American Spirit: A Novel (9 page)

Armed with this information, Matthew makes an honorable effort to stay in his seat reading his free book from the community center’s Put ’n’ Take box. This book, this manifesto that tells one to eat and pray and bone strangers every so often, it’s on to something, working into the brain like
easy-listening music, it’s digging into the body like Lyme, spiraling in through the skin in tiny concentric circles and then setting off little bombs of ideas inside of Matthew. As these ideas hit, Matthew slowly lowers the book into his lap, tilts his head back, closing his eyes for a minute for some reason. A suit-and-tied man about Matthew’s age across the aisle looks on in mild disbelief. He keeps looking as Matthew resumes reading the book and nodding as he identifies with words on the page, wearing the large headphones scraped and cracked by pavement, wearing too-short nylon jogging shorts that can’t hide scraped and scabbed road-rash legs, wearing a big blue-green bruise that has bloomed on the upper arm where someone had a grip on him in struggle, evidently. Matthew looks up to catch the man staring, realizes that this man is not on a spiritual journey, and is in fact looking and judging. Matthew gets up and heads three cars ahead to the meditation/bar car where spirituality is understood and probably even celebrated.

“Heineken, please.”

“I didn’t know anyone still drank these things.”

Rally to not take this as a slight; strive to reach out to someone and be positive and make small talk. Because, Goddamnit, where did small talk go? When did it disappear? How is it one day you’re feeling Steve Timmel’s face at a corporate creative retreat, and the next you’re longing for someone to say hello to you; to affirm that you’re still existing here on this big round dumb hunk of rock and sea?

“I drink them. I’ll drink them all.” Woops, not nearly as
witty and benign as it seemed in the brain before it was spoken. Especially combined with the scrapes and bruising and busted-up headphones.

Concerned pause from the barman before issuing the price, and then: “Four-fifty, sir.”

“There’s no, kind of, happy hour that happens, right? Like if I wait till three?”

“If you wait till three, we’ll be in the station.”

And judging by the self-congratulatory chuckling, apparently the train bartender knows this is the funniest joke anyone has ever made to a passenger who is entering a period of their life where they can no longer expense things like beer.

“Is there a happy hour on the return trip?”

“Depends when you come back.” And now more laughing.

Matthew slips a hand under his waistband into the little underwear pocket jammed with gun cash. This is maybe not such a good thing to do when maintaining eye contact and trying to appear friendly, as there appears to be concern registering on the barman’s face once again. The hand goes down, crotch bound, roots around deep, comes up with a bill to hand Bob Hope before he can break into his next bit.

“Out of… twenty.” And he uses a little napkin to take the bill!

“It wasn’t in my… There’s a little place to keep it. There’s a pocket.”

Matthew walks over to the center of the car, leans up against the weird little circular table, drinks from the can, ignoring the looks, reading his free book about praying and
eating, filling himself with ideas of traveling the world on a quest for redemption; the book is filled with beautiful heartfelt ideas that are wonderful for others and terrible for him.

Next stop, Grand Central Station, and from there, go outside and walk west on Forty-second Street over to Sixth Avenue and board the downtown F train. The F stops at West Fourth and, again, one is borne up from the warm underground womb and into the crisp, even cold, late-spring day. Matthew walks eastbound through the weird central part of the Village to cut through Washington Square Park and head diagonally down, eventually to Houston and farther east to Hernan and a gun. The body is underdressed for a day so crisp, so it contracts, it moves along fast with the arms crossed tightly on the chest, shoulders shivering and hunched, pushing forward past the border of Washington Square with a cagey sense of purpose. This, coupled with the wounds of jogging and meditating, evidently mimics a drug addict, because the resident dealers beeline in from a distance, like hungry coyotes sizing up the opportunity; their speed and aim increase when they detect the remnants of the little sideways limp.

“Smoke? Smack? Rock? You doin’ okay, baby?”

“Oh… yeah, I’m just a little cold so I’m walking like this. I don’t do much in the way of heavy drugs. I mean, at parties, some blow maybe. The only reason I look a little under the weather is from taking a jog and then…”

“Man, you fuckin’ talk too much.”

And with that the first coyote is gone; back off to whatever vantage point it advanced from, and the next one comes on.

“He ain’t got shit like this, baby. Smack, rock, buds?”

“Nah. I was just telling your friend that…”

“Ghost ain’t my motherfuckin’ friend, bitch.” And he peels away like the last one, the next one rushing up alongside, matching pace and stride, seamlessly.

“They ain’t got this. You want a taste?”

“I’m good, man. Tough day, that’s all.”

That one filled the chest and stride with some casual confidence; felt good, felt solid and honest—maybe even enough to make Matthew feel a bit like a sort of Connecticut-tamed badass; no time for drugs, gentlemen, there’s the matter of buying a secondhand gun. Matthew actually believes, for a moment, that this is what it must be like to be famous and too busy to talk to everyone approaching. He secretly wishes they would all approach, in a group, all hollering their questions and propositions, jostling as he keeps moving, fighting for position like a pack of paparazzi. One last straggler approaches for a last chance before Matthew is out of the park and on his way.

“I’ll take care of you. What you need today?”

“I’m good. I don’t need any more of it today.”

Matthew doesn’t even know if one is supposed to do it more than once a day if one is hooked. He assumes that if you’re hooked on something, you must do it a lot more than once a day. The dealer starts laughing for some reason and walks away.

Girls, Girls, Guns

H
ERNAN HAS A SLIGHTLY
larger apartment than one might expect for an aging South American and Lower East Side fixture with a few neighborhood hustles left to grind. One would have to imagine the blocks between here and the alphabet streets have surely changed quite a lot since the eighties and nineties heyday. There are tools littering a corner between the tiny living room and kitchen, a couple of buckets of Spackle and paint, tarps folded, tools cluttered up on a belt and spilling from a box. Hernan is probably Matthew’s age, or a few years younger with the difference made up by a streetwise life that wears and lines one a little.

“Hey, Matthew, Tim’s boy. Come on in,” this at the door to his apartment after clearing the buzzer downstairs.

“Doing some remodeling, huh?”

“I’m doing some of that shit, yeah. I’m doing a lot of things, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Yes. Yeah.”

“I’m doing some contracting shit, and I’m doing some of the shit you came here to talk about; these are my blocks. I don’t got the jump shot and I don’t produce beats or shit like that, so these are gonna be my blocks forever, B.”

“Your blocks?”

“My streets.”

“I know.”

Hernan puts three guns on the table in front of the banged-out sofa. He’s excited, kind, and precise in doing this; like a ten-year-old laying out the baseball cards he’s hoping to trade today.

“That’s fifty-six; two nines and a thirty-eight. I know dudes that roll with that much for rep.”

“Oh, okay, so, well, I don’t know if…”

“I’m kidding, bro!” And here is more of that kind of laughing the bartender on the train was enjoying. Inside of Matthew the brain wonders, again,
What is it lately with people and laughing?

“I just…”

“You should’ve seen your face, B! Can you imagine some guy walking around with two Tek nines and a thirty-eight? All Grand Theft Auto an’ shit?” And, of course, more laughing from Hernan about what Hernan said. When one person is laughing and the other one isn’t, it takes an eternity
for the laughing to end. The brain gently screws the face up into a frozen and polite smile on Matthew, the eyes pleasant, lonely, confused, and seeming to be standing by for something to latch on to.

“Yeah, no, you got me on that one. I just wouldn’t know, really. But, yeah, I think I only need one gun.”

“Let me ask you: How much would you like to spend for all intents and purposes for this inquisition?”

“You know, maybe a hundred.”

“I’m not sure a sufficing number of currency is…”

“That’s not really the way those words are… just talk normal.”

“That ain’t enough money; what are you, fucking nine years old?”

“Okay, well, let’s see what, um, what I’ve got in here.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what the fuck!”

“Oh! No, I’m… There’s a pocket in there; like a zipper pocket. For your money and driver’s license and stuff, like, while you work out or jog.”

And now Hernan is cracking up again. Matthew, by now used to the people having a great time laughing at something he doesn’t understand as funny, doesn’t even bother with the convention of a polite smile. He just digs down in under the waistband and above the pubic bone, to the left of where the lump of dull pain lives, unzips the pocket, and pulls up a handful of bills; a loose wad and the rest stacked and folded in half, Hernan looking on, none too pleased with what looks like a paperboy’s salary. Small wadded bills littering his
coffee table. After rummaging through the currency yanked from the crotch pocket, Matthew counts to a final number.

“I actually have to keep some for a cab back up to the train. What can I get for like… sixty-nine fifty?”

This just brings a sad silence from Hernan.

“Shit, B. You ain’t walking with a nine for that kind of change.”

“I’m kind of fucked because I don’t have a job anymore. You’re the first person I’ve told that to, oddly enough.”

“Well, you better be telling somebody at the front of the line at the state office, because that money under your dick ain’t…”

“It’s a pocket.”

“Well, whatever’s in it ain’t gonna carry you far.”

“How much more would I need for that one?” Matthew asks, pointing at the nine millimeter.

“Like three and a half times what you were hiding under your dick.”

“Fuck, well…”

“If you want, you can run a pack for me tonight and we can work it out.”

“No, I can’t do remodeling stuff. I’m seriously, like, I can put in a dimmer switch and that’s about it. I can take care of any people that need dimmer switches, but you probably don’t even…”

“I’m talkin’ ’bout a pack, B. You roll with one of my backpacks to some people’s places and sell them some shit and come back tonight with the cash. People call me; I call your
cell and tell you where you’re going. This is weekend shit, nothing heavy; ’shrooms, brownies, X, eighths of bud.”

“No, I…”

“I’m talkin’ ’bout mainly dorm room kids and white chicks with offices.”

“Women? So, I don’t have to stand around in Washington Square or anything, right?”

“I’m not sayin’ you’re standing around the park in a ski jacket selling fake coke and two-bit green shit.”

“It’s fake, their cocaine?”

“I’m thinking you’re playing dumb-as-shit at this point. This ain’t shake, this ain’t kitchen sink scrape, this is out-West shit. These people buy from me every weekend. You’ll clock maybe a thousand bucks in three calls, and instead of giving you a cut for running, I’m just hooking you up with one of these since you’re light.”

They both look at the guns, common sense making this all seem less of a risk. Who among us doesn’t want to get their life back on track; to get to feeling like one hasn’t got less than he had and one has even fortified what is left? The brain reasons that life is supposed to be a journey, and that means you don’t turn down selling shit for Hernan to make this gun thing happen. That one was so close to Zen that the hands produce the phone and typing device from the running sock. The typing starts and Hernan is staring.

“I’m just letting my wife know I’ll be late.”

“Okay, yeah, take care of the home front, B. That shit’s important. Nothing without these ladies, butchu know that, I
don’t need to tell you. Shit… Love and God, that’s where it at, B. An’ you got that little boo all waiting for you.”

“I don’t really think I…”

“Aw, she all at home waitin’ for her man to get off the corner. She want some company up in there, B!”

“Right, yes, we’ll… jam. We’ll be… jammin’…”

Hernan pulls one purple backpack from a small and immaculately inventoried closet where about a dozen others hang from numbered pegs or sit in bins with numbers clipped to them by clothespins. A purple backpack certainly tops off the evening’s ensemble of knee-high athletic socks pulled all the way up to where the scrapes and cuts start on the legs, running shorts stuffed with too little cash, and a promotional tee shirt for a weekly news magazine that New Time publishes. To open the pack is to open up a tiny purple canvas sky above an opaque polyurethane field with a tiny horizon; perfect rows of Ziplocked tops of clean, crisp, categorized poly bags with different-colored stickers on them. Matthew lets his fingers amble over them and Hernan gives him directions through the rows of the field; what the colors are; what the prices are; what the contents are; why it’s a sign of quality that the mushrooms look blue at certain angles; what to tell people with regard to storing and using whatever they buy; why freezers aren’t great for drugs; why the Ecstasy is only half as good if the customer is drinking alcohol instead of sugars and acids like orange juice or lemonade; why Matthew can’t take back empty poly bags and how they should be discarded at the customer’s apartment
if they’re going to be discarded. Hernan doesn’t tell him that this last bit could mean the difference between being charged with the intent to sell drugs versus the considerably harsher charge of actually selling drugs, because to discuss getting caught and arrested and arraigned is a bit of a buzzkill to someone finally getting started selling weekend drugs to pretty girls in order to buy a gun. Lastly, Hernan mentions that Matthew should be polite, should be talkative and jocular and keep things light; that it’s important not to act like a drug dealer. And also, one shouldn’t stay too long. Matthew stifles a yawn; he has reached for the backpack twice during this little seminar, but Hernan had pulled it away from him both times. Most of the details and instructions from Hernan run through the brain like names in a meeting one can’t wait to get out of, or directions to a store past a barn near the filling station past the pond and around the other side of a country diner; all of it gone the second the head’s gray has parsed it with precision. Finally, the pack isn’t pulled back when Matthew gives it a willing grab.