‘Brother D,’ said a man from the couch. He didn’t sound Haitian. ‘Brother D, how you making it? That’s a fine piece of ass you got riding with you. Who are you, lady? This here is my place of residence and I ain’t never see you before.’
Definitely not a Haitian, she thought, more like hard-core Harlem.
‘I’ve got five Ks of smack here. It came by way of Cambodia. It’s serious shit.’
Hard-core Harlem began to laugh. The Haitian who’d opened the door squeezed her ass as he passed by and disappeared into the kitchen.
‘A white lady with five Ks, now ain’t that something?’ said Hard-core Harlem.
The man next to him on the couch had dreadlocks and was silent. In the little light she could make out a scar running diagonally across one cheek.
‘Believe me,’ said Julie. ‘It’s something.’
‘She’s for real,’ said Dwayne. ‘She got contacts.’
‘Yeah, like who?’
‘A friend of mine,’ said Julie, ‘he knows a lot of people in Cambodia.’
‘Cambodia,’ said Hard-core Harlem. ‘They got the fine shit, those gooks, right?’
‘It moves through Cambodia,’ said Julie. ‘They don’t grow it.’
‘Yeah, well, money don’t grow on my knob, neither,’ he continued. ‘So, D, why don’t you grab that scale over there and let’s see what we’re fucking with.’
‘She won’t burn you on weight,’ said the Haitian with the scar. ‘She’ll cut it on you.’
‘You could step on this shit ten times over,’ said Julie, ‘and every junkie on the corner would OD.’
‘Hey D, where did you find this chick, this Miss Cat Power? I like her. She got a fine set of titties and she talks real tough.’
Julie heaved the bag on to the table, unzipped one of the five zip-locked bags, and spilled about a gram onto the table.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Have a taste.’
The Haitian with the scar got up and came over to the table. He had a claw for a pinkie. Julie stood back. He was terrifying. The Claw took a hit off his pinkie and stood looking straight at her. Julie closed her eyes. Her compulsion to get out of the room was rampaging. It was keeping her from fainting. The Claw with the scar sniffled, and then went back and sat down on the couch. Shortly, his head kicked back. Good, thought Julie, a good sign. Then the Claw whispered something into Hard-core Harlem’s ear.
‘My associate is impressed. Let’s see the rest of it.’
Julie took another zip-locked bag out of her purse.
‘Hey,’ said Dwayne. ‘Like I don’t mean to be speedy, but where’s the money?’
‘At the store, daddy. At the store,’ said Hard-core Harlem.
‘Well, why don’t you send someone to the store.’
‘I’ll send someone to the store when we’ve verified that everything is cool.’
Hard-core Harlem got up and flipped a wall switch. An overhead light shone down on to the table. He wore tan pants and a purple rayon shirt unbuttoned so as to display his chest jewelry. Now all five bags were on the table. He opened one and worked his index finger down to the bottom, came back up, and took a hit. Then he got a scale out and began to place the bags on it.
‘Okay, D, let’s you, me and Miss Cat Power go down to the store. But I’m only going to give you eighty ’cause that’s all I got. That fine with you, lady?’
‘The deal was a hundred and ten,’ said Julie.
‘Like I said, eighty is all I got.’
‘I’ll say it again,’ said Julie. ‘The deal was a hundred and ten. Now I’m hearing bullshit.’
She couldn’t believe it had come out of her mouth. She was role-playing an argument, the lines of which had been handed her from cinematic moments of years past.
Hard-core Harlem straightened up. A knife was dangling at his side. Now he was facing her from across the table.
‘I like you,’ he said. ‘You got some fine titties. Later on we can party. Right now it’s eighty. My mother still bakes with cornstarch.’
‘I guess,’ said Julie, ‘I’ll take it.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Hard-core Harlem, taking out a box of Kool and emptying the cigarettes on the table. ‘I’ll make up the difference to you.’
He dipped the empty cigarette box into one of the bags and filled it with powder.
‘I hope you’re cutting back to less than a pack a day,’ he said.
Everyone in the room laughed. Then he handed the pack to Julie.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘let’s make it down to the store.’
Lightning on the Sun
, 2001
Harvey Rottenberg
Planted, Burnt, and Busted
A
FTER MOVING FAR
and fast for two weeks, anywhere we could cook a meal felt good, even the motel in Seattle.
The dinner dishes were done. My old lady was lounging around in a pair of sheer tights, reading. I was into a yoga pamphlet titled ‘How You Can Speak With God’. The room was permeated by a feeling of well-being and peace that comes as a great home-cooked meal is digested in silent contemplation.
The door rattled. I went to check it out, putting down flashes of paranoia. ‘Can’t be thieves,’ I thought. ‘They’re making too much noise.’
The door flew open. Three men in shoddy overcoats surged in, obnoxiously pushing snub-nosed revolvers before them.
The muscles of their faces were knotted by the tension of anticipation. They probably were out in the hallway for quite a while, hyping themselves to come through the narrow door. They obviously feared for their lives. But they must enjoy the feeling or they would find a less dangerous line of work.
‘Police,’ one ejaculated perfunctorily. But his body was still hard-on tense. And his gun jerked in tiny spasms, as he flicked his glassy eyes around the room. They were all wound like spring steel, really wired.
‘Don’t move,’ one spat.
‘Sit there,’ his partner ordered, eyeing my chick’s crotch through her tights.
‘I told you not to move,’ the first one menaced us, as we went to sit down.
Two more cops rushed in. We could hear them start to throw things around in the bedroom. They were gentle with the motel’s property, but not very considerate of ours. Another cop appeared at the patio door, struggling with the outside lock, We were surrounded, just like in the movies. Much later, I speculated that had I been armed and violently inclined, I would have been able to kill all three of the cops who pushed through the narrow door, after the noise they made preceding their entrance, only to be shot myself trying to escape the room.
I moved to let the cop in from the patio, but stopped when one of the heaters levelled his gun at my belly. Just like in that movies, but the gun was real. It looked more solid, more real than anything else in this little drama.
‘That’s not where we’re at,’ I told him, nodding at the gun.
Apparently all the propaganda about long hair and peace and love had reached him. Or perhaps he was sensitive enough to realize that the place reeked of peaceful vibes until he and his cronies barged in.
He became embarrassed, it seemed, at having threatened me with the gun. He seemed almost surprised to follow my glance to his hand and find a hunk of deadly metal there. And, as if woken from a dream, he jerkingly holstered his weapon.
The lesson rang home. When dealing with the police, get them to holster their weapons as soon as possible. When a man holds a gun on another, he is totally captured by the idea that violent death is imminent. Even if the idea is obviously false, the gun is strong enough as a symbol to warp his perception to the point where his judgement is affected. And both the holder of the gun and the person at whom it is pointed may begin to deal with each other unaware of what the realities of the situation really are.
The tension relaxed as each of the cops came to the realization that there would be no violent resistance. There was a visible pause in the drama, as they holstered their guns and rechannelled their thoughts from the death-violence groove into relief-release-power grooves.
Some felt the release so strongly that they became manic, chatty, and started to riff with us in over-familiar terms as they rummaged through the rooms like schoolkids turned loose in an abandoned house.
When I realized how quickly the moods of these policemen changed, I re-enforced within me the determination to remain calm, as much in control of the situation as was possible. I asked if they had a warrant. They told me I’d see it later.
Let them throw our stuff around all they want, I remember thinking smugly. They may be hip to me. But the pad is clean. Everything is cool. You guys have blown a big bust by arriving a day early.
I was so sure everything would be OK that I found myself rapping about yoga to one of the cops who had caught the title of the pamphlet I still held in my hand.
One of the cops emerged from the bedroom and beckoned to the man in charge of the raid. They disappeared back into the room and I flashed on the litter of small bills. Totalling over $1,000, on the dresser top. But before I could move to protect my bread, the cop who was gleefully emptying my old lady’s purse in the kitchenette squealed.
‘Yours?’ he asked. The tiny beaded bag looked strangely out of proportion dangling from his sausage fingers.
‘It’s mine,’ she admitted before I could tell her to keep her mouth shut.
‘This yours, too?’ the cop enquired, producing a microscopic piece of hash and part of an orange tab.
She looked like a kid who had been caught at some mischief – sort of I-guess-you-caught-me-but-isn’t-it-cute? But this was no indulgent parent questioning her. It was the Man.
‘You are under arrest,’ he told her. Blah, blah, blah, and anything you say may be used against you.
That was a drag. But she insisted on carrying, even after I warned her to cool it while I was heavy into my dealing changes. Now she knew why, I thought self-righteously.
Still, it was all cool. There was the money in the bedroom and over a thousand hits of sunshine stashed elsewhere in town. I would be able to bail her out and get a lawyer the next day. We were planning to stay in the northwest for a few seasons, anyway. My tight-assed smugness disappeared quickly. One of the detectives came out of the bedroom, pulling two lids from his coat pocket. ‘We found these under the mattress,’ he said sincerely, as if trying to establish the veracity of his lying words by enunciating them clearly and concisely. ‘You are under arrest for violation of the Uniform Narcotics Act, etc., etc.’
I was really naive, I had really thought that a whole mob of narcs, apparently informed about my activities, were going to crash into my rooms with drawn guns, search them, and just go away if they failed to turn up any incriminating evidence. How foolish. The sight of this agent of the law, this trusted civil servant, whose word would stand against mine in any court, whipping the evidence out of his pocket in my plain view, really struck me.
Until that point I tried to project the attitude of calm, polite self-assurance that experience had taught me was the correct way to deal with petty bureaucrats and traffic cops. But the sight of this harassed little man, forced to bring along his own evidence even after being tipped to my activities by informers, was too much. I almost laughed out loud, but felt constrained to merely grin and shake my head.
He was enraged that I found his antics humorous. He rushed across the room and locked eyes with me. A mistake, since I remained calmly smiling down into his eyes, though he stuck his face as aggressively close to mine as his limited stature would allow. Considering that I stood a full head taller than he, he looked quite the fool.
‘You, you, weirdo, New York ugly. What are you looking at with your buggy eyes?’ he spewed. He was really trying to get me to blow my cool and swing at him, and this was the best he could come up with.
It still blows my mind that he thought his schoolgirl epithets would lure me into playing his game and maybe getting hit on or shot.
Another detective interrupted our little showdown by crisply snapping, ‘Would you like to make a statement?’ The tension broke immediately to return to routine.
Suddenly, I remembered the money on the dresser. They had not mentioned that it was being held as evidence. I wanted to be sure I had it or it was accounted for when we left for jail. But again I was being naive.
‘What money?’ the cops who searched the bedroom chorused. The cops who had not been in the bedroom exchanged covert glances. So I announced there was over $1,000, consoled that the money would now be split so many ways that each cop, in essence, would be merely a petty thief.
Now they were anxious to move the routine along. Again, they asked if I would make a statement. Did they really expect me to cooperate, I asked, after they had planted and robbed me? I told them that if we were under arrest we would like to be booked as soon as possible, so we could start arranging for lawyers and bail.
The name-calling cop snapped back that I shouldn’t tell them how to run their business. But I insisted. It’s safer in a cell with a bunch of drunks than in a motel room with armed detectives. Once you’re arrested, get to jail as quickly as you can.
After enough time elapsed to show me that they, not I, was making the decision to leave, they told us to move out, I had to remind them that my old lady was only half dressed though most of them had earlier made a point of ogling her ass through the transparent material of her tights. Sometimes cops will ignore the most obvious facts of your rights and comforts. They must be reminded calmly in a way that is impossible to construe as resisting arrest.
The cop who manacled us put the cuffs on loosely. ‘It’s the rules,’ he apologized so the others would not overhear. This was the same policeman who was embarrassed at having threatened me with his gun. He also seemed very uncomfortable when his buddy flipped out and he was genuinely interested when we were rapping about yoga. It appeared that not all cops had surrendered all vestiges of their humanity when they were issued their guns. But then another cop threatened to tighten the cuffs until they cut off my circulation if I didn’t shut up and stop trying to reassure my old lady that everything was going to be all right.