Baby Huey: A Cautionary Tale of Addiction (12 page)

I backed away from him. He was wearing his work clothes, brown shirt and short pants. “You’re right, man. I fucked up bad. Can’t believe I did it. I fucked up, Dokes, ain’t no need of lying about it.”

Stole his thunder.

“Dude, you right about that. How the hell you start smoking that shit?”

I told him what happened with the bank job, then lied I smoked a joint not knowing crack was in it. “I’m not hooked on it, though. Last night was my last time. Doreen kicked the door in, I blinked out, hit her. I’ll call her today, apologize.”

“Dude, I’m not sure it’s going to be that easy. She called me last night crying her heart out. The way she told it, you beat her up, tried to beat her son and then she clocked you with the VCR. You’re not hanging with Fifty, are you?”

“Fifty who?”

“Don’t play that shit with me, dude. You know Fifty, the guy at the party the other night? I don’t know what he did to Doreen, but she hates him with a passion. And she’s convinced he had something do with you smoking that shit. Any truth to that?”

“Where did she say she’s staying, over to her mother’s?”

“You’re bullshitting now--makes me wonder if you’re serious about leaving that shit alone. You don’t want to lose Doreen, John. I know you don’t want to do that. I were you I’d cut Fifty loose right now--he ain’t nothing but poison. And I’d get myself into a rehab real quick. You ain’t bad off yet, but it’s coming. I’ve seen it happen too many times. You want her back, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Okay, then. There’s a rehab on Barrow Road, it’s free. I can’t remember the name of it, but I hear it’s pretty good. Three months you’ll be out. Go get some clothes, I’ll drive you over there. You’ll need to sit in the back of the van so nobody sees you.”

“Hold on, Dokes. I’m not fixin’ to go to rehab. I’m not hooked, man. I’m not doing it anymore. Sometime today I’m going look for a job. Can you get me an application at UPS?”

“Shieeeet!” Dokes said. “You’re not messing me up. You can’t pass a drug test. You get out of rehab I’ll get you an application, put a word in for you.” And he went on and on, insisting I go into rehab.

Tired of hearing him talk, I walked him out to the balcony, asked what time he had to go back to work. That didn’t stop him one bit. A blue Yugo drove slowly down the street and I moved to the front door.

“That ain’t Oscar, is it?”

Dokes looked and said no. “You scared of him?”

I said yes, and closed and locked the door.
Damn Dokes.

Through the window I watched him cross the street and get into a UPS van. Then the blue Yugo rolled down the street and stopped. Oscar got out of it and started conversing with Dokes, who for some reason kept pointing up at the apartment.

So what, Oscar, Pooh, Dumbo, whatever his name, he couldn’t get in. What seemed a long time, Dokes and Oscar stood out in the parking lot talking. Another car drove up, a gray Camry, and I lost sight of it as it pulled into one of the parking slots near the building.
Is that Doreen?
The way Dokes and Oscar stopped, looked, and walked over out of my sight, that had to be Doreen.

Shit!
Doreen had a key. I heard footsteps ascending the stairs. Two options: stand up to Oscar, show him I wasn’t afraid of him even though his biceps were bigger than my thighs, and if he hit me, I’d hit his ass right back, try to knock the shit out of him…or hide.

The front door opened just as I was closing the cabinet door under the kitchen sink behind me. Heavy footsteps pounded the linoleum in the kitchen and then trailed off somewhere inside the apartment.

Oscar’s voice: “Y’all come on in. He’s not here.”

More footsteps moving about. Dokes said, “He was just here a few minutes ago. I talked to him.”

Why the hell Dokes wasn’t delivering packages instead of trying to watch a fight?

Oscar said, “Yeah. He must be hiding then. Let me find him.”

Doreen said, “Pooh, I’m serious, don’t start anything. I just want to get a few things and leave.”

“Okay, sure,” Oscar said. “I’m not going to put a hand on him. I’m just putting my foot up his ass.”

The pipe near my neck was leaking, water dripping down the back of my shirt. The floorboard beneath me stank of mildew and something fetid. Rat shit, I thought.

A long while I didn’t hear anything, and then the heavy footsteps returned to the kitchen. Cabinets doors were opened and slammed shut. I stopped breathing. Through a crack I saw Oscar’s hand reaching for the door handle…

“He’s not hiding in the cabinet, Pooh,” Doreen said. “He’s not here.”

The door opened a bit and Oscar said, “You can’t tell about him,” and let the door close shut. I resumed breathing. “That cheap stereo in the bedroom, can I have it?”

“No, Pooh,” Doreen said. “That belongs to John.”

Oscar didn’t argue, told Doreen he had to go pick up his wife. “Call me when you see him again.”

I heard the front door slam shut, started to get out but stopped when I heard Doreen crying.

Dokes said, “Are you okay?”

“We were so close to making it happen, Dokes. My son…John was around him when he was just a baby. We were looking at a house…” A pause, punctuated by nose blowing. “I love him, was willing to do anything…” Loud sobs.

Dokes said, “It’s going to be all right. I talked to him today, told him to go to rehab. He’s not liking the idea right now, but I think he’ll come around. Doreen, he did admit he messed up. You and I know that’s not him.”

Doreen stopped crying. “You don’t get it, Dokes. It’s over, the marriage, everything, it’s over! I could have dealt with the crack, though eventually he would’ve had to go to rehab. That’s not why it’s over. I could have even dealt with him blowing all my money. Dokes, a man doesn’t put his hands on me but one time. I don’t give a damn what he’s smoking. I’m not
that
woman. You hit me once it’s over, no coming back. Not open for discussion. He started at Lewis, too!”

“Doreen, I wouldn’t hit you if my life depended on it.”

Doreen laughed. “I’m not talking about you, Dokes. I know you’re a gentleman with your women.”

What women?

Dokes said what I was thinking, “What women?” and started talking about how he was looking for the right woman, a real woman, a woman of Doreen’s stature.

Doreen said exactly what I was thinking, “Dokes, you sound like you’re hitting on your best friend’s wife in a time of crisis?”

Dokes found that funny, and so did Doreen, laughing right along with him. Their hilarious conversation drifted beyond my hearing and then I heard the front door close again.

It took a minute to get out, my legs and arms stiff. The finality of Doreen’s words worried me.
“It’s over!”
No wriggle room in it.

No, she’s pissed, needed a few days to cool off. Give her a week and go apologize, tell her I love her, I lost my head when I was smoking that shit, won’t do it again--smoke that shit or hit her--tell her I can’t live without her, “I’m sorry,” tell her I love Lewis, I want to make it up to him, I want us to be a family again, I want you to come home.

It sounded good, but “
It’s over!”
kept playing inside my head.

Mama came by that evening, took one look at me and started crying, wouldn’t take a seat, just stood there shaking her head and crying. Almost sixty-years-old she didn’t have a strand of gray in her head, just dark circles under her eyes, formed by years of working the graveyard shift at a nursing home.

Finally she took a wad of tissue out the pocket of her green scrubs and wiped her eyes and said, “A young fella used to work with me, a nice young man, one of the few who’d do the job, named Darius. Most of the younger ones you can’t get to do anything. They eat patients food, steal their money and then get mad time to work, afraid to get shit on their hands. Darius wasn’t like that; he’d even talk to the patients, listen to their stories, and some of em talk your ears off.

“The devil uses all kinds of tricks, you know? Darius didn’t smoke, drink, do drugs, nothing. The wrong people came along and he got to messing with em and next thing you know he’s doing what they doing. He’d kept reading his Bible, kept his eyes on the Lord, he would’ve seen them as the devil the second he laid eyes on them. I look at you and see Darius before he took sick. AIDS. Dead.”

“Mama, he musta been an intravenous drug user. You kidding me? How I remind you of someone like that? I don’t use drugs! What did Doreen tell you?”

Wrinkles bunched up in the bridge of her nose, as if she detected a bad scent, an indication she didn’t believe a word I said.

“Darius didn’t shoot dope, he smoked crack, the same shit you smoking!”

The way she said it shocked me, let me know she was more upset than I thought.

“Doreen said I was smoking crack? Mama, she’s mad because I was fixin’ to whoop Lewis. She got him spoiled, lets him run all over her.” Mama understood discipline; used to beat the hell out of me. “I ain’t feeding a child and let him run over me too. I ain’t gonna do it, Mama.”

The look on her face said she wasn’t buying it.

She said, “You don’t have a job. How’s you feeding him?”

I didn’t answer, and wondered when was she leaving.

“Last night,” she said, “I dreamed a man getting shot. He didn’t have a face. I saw him in a nursing home, bedsores all over his body. Out the window of his room I saw the sign Dean’s Nursing Home and I realized who the man was. It was
you
.” She took a seat on the couch, stared at the black purse in her lap. “Dean’s Nursing Home is where people with no insurance and no hope go. It’s a disgrace. You don’t want to go there, John.”

“It was a dream, Mama.”

Mama shook her head, bit her top lip and said, “My brother, CJ, said you could come work for him. I think you should go. Today.”

“In the country, Mama? I’m no farmer. Look, Mama, Doreen and I had a little fight. Things got a little out of hand, I’ll admit that. I’ll apologize to her, find another job, and everything will return to normal. Ain’t no need of me running off to the country.”

We sat there silent for a long time before Mama said, “John, I think you should forget about Doreen coming back.”

Fifty sat at his kitchen table eating strawberry ice cream out of the carton, nodding his head as I told him what happened.

“That stupid picture you gave me, that’s what made her suspicious, got her looking into shit. You didn’t even sign the damn thing, so tell me how she connect it to you?”

Cindy was standing in the doorway, hands on her hips, in a pair of holey jeans and blue shirt.

Fifty said, “Why don’t you take a walk?” Cindy turned and looked at him. “Yeah,
you
! You the FBI? Nothing to do except eavesdrop on niggers? Take a walk!”

When Cindy left Fifty said, “You got a bad habit confronting me when my woman present, you know that?” He pushed the carton away and pulled out a rock and a pipe from his shirt pocket. “Let’s get some things straight here. One, I didn’t start you smoking crack. Two, I ain’t got nothing to do with you and your woman. Okay?”

“Doreen ain’t psychic! If she know you painted that picture she knows you. I’m asking you how, when, under what circumstances!”

“First off, stop shouting. I’m right here. You wanna hit this or what? This all I got.” Fifty caught my hand as I reached for the pipe. “Hear me out for a sec. A few years ago I lived with this girl, a college girl, young but with a good head on her shoulder. She had grit, you know, wouldn’t take shit off nobody, knew what she wanted and had an idea how she was going to get it. We had a good relationship, but I didn’t realize that then. I took her for granted. Then I--”

“Wait a minute, asshole! You talking about Doreen? My wife?”

“Naw, man. Hell naw! I’m talking about Doreen’s girlfriend, Wanda. You insist on putting Doreen and me together, don’t you? See, I went to jail--not for drugs. I got caught up on a bullshit parole revocation. Did five years. That’s when I realized how good a woman I had. By then it was too late. She’d married a spineless jerk.”

I lighted the pipe, inhaled, exhaled, and stared at him through the haze. “Why didn’t you tell me this before, in the beginning?”

“It’s something I don’t like to talk about.”

That magical feeling wasn’t strong enough to erase the thought that I’d lost Doreen out of my mind. “This shit kinda weak.”

Fifty took the pipe, said, “Yeah, it is,” and inhaled.

There were more questions I wanted to ask him, but now I couldn’t remember a single one.

Fifty said, “You want some more, don’t you? Well, I’m assed out. Cindy is too. You ain’t got a few quarters squirreled away for a rainy day?”

“I ain’t got a dime.”

“Hate to bring Doreen’s name up again, but did she leave anything when she left?”

“Yeah, she did. So what?”

Fifty laughed. “Man, you’re a bachelor now. All you need is a bed, a couch, a TV, a spoon and a pot. Sell the rest. I know a man with a truck. I’ll help you load it up.”

“Why I don’t see your shit on the back of a truck? Huh? I’m not selling my shit. Doreen come back see all the shit gone that’s another problem.”

Two hours later we loaded the minibar, the dinette set, two dressers, a loveseat, a stack of movie DVD’s and the stereo that Oscar had his eye on into the bed of Fifty’s friend’s truck.

Dorothy, the proprietor of Dorothy’s Furniture and Appliance, on Asher Avenue, looked over the collection of Doreen’s and my five-year marriage and said, “Three hundred dollars, take it or leave it.”

I told her the minibar alone cost three hundred dollars, but she couldn’t care less. Repeated her first offer: “Three hundred, take it or leave it.”

We
took it.

At the dope house Fifty remembered his friend wanted thirty dollars for use of the truck. Then he came back with six little pebbles I couldn’t imagine costing two hundred dollars.