Authors: Richard Price
His apartment was spotless and spare. No great sound machine or television setup, no phone, nothing hanging on the walls, just a three-piece bedroom set and a four-piece living room ensemble, all bought in a half hour at the House of Bamboo in a shopping center over in Queens where no one knew him. He had moved in six months before, after a showdown with his mother over his dealing. Even though he was only nineteen, he had enough money to buy himself a house somewhere, but if he got arrested the house would be confiscated; even if he bought it in someone else’s name, jail time would mean no cash flow, no payments to the bank, and the place would be repossessed. But at least Strike had considered the idea: most of the dealers he knew never even thought about houses. Like Horace, they spent all their money on toys—man-toys maybe, but lightweight vanity buys—living in dumps and wearing too much gold. They couldn’t get out of that minute-to-minute survival head long enough to take the money and buy something substantial. “They don’t
have
no future because they don’t be
lieve
in no future” was the way Rodney put it, although in Strike’s mind Rodney wasn’t really anybody to talk.
Every time Strike stopped on JFK for a red light on his way over to Rodney’s store, his hand dropped to the .25 automatic he’d stashed under a homemade flip-up lid on the step well. There was a stickup crew from Newark that was hitting on Dempsy dealers, following them home or getting them at the lights. And they were shooting too: one guy in the Sullivan crew was on a respirator, and some docker from Cleary Avenue was dead. Of course some people said it was Erroll Barnes, but every time some no-witness mayhem went down, Erroll’s name came up. Erroll Barnes was a Dempsy bad man, had served seven years for killing a TV reporter who was accompanying the cops during a raid in Elizabeth. He didn’t get life because his lawyer convinced the jury that Erroll thought it was other dealers coming to kill him, that he’d never knowingly shoot at cops. That’s how it went sometimes. But if Erroll Barnes
was
behind all this, that could be the best insurance for Strike, because Erroll and Rodney grew up together used to pull stickups together, did time together, and now Erroll was Rodney’s troubleshooter and dope mule and Strike couldn’t see Erroll shooting up Rodney’s people. Still, it wasn’t unheard-of once you understood that after all the We Are Family bullshit went down everybody was really just out for themselves.
Strike hated having a gun, only got it because Rodney had told him he was too little and skinny to get anybody to toe the line just on say-so, that he had to have a piece to do the job. But the truth of it was, he was scared of the gun once he got it—not scared of shooting somebody, but scared of his own anger and what trouble he could get into for shooting somebody. His fear of having to use it probably served him just as well, sometimes even made him creative. One evening three months before, he had found out that some kid working for him was going over to Rydell and selling his bottles for fifteen instead of ten, then pocketing the extra five for himself. Not wanting to use the gun, Strike went over to a pet store, bought a dog chain and whipped this greedy little motherfucker to the ground in front of an entire Saturday night’s playground crowd, standing over him like some heave-chested slave master. It was just business, but Strike didn’t like to think about how good it felt, didn’t like to imagine where that might have ended for him if he’d had that gun in his hand.
Strike took a vanilla Yoo-Hoo out of the glove compartment and sipped it as he trolled the boulevard. About every two blocks some JFK docker would wave in recognition or yell out his name, or some pipehead girl from the projects would get all happy-faced seeing him, tiptoe out into traffic and try to wheedle a bottle out of him before the light changed. Despite his wariness, there was a part of him that loved the charge he generated in others: the lit-up look the pipeheads got on seeing him, the salute of the clockers. Someday it would be the end of him, this recognition, this power, but other than the lifelong tug of war between him and his mother, it was the closest thing to love he had ever experienced.
At the light before the turn to Rodney’s store, two plainclothes cops pulled up alongside the Accord. Strike made a point of casually looking into their window, then looking away. It was only natural to look at a cop car; nothing gave a docker away to a profiling cop like that stony straight-ahead stare at a red light.
The cop in the shotgun seat, a pink-skinned albino with a wild white Santa Claus beard, rolled down his window and tilted his chin at Strike. Panicking a little, Strike forgot about the gun in the step well and worried instead about the open Yoo-Hoo.
“Yo, Strike.”
Strike rolled down his window.
“Tell Rodney to give me a call.”
Strike nodded, relieved, but freaked too. The guy must be on Rodney’s payroll, but how did the cop know who he was? Strike had never seen him before. The light turned green and Strike let him roll off first.
Give me a call … like Rodney would know which cop this was. The guy probably thought he was the only eyes and ears Rodney had. Strike hissed out his disgust: everybody was full of shit in this game. The cops bullshitted each other, the dealers bullshitted each other, the cops bullshitted the dealers, the dealers bullshitted the cops, the cops took bribes, the dealers ratted each other out. Nobody knew for sure which side anybody was on; no one really knew how much or how little money anybody else was making. Everything was smoke. Everything was pay phones in the middle of the night. Being in this business was like walking blindfolded through a minefield. It was hard to know what to do or what not to do, but in order to survive Strike went by three unbreakable rules: trust no one, don’t get greedy, and never do product. Most people who lasted out here lived by the same rules as Strike did, plus rule number four, which was kind of a balancing act with rule number one: you got to have someone watch your back. You got to have a main somebody to cover your ass. You didn’t have to trust him completely but alone is tough There’s always something you’ll need help with. Bail jail collections muscle the impossibility of being in two places at one time. That’s why Rodney had Erroll. Strike didn’t have anybody like that in his life yet, but he thinking hard on it.
The store was called Rodney’s Place, a little hole in the wall on a side street off JFK Boulevard. Rodney had hand lettered the name on the painted sky-blue cinder blocks under the window, following it with a partial list: “candy, sofe drinks, milk, games.” No one, if they noticed, had the guts to tell Rodney that he’d misspelled “soft.” Rodney had learned to read and write in prison when he was twenty-one, had earned his high school equivalency degree there and had been reading- and writing-crazy ever since. He was obsessed with tests, taking every possible written exam just to show he could pass and get some payback for all those humiliating classroom years. He now held six licenses: barber, beautician, real estate, travel agent, driving instructor and Xerox repair. Strike knew Rodney was deeply proud of his mail-order education, even though he had little to show for it outside of a bunch of framed diplomas hanging on the walls of the candy store. He never used any of the skills that came with all that paper, save for giving the occasional free haircut when he couldn’t stand looking at some kid’s scruffed-up head anymore.
Rodney wasn’t there when Strike walked in. Six young teenagers played pool under the harsh fluorescent overheads, another two banged away on the Super Mario video game, all of them silently taking in Strike with dopey frowns. The kids weren’t clockers: Rodney didn’t allow any hustling in the store, and working for Rodney meant
working.
Strike knew about that up front. He had spent a full year in here making five dollars an hour under the table, straight, no-nonsense, mule-team shopkeeping—inventory, cash register, mopping the floor, sometimes putting in fifteen-hour days, sleeping in back, then putting in another twelve. He had loved every minute of it and thought he was rolling in dough until Rodney sat him down one day and offered him a different kind of job. Now Rodney carried Strike on the books as the night manager of Rodney’s Place; if Strike ever got stopped with a few thousand on him, he could account for the roll by saying he was on his way to the bank to make a night deposit for the store. Rodney was smart that way, and he charged Strike only five hundred dollars for the honorary title. Sometimes Strike missed working here; his stomach hurt him less back then, and he used to savor the charge he felt whenever Rodney would roll in and make some noise about how shipshape the place looked.
The first time they met, Rodney had startled Strike by telling him that he “admired” his speech defect because Strike didn’t let it stop him from wanting to make something of himself, didn’t let it turn him into one of those people who would drown in a rain puddle. Rodney said he could see that Strike knew that the only place a man can be truly handicapped is in his mind, and that a man who can conquer his own mind has got the world at his feet.
Strike didn’t know he knew all this until Rodney said he did, but once he heard it, Strike began believing it. Rodney was always doing that to him: teaching him things in a way that made him feel as if he knew it all along, making Strike recognize himself. And sometimes Rodney introduced Strike to people as “my son.” He was smart that way too.
The only other guy who had worked as hard as Strike in here, and who Rodney liked as much as Strike, was a kid named Darryl Adams. Darryl was a lot like Strike’s older brother, Victor: heads down, brick-by-brick, never shooting off his mouth but never smiling either. He was quiet, neat and dependable, the sort of person Strike’s mother would like. These days Darryl held down an assistant manager’s job at Ahab’s, a fast-food shithole a few blocks from Rodney’s store, the same kind of job Strike’s brother had over at a competing grease pit called Hambone’s.
Strike wandered the cramped store in a lazy circle, scowling, resisting the impulse to clean up: the place looked like shit.
Rodney’s chubby teenage daughter sat behind the counter, staring into space and chewing air. Across the room and under a Budweiser Kings of Africa poster, Rodney’s father sat propped up on a bar stool behind his thick glasses and his cigarette smoke, watching the game of pool and jabbering away, mostly to himself. An eighteen-month-old boy chewing a Pay Day bar sat in a stroller in front of the candy counter, dressed in a denim jumpsuit. His hair had two neat slices running front to back like stripes on a football helmet, and he wore high-top baby Nikes on his feet. He was Rodney’s son, one of three Strike knew about, this one by the woman who lived a few houses up from where Rodney lived with his wife and two teenage daughters.
The kids around the pool table and video game were mostly here by default, half of them living on the street or with mothers on the pipe. Rodney kept the store open twenty-four hours, and a lot of them never went home. They wore linty sweat suits and cheap sneakers, baseball hats and no jewelry. Two of them were still sucking their thumbs.
Strike watched the game for a minute. None of the kids could sink more than one ball at a time or had the patience to line up a shot right, and with him standing there, they all got worse, knowing he wasn’t just a docker but Rodney’s lieutenant. Some of them, and some of the other kids Rodney was constantly collecting, would be getting a tryout on the street in the coming months. Most would fall off into the product right away, but a few would wear Nike Airs and gold for at least a little while before they went down too. A good run on the street was six months, and you had to have a clear head and a lot of self-confidence to make it even that long. Strike had been out there almost nine months now, and he knew that almost nobody made it out of the game in one piece, and almost everybody thought they would be the exception.
Strike turned away so the players could relax. Everything for sale in the store was behind the counter; that way no one could walk out with anything. Strike scanned the shelves: diapers, Similac, light bulbs, Tampax, dry cereal, kitty litter, coffee, kitchen matches, lighters, plus the trinity of base coke preparation: Arm and Hammer baking soda, Chore Boy scouring pads and McKesson rubbing alcohol. A pinch of baking soda mixed with a ten-dollar bottle of powder, sprinkled with water, heated, then cooled, left you with a pure nugget of smoking cocaine. And a pinch of Chore Boy wedged into your pipe would trap some of the cocaine vapors as they fled the burning nugget. Once the fumes hit the Chore Boy they reverted to an oily substance that hung in the strands; you could fire up the Chore Boy itself for a second hit, not as strong as the first but still included in the price. And the rubbing alcohol was just a poor man’s butane, although some people preferred 151 proof rum.
Every small grocery and candy store on every poor street in Dempsy always carried the trinity, no matter how skimpy and random the stock behind the counter. Not only did they carry it but they charged double what it would cost in a wealthier neighborhood—supply and demand being what they were. Rodney was a full-service ghetto capitalist: he’d sell you the bottles on the street and the paraphernalia in the store.
Strike walked over to the glass counter and stood in front of Rodney’s daughter. She stared right through his chest, her jaw rolling, her hands palm up in her lap.
“Where’s he at?”
She shrugged and gave him a barely raised eyebrow.
Strike went over to the refrigerator where Rodney stocked milk and drinks. It was a regular kitchen refrigerator but nothing in it came free. It always caught Strike up short, taking a Yoo-Hoo out of the refrigerator and then having to pay for it. And you
had
to pay for it, no matter who you were. One of Rodney’s favorite quotes was from some billionaire: “A dime’s a dime.” Twisting the cap and leaving two quarters on the counter, Strike wandered the small room feeling restless. He hated waiting for people, became vaguely jumpy when there was nothing to react to, nothing to be in motion for, and too much time to think random thoughts.