Crystal Clean (11 page)

Chapter
10

Back at home, I sat down on my bed and lit a cigarette. I was so tired. I couldn’t remember the last time I was horizontal. I knew that sometimes I’d fall asleep at the computer for an hour or so, but I couldn’t remember the last time I actually slept in my bed. My practice of sleeping every night was beginning to fall by the wayside. I was drifting in and out when my eyes snapped open.

“Shit,” I muttered, picking up my still-lit cigarette. It had burned halfway down, leaving another hole in the increasingly puckered landscape of my new down comforter. It was the second time in a week I’d fallen asleep that way. The puckers were the places where I’d sewn burn holes shut, and now I was going to have to do it again. “Later,” I thought and stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. As I got up, tiny feathers poofed from the fresh hole. Rather than going to bed, which is what I needed to do, I got high. I had things to do and people to see. Sleep could wait. I knew Shadoe was waiting for me to call.

             
“Hey. You up?” The question was rhetorical.

             
“I’m always up. You coming over?”

             
“Yeah, I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.” I had him on speakerphone so I could load my pipe and talk at the same time.

             
“All right. Is it good?” I hated it when people asked me that. I didn’t even matter if the meth was good, which it usually was. They’d bitch and moan, but they always bought. Always.

             
“
God
damn it, Shadoe. I’ll be there in a minute.” I loaded everything into my rolling briefcase
-
the same one I used when I wrote bail bonds
-
and arrived at his house forty-five minutes later.

             
“You’re early,” he said, opening the door. He was being sarcastic, but for me, arriving twenty-five minutes late
was
extremely early.

             
A couch and end table shared the living room with a motorcycle, and greasy engine parts lay on the kitchen floor where a dining table should have been. A thick layer of dust covered everything. I could see the particles, disturbed from inertia by our movement, dancing in the single patch of sunlight bold enough to risk a peek between the draperies as we moved through the forgotten part of the house. He led me through the house to the back bedroom
-
the only place Shadoe spent his time.

             
His bedroom was his office. That’s what he called it. He dropped his four-hundred-plus-pound self into the plastic lawn chair that barely fit between the queen size bed and the closet. Shadoe always made me feel a little ill. He looked like a fifty-year-old sloth with a greasy, thin ponytail. The tee shirts he wore were old, tired and no longer held their original form. He cut the sleeves and neck line out, so there was no way to avoid seeing all sagging, white flesh when I was with him.

I started getting out my scale and baggies, setting them on the wooden slab he kept for me at the foot of the bed so I had an even surface to weigh on.

“Look at this. I made this last night,” he said pulling down a small propane tank connected to a bungee cord suspended from ceiling.

“What the hell is that?”

“I designed it so that when I fall asleep with the flame going, it’ll lift up instead of burning me. I think it’s a pretty neat little invention,” he said, and he chuckled. Shadoe suffered from diabetes and had recently burned his foot so badly that he ended up in the emergency room. He’d fallen asleep holding a propane torch going full blast. Three weeks later, his foot looked like gangrene was setting in, but he refused to go back to the doctor.

An empty coffee can on the bed was full of broken and burned pipe remnants. He blew glass, but badly. He was always showing me his latest, greatest invention or new design for a pipe or bubbler. I knew he wanted to replace Kelly, the guy who blew all my pipes, but that was never going to happen. I hated his work.

It took me a long time to see to it that Kelly made my pipes exactly as I liked them, and I did not intend to go elsewhere. The stem had to be just the right length, the glass an exact thickness and the bowl and hole on top precisely as I liked. Kelly was good, too. He’d started experimenting with different types of glass and using a hotter gas. His designs were becoming quite intricate. If I wanted to smoke out of a piece of art, Kelly was my man. Besides, Shadoe could barely blow his own nose, let alone a good pipe.

I glanced up at the canister hanging from the ceiling. “Nice, Shadoe. That’s great. Does it work? Won’t it light the wall on fire instead of burning you?”

             
“No, no. I’ve rigged it so it’s far enough away from the wall and doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling. I’ve worked on this for a while and now I’ve got it perfected.” He was very pleased
with himself - cocky even. “So,” he rubbed his thick hands together, “whatcha’ got for me today? I hope it’s different. People kind of complained about that last.”

             
Well if you didn’t cut your shit with Fruit Fresh
, I thought,
they might not complain so much
. He didn’t realize I knew what he did, but I knew a lot more than anyone might have guessed. It was amazing how much information I could get just for getting someone high, or buying them a little food when they were hungry.

“Yeah, it is,” I said, and tossed him a small rock. “You’ll like it. See what you think.”

Despite everything, Shadoe was a really a nice guy. His was the only house I’d stay and get high at, because I felt safe there.
God
knows why, but I did. It almost made me feel a little guilty lying to him. The shit was the same as it was the day before, but people are easy. They’ll believe anything I tell them. It didn’t really matter how good it was. I could probably sell bone fragments if that’s what I had.

“This is good. Thanks. Can we do an ounce this time?”

“Sure. Do you have all the money?”

“Right here,” he says, chucking me a roll of bills wrapped with a rubber band.

Shadoe was a handy-man, doing odd jobs for people here and there, but his main source of income at the time was selling meth. The burdens of his weight, age and diabetes made it hard for him to walk, let alone squat and bend. Sitting in a chair in his bedroom closet was about as much exertion as he could stand.

I knew he was barely getting by, and almost lost his house recently. The previous month, he worked out some kind of deal with a man who sold Shadoe on a crazy scheme that I didn’t understand to keep him from foreclosure. Shadoe didn’t understand it either, but he scrawled his name and initialed “here, and here.” When he began “paying the man back,” it was in the form of rent.

Shadoe made enough money selling drugs to keep his utilities on, buy food and make sure he always paid me in full. He enjoyed thinking of himself as a big-time dealer and said that all he cared about was living “the life” and getting high.

For those of us caught up in the drug world, that’s all any of us cared about. Most of the people I sold to disgusted me because I wasn’t like them, right? They were meth-head tweakers. I simply
used
meth. All of the time.

The truth was, the disgust I felt wasn’t so much for them as it was seeing in them a mirror image of what I’d become.

“Do you have any sandwich bags? All I have are quarter-ounce baggies.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and pulled a box from a shelf in his closet. He was always so eager to please me. Kind of like how I was with Allan, but on a much smaller scale.

It never occurred to me until very recently how Allan must have felt about my “cling-on” ways. My epiphany came in 2009 when I joined Facebook and began the “friending” process. Someone from my past accepted my invitation with a note attached that said,
I can’t believe you wanted to friend me. I always thought you hated me in high school. Do you want to have lunch?
Two minutes later, the same person messaged me.
Did I say something to make you mad? You didn’t respond to my message.
And when I didn’t respond to that (I was a little irritated at that point) they sent me
another
message.

Two thoughts came to me almost simultaneously.
Jesus,
God
this person is annoying the hell out of me/holy shit, that’s probably how I was with Allan.
And, of course, that’s exactly what I must have been like.
Want drugs? Want sex? Can I do your laundry? Give you a blow job? Buy you a house?
(pant, pant, pant) How can you have respect for someone so determined to be a lapdog? It took me six years to catch on, but I get it now. I don’t know what I would have done if I were Allan, but I’d like to think I wouldn’t have moved in with me.

I weighed Shadoe’s crystal and threw him the closed baggie. “Do you have a Q-tip?” I asked, counting the bills. “I need to clean my pipe a little.”

             
“Here, use mine. It works really good.”

             
“You know how I am.” I could never use other people’s pipes. I wouldn’t drink out of glasses in anyone’s house, either. Even if they were clean. I always carried a bottle of soda in case I got thirsty. Just one more way of separating myself, I suppose.

Shadoe found a Q-tip, and I started cleaning my pipe. “You’ve put more blankets over your windows, huh?” He had thick, heavy blankets nailed over his bedroom windows from the ceiling to the floor.

             
“Yeah. Now I think I’ve got every crack covered.” Shadoe was like a lot of people I knew: paranoid as hell that someone was always watching them. Blinds weren’t adequate window coverings, they reasoned, because people could see through the tiny holes
where the strings threaded through. It was ridiculous. I hated paranoid people and swore to myself when I started this gig that I wouldn’t let myself succumb to it. I saw enough twacked out people day in and day out, including Garnett, to remind me of my vow, and somehow that allowed me to escape the paranoia that consumed so many people I knew.

             
I took a huge hit off my pipe, clouding the room as I exhaled. “Shadoe, has it ever occurred to you that you just aren’t that interesting? Why would anyone want to spend their time watching you from rooftops and trees?”

“You never know,” he said. “I like to be safe.” I rolled my eyes because that’s what I always did when we had those conversations.

We sat and smoked, and I listened to him ramble while I updated my ledger.

“You know you shouldn’t write things down. I keep everything right here,” he tapped his head with his still smoldering pipe. “Writing things down will get everyone you work with in trouble if you ever get popped.”

“I’ve told you, the only person my books would ever incriminate is me. Besides, Shadoe, what you keep in your head isn’t anywhere near as accurate as my ledger. I’ve got everything coded.”

I charged Shadoe $1100 an ounce because he thought he was getting a killer deal. The guy he went through before charged him more for product that always weighed light and wasn’t nearly as good as what I had. I also charged him that much because I knew he cut it and should have been making bank.

I had all my ledgers in a file cabinet at home. Every nickel I’ve ever spent on dope and every cent that’s ever come in. When it became clear that I was selling more than just quarters and half grams to cover my own habit, I started keeping books. It was how I made sure business was profitable and not just me selling in order to cover the cost of my own drugs. “We don’t commit felonies for free,” I’d say. Selling meth in the quantity I did was a business, and good business people always know what their bottom line is. It just made sense and it pissed me off when people like Shadoe wanted to lecture me about my bookkeeping.

The side benefit of keeping records, which I didn’t anticipate, was that it was impossible for anyone to do the “Dude, I paid you last time. Don’t you remember? We’re even, I swear to
God
,” thing. My people all knew I kept records because I wrote everything in the ledger in front of them, unless there was a public transaction. “You think we’re even?” I’d ask if they balked at their tab. “Well, let’s just compare your notes to mine.” Sometimes I’d imitate “The Church Lady,” a skit Dana Carvey used to do on Saturday Night Live. “Oh, you don’t have anything written down? Well isn’t that
special
. I guess all we have to go on is what I have here by your name.” I rarely had anyone question me and they all knew I was fair.

As Bob Dylan sang in
Absolutely Sweet Marie,
“To live outside the law, one must be honest.”

Josh, my newest “boy,” moved more meth than anyone else did for me, but he was irritating as hell at times, so his price was $950. A twenty-two year old white boy, Josh dressed like a wanna-be gangster with his jeans slung low, untied kicks and his hat on backwards. He’d recently bought a Blue Tooth, the latest thing in cell phones at the time, and wore the earpiece constantly. We’d be in the middle of a deal and he would start saying things that didn’t make sense until I realized he was talking to someone on his phone. Josh was a pretty boy and quite the ladies’ man from what I heard, mostly from him. He had long eyelashes and batted them at me.