“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?