Shadow Traffic (4 page)

The dealer is a giant with a body like a bear's. I'm a good-sized man but the dealer is taller and substantially heavier than me. Big as he is, his voice is even bigger and compels you to listen to it. There's something else that's special about his voice. When he talks you believe what he's saying, at least initially, which gives him a tremendous advantage. It's a voice of absolute confidence.

I met him at the regular basketball game on the playground in Center City. At first he was just one of the players. On the playground the dealer told lots of jokes, mostly dirty ones about women, which made the other players laugh. I laughed too, but mine was forced. The dealer claimed he used to be a radio DJ in Boston, where he knew lots of famous people in the entertainment and sports worlds, and was now the lead singer in a local rock band. He had one of those lives where you never knew what was true and what wasn't. It was just one strange thing after another—like a parade of strangeness—but the rock band part I knew was true. The dealer had a good singing voice, actually, and would often show it off in the most incongruous places. It was something I could never do.

His whole approach to basketball was different from mine,
too. I pass, hustle on defense, scrap for every loose ball, but the dealer was only interested in scoring. When we played on the same team he would shoot too much, especially from long range. He was a streak shooter, but he shot as if he thought he was always hot. I had to hide my irritation that he didn't pass the ball to me enough, which made me nervous, but worse still was when we played on different teams and I had to cover him. He'd use his strength to camp out in the key and when he got the ball, back me down till he got a lay-up. Sometimes, it was too much for me, and I had to call a three-second violation on him, which he didn't like. More often than not, I tried to cover someone else.

When we introduced ourselves he said his name was “Dash.” He told me his stage name but never his real one. I was pretty stressed when I met him, having just broken up with my girlfriend. I'd also recently been transferred to a new division of my company that allowed me to work almost exclusively at home in my new condo. I thought I wanted that (I was making more money at this new position, as well), but after my ex left, being alone so much began to weigh on me. I didn't have use of my driver's license either (which is a long story), and Dash used to drive me home to West Philly. That was nice of him, I know, but during the rides he'd often sing '80s rock songs at the top of his lungs or talk right-wing political stuff (Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh were two of his heroes), always trying to convert me but never succeeding, or else talk about all the women he'd had sex with. One time I told him I wasn't doing well with drinking and wished I knew a way to get pot. I explained that I hadn't been in Philly for a long time and didn't know who to ask. The dealer said maybe he could help, and that's how it all began.

Whenever I'd ask him how his music gigs went the dealer would say, “Primo, great,” something like that, yet he never
seemed to have any money. Then I learned that he wanted to be paid in free pot from the stash I bought rather than in cash, which might explain, in part, why he was so hard up financially. As far as the pot went it worked this way. I'd give him the money (eighty to a hundred dollars up front) then wait for him to come back from his source. Then I'd give him about a third of the pot outside in his car, then run back to my place with the remainder. The good part about this method was that I got to stay home. The bad part was he almost always took two to three times longer than he said he would.

During my wait I'd become hyperconscious of time, staring at my watch dozens of times till I'd get his call. It wasn't so much that I was craving pot as that I feared Dash would just run off with my money and never return. I'd have to give up basketball as well as pot then. It would be too humiliating to face him on the playground if he stole my money.

One time, he didn't call me until four hours after he said he would. He explained that something had come up but that he had my stuff and would call me the next day to arrange a drop off. Turns out five days passed before he finally gave it to me after basketball, admitting he'd already smoked a little of it himself. During those days while I kept wondering if he'd call me or not, I became ultrasensitive to the sounds in my condo as well. I was on the ground floor and had rarely heard the elderly lady with bright red hair who lived directly above me and who I'd nicknamed Birdwoman to myself because she was thin and talked very rapidly, as if she were always being chased by someone. But during those waiting days I started hearing every step she took as she'd walk from room to room, restless bird that she was. Bottom line—I had a lot of trouble sleeping and had to waste some of the pot I did have left just to finally knock myself out.

Next time we talked, I told Dash I wanted to ride with him on his drug runs, which meant getting dropped at a gas station / car-wash that had a convenience store as well, until he came back with the stuff. (He'd never bring me to the source, of course.) I thought this would make it harder for him to take off with my money, but it had its drawbacks too. Sometimes Dash would return empty-handed, saying the source wasn't there. Once I said, “Why don't you call him before you drive over to be sure he's home?” “I do, brother,” he said, “but he doesn't always answer his phone.” He went on to explain that the source (who was an electrician) generally didn't do much once he got home from work, but sometimes he got emergency calls to fix something. “Then he's gotta split right away in his car. … On the road again,” Dash suddenly sang, but more like Freddy Mercury than Willie Nelson.

Waiting at the gas station for him to return was nothing I enjoyed. It was like a mini-mall for the unsavory. A number of times I saw some hookers hanging around there, sometimes with their pimps, other times I thought I saw drug deals going down. Worse still, about a third of the times I'd see parked police cars. The bottom line is waiting there I often found myself worrying about getting mugged or getting busted.

The dealer worried a lot too. He'd been arrested before and once had to wear a wire for the FBI as part of his deal to stay out of prison. He'd had some really harrowing experiences as a result of that wire—one that involved sending his ex-wife to jail and her lover into a gunfight with the cops, who “blew his brains out then scattered them in all four directions,” as the dealer put it, looking me right in the eye. He worried more about getting caught than anyone I'd ever bought from, which wasn't a bad thing really because it made him careful in lots of ways, like
never mentioning what we were doing on the phone, or never using anyone's real name. It made me feel better about our odds of not getting caught. But it's also true there's a thin line between productive worrying and paranoia that the dealer sometimes crossed. For instance, his always wanting me to smoke while we were together, even in his little blue convertible. I thought it was reckless and said I didn't want to do it. The next time we went out riding (it was in the afternoon after basketball this time) he asked me again, and I told him I didn't want to get messed up in the middle of the day, 'cause I had work to do and I wanted to save my stuff for when I really needed it. It wasn't until the time after that (which was only a few days later) that I finally understood. We were driving toward the source when he suddenly said, “Are you a cop, Jeff?” looking me straight in the eye again in that dramatic way he had, like he was a detective on a TV show interrogating me.

“You're kidding, right?” I said, half laughing.

“Do I look like I'm kidding?”

“Why would you think that? You've known me for months, you've been to my place. You know what my job is.”

“You never smoke in front of me, OK? If you smoked in front of me I'd know you weren't a cop.”

Next thing I knew he produced a joint and somehow lit it while he drove.

“Come on, brother,” he said, “you have to smoke this now.”

No man likes to hear the words “have to” from another man. But he was my only link to pot and the other drugs I was also sometimes taking, so I gave in and smoked.

Things went along all right for a while but then the dealer began having trouble with his girlfriend, Maryann. He lived with her in a pretty nifty apartment in Center City, which I saw one
time. She was a good-looking woman with an excellent body, but she was almost fifty, nearly fifteen years older than him, and the dealer liked younger women. Maryann had some pretty serious bucks, though, and he was living with her for free. He claimed he loved her and bragged that he was being “almost faithful” to her. I thought, when you're economically dependent on someone things can get confusing and it's hard to separate love from money, but I kept that opinion to myself.

As things got worse with Maryann I could see he was getting worried. She didn't want him smoking for one thing. She probably also sensed he could never be monogamous. Soon he began calling me to do dope runs every three or four days. Even though more than half the time the source wasn't there, I was still buying too much pot, and keeping so much in my apartment was making me nervous. I knew that if you got busted your punishment was determined by how much pot you had in your possession. “One or two small bags probably won't get you put in jail,” Dash had said. But I had a lot more than two bags. As a result I began smoking more so I'd have less in my possession if I were ever caught—which seemed logical at the time. As a result of that, however, I was spending too much on it and told myself I'd have to just stop answering his calls for a while and skip basketball for a while too—which would hurt—or else just say no to him on the phone and risk getting him angry, maybe so angry that he'd stop buying for me. The dealer was already saying from time to time that he was gonna quit soon. “You better start buying more 'cause I'm gonna stop doing this soon, it's just not worth it,” he'd say, though I never fully believed him.

Just as all this was reaching a crisis point the dealer went away for a while. He'd gotten a minitour for his group—three or four gigs in small towns in Missouri and Wisconsin. It was like the
sudden removal of a loud, relentless noise and my first reaction after he left was, paradoxically, to feel disoriented, nervous. But after a jittery first day, my normal sense of time returned, then my normal sense of hearing, though I could still hear Birdwoman puttering around. It was as if once I started hearing her a few weeks ago I would always hear her. But with the dealer gone it was comforting, in a way, to know she was there to potentially talk to, if only I could, like the dealer, take more of the initiative.

For the first time I found myself wondering about Birdwoman's life. So far we'd talked mainly about condo issues (there were only the two of us in the building), like where to put recycled trash, or about the condo fees I'd forget to pay. A couple of times she'd met me in the hallway outside my condo and helped me install a new fuse she gave me. It felt good to have someone do something for me without paying them. My mother was maybe the last person I'd experienced that with, but she was far away now, so it was really nice.

Soon I found myself wondering what Birdwoman was doing upstairs, how she spent her time. I knew she didn't work and had once been a professor. I think the real estate agent told me she was a painter to reassure me that her noise level would be low. Once when I gave her a copy of my keys I stepped inside her place for a minute or two and was dazzled by its elegance—at least in comparison to mine. I remember she had lots of paintings on the walls and that many of them were hers and were very good as far as I could tell. I wished I'd told her so then, when I had the chance, but not wanting to reveal that I didn't know anything about photography, I said nothing. I did compliment her place but didn't think that would matter much to an artist who put so much of herself into her work.

I was disappointed in myself, at how stingy I was to her, especially
considering her age (probably late sixties to early seventies) and how few times she would probably ever hear her work praised again. I promised myself to tell her how much I liked her work but so far I hadn't found the right time. Unfortunately, that's the way I am. I often know what I want to do but aren't able to struggle enough to be able to do it. It was like my relationship with the dealer, who, like a magician, had suddenly appeared again.

“I'm baack,” Dash said to me on my cell phone, sounding in his clowning way like Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
.

“Hey, how'd the gig go?” I said, trying to sound light-hearted.

“Fabulous, primo. They loved us.”

I congratulated him. I was suddenly full of congratulations, like Santa Claus with his bag of toys.

“I'm going over there now, you wanna come? It's no biggie to me if you do or not but I'm only gonna do this one or two more times, so if you do it, you have to buy in quantity.”

“Is one hundred OK?”

“One hundred's OK. I'll be over in fifteen minutes, then we'll take a ride together.”

I wanted to ask him if he'd actually spoken to the source first but I held my tongue. While he was away I'd secretly worried whether I'd ever hear from him again, being afraid he might move to the Midwest or else truly have his much-threatened change of heart about dealing, and now that I finally had him on the phone I didn't want to aggravate him.

Meanwhile, Dash was telling me more information about our trip. “We're gonna go straight there, I just have to stop at a Kinko's to check my e-mail—unless you have a computer I could use at your place. Do you?”

Reluctantly, I said yes. The dealer had only been in my condo once before and even that was over my protests. Instinctively, I didn't want to ever have him over. The first time I did he commented on how big my place was and asked me what the rent was, not understanding that I owned it. I told him it was five hundred a month less than it would have been if it were an apartment and he believed me. In some ways the dealer was naïve (like the way he believed everything Bill O'Reilly said). This time he said almost the same things as before.