“Oh, right. Sorry,” the square mumbled as I stepped out of the cab. He went down the street the way he’d been heading when he stopped to ask me that bullshit.
“You sure this is where you want me to let you?”
“Ain’t no sweat, man, I can handle it.” I peeled off some bills and handed them to the driver. On the backseat was a folded newspaper and an article about that bald chick, the singer, Shanay, Sinbad, whatever the fuck, and how she’d joined some kind of Catholic cult and was calling for the Pope to renounce Beelzebub. Hilarious.
“Enjoy your stay, sir.” He touched his cap and put his hack in gear. The car was just like the kind I’d seen roving around London, only there weren’t as many of them here. You’d think they’d be stacked up at the hotel I was staying at, but the doorman hipped me to hoof over to O’Connell Street, where I found some lined up.
I snuggled my upturned collar closer to my neck and put the zipper of my leather jacket all the way up. When you got the crawlies like I had, everything is like constant heated pins poking from beneath your skin. Plus the goddamn cold, which I wasn’t a fan of to begin with—gloomy weather was all up in my ass. I looked across a section of the park and could see the projects, or
estates
as they called them over here, just beyond.
Walking head down, hands tucked away, I knew deep inside but wouldn’t fess up that I was two steps from being certified a fool. I could have been back in my comfortable hotel room, hands roaming all over Molly, Mary, or whatever the fuck was the name of the honey who’d started conversing with me in that pub after the game at Lansdowne.
“I’ve seen you play before,” she said, her liquid browns steady on me.
I’d been giving her and a couple of her girlfriends the glance. They’d started whispering and giggling to each other after me and some of the others from the Dragons and the Claymores had strolled into the joint. The teams had come to Dublin to play an exhibition game at the stadium normally used for rugby and soccer. The stands weren’t nearly as full for us as they would be for their own games, but the curiosity factor and that football, my kind of football, involved its own slamming and swearing got some of the natives out to see us. What the fuck, slappin’ heads was slappin’ heads.
And where you had muscular dudes grappling and tearing at each other, you had the type of woman who dug that kind of action—and not just to watch.
“When was that?” I said, moving to give her space at the bar. She leaned in.
“In Chicago. I lived there for a while. Had a job selling dog products.”
“Dog products?”
“Flea-control solutions, chewy treats, that sort of rubbish.”
I liked her toothy smile. Well, okay, I also liked the fact she had some guns straining that sweater she was wearing. Those bad boys were calling my name. But damn, she knew I was looking. She was too. “So you saw me on TV?”
“Live and in color,” she said, assessing me up and down like a coach figuring out if I was first-string or pine-rider. “Soldier Field. The Falcons against the Bears, before they were in the Central Division. You had two touchdowns for Atlanta.” She paused, considering something, then said, “I believe you shook your arse at the crowd after that second one.”
I gave her my gee-whiz Urkel bit. Babes like a motha-fuckah to be self-effacing and shit. “Just trying to keep the fun in the game. Say did we—?”
“No, Zelmont, we didn’t. All your women blur in your mind, do they?” She’d lit a cigarette and let the smoke float between us.
“It’s not that, it’s just, you know, when you’re on the road during the season, shit just gets jumbled. ’Course, it’s not like I’d forget you.”
She knew it was bullshit, but it wasn’t as if we were carrying on a romance like in one of them whack Merchant Ivory flicks I’d been forced to watch once. She knew the score.
And not an hour later, we were doing it freestyle in my room and I had my hands and lips all over her gorgeous tatas.
“I know this is going to sound off,” I said later as we lay in bed, my hand rubbing her firm, what she’d call it?
Arse
. Hilarious.
“You’re mad for me and want me to journey to your mansion in America with ya?” She said it in that kind of exaggerated Irish accent they used to do in those old black-and-whites where some stooped-over gray-haired dame played Jimmy Cagney’s mother.
“Right,” I said, gently squeezing one of her breasts, getting a moan out of her. She put her hand on mine. “Do you know where to cop some crack? Get some, I mean.”
She laughed down in her throat. “Good thing I was in the States. Over here,
crack
means to fart and
the craic
means, well, means the good life. Which,” and her amber eyes crinkled at the edges, “I guess is a kind of way of looking at it. Though lately that slang has found its way here, meaning what you mean.”
I had no goddamn idea what the fuck she was talking about. I was needing, but had enough sense to know it was best not to go off and probably screw up what might be my only connection, and my only chance of doing the nasty again before I had to light out tomorrow.
She reached across me for the phone on the night stand, those wonderful titties mashing against my chest. “Let me make a few calls, darling.”
And that’s how I found myself staring, confused, at a sign. I figured the burning in my head had bored a hole in it and the crack cravings had me seeing mirages and what not. But then I remembered that Connolley, our backup quarterback, had been over here before to see some cousins and had mentioned that it wasn’t unusual to see signs in Gaelic.
I sniffed, resisting the urge to scratch my itching, the invisible ants marching up and down my arms in sneakers with spikes. I tried to get rid of the image of hundreds of those tiny pincer jaws taking little chunk after little chunk out of my flesh. There was a sign in English just to the left of the Irish one, but the only reason I’d stopped was not to locate myself, but to get psyched. I was on a field I hadn’t played on before, and had better be on my J.
Maura, yeah, that was her name, had told me that this place, Ballymun, was going through renovations. There was a main street running through the middle with brown and gray buildings on either side, and three tall main towers standing out. I didn’t grow up in the projects but had been in more than a few in my time for one reason or another. Lately, though, it had been for the reason I was here now after being given my walking papers from the
NFL
for failing a random drug test, and getting bounced to the European league.
And it ain’t like I was 24-7 on the pipe. I wasn’t no weak-kneed dope fiend. It was just that my gimpy hip had been giving me fits again and I’d been hiding that precious detail from the docs. But if I asked for more than the usual allotment of painkillers, they’d know something was up. Hell, if you played ball for more than two years you just naturally needed some kind of legal narcotic cocktail to dull the constant throb from that sprained ankle that never had much of a chance to heal, or the tingle you never lost in your hamstring when you had to cut sharp down field. That was expected. The league’s croakers knew what to give you for that shit, that was the ordinary.
But my on-again, off-again hip had started to pain me something fierce after I’d been tackled by this wheat-smellin’ Russian fuck playing for the Monarchs two weeks ago in Wembley Stadium. Bad enough after that I’d started cutting the pain with crack, knowing it would hype the demand in me if I wasn’t cool, and I could be the monkey dancing on the string again.
The fuck? Enough of that inspecting myself humbug. This wasn’t no excursion to some all broads college with me working to get some muff diving professor and her prize pupil back with me to my room. Had to stay on point. I crossed behind a bulldozer on the low end of a mound of torn-down brick and wood and glass. There were a couple of figures moving over the mound, picking at this and lifting that in their search for plumbing pipes or porcelain to sell, I assumed.
I went past them and, checking the directions Maura had written for me, found the doorway I was looking for in the night. Not too surprisingly, there were some kids bivouacked in front of the building I’d been told to find. A couple of them were passing a joint and another was bopping to a boom box blazing a Tupac number, “Dear Mama.” The aroma of their chronic drifted to me as I got close. Their blunt popped and sizzled, too many seeds in the cheap shit they were toking on.
“Hey,” one of the kids said, spying me as Shakur growled, “I reminisced on tha stress I caused, it wuz hell huggin’ on my mama from a jail cell.”
“You a boxer, are you, mistah? Come to show us hooligans how to put our energies and urges to good use?” He did a quick flurry, hands and feet movin’ and grovin’ all the time, his eyes never leaving mine.
The others cracked up. The oldest of them couldn’t have been over thirteen. Since yesterday it had been hard as Chinese chess for me to understand their accents. But now with the jones all over me like poison ivy, I was getting every word.
To the one, they all looked hungry. Not for a burger so much as that something they couldn’t get growing up around here. Say what you want about anything else, but that was a condition I knew something about, ’cause it was how I’d come up in South Central L.A., even if I never did live in the projects.
“Gotta do some business.” I flashed a ducat.
“Yeah?” the one who’d called me a boxer said. “Like ’em young, do you?”
“Sound like I’m cooing like Michael Jackson?” Not that I believed for a second these little shits wouldn’t have taken me around the corner and laid a busted chair leg or rusted muffler upside my head in a heartbeat. I pressed the money into the kid’s chest and he took hold of it. I pointed at the door behind him.
He snorted and, making a show like he was Jeeves, stepped aside, bowing and indicating for me to come forward. What a surprise, the door wasn’t locked, and I entered the tower called Pearse, whoever the hell that was.
As the door closed behind me, my radar bumpin’ in case one of them got a notion, I heard a
clop-clop.
I looked back through the safety glass and got sight of another kid in a watchcap and torn windbreaker galloping up to the others on a spotted nag. The horse’s belly was sagging, the hind legs barely thicker than my arms, but damned if those kids didn’t gather around it, petting and nuzzling the sad beast. Maybe they’d use the scratch I gave them to feed the thing rather than waste it on weed. Yeah, maybe.
I went up the stairs; the hallways were pretty clean and there were few busted lights considering it was public housing. I got to the fourth floor, an older lady all bundled up coming at me from the opposite direction, humming a tune. She lifted her head and then stopped singing. Her eyes went wide and she breathed all funny ’cause she wasn’t sure what to make of me prowlin’ about.
“What’s this then?” she said as I stepped past. “You going undercover for the Gardaí?” She smelled of cigarettes and crushed flowers, and I finally got to the door I’d been directed to after Maura had made her third call.
“Now, mind you, you’re an able lad, Zelmont,” Maura had said, her hand down between my legs, “but you want to stay sharp, right? They’ll be more scared of you, what with you being big and black and delicious”—she kissed me—“but they grow them tough over there too, right? Just because this isn’t the South Side or Harlem doesn’t mean they’ll all curl up and cry.”
“Thanks, baby,” I’d said, kissing her back. “You just order up a roast beef sandwich or potato pancakes or whatever the hell y’all eat over here from room service, and I’ll be back soon for round two.”
“You better,” and she put some flutter in her lids while she locked her hand around my johnson, sliding her grip up and down its growing length. But I had the cravings so bad I didn’t let her finish and left her snug under the blankets and me flicking icicles off my nose.
“What?” came a voice from inside the apartment after I knocked on number 435 a second time.
“Ian said I was cool.” That was the name Maura told me to give.
“Did he now?” I didn’t hear any feet scuffling.
I felt like hitting the door with the dull end of my fist to let him know I wasn’t fuckin’ around, but didn’t want to jump wrong on turf I was clearly out of my element in. “Look here, I don’t want to conduct my business in the street.” A pensioner from the next door apartment was glaring at me. She wasn’t going nowhere until I did.
“Who did you say?”
Fuck. “Ian. What? I talk like I got feathers in my mouth? Open this mothafuckah up, man, c’mon. I got the cheddah,” I spat close to the wood. “Got dollars if you want.”
The door hinged back. “Oh, well, that’s different then, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t see much of the room beyond and didn’t much care. I pushed through, if only to keep the old girl from giving me more of her vulture’s stare. She was getting on my nerves, which were already about to shoot out of my pores, tingling as my sweat dripped over their raw ends.
“You a long way from home, my brother.”
“You ain’t never lied.” The one who’d opened the door was lanky, with a dainty potbelly like you saw on cats who appreciated their apple pop tarts too much. He wore a pullover shirt and pants made out of cotton so goddamn thin I wondered how he didn’t freeze his nuts off when he went out in them. He was barefoot but had on a plaid snap-brim hat pulled low over longish hair.
“And you’re in need, yeah?”
“That’s right.” We’d each taken a step back from the other. I knew I could take his skinny ass, just like I knew it wasn’t only me and homeboy in this crib. Which wasn’t jacked up—no holes in the wall, the furniture, while there wasn’t much of it, wasn’t busted up, and there were no panes missing from the windows. There was even a TV on low with that big-headed Al Gore on it answering questions about him getting his campaign for the Dems nomination underway.
“So what is it you want, sir?” He smiled, lifting his chin some even though he was pretty much my height.
I was holding a few folded bills. “What I want is some crack.”
He cocked his head to one side.