,” Funboy said. “Knockers’re black. But the dope boys got it twisted. That’s why some spots won’t serve white fiends.”

“It’s easy,” Tony said. “Knockers always white. That’s why we don’t serve white boys. Except you, Funboy. And you.”

“It’s tricky,” Henry said, “but I got the trick. Knockers always look you right in the eyes. Their eyes knock into yours. It’s why they’re called knockers.”

“Knockers don’t look at the dope right,” Dom said. “They look at it the way you might look at a beer. Or at Henry.”

“Knockers drive Toyotas,” Todd said.

“Knockers have white teeth,” Fathead said. “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their teeth.”

“Knockers mostly snort dope, they never shoot it,” Funboy said.

“If you ask a knocker if he a knocker, a real knocker gotta tell you,” the teenage dealer said looking at me. “You a knocker, motherfucker?”

“There are fake knockers and real knockers,” Henry said. “The fake knockers cover for the real knockers. They send ’em through and everyone freaks. Then they go and everyone chills. Then the real knockers come.”

“Knockers talk to the helicopter cameras with their finger moves so watch how they fingers move,” Chico said. He was one of Funboy’s friends.

“A knocker got me.” This was a girl I met at the Center for Addiction Medicine. “I can’t tell you what it looked like.”

“If you ain’t a knocker I wanna see you do that shit in front of me,” the dealer said.

“Knockers smoke Winstons,” Karen said. She stayed at Dom’s until the knockers got her.

“You can tell fake knockers ’cause they look more like knockers than the real knockers do,” Henry said. “Real knockers look just like us.”