Dope Sick (3 page)

“You need a hit?” Rico asked as he cooked up the dope.

“Nah,” I said. “I'm good.”

What I didn't say was that I wasn't into no dealing. The Man catch you with a taste and you get a slap on the wrist. You get caught with enough to deal and you catching calendars. I'd rather die than face fifteen to twenty years in jail.

Still, I copped a bag when Rico started his nod, figuring I could bring it up if I needed to.

I'M SITTING THERE WATCHING
the whole thing on television, watching my life like it was happening outside my body. The whole thing was fascinating and scary at the same time. I could even feel my body moving when I saw myself on the screen. It was like I was in two places at the same time, being two people, with one of them looking inside the other, checking out his own mind.

“Then what happened?” Kelly had a way of kind of hunching his shoulders when he talked, like he was pushing the words up.

“You think people in the street can see the
lights from the television?” I asked.

Kelly clicked the remote and we were looking at the street again. There were three police cars, and some of the officers were looking up at a building, but it wasn't the one we were in.

“Then what happened?” Kelly asked again.

“We waited around for a while and Rico tapped the lid again. He got another half bag, cooked that up, and hit the line. That kind of freaked me out, because I figured he might just go on tapping and cooking up the stuff until he blew the whole gig.”

“Then he wouldn't be able to go with the sale?”

“Yeah. So I called him on it,” I said. “If the deal didn't go down, we could say the white boy didn't show correct or we saw some wrong-looking dudes hanging around. But if the dope was light when we took it back to Dusty, we were going to have to take the heat, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah. You scared of Dusty.”

“So then it was time to go do the thing and Rico had said we should carry a piece in case somebody tried to rip us off,” I said. “I didn't think no white
boy trying to cop in the middle of Harlem was looking to rip nobody off, so it wasn't a big thing. Rico was feeling nice, but he wasn't really high yet, so it looked like a bet.”

“You wasn't using nothing?” Kelly asked.

“No, I ain't stupid, man. I just needed to get paid. Drugs and business don't go together.”

“I always wondered why they put those candles on the sidewalk,” Kelly said.

“What candles?”

“You know, where they find the body,” he came back. “They put candles on the street and write stuff on the wall like ‘June Bug, we love you,' and ‘RIP.'”

“That's a memorial to whoever it was got killed,” I said. “You didn't know that? Where you live? If you from around here, you should know that.”

“Yeah, I know that, but why candles and flowers after the killing when half the time they didn't even know the dude before he got killed? Or some girl got killed or some baby got killed,” Kelly said. “Don't make no sense to me.”

“So you ain't the smartest sucker in the world,” I said. “Nothing wrong with that. But those candles and the flowers and the good-byes written on the wall is like a sign of respect and love.”

“Why you showing love to somebody you don't know?”

“Later for all this mouth running.” I was getting tired. “How I'm going to get out of here?”

“You think the police are creeping up on you?”

The truth was that Kelly was creeping up on me. He was making me jumpy. He looked like street and he talked like street, but something was telling me different.

“All I want to do is get some distance from here,” I said. “That's straight up. You got some ideas how I can do that?”

“By changing something you did,” Kelly said, “making it all different. Look to me like you've been making garbage for a while and dragging it with you. Now you need to get out of here, and that garbage is weighing you down.”

Somebody had their radio going, and I heard
it playing a drum-and-bass jam. It was pounding like my heart was pounding, but it had more rhythm.

“I'm going to make something different with that television and your remote?” I asked. “You got to come up with a stronger line than that, man.”

“You got a better idea?” Kelly asked. “You standing here shaking and sweating and wondering if you gonna make it through the night. You ain't got nothing going on, so you might as well keep watching the tube and working your brain to figure out where you need to be making some changes.”

“Did I tell you that you're a spooky-ass chump?”

“I don't know about the chump part, but I like being spooky,” Kelly said. “You know, like you meet up with somebody in the dark and they see you spooky, they start paying attention. Like you paying attention.”

“Whatever. Anyway, I'm still working on that day. If that day was different.”

“You mean getting up in the morning?” Kelly
asked. “You want to stay in bed?”

“That might have helped, but I'm really talking about what happened with the cop,” I said. “Yo, you got any aspirins up in here?”

“Your arm hurting?”

“Why you think I need the aspirins? You know my arm is hurt.”

“Okay, so let's get back to yesterday and the cop.” Kelly ignored my arm hurting. “Rico was tasting Dusty's stuff, but you wasn't using nothing?”

“How many times I got to tell you?” I said.

“Three's a good number,” Kelly said. “But it don't make no never mind to me. You the one looking for a change. I don't need to change.”

“You sitting up here by yourself watching television in this stink hole is what you want to be doing?” I asked. “You look like you need a change to me.”

“Check it out, Lil J,” Kelly said. “You got the Nine and all I got is the remote and the television looking out on the world. But I can walk on out of here and go crosstown and cop a burger and
some fries if I want. If I want, I can smile all the way like I'm crazy or ask people for spare change or just stand on the corner and watch the world go by. You can't do none of that without maybe getting gunned down, so why you still up in my face running game?”

“So what you want to know?”

“Like I said before”—Kelly's head turned a little, but I still didn't see his full face—“Rico was tasting Dusty's stuff, but you wasn't using nothing?”

“I don't hit the line, but sometimes I skin-pop,” I said. “Just a little under the skin when I'm down. I used to party all the time, but I know…”

“You know what you know, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You scared of hitting the line?” Kelly asked.

“I heard a lot of bad things happening when dudes be shooting dope right in their veins,” I said. “Infections. You get some bad dope and put it right in your vein—you can be dead before you know it. I'm a little scared of needles anyway. I figured I wouldn't get hep C or AIDS or nothing
if I just skin-popped.”

“You got to work hard to be that ignorant, but if you going to dope it up, you might as well be ignorant, because it's all going the same way,” Kelly said.

“You don't know that.”

“I know you got to lie about even using,” Kelly said.

“I use, but I'm not really into a trick bag,” I said. “You know what I mean?”

“So, tell me what happened with the cop.”

I sat down on the armrest of a stuffed chair. It smelled a little pissy, but I didn't care. I was really getting tired. “Me and Rico got the stuff together and wrapped it in that plastic Baggie you put food in when it got to go in the freezer,” I said. “We put a little tape around it, so in case the white boy got nervous, he wouldn't want to take the time to unwrap it. Maybe he would just want to give up the cash and return to wherever he came from.

“Rico was down from his nod and was grinning and bopping the way he do when he's high. I was
mellow, but I was okay. You know, I wasn't nervous or anything. That's the way dope does me. I still got the same things going on in my head, but it's like I don't care that much anymore. We got down where we was supposed to meet the guy with the cash—he was supposed to be wearing a jacket and a green-and-yellow sweater that said
FUTBOL
. I spot the dude and Rico goes over to him and says something while I hold on to the drugs. Then we go into the building.

“I'm checking the dude out and he's jumpy, like he's anxious to get the stuff. I figure him to be a dude using big-time and needing to get right. I check his hands, and he's got tracks on the back of his left hand—you know, maybe he's right-handed and running out of road—and he's been hitting the veins there too hard. But I was getting nervous, too. I'm sensing the set ain't correct.”

“Your high wearing off?” Kelly asked.

“No, the white boy is getting me nervous,” I said. “He's all jumpy and everything, but he's chubby, too. You know, if he's that heavy into
horse, running up to Harlem to buy it from strangers, how he spending so much money on food he staying chubby?

“I looked the guy right in the eye and said, ‘Rico, this fool ain't right.' Meanwhile, Rico got the money and the guy was scoping the dope and trying to pull out a bag from a hole he punched in the plastic with his finger. He looked up at me and then at Rico, and Rico pulled his piece, put it upside the guy's neck, and told him not to move. Rico felt around his waist and didn't feel no piece and said he was all right. But I knew if he was a cop he might have his piece on his ankle and I told Rico to check his ankle. Then everything broke out.

“The cop hit Rico with his shoulder and tried to push him back, but Rico got the gun up again and told the cop to chill or he would blow his ass away. Then the cop said for us to chill and everything would be okay. He was calm too. I went down to his ankle and found his gun.

“Rico said we was taking the dope and the money, which was the right thing to do. Then we
asked him if he had some handcuffs, and he did. We handcuffed the fool to the banister. We knew he had some backup outside, but we had another way of getting out the hallway. We told the cop if he hollered we were going to come and shoot him. We started down the hall and Rico, thinking with his dope instead of his head, said he was going to check to see if the cop had a wallet. I told him we needed to get up out of there, but he went back. I heard the guy saying ‘Don't shoot me, don't shoot me!' Then…
Pop! Pop! Pop!”

“Rico just wasted the dude?” Kelly asked.

“Yeah. Yeah. Then he run by me toward the door. We come running out through a yard. There was a cop in the yard in plainclothes. He had on a uniform like the ones the guys who climb poles to fix telephone lines wear. We surprised him and Rico took a shot at him. I jumped the fence and started running, and Rico must have jumped after me. I felt something hit my arm. I didn't even know I had been shot. You know, the adrenaline was pumping.”

“You were scared.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I was so scared, I couldn't even catch my breath. I was like huffing and trying to suck in some air. I ran down the street, cut through an alley, and then wound up back on the street. I was down on 122nd Street, across from where that warehouse used to be. There was nothing happening on the street except a whole crowd of brothers hanging out, as usual. I slowed down to a walk and headed downtown. I wanted to run, but I was trying to keep cool at the same time.”

“Why you keep the cop's gun?”

“How you know…? I was scared to have it on me and scared to throw it away. I was in, like, a panic. You know what I mean? I knew if the cop was dead, it was going to be all over if they got us. You can't kill a cop and look for mercy. We could have got away clean if Rico hadn't gone back for the cop's wallet. He probably didn't even have no wallet on him.

“I circled around and went uptown to Harlem
Hospital and got some coffee in that little restaurant right off the lobby. The guy had the news on, but there wasn't nothing about the deal, and for a while I thought maybe the guy wasn't a cop and maybe Rico hadn't really shot him anyway.”

“You believed that?”

“Naw, but I wanted to believe it. I really didn't know what to believe. All the time I was thinking about what had happened and steady hoping for the best. At home I told my mother that they had run out of her medicine and I would get it in the morning. She asked me if I had got the job and I said no. I had the Baggie from Dusty's loads, and I cooked that in the bathroom and popped it so I could relax.”

“Why you say you weren't using?” Kelly asked.

“It ain't really your business,” I said.

“What? What you say?”

“Nothing, man. I know I was using. I ain't happy with it or nothing like that,” I said. “You don't be getting off scraping the streets looking for no dope and you don't be getting off being half sick all the time.”

“You nodded out?”

“No, I was too uptight. I lay across my bed in the dark feeling bad. Rico called me and said he had taken the money over to Dusty and he had some cash and a taste for me. I wanted to ask him if he had killed the cop, but I guess I didn't want to know. He sounded like nothing had went down, like it was some cowboy movie and we could just move on. Then Skeeter called me, real late, and told me that the cops had picked up Rico. He asked me if I knew what Rico had done. I said no.”

“So what you did you want to change?” Kelly asked.

“I want to change going with Rico in the first place,” I said.

“Just get you out this mess and you be straight?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I won't be facing no cop-shooting charge. They got Rico, and I know he's going to rat me out. Then I got twenty-five years to life if the cop lives. If he don't live I'm going to be facing…you know….”

“The rest of your life in jail?”

“Yeah.”

“So you want to be back looking at the line at Home Depot and thinking how you so lucky you ain't in jail?” Kelly asked. “What you call it—broke sick? That's where you want to be?”

“I'm not saying that's what I want altogether,” I said. “But what I'm saying is, if I could get out this mess, maybe I could do something good with my life.”