Memoirs Aren't Fairytales (15 page)

A few days later, Claire came over and invited me to go out and spend the day with her. I'd just gotten home from my morning shift of panhandling and hadn't made shit. It was Friday and those were usually my best days. She wouldn't tell me where we were going but said it would mean a lot to her if I came. I told her I'd go, as long as we could leave in a couple hours and be back before five. I needed enough time to get dressed for my evening panhandling. She said yes to both. When she left our room, I asked Sunshine if she wanted to come too. She said no and we did a shot together.

Claire took me on the same route I used to get to Richard's, but we got off the train a few stops before his and then got on the bus. I couldn't imagine where we were going and what was so important we had to travel so far.

She stopped walking in front of a massive brick building. It took up an entire block and was at least ten stories high. There were bars over the windows and when I squinted, I saw people standing in front of them.

“Where are we?” I asked, trying to look for a sign on the building.

“Henry lives here.”

We were at the county jail?

“I want you to meet my son,” she said. She looked so happy that I'd come with her.

“I can't go in there, Claire.”

“Of course you can, honey.”

“No, I really can't. I've got stuff in my purse…” I looked around to see if anyone was listening.

“Hide it over there,” she said and pointed to an alleyway. I could do this, right? I could walk inside a jail and look the officers in the eyes, pretending not to be high. This was the first time Claire had asked for something. And I'd gotten this far. But damn, jail? Really?

I left her on the corner and went into the alley. I stuffed the Ziploc between a dumpster and the wall.

As the steel door of the prison shut behind us, I pushed down the sleeves of my hoodie.

Claire checked in at registration. The man behind the glass wall asked for my ID, and I placed it in the chute at the bottom of the glass. He slid my ID through a machine next to his keyboard and then his eyes moved to my face.

“Nicole Brown,” he said, looking at my ID again.

My license picture was taken when I was sixteen.

“Yes,” I said.

“Fill out this registration form,” he said, dropping a clipboard into the chute. “When you're finished, bring it up to the security line.”

Claire led me into the visiting room and chose a table in the back corner. I sat down and exhaled the air I'd been holding in. This was crazy, I was on dope and in jail, but I wasn't behind bars.

A buzzer went off, and the front door opened. The prisoners came inside, and Claire stood on her tiptoes, scanning each face. They were hard to tell apart, all dressed in bright orange jumpsuits with buzzed haircuts.

Claire waved, and a man who looked about my dad's age came over to the table. He had amber eyes, the same color as Claire's. But he looked so different from the pictures I'd seen. His hair was gray, his nose crooked, his shoulders slouched, and he walked with a limp.

After they hugged, she introduced us. Henry stuck out his hand, and his fingers were like ice against my sweaty palm.

Claire said how nice it was I was finally getting to meet her Henry. And Henry said he'd heard a lot about me, and besides Claire, I was the only other person who had visited. None of his childhood friends had stopped in? If I were in jail, I'd want visitors all the time. But besides Sunshine and Claire, who would visit me?

“How you feeling?” Henry asked me.

“Fine, why?”

“You're more than fine,” he said. “You're riding pretty high right now.”

There were officers standing by both the front and back door, but they were far away and couldn't hear what he said.

When Claire had told him about me, I guess she didn't leave anything out.

“Your pupils are a dead giveaway,” he said. “I was a junkie too, you know.”

Claire reached inside her purse and took out a tissue, dabbing her eyes and under her nose.

Wait. Was this the reason she asked me to come here? So Henry could lecture me about consequences like he was some straightedge? But I thought my visit meant a lot to her because she wanted me to meet her son?

“Heroin brought me to prison,” he said.

He told me about the night he'd been arrested. He'd been on smack and needed money to pay off the dealers he owed, so he held up a store at gunpoint. The owner of the store had pulled out a gun, trying to protect himself, and Henry got scared and fired. The man died instantly. Henry took the cash from the register and got four blocks down the street before the cops picked him up. He was sentenced to life without parole.

“How old were you?” I asked.

“He was twenty-four,” Claire said.

“I started slamming junk when I was eighteen, I was living with Mom and stole all her valuables for drug money,” he said and reached his hand over to Claire. She held his hand between hers. “And I put her through hell.”

For the first time since I'd met her, I saw pain in Claire's eyes. They filled with tears, and as she blinked, the drops rolled down her cheeks. That was why she didn't freak when she'd caught me nodding out. But why didn't she tell me Henry was a junkie too?

“You've seen what dope did to your buddy Eric,” he said. “When it comes to heroin, it's either death or jail, there ain't nothing in between.”

He was so wrong. I didn't owe anyone money. I didn't own a gun and I'd never commit armed robbery or pull the trigger to get my fix. Eric had OD'd because he wasn't good at using needles and hadn't known how much dope to shoot. Renee got pregnant, but it wasn't from doing heroin.

If they thought they could turn me sober by bringing me here, they were wasting their time.

The buzzer went off, and visiting hours were over. Henry and Claire hugged, and he shook my hand again. His skin was clammy, and my hand slipped out of his grip from the sweat.

“I thought it would mean more,” he said, “seeing me in orange and listening to it in here.”

That didn't change how I felt. Jail was for people who were stupid enough to get caught or for people who got ratted on like Que and Raul. I was a junkie, not a dealer. And I wasn't stupid.

When we got outside, I went straight into the alley and over to the dumpster. I reached my hand behind it, searching for the Ziploc. My hand grabbed nothing but air.

The bag was gone?

“Claire, I can't find it, will you look?”

She bent to her knees and ran her hand along the crack. “I don't see it, honey.”

Where else could it be?

I looked all over, by all three sides of the dumpster, and under the piles of trash on the ground that hadn't made it into the bin. If it wasn't on the concrete, it had to be inside the dumpster. I opened the lid and climbed up the side. I ripped open all the trash bags, rummaging through the food and papers. The Ziploc wasn't in there either.

I jumped to the ground and took off my hoodie, ringing out the soaked sleeves. There was a banana peel stuck to my sneaker, and my hands were brown and sticky.

Someone had stolen everything I had, my needles, spoons, and a whole day's worth of smack. Who would do that to me? And how did they find my bag?

I had three dollars in my wallet. And five hours to make enough money to replace it all or I was going to be dope sick.

CHAPTER TWELVE

We didn't get back to the hotel until five, which didn't give me much time to dress and stuff my baby bump. I packed my stomach as fast as I could with Sunshine's socks and plopped down on a new corner, at Huntington Avenue and some cross street. Usually I chose a spot closer to the Prudential Building, but if I wasted anymore time walking, I wouldn't make any money.

Huntington was busy, but the people were barely looking at me when they walked by, and they seemed much younger than the usual business crowd. Some even laughed at my cardboard sign. They didn't understand how badly I needed their money and how sick I was going to be if I didn't earn enough.

I started calling out, “Can you spare some change,” to everyone who passed. That didn't help either. It was like I was invisible.

One guy dropped a couple pennies in my hand. “Use a condom,” he said.

Wasn't it too late for a condom?

“I did, it broke,” I yelled, but he was already walking away.

He must have heard me because he turned around. “People like you shouldn't be having sex,” he said.

What did he mean by people like me? Because my sign said I was sixteen? My sleeves were rolled to my elbows, so maybe he saw my track marks. That didn't matter though, just because I used heroin didn't mean I shouldn't have sex.

A group of teenagers were coming down the sidewalk and all of them were wearing Northeastern hoodies. I'd forgotten that Northeastern University was on Huntington Avenue and only a few blocks from where I was sitting. Damn, that was the reason I wasn't making any money. College students didn't have spare cash like business people. I'd picked the worst place to panhandle, but it was too late to move spots. It was already six o'clock and the evening rush was over. I went back to the hotel and counted the cash I'd made during both shifts. I had eight bucks and that was only enough for one bag. I used three bags for each shot and needed at least three more shots to get me through until morning. I was thirty-seven dollars short.

I searched the room, looking in all the spots where Sunshine might hide an extra stash. But I knew there wasn't smack in the room. Junkies didn't plan for times like this. And there wasn't anything of Sunshine's I could pawn. The TV was too heavy for me to carry, and pawnshops didn't buy clothes or makeup.

I called Sunshine's cell to ask if we could meet up, but she didn't answer. I phoned a second and third time and still, she didn't answer. Where the hell was she? She needed to change and paint her face before hitting the streets, and it was already dark.

I didn't want to work the corner without her. Pimps forced new girls into their cars and beat them until they agreed to be one of their whores. Sunshine knew all the pimps, so when I was with her, they left me alone. But she wasn't answering, so turning tricks wasn't an option.

I knocked on Claire's door, and she invited me in. The fish she was cooking made me queasy. It had been eight hours since my last shot. A couple more hours without dope, and I was going to be really sick.

I asked her for money, and she gave me the two dollars she had in her wallet.

“That's all you've got?” I asked. “Will you go to the ATM?”

“My check hasn't come in yet, so I don't have any more to give you.”

I thought of the Ziploc and how she had told me to hide it in the alley.

“Did you steal my bag of heroin?”

She was standing at the kitchen counter, mixing something with a big spoon. “Why would I do that?”

“For the same reason you wanted me to meet Henry,” I said.

She walked over to me and put her hands on my shoulders. “I wanted the two most important people in my life to meet, that's all.”

“Then why did he lecture me?”

“You and Henry share the same past,” she said. “Who better to hear it from?”

“The only thing I share with Henry is love for the needle. He murdered someone for—” I said and stopped.

Her eyes welled up, and her hands dropped from my shoulders.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I shouldn't have said that.”

Still, it was too much of a coincidence that I'd gotten lectured and had my dope stolen on the same day.

“Just tell me, did you take it?” I asked.

“I don't steal people's things,” she said. “Plus, I was with you the whole time.”

She was right. She'd never left my side while we were inside the prison.

I told her I'd see her tomorrow and walked out the door. I paced the hallway, trying to come up with a plan. I could suck Richard's dick for a bag or two, but I needed more dope than that. I'd have to give him head all night, and I'd be too sick in the morning to panhandle.

I had to call Michael. He'd start in about what I had said to him at the train station, and I'd have to listen to all that rehab shit again. But I didn't have anyone else to ask.

He picked up after the first ring. “Are you okay?” he asked.

I needed to come up with something good.

“I've been calling you nonstop,” he said. “Why is your phone always shut off?”

What would make him want to give me money?

“I've been looking for you too on the streets,” he said, “since I don't know where you live and…”

The streets? I had the perfect lie.

“Cole?”

“Yeah, I'm here,” I said.

“Will you go to rehab? For me? Please?”

“I'm in trouble.”

His voice was even more panicked than before. “What's wrong? What happened?”

“I'm pregnant and I need money for an abortion.”

“You're what?”

“I can't have the baby, you know, like this,” I said.

“Have you been to the doctor?”

“The abortion costs five hundred and I've scheduled it for tomorrow morning.”

“Come over, I've got the money,” he said, and I hung up.

I didn't have a lot of time. I needed to get the cash and go straight to Richard's so I could catch Sunshine before she left for work. She usually kept a few clean rigs in her purse.

When Michael opened the door, his face looked like I had kicked him in the gut. My stomach wasn't any better. I was starting to feel dope sick, and pretty soon I'd be throwing up.

He moved to the side of the door. “Let's talk,” he said.

I stood in the living room, and he took a seat on the couch. He asked me to sit next to him.

“I don't have much time,” I said. “So say what you have to say.”

He shook his head and put his hands on his cheeks. “What happened to you?”

What happened to me? Women got pregnant all the time and chose to have an abortion. Since I was slamming dope, wasn't that the more responsible decision?

“You had everything going for you,” he said. “And now look at you.”

I crossed my arms over my stomach, trying to hold the food down. “Are you going to give it to me or not?”