Dope Sick Read online

  “Can I tell you why I said I need a hit?”

  “They’re your minutes,” Kelly said.

  “When I was a kid, I started carrying around some thoughts,” I said. “At first it was like I was carrying them around with me to think about now and again, but then it was a little like I just had them on my mind all the time.

  “Maybe I’m wrong, but I think some people walk around and think about germs or something, like the woman in the commercial. I look at her and think she’s got germs on her mind and then she’ll switch to that spray stuff and then she’ll be thinking about her children. When her husband gets home she’ll be running her mouth to him, telling him about whatever little thing she was doing all day and he’ll tell her what he was doing and they’ll be thinking about that. Me, I don’t think about nothing else but the things that get me down. It’s like the sad part of me is taking over my whole life.”

  “I got to go to the bathroom,” Kelly said.

  “Just sit there, sucker!” I lifted the Nine and pointed it dead at him. “I’m trying to tell you something.”

  Kelly stood up and started past me. “Go on and shoot, Lil J,” he said. “You got the power.”

  He threw the remote in my lap and moved, almost like a shadow, past me and into the hallway.

  I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what. I looked at the remote and then at the television. I put the Nine down, knowing I didn’t have no power. My thumb moved over the button, but I put that sucker down on the arm of the chair in a hurry. I didn’t want to deal with my own life. No way.

  I sat there, listening to see if I could hear Kelly. I wondered what he was doing, and then I felt my heart jumping in my chest. I was scared. It was almost like I was getting dope sick again. I was needing some help in a hurry.

  “Yo! Kelly!” I called to him. “Kelly!”

  I was imagining me on the roof with the gun upside my head. I was imagining me with my eyes closed.

  “Yo, Kelly!” I called to him again. “Yo, please come back, man!”

  Kelly came back into the room and took the remote from the armrest. When he passed me, his leg went right next to mine, but it didn’t touch me, or I didn’t feel it. He sat down in his chair and I felt myself breathing easier.

  “I’m sorry I got uptight,” I said.

  “You need some sleep?” Kelly asked.

  “I’m not tired,” I said.

  “You look tired,” Kelly said. “You sitting there all droopy looking. Your mouth hanging open.”

  “You ain’t the prettiest sucker in the world either,” I said. “What you checking me out so close for anyway? You funny or something?”

  “Don’t front me,” Kelly said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, that’s different. What you thinking about that cop’s family? What you think they doing now?”

  “Being sad,” I said. “Being miserable. Depending on how it turned out.”

  “Yeah, there’s a lot of sadness in the world, Lil J,” Kelly said. “I think that’s because when you know your situation, you bring a judgment to it and it don’t make a difference if that judgment is right or wrong. You own it either way.”

  “Or somebody could bring their judgment and lay it on you,” I said.

  “Yeah, like you were mad at that teacher because he didn’t know your situation, and yet you weren’t going to let him know what was going down, because it made you feel bad, right?”

  “Something like that at first,” I said. “Then it come to me that I wasn’t really mad at Mr. Lyons—not mad at him personally. What I was mad at was the feeling that I was in a different place, a bad place, and nobody could get next to where I was.”

  “The silence was creeping in,” Kelly said.

  “I don’t exactly know what you mean about that silence stuff,” I said. “But I knew I was mad when I left school that day. I went to the park and hung out. Then, for some stupid reason, I decided to stay in the park all night.”

  “Spread the stink around so everybody know how you were feeling,” Kelly said.

  “Something like that, but I didn’t put it the way you putting it,” I said. “You can talk good. Not pretty, but you got a little weight on you. I bet I can outrhyme you, though. When I spit my rhymes, I sometimes get into a whole ’nother place. I’m like reaching and preaching on a new level. You ever try rapping? Maybe you could DJ if you were carrying enough tunes. What you got going on?”

  “I got my place here and I got my television and I got my remote,” Kelly said. “What you got is sleeping in the park all night.”

  “No, I didn’t sleep in the park all night,” I said. “Trees and stuff is too scary in the dark. You know, you see the branches moving or the wind, making the leaves rustle like they’re whispering something in the dark, and it gets hairy. Plus, you be thinking about all those movies you’ve seen and you think that maybe one of those serial killers is hanging out in the park looking for his next victim.

  “So I went to my apartment building, but I didn’t go right home. I went up on the roof to sleep. Just like…”

  “Just like you ain’t got no place to go and you’re not in a hurry to move on,” Kelly said.

  “What you’re saying is the same thing everybody else is running down and I can hear it’s the word,” I said. “But—square business—I’m not out here looking for no garbage cans to curl up in. I’m looking for the same good dreams everybody else is hoping for, but I don’t see where they are. Or maybe I see where they are, but I don’t see how to get there. I’m sitting up here rapping to some spooky sucker like you and I wouldn’t even want to tell nobody about it, but I don’t know what else to do. You can run down how weak my game is all you want, but that ain’t making it stronger.”

  “What happened that night you came home from the park?”

  “It was about one o’clock in the morning. I knew that because you can look from my roof over to the funeral parlor across the street and they got a big blue clock in the window,” I said. “It was about one o’clock or maybe a little after. I was real mad, and I made a decision that from that moment on I wasn’t going to care about nothing in the world—I wasn’t going to care about my mother, about school, about nothing. It was like I gave up on living right then and there.”

  “I thought you was thinking on change,” Kelly said.

  “I would have run to some change if I knew where change was, man,” I said. “Can’t you dig that?”

  “You ain’t no dog, brother,” Kelly said. “And you ain’t no cat. You’re a guy, and looking for a way out of your situation is part of the deal.”

  “Whatever.”

  “So you spent the night on the roof?”

  “No, because it started to rain and so I went on downstairs into my apartment and went to bed,” I said. “That don’t sound too good, but it was a different me. That was a me that just didn’t care anymore. But I know you’re too lame to figure that out.”

  “No, I’m all over it,” Kelly said. “If you tell yourself you don’t care, then you don’t have to do nothing. Right? Get high. Cop a nod. Move on to the next high.”

  “Yo, Kelly, why you so hard?” I asked. “On one hand you acting like you hip to the whole scene, and then you’re sliding back like you didn’t hear nothing but some verbs and nouns, man.”

  “Lil J, listen to what you’re saying. You’re talking about how hard it is for you to make the right connections and how you see the right places but can’t get to them, and I’m sitting up here watching all this foul mess on television and digging on being spooky, and you think that you and me should be hooking up and making something good happen. Yeah, I can dig where you coming from, but I can’t make you walk over to where I am and I can’t get to you in no easy way. You talking about loving Lauryn and little Brandon—”

  “Brian.”

  “Little Brian, but you can’t even get to them even if it only means walking down the block,” Kelly said. “Life happens, broth
er, but ain’t nobody promised easy.”

  He was right. I did want easy. More than that, I thought I was due some damned easy.

  The sound of a helicopter surprised me, and I went to the window. It was daylight already, and I asked Kelly what time it was.

  “Ten minutes past six,” he said.

  “What kind of watch you got?”

  “Timex.”

  “Timex? That ain’t saying nothing,” I said. “You should get you a Rolex. That helicopter is over a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. Probably talking about the traffic. I’m thinking about getting up out of here. About seven-thirty, when everybody hits the streets, I’ll split.”

  Kelly started flipping through the channels. He called me over to check out what he was watching. It was that guy on NBC with the long face.

  Police Officer Anthony Gaffione is stubbornly clinging to life today after being viciously shot by drug dealers in Harlem. Gaffione, the father of two small daughters, was working undercover in an area known for drug activity. Police have made one arrest, nineteen-year-old Rico Brown, and are now searching for the shooter.

  Then my picture came up on the screen and the guy was still talking.

  Jeremy Dance’s street name is Lil J. He is armed and considered extremely dangerous. Police officers all over the city and in nearby Jersey City, where Lil J is said to have gang connections, are in a desperate search for the alleged accomplice in the shooting.

  I understand we have Mrs. Gaffione on the line. Mrs. Gaffione, we wish you the best of luck in what has to be a difficult time. How are you holding up?

  “All we have is our prayers that Tony pulls through. I know he’ll never be the same and neither will we.”

  Mrs. Gaffione, believe me, all of New York will be praying for your brave husband.

  “They’re gonna kill me, man. I know that. They out looking for me and they getting ready to kill me. Rico told them I was the shooter and there’s no way I’m going to stand there and shoot nobody for nothing. All that’s on Rico and his dope. Now my life is over. That’s it, my life is over.”

  “What you crying for if you don’t care?” Kelly asked.

  “What you mean what I’m crying for?” I asked. “Would you want your life to be over on some jive humble like this? They ain’t going to believe me. They’re going to believe Rico because he got his story all in the papers and on television. They’re going to put his ass in jail for fifty-leven years and they’re going to put me in jail for that much and two dimes more! What that punk Rico is thinking about is, if that cop dies they’re going to be talking about the death penalty—like they got on that dude from Staten Island. He’s going to keep on lying on me to save hisself.”

  “So what you going to do?”

  “Nothing to do. I can’t stay here and I can’t go out there because they’re going to kill me,” I said. “That’s what they really want to do. They don’t want no trial. They want some chalk around my body.”

  “So what you going to do?” Kelly asked again. “You’re saying you can’t stay here and—”

  “Yo, Kelly, shut the hell up!”

  Silence. Only the distant sound of the helicopter and the close-up sound of me sniffling. It was like my whole life was falling apart in one long, horrible moment. All those times of not knowing what to do and feeling bad were being rolled into one straight-out nightmare.

  “Yo, Kelly, you think this is how hell is?”

  “How I know?”

  “Fast-forward that picture again,” I said.

  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!”

  11

  “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 l
ook 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.