“And expensive,” I add. She always thinks things are better if they’re expensive.
“Oh, Dennis,” she says, “you’re something else. This is …”
She can’t finish the sentence right away, and she waits.
“You drive us all to the brink of despair,” she says finally, “and then you do this.”
I don’t say anything, and I am happy to see how she likes the ring as she slips it over her finger. It fits perfectly.
“How could you afford this?” she asks. I knew she would ask.
“I just saved,” I answer, “a little here, a little there.”
“You know, Dennis,” she says, holding the ring out in the light, “to do this shows something that’s in your soul.”
I don’t want her to make such a splash about it. I know she has most of what she needs, like food and clothes and this apartment, and I don’t guess anyone really needs a gold ring. Especially since I don’t want the ring to do anything except give her something to be happy about, something out of the blue that will make her smile.
“Oh, c’mon,” I say. “I just wanted to give you something.”
“Yes,” she says, “you have given me something. And I hope you never lose it.”
“The ring?” I ask.
“No,” she laughs. “Not the ring. C’mere now and give us a kiss.”
I laugh, too, saying, “I already gave you a kiss, Mom, and I gotta go to meet the guys on 54th Street.”
Going down the stairs to the street, I think about what I said to my mother. It was a little lie, but still it was a lie, and I wonder if I’ll be able to get it out of my head. Why am I lying to my mother like this? I’m not meeting the guys on 54th Street at all. I’m meeting the guys on 55th Street, but I don’t want to tell her that.
I don’t want her to know.
I
t is now two weeks later, and the three of us are sitting around in the basement of number 2 Sutton Place South, on 57th Street. I come to this building a lot with the flowers, and I know the lay of the basement delivery area. So does Mikey, because his father is a janitor here. We are in the boiler room, down a deep stairwell from the basement, the deepest part of the cellar, and there is a constant background of hissing steam.
We came here straight from making a score on 120th Street.
“Nobody will ever come here,” Mikey says, “unless the boiler breaks down and they run outta hot water.”
It is hot, steamy. The walls are dark and shining with the sweat of the moisture. There is a water bug on the ceiling, a large one with feelers that shoot out about three inches. It doesn’t move, and seems frozen by the sound of our voices.
There are no chairs, and so we are sitting on the floor. Frankie takes a set of works from under his shirt. There is a small metal cap from a medicine bottle, and he puts it between the prongs of a bobby pin, which acts as the handle. It is like a miniature cooking pot.
There is a weird sense going through me as I watch this. It is like being at a High Mass where the priests are doing things that you haven’t seen before, that you don’t quite understand.
Mikey wraps thread around the tip of a large eyedropper and jams a needle on it. Frankie has the junk this time, and we watch him drop his pants and pull the glassine envelope, half the size of a pack of matches, out from between the cheeks of his ass. It is almost as if he has farted it out, but no one laughs. There is nothing funny about it.
Frankie now opens the package and creases an edge of the paper to pour out the white powder.
“Careful, man,” Mikey says.
“I know what I’m doing, man,” Frankie says. “Don’t give me this careful bullshit.”
“Easy, guys,” I say.
This is the first time I have said anything since we got off the Second Avenue bus. The last time I was with them we just scored the horse, but today I’m going to try it.
Frankie pours the powder in and goes to the water faucet on the side of the boiler where Mikey is washing the needle. He puts a little water into the cap and mixes the powder with the water. It looks like white mud, but when Frankie puts a match to the bottom of the cap, all of it begins to boil, and the white substance disappears. It now looks like water. Just plain unadulterated water, painless and harmless.
“Perfect cook, man,” Mikey says. “Perfect cook.”
“Okay, Dennis,” Frankie says. “You’re up.”
Until this moment I was thinking that I could still be along for the ride, but now, in a split second, I am a real part of all this. I have heard so much about how taking drugs just once will make you a drug addict for life, and drug addicts are the slime and the sewer scum in any neighborhood.
“C’mon,” he says.
I never think about Frankie being a drug addict, but I guess he is. He’s far from being a dreg, though. He’s a good friend. I can tell the difference between a good guy and a dreg.
But Mikey? Mikey pushed his mother, and being a drug addict made him do that, and so I think Mikey may be a dreg.
“C’mon, Dennis,” Frankie says again.
Maybe there’s still time to back out, I think. As exciting as this is to me, I know that I don’t care about it so much. There’s no reason for me to do this, except to try it.
“Naw,” I say.
I don’t know what to expect. So there’s nothing wrong with being worried about it. Yet, still, there is something that makes me wonder what it is all about, what it feels like.
I think about my mother making me eat all those things I hate, like tripe and eggplant and brussels sprouts and beef liver, and I can hear her voice saying, “You have to try things, Dennis, you can’t just say you don’t like it if you don’t try it.”
“C’mon, Dennis,” Mikey butts in. “You could snort some if we had some powder, but we cooked it all. You don’t have to take it mainline. You could skin-pop. Takes a few minutes, but then you’ll be off.”
“Is it habit-forming?” I ask. I don’t know why I asked, because I know the answer.
Mikey laughs.
“Yeah, man,” he says, “but that’s what’s great about it. You’re always looking forward, man, and that’s where it is, you know, in looking forward. It’s all there.”
“You can’t get a habit,” Frankie says, “if you just skin-pop. Don’t listen to this guy. You can only get a habit if you mainline. Like this, see?
Frankie has filled the eyedropper with the solution and wrapped his arm with a belt, holding one end of the belt between his teeth. He is smacking his veins with two fingers, getting a vein to rise. And then he puts the needle into a vein and jabs it around a few times until he finds the hole he is looking for. Then he spits the belt out, just as he is squeezing the bubble top.
I watch the solution disappear into his body, and I watch his lips change in a second from being pursed and all business and serious to a round smile.
God, I don’t know what to think as I watch him close his eyes for a long minute. He tries to talk, but I can see it is hard for him to open his mouth. Finally, he is able to say something.
“Just skin-pop, Dennis,” he says. “It is okay, man, I wouldn’t screw you up, you know that.”
I do know that. Frankie wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. I am thinking I should try. If I was ever going to try, this is the right time. Frankie won’t let anything happen to me.
“All right, man,” I say. “Just one time.”
It is like diving into the cold water, I am thinking. Just tell yourself to do it, and you’ll do it. It wipes the questions out if you just tell yourself to do it.
Frankie has his eyes closed again, and so Mikey takes the needle out of Frankie’s hands and refills it. He leans over to me and pinches the skin on my upper arm, around my muscle.
“Watch, man,” he says, “it’s like darts.”
I feel the steel going into my arm, and I flinch. But he is holding me firmly, and I don’t go out of his grip. And then he lets go of my skin as he squeezes the bulb quickly, and I feel the solution going into me like a shot at the doctor’s office. And then there is nothing, except that I can see a little lump on my arm where Mikey has taken the needle out.
I begin to watch Mikey load up for himself and tie the belt around his arm, and then, suddenly, out of the blue, it feels like someone has coated my eyelids with lead. They are so heavy. I am thinking, okay, I am not spinning, but everything is so heavy. My hands, my head, my fingers, all feeling like they are nailed down. I try to open my eyes, but I cannot. I think about that water bug I saw, and I begin to worry about it. I’m getting afraid. I know that the water bug on the ceiling has moved to just above my head, and that it is going to let go of the ceiling and fall through the wet air of the boiler room and land in my hair, and I try to open my eyes to see where it is, but I can’t, and I am picturing the three-inch feelers coming down my face, the bug stopping high on my cheek and rubbing the feelers together, and I think I can feel it there, and I am sweating with the fear, and I can’t move my hands to smack it off, and I am beginning to smell it now as it gets close to my nose.
But, then, just as suddenly I forget about being afraid, and I am not thinking about the bug. I don’t care about anything except raising my hand. But my hand is made of concrete, and it is welded on my lap, and I can’t raise it, but I don’t care. And time begins to pass. I can’t think of time. There is no time. There is just now, and the now seems to be endless, with no beginning and no end, like God Himself.
I don’t know where we are, but all of a sudden, we are moving. I sense these moving shadows along the walls of the cellar, and I realize that they are our shadows. And then there is sunlight, and we’re in the park on 57th Street and the East River, where my mother took me every day for all those years when I was trying to grow up in New York. I sit on a bench, and it seems like days go by as I sit there, the green strips of wood gently wrapping around me, keeping me from floating up into the trees, my body like a tub of granite floating miraculously over the trees and then down into the East River, like a concrete coffin floating on top of the water. I am so afraid. I don’t know why I have done this.
My hand is now on my face, glued to my face, trying to stop the itch on the side of my nose, and the itch on my ear, but my hand doesn’t move, it just stays glued there until I forget why I raised it, or how.
I can’t feel my heart beating, but I sense I am sweating because of some cloudy fearfulness. I know I am afraid. And what makes me most afraid is that I don’t know what to do when I’m afraid.
I just want to float in this blackness, thinking that if I had one wish in the world, I would wish that my brother and my mother knew to come get me.
Maybe then the itching would stop, and I could open my eyes.
I
have been trying not to think about all the letters from Cardinal Hayes High School that I have been ripping up.
I guess they will send someone down to 56th Street sometime soon, but it won’t get me anywhere by worrying about it. I worked a long day today at the florist, and I have a few extra dollars in my pocket besides what I spent on a case of beer.
It is a hot night now, one of those Indian summer nights just before Halloween, and I have been drinking the beer all night with the Morgan brothers down by the river. I was going to meet the guys on 55th Street, but I met Terry and Jackie Morgan just as I came out of my building. They’re always a lot of laughs, and so we came down here to the Beekman Place park by the river, and we’ve been arguing now for more than an hour about why the Yankees lost to the Dodgers in the World Series, and how Marciano could beat Archie Moore with one hand tied behind his back. Park talk. Sports bullshit.
Terry Morgan just left us. He went to have dinner with some girl he met in a hallway when he was delivering papers down on Sutton Place. Her parents were taking him to a restaurant called the Russian Cafe, and we told him that if he got caught there, he would be arrested for being a communist.
Except for Joe’s Original Restaurant and Emiliano’s pizza place, I still have never been to a restaurant for a meal, and I envy Terry for finding someone to take him.
The park on 51st Street is dark, and we are alone except for a few strolling couples who pass back and forth giving us strange looks. The sound of the traffic on the East River Drive is never ending, just as the neon Pepsi-Cola sign on the other side of the river never goes out. There is a constant grind of tires against the concrete, like there is a sawmill somewhere in the distance.
“How do you get a rich girlfriend like that?” I ask, holding a can of Rheingold beer.
“Just walk the streets around Sutton Place,” Jackie says. “They are desperate over there for guys like us. They go home at night and put diamond rings on their fingers to play with themselves ‘cause they don’t have guys like us.”
“How come you don’t have one,” I ask, “with or without the diamond rings?”
“Because I have Annie,” Jackie says, “that’s why.”
“Who’s Annie?”
“Give me some beer,” he says. “Can you keep a secret, a secret like if you tell anyone at all, I will personally cut your personals from your person?”
“I can keep anything,” I say, “even a girlfriend if I could find one. A secret’s easy. So who’s this Annie?”
“Annie Dunne.”
“Annie Dunne with the husband in Sing Sing Annie Dunne?”
“That one,” he says. “I went to bed with her three times.”
“Jackie,” I say, trying to remember the things I heard about the Dunne family, beside the fact that most of them are a little crazy, “isn’t the husband in jail for murder?”
“No,” he replies, “I think for beating somebody up, but he’s in jail for another ten years or something.”
“Jackie,” I say, swigging the beer, “you ever hear of jailbreaks?”
“This ain’t the movies,” Jackie says, laughing.
“But, Jackie,” I say, “even in the movies they don’t all get killed in the jailbreak. Some of them go on to become priests, and some others come back to kill the guy what was banging his wife.”
Jackie gets up from the bench, laughing loudly now. “Come on,” he says, “let’s go pay her a visit.”