Ed King (28 page)

“You know what?” Mike asked, after kissing her back, in the same friendly way, but on the lips. “Just about every chick I sell to thinks I trade blow for throws. That’s pretty cool, I guess, but I’m in business.”

“Perfect,” said Diane. “Did you notice I put money on the table?”

“Yeah,” said Mike. “That won’t get you much.”

“Three grams.”

“Another four hundred if you want three grams.”

“So, like, a hundred sixty-five a gram.”

“About.”

“What about ten?”

“That’s fifteen hundred.”

“What about twenty?”

“That’s twenty-five hundred.”

Diane took twenty-three more hundreds from her wallet. “Give me twenty grams,” she told him.

A dangerous game, but she liked dangerous games. Buying ten or twenty grams at a pop from Mike, turning it around as tenths at The Palms, giving away freebies to get people started, friends of friends coming around, maybe some of them untrustworthy, which made it important to scope people out and to pay attention to who crashed her parties. Like who, anyway, were those three quarterbackish guys, laughing, between bumps, about the Pittsburgh Pirates’ nose-candy troubles while drinking Coronas and playing with her remote? Could that be the sort of farce narcs put on? She checked on them later and heard a lot of doltish laughter that sounded reassuring. These three were too coke-centric to be narcs. Then she would check on someone else.

The upside was money; the downside was anxiety. Whores got short sentences, but dealers didn’t, not in Ronald Reagan’s administration. Diane didn’t like looking over her shoulder or anticipating a knock on her door, so she made a deal with herself: get out as soon as possible. Pursuing that end, she studied investment at the Kirkland Public Library—
Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal
, and books called
Investing for Beginners
and
How To: The Stock Market
. For the most part, it was stultifying reading; intercepting funds, it turned out, was a job. On the other hand, it didn’t involve sweat or danger. The hardest part was picking up the phone and putting down a bet with Charles Schwab.

Emily came by 226 one Friday in an unbecoming halter top that called attention to her caved-in posture. Diane poured wine, put on the Pointer Sisters, and went to work as Dear Abby. Emily had a new job—she worked in Accounts Receivable at a company called Aldus, although she couldn’t explain what Aldus made or did, other than to say, “We do PageMaker,” and, “PageMaker’s software for computers.” Basically, she
wasn’t going out, except to run two miles after work. “And why is that?” asked Diane.

“Because nobody asks me.” Emily sipped her wine. “You probably think I’m pretty out of it.”

“No,” said Diane, “I don’t think you’re out of it. But I do think you’re lacking—don’t take this the wrong way—confidence. Is it all right with you if I say that?”

Emily leaned forward. One of her boobs—inside the dumb halter top with its infantile polka dots—was bigger than the other. “Keep going,” she said. “I want to hear this.”

“I don’t mean to sound derogatory. Perhaps ‘confidence’ isn’t the word. Maybe it’s something else—presence, you know. More subtle than confidence. God,” added Diane, “you mustn’t listen to me.”

“I’m just so out of it and dull. It’s depressing.”

“Well, keep running,” urged Diane, “said the out-of-shape advocate for aerobic fitness.”

“Running brings me up for like an hour, that’s it. Otherwise, I just feel so down.”

Diane the Coke Dealer knew this was her cue, but in the case of Emily the Pathetic Drip she just couldn’t be like the
Reefer Madness
guy who hands out free joints to kids. She felt auntish about this pigeon-toed loser. “Emily,” she said, “come on, now, cheer up.” This got Emily to smile, wanly. “Top totty, you are. What you might call a babe.” She said “a babe” in hyperbolic frat-boy. “Shall we go out on the pull, you and I? Find a handsome stud to chat you up?”

At ten, they visited the Pelican on this mission, Emily wearing too much blush and drinking too many piña coladas before claiming to have a “migrainy headache” while Just for Kicks was tuning up. So be it. You couldn’t actually change the world. So that was the right moment for a rail of gratis coke, hoovered bravely in a powder-room stall, and afterward it was fun to see Emily, that long-stemmed shrinking violet, out on the dance floor with her arms overhead, trying hard to look sultry and orgasmic and, in her own stupid way, succeeding. This new Emily, horny and on coke, eventually left Diane missing the old one. She took a cab home, where she sprawled on the couch watching
Top of the Pops
. In the morning, the television was still on.

An adequate life: nothing more. Here she was, the resident coke dealer to kids holding down their first real jobs. She was full of people, but vulnerable
to nostalgia. It was embarrassing, for example, to be Diane Burroughs in front of Diane Burroughs when Gilbert O’Sullivan sang “Alone Again (Naturally)” and got her all mired and choked up. And yet the Irishman’s smarmy ballad did drive her to tears. “To think that only yesterday, / I was cheerful, bright and gay”—that pulled Diane into a wallow. The same thing happened when she opened a letter from the constable, densely written in a shaky hand, mentioning bunions on top of his diabetes. Pathetic John, poor dear old John. But, then, Diane had other moods, too, wherein she wanted to fire back, BUGGER OFF, YOU BORE.

Mornings were better. Always looking for hot stocks, Diane spent a lot of hours at the library, researching the market anxiously, and fretting over pulling this or that trigger with a call to Schwab. Sometimes she made the call, but mostly she watched while the Dow passed 1800 and accelerated coke sales. Diane joined a gym called Serious Fitness where muscular Shane, the cabaña-party king, was an assistant manager, and where Kelly and Ted worked out. Tightly packed with large exercise machines, loud with music, and lined with mirrors, Serious Fitness was for the most part tense, humorless, and male, but its lobby included a smoothie bar and tables where Diane, freshly showered, could cultivate customers, and where she found herself, before long, filling orders for buyers more dubious than her usual suspects: a guy who was in and out of bouncer jobs, a guy hamstrung by a restraining order, a guy on probation following a nightclub assault, a guy who was fencing stolen everything and wanted to trade coke for jewelry and state-of-the-art stereo equipment. Diane stayed cash-only, though, and since she had plenty of it now, it was sort of hard to get off this wheel, especially when its momentum made her so flush she felt nervous hiding her money beneath her mattress and was forced, by paranoia, to get a safety-deposit box. There her cash sat in neat, banded stacks, just as it had in Sullivan’s Gulch, looking all the harder to resist.

It was in the middle of this period of soaring coke trade that Club called. It was 11 p.m. and he was at a telephone booth in downtown Seattle, saying, “Guess what, I’m in your neck of the woods. Fancy a pint, luv?”

She met him at the J&M Cafe, which had a pressed-tin ceiling and a mahogany bar. What had attracted Club to the J&M, though, was the price of its “Yankee excuse for lager”; when she showed up, he had a
pitcher in front of him and was drinking, alone, with his back to a wall and one hand in the pocket of his peacoat. Dangling a cigarette from his lips, he explained himself: he’d been at sea but was unemployed just now on account of a hankering for a lark, and he’d been bouncing a little on saved-up funds from San Diego to Whitefish via bus rides and hitching. Now he’d come this way to look her up, if for no other reason than that Diane was family. “Maybe it’s just the booze talking,” he said, “but I’m looking back on things right now.” Which was good, because Diane was looking back, too.

She took Club in out of curiosity, and for his entertainment value, and because remembering her childhood had become, for her, an increasingly common sentimental pastime. Club was a penny-pincher but not a soaker or gouger, and regularly ate tinned clams for supper, with pilot bread and ale. “Problem with the States,” he said, “can’t get a decent pint,” which to him meant a can of Boddingtons. Diane found some Boddingtons in a specialty store, and they took a goodly supply to The Palms’ Building B laundry center, stuffed in their loads, and played single-deck canasta. As their roiling clothes slapped the innards of the machines, they both got started down the road toward arseholed and jointly disparaged their recently deceased mother, who’d boxed Club’s ears so frequently he’d finally left—that was the reason Club gave for fleeing at fourteen, that and the urge to join a skiffle band. And he had skiffled a bit, in London, at first, but not a penny to show for it, though later in London he’d learned to do stick-’n’-poke ink, which paid a few bob, and then he showed Diane the Celtic dragon on his shoulder—well drawn, in flames, and intricately pigmented—he’d had done at sixteen. He’d next been to sea, he said, and had his papers.

They were sixteen months apart and, off and on, had lived in the same house, so they could remember finding nothing in the kitchen, and sitting on the stove with the oven on for warmth and a blanket nailed across the doorframe while listening to the Light Programme, the mention of which now set off a blistering bout of recall—
Journey into Space, The Goon Show, Riders of the Range, Pick of the Pops
, “the frigging Cliff Adams Singers,” “frigging Jimmy Clitheroe,” “frigging Mr. Higginbottom,” “frigging Alfie Hall.” They’d both liked heaps of white sugar taken straight, and Marmite and margarine on toast, and pilfering tea biscuits, and shoplifting, and gin when they could get it, and puff except that puff was
frigging dear, and frigging Tommy Steele and the Steelmen. But then Club, with no warning, had decamped for London.

Club pressed to know where Diane’s money came from, and she told him she was a dealer. “Did you apply for citizenship as a dealer, then?” Club asked. “Are they short on dealers in the States here, luv?” So she had to explain what a green card was, and that by marrying Jim, and staying with him for three years, she’d earned the right to be naturalized and could even vote now, if she wanted to—though thus far she hadn’t taken any interest—and was required to pay taxes on anything that didn’t fly under the radar, which didn’t matter, because everything she made flew under the radar. Club steered her back to his subject: dealing. Club knew his way, a little, around dealing, because in Liverpool he’d been a rock addict—after, he said, he’d weaned himself off skag. “Show me a Liverpudlian,” he said, “and I’ll show you a dealer.” He’d even dealt himself for a while, but it was bloody dangerous, he said, because of the IRA. “You’re shitting me,” said Diane. “Come off it, Club.”

Club only dragged that much harder on his fag. “No messin’,” he said, as if hurt. “Heard of The Cleaners? Prop up the Merseyside mafia and all that? Me, I was dodging The Cleaners, you know. Pinched, I was. I did a runner.”

He stayed on in Diane’s second bedroom, drinking Boddingtons and talking like this, and sitting by the pool looking pale and strung out—at first—then painfully red. Diane saw that he was damaging her good reputation, and that The Palms’ in-crowd treated him with kid gloves, but what did they know, and what could they know, other than the weirdness in
A Clockwork Orange
? Or what they read about football hooligans? For them, England didn’t exist.

One night, she took Club to the Pelican for tap ale. He swallowed a lot without needing the loo—“one of me strong points,” as he put it. She laughed at this and confessed to Club that beer never stopped for long in her, that she had a weak bladder, “like Mum had.” “We all have our weak points, don’t we?” Club answered. “Yours is running off to the bog.” Then he celebrated his onion rings, but not Night Groove (“shite band of pimps”), sat at the bar bumming fags from people, and tried chatting up a trio of girls having nothing to do with him, except as a British basket case, threatening at first, but then comic. With his nifty elocutions and stream of cute jokes, Club made a valuable fool of himself for the benefit
of people who felt smarter than he was. Coke King Mike was especially condescending, and didn’t try to hide his amusement at Club as the avatar of English daft. But Club, after all his pints, was not remotely in his cups, and spoke to Mike in Mockney for Diane’s sole amusement, sounding like Eliza Doolittle’s da. “Wot,” he said, “ ’ere’s to ya, Mike. Cheers. That’s me boy. Gawd, look at them bristols.”

There was some trouble later, in the back, by a pool table, where a footballish-looking guy made the inebriated error of calling Club, rather loudly, Popeye, and got dropped with a hard flush right.

So Club came in handy. Say you wanted to sell eight thousand dollars’ worth of blow to someone you didn’t know; you could bring Club along, since he looked unpredictable—a dodgy Brit who might be off his rocker. Diane brought him. He liked his role—played it as a prickly, agitated, shiv-concealing ex-con—and got a sap out of a pawnshop case, and started carrying it inside his coat, along with pepper spray. Diane had to preface her transactions now with, “This is my brother, don’t worry about him,” but she could see people worrying anyway. Which was good.

Club, decked out in military-surplus fatigues, a stained, ribbed tank, and combat boots, started throwing dumbbells around at Serious Fitness, partly because he had time on his hands, but also, he said, “to back up my evil stare, Di, at crunch time.” Club made some gym friends, other lowlifes and losers, two-bit bodybuilders who endorsed, while they worked out, amino acids and protein powders. There were televisions mounted in each corner of the weight room, usually playing MTV videos, and Club and his mates, between sets, gave commentary—thumbs up for Aerosmith’s “Dude (Looks like a Lady)” and for fucking Madonna in “Who’s That Girl?,” thumbs down for fucking Run-D.M.C. and the fucking-all lame Steve Winwood. Nevertheless, Club exercised judgment in mixed company and, at least at The Palms, was generally a gentleman whose sense of decorum had an element of the maudlin only if, like Diane, you were looking for it. At home he was impeccably, even rigorously, not a problem, and if somebody like Emily came to the apartment, he had the good sense to sidle out. He’d say two or three polite, safe things, then rise, take his jacket off a hook, and declare that
he was “off on a peregrination”—he applied class deference and reassuring syntax so that no one would be scared to show up. The gormless Emily didn’t seem to mind him, though, except for his fags. She treated him as if he wasn’t a mongoloid, and he started hanging around when she called—for popcorn and Hearts—and going out to the railing to blow his smoke rings over the swimming pool so Emily wouldn’t cough.