The Lotus Crew (2 page)

“Only the wilder ones. Last time he was gonna form the Rainbow Society, sort of a crew based loosely on the Chinese Triads. Quite a historian, Tommy is. Obsessive about secret societies. Reads everything he can get his hands on, raps to people who know the score.”

“So he's going to give it another shot?”

“Near as I can tell he got his uncle to spring for the seed cake, and his importer gave'm a nice low price for kilos.”

“All he needs is a crew.”

“Yeah, a Rainbow crew. All different nationalities.”

“That's where you come in.”

“I guess.”

“Gonna do it, Alvira?”

Alvira shrugged. “I'm broke. The trip to L.A. tapped me out, and I've still got m'monkey. Got to do it. I just want to get by without the scuffle.”

“And Tommy? What about him? He don't need money.”

“Oh, Tommy—man, you know. He just wants to be the Emperor.”

^*
A glossary of street terms is provided
on page 171
.

Child of Nova

JOHN JACOB PENNINGTON,
age sixteen, had basic universal knowledge down to two self-evident premises. First: high school is a stone drag. Small wonder so many educated people committed suicide. Second: one thing made it tolerable. The goodness. With a little powdered cool he could calmly sit right through the most tedious pedantic fits his teachers could invoke. He didn't have to doodle or move his legs furiously back and forth or, in any way, tip his mitt to the fact that he was bored beyond reason by the asinine assumptions, the condescending smuggery of his learned instructors. JJ's mind absorbed basic paradox gracefully. He knew that nobody really knows anything. Was that a secret? Had somebody forgotten to tell them? The teachers reminded JJ of ex-cons in that there was a dreary institutional predictability to them. Every ex-con he knew preconceived the same things in similar ways; stock questions and stock answers. Teachers were a notch below, actually. They were so busy cross-referencing and analyzing that they missed what was happening right under their noses.

JJ scratched his crotch and flipped pages of the book he was reading. It was study-hall period, and he'd just administered a healthy bang of Dr. Nova in a deserted balcony above the auditorium. Now he'd be able to sit it out. Study-hall was one of the few periods JJ liked. It allowed him to read what he wanted. First he'd burned down various histories of Hannibal. Baddest warrior the world has ever seen, and dark like JJ. But history couldn't hold him. Who really knows what happened back then? People can't agree on what happened five minutes ago right in front of their faces.

The next phase of his reading career began with that cantankerous and kinky Englishman, the Beast. Crowley! The book was called
Diary of a Drug Fiend,
a title hard to resist. So, sitting in Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park on the corner of Dumont Avenue and Miller in East New York, JJ exposed himself to genteel blanco bohemianisms. “Prudence, I have some lovely heroin you
might
enjoy.” Sheee-a-zit, Jim! It boggle the mind. JJ told Furman Whittle about Crowley, and a new regime kicked in. Drug literature. Together they braved dusty bloodless corridors of those bone-dry pavilions of illiteracy: libraries, most of them on college campuses, as if what they were seeking had an air of contraband. This was their discovery after asking a maternal librarian for a copy of
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
by De Quincey and receiving instead a verbose lecture that she didn't want mistaken for a verbal reprimand but, given her tact, had all the qualities of one. Evoking such passionate outpourings from so contained a creature further ignited their hungry young appetites.

Down in the coal room under JJ's building, where they hung out like the Mighty Mezz cloistered away from all those petty Earthlings up there, they started to build their own book collection. A slumbum Library of the Damned. Crowley, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Cocteau, Coleridge. Getting weary of the antique, they slid into Alexander Trocchi, Leroy Street, Piri Thomas, Malcolm X. They almost gagged on Burroughs but got it down. Burroughs was good to chill out on. Just like Billie Holiday was good to nod out on. A thick stolen
Webster's
dictionary cleared up the mysteries of words. Without the slightest effort their reading vocabularies were becoming immense. They could pull up some erudite verbiage and baffle Mr. Fob to the bone.

JJ was snapped out of his study hall dream-reading session by a sharp, obtrusive voice. A subtle bark, if there is such a thing.

“Reading Coleridge, are you, John Jacob?”

Lazy eyes looked up into the face of none other than Mr. Fob, a stiff disciplinarian and renowned imposer of sophomore English. JJ had recently concluded it was not the material that was dead but the delivery boy.

“Yesssa,” JJ let out, perched over a copy
Kubla Khan,
propping the lids open.

“You look very tired, John Jacob. Are you getting enough sleep these days?”

“Yesssa.”

“Well, see that you're alert for
my
class. You are among my brighter students, and I expect your performance to reflect that fact. Say, are you high on something?”

“Noooosssa!”

Mr. Fob did not look convinced. “John Jacob, if you allow yourself to use narcotics, you will be betraying the natural gifts God gave you. No one on drugs ever amounted to anything. You're not sheltered. You should know that.”

“Yessssa.” Shit, good thing Mr. Fob hadn't laid his sound on Coleridge, or there'd be no
Kubla Khan.

Mr. Fob sat down, making his bulky form ridiculous by squeezing it into the undersized seat. “Please roll up your sleeves for me, John Jacob,” he barked softly, eyes knowing and smug. He wrinkled his face like a jewel appraiser. “I've seen needle marks. If you have none I'll apologize, but—”

“Yesssssa.” JJ, eyes painfully wide open, rolled up both sleeves of his cotton pastel-blue shirt. The arms were spanking clean, and he turned them over slowly so Mr. Fob could verify this. JJ never hit his arms. Like wearing a sign for the heat. As juicy as those lines were, he let them be.

“Well, they look clean to me,” Mr. Fob said astutely, eyes straining through Coke-bottle wire rims. “But that doesn't mean you haven't taken pills or drunk something.”

“Noooosssa. Jus' no sleep las' ni'. I was playin' basketball an' the guys aks me t' hang out'n sing late. We was hittin' fows an' bows all ni', sa. Dass all.”

“Well, all right. Your eyes say something else, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Say, are you in the glee club?”

“Ohh, noooossa. I c'n on'y sing fows an' bows wi' m'frien's. I don' likes t'be singin' nothin' else.”

Mr. Fob's exasperated sigh marked the end of the conversation. He rose to his feet, shook his head, and went on to educate someone else.

Not Too Long Ago, N.Y.C.

T
LIT A THICK REEFER
of golden-red Jamaican and looked out the window at a perpetually teeming Sheridan Square. He hadn't been out of the joint long enough to adjust to having so many options and didn't know what to do first. He was about to throw on his jacket and take a walk when the buzzer sounded. That was rare. The bell plate downstairs was a dummy. In order to ring you had to remove the plate and connect two wires underneath. It was either Alvira or one of the Rastas bringing him some cake from the ganja shops. Praise Jah. He glanced at a mirror that afforded full view of the front stoop. It was Alvira.

T clicked into his business personality as he buzzed the door open. Mr. Sparks waited for footsteps on the stairs.

“Alvira, I thought you stepped out of the circle, m'man. You're two days late.”

“Yeah, I had a little blowout while you were gone, T. Figured I committed myself to being a good boy once we start, so I'd party one last time for—”

“You have a habit?”

“Naw. Didn't run that long. Just three or four days. I feel fine, baby. I'm ready to go. You have the number set up yet?”

T shrugged and passed Alvira the reefer. “You know what makes a pro in this business, Alvira?” he said with conviction. “A dealer does not use. That's either a law of physics or it should be, dig?” Tommy's sharp liquid brown eyes were fixed on his friend.

Alvira had his own thoughts on the matter, but outwardly he agreed. He had no business contradicting T. When it came to the trade, T was usually right. Out of sheer respect for his partner's financial expertise, Alvira nodded emphatically.

“I remember a cool that worked for me years ago uptown, back when I was running that Doublesmile bag.”

“Yeah, before you went to the can. That had to be three years ago.”

“Yeah. So this cool would meet me once a week, and I'd pass him the medicine all bagged and ready. Fifties, with the Doublesmile logo stamped on each sealed quarter-gram bag. He'd hand me the cake from the last bunch, and I'd hand him the new material. I never once counted the cake, Alvira. It was always on the money. This was cookin' for maybe six months. The two of us were splitting over four grand weekly behind this number, so I just assumed I was the best friend this cool ever had and he'd never fuck me over, you know? So one day I show and he's got the shorts. Some riff about his wife's sick and he dropped two grand on specialists. But while he's talkin' I can sense his condition. I figured he just had a little blowout like the one you're talkin' about . . .”

Alvira flushed.

“… So I told him we'd split the shorts and handed him his next week's material as if everything was natch. I never saw him next week, Alvira. Never seen him since. Imagine blowin' that kind of weekly turn for a lousy burn.”

“Pretty shortsighted,” Alvira conceded.

“Fuckin' stupid is what it is. But when a man's usin' he's not there anymore. You ask him a question and Jones answers for him. Tell him to expel Jones and he says, ‘What Jones?' I been in the game too long for that sound, Alvira. I don't want to hear it from anyone. Certainly not a friend.”

Alvira's eyes tightened. “If you're worrying about me, T, I'm steppin' out of the box. I know myself. If I say I'm gonna do it right, that's what'll happen. I didn't try'n hide my blowout, and I didn't do it on credit.” Alvira looked towards the door. “If I'm going to worry you let's chill it out right now—”

T put his open palm up in a bid for silence. “Don't talk like that, Alvira. I set this up for the two of us, and that's the way the play stays. I trust you. That's rare on this planet, but I do. God knows why. Just an instinct, I guess. If I'm soundin' down on you it's because I know our friend Mr. Jones too well. I don't want him workin' against us. You're gonna have to face some tasty schmooz in this game. Every time we re-up material we'll have to sample it. Extreme caution is in order, or Jones will make his presence felt. Believe me.”

“I hear you.”

“This is a chance for us to take some real steps forward, Alvira. We'll triple our cake on the first play, and you'll get acquainted with my supply people so you can negotiate future buys without me. We'll be sittin' right if this goes down. Think about it.”

“Oh, hey, I think about it all the time.”

Alvira broke eye contact to rumble for a match. He lit a Three Castles and sat back, relieved that T had turned his attention to preparing another reefer.

A slight tremble passed through Alvira, and he recognized the modulation of his system from opiated to mild yen. A gentle hunger, not a fierce need. Another few days and he'd've found himself in trouble.

“Here, Alvira, this reefer's laced with freebase. Should distract you from the blowout blues.”

Alvira sat back comfortably in a soft blue chair by the window, dreaming about his first sniff in the school yard long ago. He'd felt better at once, as if some great abstract adjustment had been made. Boyhood chalk on the street for years. A lot of time had passed since he'd played handball on the factory wall, watching the workers perform their tediums through bleak dirt-smoked windows. Alvira swore he'd never end up like that. It'd be like doing time without a conviction.

“Alvira, you seem miles away. Dreamin' about all the cake you're gonna make?”

“Just dreamin', actually, about a pinch of powder to the wind on a gray afternoon years ago.”

T knew the ritual. A pinch of powder to the wind for the souls who've slid into Endless Nod.