Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (20 page)

He played with the flame adjuster and flicked the lighter again. The flame shot an inch high and wrapped around the pipe, dancing close to my nose. I reared back.
Wasn’t this what Richard Pryor was doing when his face caught on fire?

“Quick, man. Breathe deep.”

I did as I was told, taking in the gray genie smoke in three quick gasps. The warm ahhh of euphoria was immediate, and the desire to copulate was feral. We gave each other a few sloppy kisses and his hands buzzed all over my body like hummingbirds too excited to land.

“Hey, wanna get out of here and go to my place?” he asked. “I live just around the corner.”

“Yeah. Let’s go.”
I’m just a girl who cain’t say no. I’m in a terrible fix.

We opened our buddy booth to the harsh glare of fluorescent lights.
What a buzzkill.
But the lights weren’t to blame. I had forgotten that the buzz of crack is killed over and over, almost as fast as it’s ignited.

We exited Les Hommes into the orange glow of dusk. Crackie halted me with his hand as he stood on the sidewalk and looked both ways as if we were being trailed. Confident that the coast was clear, he motioned me to follow. “Okay. Let’s go.”

In the last flicker of the fading sun I could see that his jeans were a little grimy. His T-shirt frayed. As awake as he was, Crackie was exhausted. I was following a madman.
You’re easily led,
I could hear Mama Jean saying.

Crackie really did live around the corner, a right and then another right. However, we had to zigzag across the street a couple of times. “Just in case we’re being followed,” he said. As he was unlocking the door to his third-floor, walk-up apartment, he froze and looked at me gravely. “Hey, I should warn you.”
Isn’t it a little late for warnings?
“My apartment’s kind of messy. I’ve been really busy lately. No time to clean.”

“No worries.”

“I also don’t have that much rock left.”

My experience with tricks who apologize for the atypical messiness of their apartment is that the mess is not only typical but often downright filthy. He opened the door into a one-room apartment and fumbled for something in the fluorescent light of the hall. Click. The apartment was illuminated by a big-screen TV, silently playing porn. It was as if we’d never left Les Hommes.

He shut the door. When my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw that his place wasn’t an apartment but a satellite office of the city dump. There were piles of dirty clothes, piles of cartons of half-eaten Chinese food, piles of unopened mail, piles of magazines, piles of newspapers, piles of CDs, piles of piles.
It’s enough to uncurl your public hair.
The only piece of furniture I could see was the bed. We shed our clothes and climbed on the bed, becoming two more useless piles. We smoked what was left of the rock and stared at porn on his large-screen TV.
There’s nothing more disgusting than a large-screen TV in a small studio, except for a large-screen TV over a fireplace.
The burning desire to copulate had melted away, the high of the crack having trumped the low of my baser instincts.

“Should I get some more?” He looked at me with a lunatic’s eyes. “I can get some more. I’ll get some more. Want me to get some more?”

No.
“Okay.”

I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t.
Maybe just one more hit and then I’ll leave.
It felt like one of those dreams in which you want to run but are powerless to move. Besides, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

As Crackie pulled on his clothes while peeking beyond the drawn window shade—
just in case
—the phone rang. And rang. Next to the TV I could see the maniacally blinking red message light of his answering machine.
That’s a lot of piled-up messages in that machine
.

“Go away!” he screamed at the phone until the machine picked up.

After his greeting answered—which didn’t say,
I’m smoking crack for the next month, so don’t bother to leave a message
—the caller spoke desperately into the machine. “Hey, girl. Did you get my messages? Why don’t you call me back? If you’re there, pick up. Come on! Now your mother’s calling
me
. What am I supposed to tell her? She’s really worried. I’m worried too. What’s going on?”

We stopped and stared at the disembodied voice coming from the machine.

“Shut up! Shut the
fuck
up!” Crackie screamed at the speaker.

The caller paused and asked one last question before hanging up. “Where have you been, man? Where have you been?”

I could hear Mama Jean. I didn’t hear her saying,
Where the
hell
have you been?,
as she was fond of saying into my answering machine or into my ear when I did pick up. I heard her say,
Where have you been, Lord Randall, my son?,
as she did when I was a little boy, whenever I had been out of her orbit for a time. The sound of her voice in my head was the sound of what was left of my conscience.

As Crackie left his apartment to get more drugs, he said, “I won’t be long, man. I’ll be back soon.” In the scant hour we had known each other, he’d apparently deemed me trustworthy enough to guard his filth.

After he was gone, I sat among the ruins of his life, staring at that blinking red light.
How did two drinks after work turn into five and slide into smoking crack at dusk?
Michahaze was waiting for me at home. I had work tomorrow. It was still light outside. It wasn’t too late to return to safety.

I finally stopped staring at the red light and said out loud, “I have to leave.” I pulled on my clothes and got the hell out of there.

I never asked Mama Jean why she called me Lord Randall. I had since learned it’s the name of an ancient Anglo-Scottish ballad. As I hurried home to Michahaze, the ballad echoed in my gin-cracked head.

“O where have you been, Lord Randall, my son?

And where have you been, my handsome young man?”

“I have been at the greenwood; mother, make my bed soon,

For I’m wearied with hunting, and fain would lie down.” …

“O I fear you are poisoned, Lord Randall, my son!

I fear you are poisoned, my handsome young man!”

“O yes, I am poisoned; mother, make my bed soon,

For I’m sick at the heart, and fain would lie down.”

TWENTY

Account Past Due

“Can I get my bath now?” Mama Jean asked as she stood impatiently in the bedroom doorway of the new apartment Michahaze and I’d just bought in Chelsea.

“Yes.” I sailed past her toward the kitchen to get more coffee. “Bathroom is all yours.” She always took a bath, never a shower, because a shower would threaten her once-a-week hairdo, which she had had done to travelproof perfection the day before she left Beaumont.

“Good. Because I have to hurry. Jeffrey’s picking me up at nine.”

“Me too. I have to be out the door in twenty minutes for an early meeting.”

Mama Jean’s solo visit was for three reasons: to see our new Chelsea apartment, which she had helped us get, to see my brother Jeffrey’s house in the Berkshires, and to see her current heartthrob, Hugh Jackman, in the Broadway musical
The Boy from Oz
. Actually, four reasons, the fourth being to see Jackman a
second
time in
The Boy from Oz
.

Michahaze and I were not quite ready for her visit. We had barely been two weeks in the place, a fabulous, sunny, tenth-floor loft apartment with windows as tall as the twelve-foot ceilings and views of the Hudson River and the Empire State Building. We hadn’t worked out its kinks, such as the air-conditioning. She was here during an unseasonably hot June week. Our bedroom was the only room that had AC, and luckily, that’s where Mama Jean was staying, sleeping in the ornate Victorian bed that had been in her family for years. When she gave it to us, she said, “Generations of my family on Mother’s side were born in this bed. I guess this is the end of the line.”

Mama Jean could barely wait to visit. She wanted to see where her money had gone. She had taken a second-mortgage loan on her house to help us with the down payment, a loan I was to pay the monthly interest on until the day I could pay her back. I didn’t want to ask her for the loan. I didn’t want to be in the red with her. Even when she lovingly lavished on me the trips to Europe in high school, the cars, the expensive college education, to my mind she was always waving a bill that showed past-due amounts that added up to a grand total of “prove you love me as much as I love you.” I felt that I could never thank her enough, never level the playing field, never pay off the grand total.

The night before, we had seen
The Boy from Oz,
the musical about singer/songwriter Peter Allen, who had been Judy Garland’s lover, married Judy’s daughter Liza, but was gay and died of AIDS.
And Mama Jean thinks my life is sordid?
When I was a kid, I was watching old footage of Judy on TV as Mama Jean cut a diagonal swath across the den in a hurry for work. “Look, Mom! It’s Judy Garland.” Without stopping, she dismissed Judy with “
Uh!
Worst degenerate Hollywood
ever
produced!” She’d since revised her opinion, classifying Judy an alcoholic victim of both Hollywood and her stage mother.

“I’m telling you, Hugh Jackman is going to be a
huge
star! Listen to me. I can pick ’em.” The second time she saw the show, Mr. Jackman called her name from the stage during a riff with the audience. She sounded like a schoolgirl when she retold the story. “You should have heard him! He called my
name
! He said, ‘Jean!’”

I wasn’t as hopped up as she was to see the show. I’d heard it was schmaltzy and maudlin, so I wasn’t expecting to flood tears as Peter Allen lay dying of AIDS while his devoted mother sat by his side. I hid my tears from Mama Jean.

At intermission I left her in her seat to go to the bathroom but sneaked in a quick pop. I always—almost—controlled my drinking around her, but especially after the aborted attempt to get sober. When I told her that I was drinking again, she said, “But you told me that ‘one’s too many and eleven is never enough.’” She was throwing back in my face some of the bumper-sticker wisdom I’d picked up at meetings. “Well, those meetings taught me how to keep it under control.”
Let’s not think about that night in Rio.

Shaking her head, she said, “If you say so,” making it clear that
she
didn’t say so.

So on that hot morning as we were rushing to get ready, the combination of the heat in the apartment and the heat in my body from last night’s bourbon nightcaps left me cranky and wet with sweat. By the time I reached the kitchen to pour my second cup of coffee, I thought of how I had Mama Jean–proofed the apartment: hidden the blue movies, hidden my old books on alcoholism, and hidden anything in the nightstand drawers I didn’t want her to see. I wished she had waited until later to visit, after we had worked out all the kinks in the apartment—
Oh, shit!

“Don’t turn on the”—I heard the bathtub faucet go on, which meant that she was leaning over the tub and beneath the showerhead—“shower!” One of the kinks we hadn’t worked out was the shower valve, which was stuck in the on position, so that when the water was turned on, it automatically sprayed from the showerhead. I had forgotten to switch the valve to the faucet position.

“My hair! My hair!” I heard her shriek like the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy douses her with a bucket of water. I ran to the bathroom. She was standing at the door clutching a towel to cover her naked body. She pointed with her thumb at her hair. “My hair is
ruined
!” I didn’t know what she was talking about. The proscenium arch of hair around her face looked as perfect as it had only seconds before.

“It looks okay to me.” She turned her head to show me the back. It resembled the side of a mountain after a mudslide. She jabbed her thumb at the air in front of it. “Does
this
look okay to you?!” She didn’t wait for an answer. “What am I going to do? This hair was supposed to last me a week!” Jeffrey was picking her up at nine to drive her to his house in the Berkshires.

“I … I don’t know.” I turned to Michahaze, who had emerged from the den, where he and I had been sleeping on the pullout sofa, and shot him a desperate look of help. “But I have to get to work.”

Michahaze, always the calm voice in any storm, said, “Jean, it’ll be okay. I’m sure that once you get to the Berkshires, you can find a hairdresser.”

She shot back, “They don’t know how to do hair like this up there!” As always, she was right.

*   *   *

During that trip, a tumor of dread was growing inside me like cancer. It was the fear of giving her bad news, news that couldn’t have had worse timing, given that we had just moved into the apartment that she had helped us buy. I didn’t tell her on that trip. I waited until I absolutely had to, later that summer. It was the fear of telling Mama Jean that Michahaze and I were not coming home for Thanksgiving. Every year, for thirteen years straight, Michahaze and I had made that trip to Beaumont for Thanksgiving to decorate the tree. And I returned not quite four weeks later for her big party, Christmas, and to de-decorate the tree.

That we weren’t coming home for Thanksgiving was a big deal. Logically, I knew it shouldn’t be, but with her this was a breach of contract. We were going to Mr. Parker’s brother’s wedding in Mexico. I knew the conversation wouldn’t be pretty. Usually dreaded conversations don’t go as badly as one expects. This one went worse.

Before the conversation, on a Sunday morning, I fortified myself with my usual weekend
day
drinks—Bloody Marys and Greyhounds (grapefruit and vodka)—to gather the courage to tell her. That’s not quite true. As usual when I told her something she didn’t want to hear—such as coming out to her on the phone—it was because she asked. I was on my third drink when she called to ask when Michahaze and I were going to book our tickets for Thanksgiving. LBD hit. I felt as if I were ten years old on top of the high dive at the Beaumont Country Club swimming pool, terrified to take the plunge. I took a supersize gulp of my Greyhound and jumped into the deep end.