Authors: Jess Row
Anyway: you wouldn’t believe how popular we were. We had three routes: the long one, Duke to Burlington; the short one, Burlington to Princeton; and the east-west, Harvard to Oberlin, stopping at Amherst, Cornell, and Kenyon. And our drivers—well, they were paid a percentage of sales. Some of them made enough for college themselves doing it. We couldn’t pack the vans tight enough. Everyone knew what the Little Green Bus was for. The weed had a brand name: we even had custom-made horns that played “Brown-Eyed Girl.” I swear to God, there were places—Sarah Lawrence was one—where we’d sell out the store and have to send an overnight driver down from Burlington to restock for the rest of the trip south. And we were doing it with a fifteen percent markup for convenience. No one cared. The product was awesome. The whole thing was a guerrilla sales company before the concept existed. Word of mouth. No advertising. No corporate address. All the fleet management was done by a
guy Seymour knew in Hartford: he painted the vans, he fixed the vans, he provided the gas cards for the drivers. We paid him in cash. No taxes, no filings. The credit card account went to a Mailboxes place on York Road.
It was genius, and it lasted three years. Longer than we ever imagined. Right through the millennium. Finally, one of our drivers had an accident—in an empty van, by some miracle. Taking it in for service. Rolled it over on 91 near New Haven and ripped the chassis open. Bricks of weed all over the shoulder. Seymour sent the guy bail money and then somehow got him on a plane to Honduras. No names, no evidence, but the whole network had to go overnight. We left fifty thousand dollars out on the road, plus the value of the vans. Just abandoned them wherever they were. One guy drove his off a pier into Lake Erie. Another took his out to Moab, got all the pot out, and then torched it in a bonfire out in the desert, or so the story went.
And all this time Seymour was in Vermont, running the wholesale operation, and I was still here, in Dad’s house, running Little Green Bus and picking up checks from that mailbox out on York. We talked only on pay phones, like real drug dealers. And I was getting a little paranoid, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash in the house. Because that’s how much it was. I kept my expenses basically at zero. Survived on Chinese food and those bagged premade salads from the supermarket. Still drove Dad’s old Scirocco. Wore two pairs of black jeans and a black Carhartt hoodie. But the isolation was wearing me down. Alan was long gone. Everyone else from Willow was out of college by now and living in Brooklyn or Berkeley or China. I hadn’t made hardly any friends at UMBC, and I wasn’t playing music or going out much. The work was seven days a week, twenty-four/seven; I had to carry two pagers and a cell every time I left the house, even to walk around the corner.
So, to make a long story a little shorter: I bought a gun. Not for any good reason. We made no enemies. No turf wars. Never sold shit in Baltimore;
Hopkins wasn’t even on our radar. Nobody was going to try to rob the house; it was still the fortress it always was. But living alone so much of the time—and watching too many movies, too much bad TV—makes anyone crazy. You get so you can’t even make conversation with the girl giving you change for a meatball sub at the deli. Everyone starts giving you these big eyes. So I bought one gun, a Glock. Kept it under my pillow. Then Jonas, the guy I bought it from, offered me a discount on a hot double-barreled Mossberg. I kept that one next to the front door. If I had to I could kill someone by shooting through the door. Then another Glock to keep under my seat in the car. Then a little gun, a Walther PPK, .25 caliber, that I kept in my waistband wherever I went. Then, just for the hell of it, I bought an AR-15 kit gun off the Internet. Screw-on silencer, extra-long clip. No special reason other than that any kid who grew up watching
The A-Team
wants one of those things. I just wanted to take it out to the range and see the look on people’s faces. Hell, going to the range had become my only means of entertainment other than jerking off. I had an unlimited pass. In a couple of months I’d gone from just another unarmed Joe Schmo to the owner of my own private arsenal.
And then Seymour came for a visit. Just stopping through. We hadn’t seen each other face-to-face in nearly a year. He came through the door and took it all in with one look. I was holding the Mossberg in one hand and a bottle of NoDoz in the other. That was my drug of choice in those days. Espresso wasn’t strong enough. Epinephrine freaked me out. Coke and meth were too dangerous. So I’d take six NoDoz at a time, ground up in a Mountain Dew.
Look at yourself, he said. This isn’t just pathetic. It’s dangerous. This isn’t the business we’re in.
How do you protect
your
money?
I hide it, he said. I launder it. I can teach you all that shit. Why didn’t you
just ask? You need a course in Drug Banking 101. But first you need a vacation. Callie’s taking over Little Green Bus. You’re coming back with me to Burlington, right now.
And you know what? I knew he was right. I had to get out of town. Baltimore was killing me. That house was killing me. All Dad’s things were still around: his pictures, his records, his clothes in the closet. I still slept in my old room, on the same bed I’d had since middle school. I was turning into some kind of pale underground fish, you know, the kind that live in caves, that never see daylight in their entire lives? I was turning into a bat. My skin kept breaking out. I hadn’t had a girlfriend in years, but I was watching porn and jerking off four times a day. It was deforming me, all this easy money. It was warping my spirit. Ultimately, I’d screw up somehow and get caught. Or go crazy. Or get so sad I’d kill myself. Or do it by accident, cleaning my guns. Seymour made me get rid of them before I left. One by one, we filed off the serial numbers and threw them over the Tydings Bridge into the Susquehanna. I cried, doing it; it was like killing kittens. Those guns were innocent. They were the only family I had. Then I curled up and fell asleep in the back of his Wrangler and woke up the next morning in the Green Mountains.
I know it’s silly. I know it’s a cliché. But I’m not afraid. I’m not deceived. No one would tell this story for me. Listen: when I was in Burlington, this was in the spring of 1998, April, May, I was there for a month, and it seemed like every house I went to, every car I hitched a ride in, this song was on the stereo. Okay. Big whoop. Crunchy granola folks like Bob Marley. But everywhere, and the same song. That bass line was in the air; it carried me. Days and nights blurred together. I was carrying around fifteen thousand dollars in a little Mountain Gear backpack. Bricks of dirty twenties. Seymour had made up with his girlfriend, bought a new house with her, and he kept saying, look, let me show you what it’s like here, you’ll never want to be anyplace else.
It was pretty great. No matter how high you are in Vermont, and I was high, you feel as if you’re just getting healthier every day by breathing the air. It’s like air conditioning for the soul. Anywhere you walk in Burlington you can see these amazing mountains, Mount Mansfield, the Green Mountains, and then there’s the lake right at the edge of the city, and everything just feels washed clean and new. I suppose it reminded me a little of what Big Love was like, back in the day. Wouldn’t want to live in Vermont, god knows, but it’s about the best place in the world to recharge. And Seymour had this amazing house, a modern place, all wood on the outside, huge windows, beautiful trees all around, cedars and hemlocks, with a sauna and a hot tub on the back patio. His girlfriend—I think her name was Amy—was this incredibly beautiful half-Japanese, half-Mexican girl, still in college, who was some kind of professional vegetarian chef and also a harpist. She would make us these incredible meals, huge salads, fresh soups, sushi, cold noodles, homemade tofu, and then go off into her studio over the garage and play the harp all day. It was the first time I’d ever really tasted food in my life. Seymour took me downtown and bought me all new clothes—lots of linens, and a couple of really beautiful suits, from this tailor he knew, a Czech refugee named Jaroslav.
You know what I’m trying to show you? he said. It’s very simple. You want to know how I hide my money? I don’t. Nobody bothers rich people in this world. Yes, there’s some basic mechanics involved. You’ve got to get that dirty cash into bank accounts. I mean you. Starting now. We’ve got to work on that. But the most important thing is, you’ve got to live like you’ve got nothing to hide. No fear. And for god’s sake, live like a grown-up. Don’t know what couches to buy? Get a decorator. Better yet, marry a decorator. Don’t know what suit to wear to a summer wedding? Go into Bloomingdale’s and ask. You’ll put it together soon enough. That’s your work from now on. Worried about getting a life? Forget that. Get a
lifestyle
.
I was listening, but at the same time I wasn’t really listening. You could say I was storing it up for later. His life wasn’t my life. I was still an egg. Still cracking. The chrysalis. It was all coming together, but I couldn’t see what it was. I was just walking around with a gigantic rock in my gut. Seymour knew it, too, and he kept saying it was a matter of changing the formula. He had a whole room full of bud, in glass jars, all labeled, sources and dates—his apothecary—and his philosophy was that there was a blend for every psychic condition. That was what he was working on: weed psychiatry. First he had me on “Questioning,” then “Anxiety Detox,” then “Clarification.” I smoked it, I used his atomizer, ate it in brownies, ate it ground up and sprinkled on rice; I got high in the sauna, in the hot tub, in the woods, sitting in his massage chair—I was his guinea pig, in other words, and it wasn’t working. What happened instead, not surprisingly, is I started to forget things. Whole conversations, whole days. Names of people I hadn’t thought about in months. I thought I had early-onset Alzheimer’s or something. And then I came to my senses and I knew I had to leave.
In the end it was very simple: I packed up and took a taxi in the middle of the morning, when everyone was asleep. That was the last I ever saw of Seymour. I went and knocked on this girl’s door. Carolina. We’d met at a party; she’d made it clear that she’d give me the time of day whenever I asked for it.
Come in, she said, I was just about to do some peyote. Want to come?
Three days later I woke up in a field, soaking wet. It was just before dawn. Half in, half out of my sleeping bag, my hands spread out on the grass, drenched in dew, smelling of clover. My backpack was gone. My money was gone. I knew that immediately. Seymour was gone. And this is what it was: we know where we’re going, we know where we’re from. We live in Babylon, we’re going to our fatherland.
I picked up my arms, I swear to god, I looked at my hands, in the dawn light, you know, the blue light turning to daylight, and I saw myself getting darker, saw my skin turning brown, all but the palms of the hands, and I knew, I knew, swear to fucking god, that I was emerging, all wet, as what I was always meant to be. I had no fear. I stood up and started walking. I went back to Baltimore; I got my savings out from all the places I’d stored it, the rafters, the basement, safe-deposit boxes, dummy accounts. I did what Seymour told me to do. Found the right lawyer. Put on a golf shirt and flew down to the Caymans with a big fat cashier’s check. And then when I got back to Baltimore I opened the Yellow Pages, and looked up plastic surgery.
Six weeks ago, when we met the first time, when I handed her the tacky laser-printed business card I’d just made—
Kelly Thorndike, Freelance Journalist
—Robin made a quick notation on her phone and said, I get an interview, too, right? Want to set one up? My schedule’s pretty full.
Mine’s not, I said. Send me a time.
Done, she said, and the next day her assistant emailed me a date at the beginning of May.
Lunch 12:45-1:50.
I wrote it down on a Post-it and stuck it on the window next to my desk, and nearly every day for weeks I wanted to call her and suggest another time, tell her I’m traveling, that my deadline was moved up—to find a polite and neutral way to cancel. I am not a practiced liar. I am not an actor. With Martin there as my alibi the whole enterprise makes sense; without him Robin and I will just be two people, two adults, out for lunch, in the ordinary everyday world. Two adults with some business to discuss, some matter at hand, but not without a mild frisson of companionable attraction, a little lighthearted flirtation. Nothing is more terrifying for a conspirator, I’m realizing, than the temptation to relax.
Let me put it another way.
Part of getting past the first stages of grieving, my therapist told me, is learning to surprise yourself again. In a traumatic event, your senses
shut down. Taste, smell, temperature—you forget to wear a hat when it’s five below. Bite into a piece of sushi and it’s like eating a sponge. Then, gradually, it all comes back, but it’s different. There’s a reset button. Like pregnancy. Or chemotherapy. Ever seen someone whose hair has all grown back a different color?
I’ve never in my life been attracted to a black woman. Not at all. Not ever. You could call it simple socialization: that in those defining years, thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, the bodies I saw, the faces I saw, were white girls, skinny white girls, by any historical standard—the standard being somewhere between Molly Ringwald and Kate Moss. Girls whose breasts disappeared in the palm of your hand, whose hips, whose asses, described a gentle curve, a suggestion of something, you could say, more than the thing itself.
And that’s still my type, if I have a type. Not long after my dinner at Martin’s, not more than a few days, I found one of the sites I look at when I need to remind myself to jerk off—which I’ve had to, ever since the accident—and nothing worked. So I crawled into bed, with half a hard-on, read a chapter of a Paul Bowles novel I’d had on my night table for months, and finally smoked the end of a joint I’d kept in the freezer since Christmas, a last-ditch effort at deriving some sense of pleasure from the world. It happened quickly after that: I could describe, in my mind’s eye, every part of Robin, the shape of her kneecap, the frictionless skin at the very base of the thigh, the taste of her as I put my mouth between her legs. I came explosively.
And is it really so surprising? I asked myself a few moments later, after I’d tossed away the tissue and pulled up the sheet, my heart still pulsing away as it did, does, after sex, the real kind. How else is there to say it: Martin has everything I want, everything
any
one wants, even if he took the strangest, technically impossible, route to get there. Of course I look at his beautiful wife—his poised, put-together, self-assured, hyperconfident Doctor Mom—and want to fuck her, to bend her over, to shove her up against a wall. Lust is circumstantial and
unfair. I’m not sorry. We know enough now, adults that we are, evolved people, not to have to apologize for our fantasies. Of course it occurs to me now that I wasn’t ever attracted to black women partly because no one ever would have wanted me to be, because it’s inconvenient, unsightly, because the image it brings to mind, let’s just say it, is the master and the slave, Sally Hemings and President Jefferson. Lust is circumstantial and politically inconvenient. So is love, for that matter. When Wendy I were first together, one friend said to me, in a drunk late-night overseas phone call,
I never thought you were the Suzie Wong
type.
Another said,
how long have you had yellow fever?
So since my night with Rina—two weeks ago, and we’ve had dinner twice since, like any old friends stranded without much companionship, the tension broken, thank god—I’ve tried not to worry about Robin. People have crushes, I’ve been thinking, and that’s what it is; why make it sound more profound, more ominous, than that? What’s going to happen, in any case?
I’m in love with you, and by the way, your husband’s really a white man, so what’s the difference, anyway?
She’s the Pat Robertson of the black family. And a shrink. Let her set the boundaries. Take notes. Make it all on the record. And move on, and maybe try not to see her again.
—
Don’t sit down, Robin says, when I open the door to her office. I’ll just be a second. She’s already changed into Lycra pants, track shoes, and a fleece pullover; now she’s slipping in contact lenses, using a compact mirror and one long, delicate pinkie. Her nails are very short, I’m noticing, with a dark plum-colored polish, almost black. You okay with walking? she asks. I always walk at lunchtime. First, because I sit all day. Second, because there’s no decent food around the hospital. That’s what happens when you tear down a neighborhood. Fancy MRIs, world-class surgery, but you have to walk a mile for a decent sandwich.
As long as you give me a head start.
Don’t worry. I don’t power-walk with company. Just like to get out of my doctor drag and be a civilian again.
Her building isn’t the hospital itself but one of its many satellites—the Hopkins Hospital, since I lived here, having become a city within a city, taking up a twenty-block square above Oldtown and Butchers Hill. The view from her window takes in the entire horseshoe of the harbor, from Canton to Federal Hill, with Patterson Park on one periphery and Camden Yards on the other, and stretching out to the tankers dotting the gray-green Chesapeake three miles away. The accumulated brightness of it all—the window, the sunburst-patterned rug, the enormous Jacob Lawrence prints above her desk, the clutter of toys and blocks and tiny plastic chairs around my feet—is making me a little dizzy.
I always tell people not to sit down, she says, because otherwise they try to be polite and break one of the little people chairs. It’s not a kindergarten class where the parents come in for conferences. In here it’s me and the kids only. I do consulting with the grown-ups next door.
What kinds of cases do you handle?
What kinds of kids? Every kind. I get referrals from all directions. Schools. CFS. Primary-care doctors. Juvenile Justice. The courts. Adoption agencies. Homeless shelters. All the way from mild adjustment issues to full-on psychosis. There aren’t enough child psychs in this world to let me be picky. She directs me to the door, waves to her assistant, and we’re in the elevator on our way down. Like this morning, she says, two appointments. Just to give you a sense of the range. First one, hyperactive mom, lives in one of the new Ritz-Carlton condos over near the Domino’s sign. She works in D.C., has a nanny seven to seven. Single, Dad’s already remarried and lives in Spain. Wants to know whether Jacob—he’s three and a half—needs Ritalin because he keeps breaking his toys. That’s number one. Number two, she’s eleven, six foster families, raped by an older foster brother two years ago, prematurely pubescent, getting in trouble hanging out with boys after school. She’s a candidate for early pregnancy for sure.
It’s pretty much the whole demographic slice.
You know who I don’t see? The suburban middle class. I mean, obviously, given where I work. But my kids break high and low. Because that’s who lives in Baltimore these days. You’ve got profoundly wealthy people in Guilford, old-line Wasp money in Roland Park, yuppies of all kinds around the harbor, and then profoundly, profoundly poor people, black, brown, beige, and white, too, of course, everywhere else. What you don’t have are teachers, nurses, firemen, shopkeepers, managers, what have you.
They
live in the county. And, of course, they don’t get to see a mental-health professional more than once or twice in their lives, because their HMOs don’t cover us. Medicaid, yes. The prisons, yes. Rich people, yes. Baltimore is like a big donut with the middle shot out.
We’ve come out on the corner of Wolfe and Orleans and now turn down North Broadway, a broad avenue of neat brick row houses that descends slowly to Fell’s Point. You like Broadway Market? she asks. It’s soft-shell season, you know. Or we could go to Bertha’s, but I think it’s overrated. Or the brick-oven pizza place.
No, the Market’s fine.
I like eating standing up. Don’t know why. Some people can’t take it. But again, I’m sitting all day. Standing up and reading the newspaper and listening to adults talk. Between work and home I get a little starved for conversation, as you can see. So listen, what was it you wanted to ask me? You must have questions.
Oh, I say, you’re answering them. Mostly I just need background. Who you are, what you think about the life you lead.
Nothing about how I met Martin? That kind of thing?
Of course. That, too.
And you’re not going to ask for my take on black entrepreneurship?
Definitely.
She bursts into laughter. I’m just giving you a hard time, she says. Listen, I could rattle off opinions for hours, so let me get some hard facts out of the way before I forget. About Martin, first off. We met in
church. He probably told you that. And it was the first time I’d
been
to church in about three years; I was there for my friend Kara’s daughter’s baptism. He, at that time, was quite the faithful churchgoer, and my god, a single man, looking like him, with a job, with a
wardrobe
, and without a mother in law—there were crowds. It was like the Google IPO. But our eyes met, la, la, la, we clicked, it all happened fast. It was very efficient. Small wedding, up on Martha’s Vineyard. You have to keep it small when there’s no family on one side.
So you wouldn’t describe yourself as very religious?
Are you talking about in a black context or a larger context?
Is it different?
Of course it’s different. The black community still treats the church as central. You can’t
be
black, in a certain sense, without a relationship to the church. An appreciation for it. I’ve got that. But if you’re talking about a deep, personal, everyday, transcendent need for prayer and reflection, an immersion in the Bible, I mean,
faith
, then no. I’m culturally Baptist the way lots of Jews are culturally Jewish. It’s imperative to me that the kids are raised in the church. Not because I’m so convinced of the moral edification it offers, but because it grounds them in the community and the tradition. It’s all about integrity and wholeness for me, not Jesus and Jehovah. Maybe you got a sense of that the other day.
I did.
You should come again. You’d be welcome, you know.
I will. It’s on my list.
She laughs again.
What, you don’t make lists?
My whole life is lists. It’s just that there’s something so earnest about you, Kelly. You
want to understand
.
You’re like one of those skinny college kids in plaid shirts in 1961, listening to Mingus or Smokey Robinson or something and trying to be hip. Can I be honest here? I keep thinking I’m being played. That’s my cynical, heard-it-all,
twenty-first-century reaction. It’s like you’ve been in a bubble the last, oh, thirty years of your life.
I don’t want anything from you, I would so desperately like to tell her, to reassure her, just an hour of polite conversation, for now, and in the long term, perhaps, your forgiveness, your acknowledgment that
none of this was my idea.
The problem is that I’m trying too hard to do a good job. I’m trying so sincerely to be fake. And now I’m stuck.
So, I say, in your view, there’s just no excuse, anymore, for a naïve perspective, an innocent question?
There would be if you came from, say, Sri Lanka. Or Mars.
Then the white observer, the interlocutor, is in kind of an impossible bind, right? If I’m cynical and worldly I get called out for making assumptions and appropriating a black perspective. If I’m innocent and careful I get called out for false naiveté. Not much wiggle room, is there?
We come to the corner of North Broadway and Baltimore. Here the grassy median gives way to a cluster of trees, a small plaza, benches, now filled with dog walkers, neighborhood wanderers, residents in scrubs uncoiling in the unfamiliar sunlight. Underneath the trees there’s a small, improbable statue, hardly more than life-sized: a muttonchopped man in a frock coat, turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt style.
LATROBE
inscribed on the marble behind him. Baltimore is full of these unexpected, anonymous tokens of a forgotten civic life.
Oh, Kelly, she says, and turns to look me full in the face for the first time. Are you really asking me, a black woman, about wiggle room?
Then I’m just supposed to stay frustrated?
Something like that.
The light still isn’t changing; I wonder for a moment if it’s broken, if we should just leap across, but of course what’s really happening is time is growing elastic, stretching out like taffy, in the course of an awkward, unexpectedly terrible, somehow ruined, encounter.
You know what amazed me about Martin, when we met? she asks.
That he could talk to anybody. I mean, that should be
my
forte. But Martin is a true genius at giving people the benefit of the doubt. It must come from a business background. To him anyone is a potential customer. Or investor, or partner, or something. But that’s not the point, really, because that makes it sound mercenary, and it’s not. He has the rare gift of turning self-interest into something that’s almost like a Christian virtue.
Whereas you?
Whereas I just carry around
baggage
, I guess. I mean, you wouldn’t know it, would you? I am the
epitome
of a black upwardly mobile female blah, blah, blah. But as it turns out I can’t hold a conversation with a white person for more than five minutes on the subject of race. Maybe those two things go together.