Dope Sick (7 page)

“What you think?” I asked Kelly.

“It's okay,” Kelly said. “I like rap. How come you didn't go on with it?”

“Why don't you run my group on your television?” I said. “Check it out for yourself?”

Kelly was keeping the remote in his hand. He
lifted it and pointed it toward the television. I was getting better at recognizing where I was and peeped the school media center.

“Yo, man, you know Miss Oglivie won't go for that,” Omar said, leaning back in the lounge chair, and shook his head. “She said we could have a rap group, but everything had to be positive. That's the whole purpose of the group.”

“Yeah, how are we going to have a positive rap group called Cellblock Four?” Victor asked. He was Omar's cut buddy, so I knew he was going to back him up.

“What's positive for one person don't have to be positive for everybody,” I said. “You trying to be positive or you trying to suck up?”

“Here's what the story is,” said Deon Crooms, who was sitting across from us at a little card table. He spoke in a low voice. “Miss Oglivie came to us with the idea of putting together a rap group, and she told us what she wanted. It was supposed to be about taking care of business in school, getting your life together, that kind of thing. If that's what she wants, she's not going to
be going for something about being thugs.”

“He's right and you know it,” Omar said.

“Who wants to hear that stuff except Miss I-Wish-the-Hell-I-Was-White Oglivie and some junior Uncle Tom wannabes?” I said. “People want to hear about some dudes getting hard and standing up to the power. What you think all them OG's is about?”

“I'm not some Uncle Tom and I'm as black as you'll ever be,” Deon said. “But I'm sick of hearing about black men having to be gangsters and getting shot forty-five times so they can say they keeping it real.”

Deon was looking around the room like he had said something deep and was grooving on it.

“So what you saying?” I asked Deon. “You saying that we're supposed to be rappers, but somebody else is going to dictate the rhymes and all we're going to do is follow the program?”

“Why can't you think positive?” Omar asked. “How are you different? What you saying ain't nobody heard?”

“Getting your head together isn't positive?” I asked.

“I don't think you can think of nothing positive,” Deon came back. “What you talking about sounds weak to me.”

Deon played a little ball and was believing he was all that and then some. He had been making some bad noise in my direction for a while. He had his head to one side, eyeballing me like I was short or maybe didn't have the heart to step to him.

“Check this out, Deon.” I went over to where he was sitting and pulled up a chair right in front of him. “I think you're weak. What's more, I think you need for somebody to do a serious readjustment of your thinking patterns by slamming you upside your head. What I'm thinking is maybe if I knock one of your ears clean through your head, it'll filter out all them turds you got in your brain that you calling ideas.”

I could look into his eyes and see he didn't know what to say. He had built up his front like a true mind warrior, but when the deal was on the
table his heart was skipping beats.

“I think you're going to throw away the whole deal,” he said. “Instead of a rap group we gonna end up with nothing.”

“We're going to be blowing a free period and everything,” I heard Omar saying from behind me.

“Let's have a vote on it,” Victor said.

“You vote on it,” I said, standing up. “I got things to do.”

I was hot when I left the lounge.

We were in an assembly when Miss Oglivie first suggested that we start a rap group. I was down with the program, but as soon as she started talking about “positive values” and all that crap I knew she didn't mean nothing good. She picked Omar and Victor, and Deon volunteered. A girl we called Silly threw in my name, but I knew that it was Lauryn, who I was getting real serious with, who had told her to do it. A lot of kids gave me a cheer because I had made a smoking rhyme about a brother who got killed on 125th and Park under
that little railroad bridge that goes into Grand Central Station. Maurice, my ace, had dug it and asked me to do it on tape over a reggae beat. I did it and he burned a bunch of copies on CDs and we passed them around, so they knew I was strong.

Miss Oglivie didn't like it, but she had to take me. Omar, Victor, and Deon stuck together like the lames they were, and I knew a vote was going to go against me.

After school I saw Lauryn on Lenox Avenue. For a change she wasn't with Silly. I had just got some fresh minutes on my cell and called her. We were walking downtown, me on one side of the street and her on the other side.

“I heard you and Deon almost got into it,” she said.

“No, he don't want me,” I said. “All he wants is to run his mouth.”

“It's still about naming the group?” she asked.

They had wanted to call the group The Righteous Brothers, which was definitely up there and I would have gone along with it if the raps they were
running were good. But they were just catching words from Miss Oglivie and snatching slogans off the wall and laying them out like they were something somebody wanted to be hearing.

“It's not just about the name,” I said. “It's about the whole set, same as it was before.”

“Where you going?” Lauryn asked.

“Thought I'd check out Milbank,” I said. “See if anybody's over there.” I was really going to the brownstone man, but I didn't want to tell Lauryn that because she didn't want me using anything.

“Why don't you come over to my place and check me out?” she said.

“I thought you and Silly were supposed to be doing something,” I said.

“So you saying that you don't want to see me?” she asked.

“I'm just saying that—” I looked over to where she was and saw that she had stopped walking. “I'm just saying that after all the grief I had today, I need to relax a little. Thought maybe I would hoop a little.”

“Lil J, you going to cop?” Right up front.

“No,” I lied. “I'm just tense, that's all.”

“So why don't you cop and then come over to my house?” she said. “Do it in front of me. Why you slipping and sliding?”

“I told you I wasn't going to cop,” I said.

“Why you shouting into the phone?” she came back.

“So what you want?” I asked. It even sounded weak to me.

“Stay there,” she said. “I'll go with you to get the stuff.”

Lauryn was treating me like I was a stone head, but I knew I wasn't. I could let the shit go in a heartbeat, but I just wasn't ready to go, not just yet, and she couldn't get next to that. But I knew where she was coming from, because I had seen a lot of dudes who thought they just had chippies and they was drowning and looking for the big fish to come save their butts but the big fish wasn't coming. My roll was different. I was correct and knew where I was going, and that was the truth—only it didn't
sound so good when I wasn't shouting it. When I was just saying it to myself, it didn't sound too good at all.

I appreciated where Lauryn was coming from. She was steady in my corner and I knew it.

I saw her coming across the street. She was looking good, as usual. What she didn't know was that I was as tense as I told her I was. She thought I was just out to party a little. But all that crap with the rap group was getting me down, and I didn't feel like going home and dealing with my moms. Lauryn came up to me and I could see she was wearing her attitude.

“I did think you were going to be hanging out with Silly,” I said.

“It's nice of you to be concerned about her,” Lauryn said.

Silly was the best-looking woman in the whole world. Her real name was Alicia, but all the guys started calling her Silly because that's the way she made you feel when she came around and you didn't know where to put your eyes. Alicia and
Lauryn were probably the smartest students in the school, too. Silly was thinking about being either a historian or a dancer, and Lauryn wanted to be a lawyer. They were both serious about their lives.

“So what you want to do?” I asked.

“You were going to cop, so let's go do it,” Lauryn said.

We had some more back-and-forth, and at first I figured she thought I'd be too shamed to use in front of her. Then she was insisting and my head was tilting to maybe she wanted to party.

The brownstone man was on 105th and Park. He ran a little bodega on the corner and sold stuff from Mexico right over the counter. I knew the cops had to be on to him, but he was always open for business. Lauryn waited outside for me while I went in, bought two hits and a bag of chips, and came out.

We didn't talk on the train uptown on the way to her house.

Lauryn's parents were separated. Her mother had a good gig and did all the right things. She
went with Lauryn to museums and plays and saw to it that Lauryn always had some cash and dressed good. Lauryn was a day and a half past fine and knew how to present herself.

The apartment was clean and everything was in its place. It wasn't like my pad, with a sink full of dirty dishes and little armies of empty plastic medicine bottles all over the place.

“So you tense, go on and get untense,” Lauryn said.

“So what you saying?” I asked.

“What am
I
saying?” Lauryn put her palms up. “I'm not saying anything. I'm just sitting here at my kitchen table waiting for you to get yourself untense. You're the one that's running the show.”

“Hey, Lauryn, let me get to the bottom line,” I said.

“You going to snort the line or shoot it up?”

That shut me up, and I didn't know what to say to her. I just sat there for a long time with my head down. Then I was hearing her on the screen and at the same time I wasn't hearing her, because I was
trying to shut it out. I asked Kelly to shut the television off.

“You dope up in front of her?” Kelly asked.

I nodded. “Just turn it off.”

“Why, don't you think it's time to see what you been doing?” Kelly asked. “How you going to put some reason to it if you keep running away from the set?”

“I wasn't running away from nothing. Sometimes it was like the heroin calling to me. When I didn't have nothing, I could think about giving it up, about turning away and doing something else. Sometimes, when I really wanted to party and didn't have the money, I'd go play some ball or just watch television and the feeling would go away. But when I had money, or when I had already scored a hit, I got nervous. I didn't have to have the dope, but when I had it, I had to use it. You know what I mean?”

“No,” Kelly said. “Let me watch the screen.”

Lauryn's mom kept aluminum foil in a cupboard, and I saw myself getting it. I folded it up
into a little upside-down tent and put the hit in the middle of it. I didn't look at Lauryn as I heated it up over the front burner on the stove and watched it melt. I watched myself changing hands as the foil got hot, then watched the hit steam up.