The Marijuana Chronicles (6 page)

Of course they would disapprove of her behavior. Her husband would disapprove. She could not bear them talking about her.

Sometimes the doorbell rang. Upstairs she went to see who it might be, noting the car in the driveway.

These visitors, importunate and “concerned”—she knew she must deflect them, to prevent them calling 911. She would make a telephone call and hurriedly leave a message saying that she was fine but wanted to be alone for a while; or, she would send a flurry of e-mails saying the same thing.

Alone alone alone, she wanted to be alone
. Except for Joseph Mattia.

Another time making a purchase from her musician-friend Zeke. And another time. And each time the price was escalating.

The third time, Agnes asked Zeke about this: the price of a Ziploc bag of “joints.” And with a shrug Zeke said, “It’s the market, Agnes. Supply and demand.”

The reply was indifferent, even rude. Zeke did not seem to care about
her
.

She was hurt. She was offended. Didn’t he respect Professor Krauss any longer? The way
Agnes
had rolled off his tongue, and not
Professor Krauss
.

She would find someone else to supply her! Nonetheless, on this occasion, she paid.

* * *

Her first drive to Trumbel Street, Trenton. Five months, three weeks, and two days after the call had come from the hospital summoning her, belatedly.

Getting high
gave her the courage. Strength flowing through her veins!

In her expansive floating mood she knew to drive slowly—carefully. She smiled to think how embarrassing it would be, to be arrested by police for a DUI—at her age.

In the car she laughed aloud, thinking of this.

The car radio was tuned now to the Trenton AM station. Blasting rap music, rock, high-decibel advertisements.
Fat Joe. Young Jeezy. Ne-Yo. Tyga. Cash Out
. She understood how such sound assailing her ears was an infusion of strength, courage.

Such deafening sound, and little room for fear, caution. Little room for
thought
.

It was
thought
that was the enemy, Agnes understood. Getting high meant rising above
thought
.

She exited Route 1 for the state capitol buildings. Through a circuitous route involving a number of one-way streets and streets barricaded for no evident reason, she made her way to Trumbel Street which was only two blocks from State Street and from the Delaware River. This was a neighborhood of decaying row houses and brownstones—boarded-up and abandoned stores. It was tricky—treacherous!—to drive here, for the narrow streets were made narrower by parked vehicles.

Very few “white” faces here. Agnes was feeling washed-out, anemic.

It was a neighborhood of very dark-skinned African Americans and others who were light-skinned, possibly African American and/or Hispanic. Eagerly she looked for
him
.

Turning onto 7th Street and State Street, which was a major thoroughfare in Trenton, she saw more “white” faces—and many pedestrians, waiting for buses.

Why did race matter so much? The color of
skin
.

She could love anyone, Agnes thought. Skin color did not mean anything to her, only the soul within.

Mattia’s liquid-dark eyes. Fixed upon her.

Ms. Agnes, I feel like
—
more hopeful now
.

A half-hour, forty minutes Agnes drove slowly along the streets of downtown Trenton. Trumbel to West State Street and West State Street to Portage; Portage to Hammond, and Grinnell Park; right turn, and back to Trumbel which was, for a number of blocks, a commercial street of small stores—Korean food market, beauty salon, nail salon, wig shop, diner, tavern. And a number of boarded-up, graffiti-marked stores. Trenton was not an easy city to navigate since most of the streets were one-way. And some were barricaded—under repair. (Except there appeared to be no workers repairing the streets, just abandoned-looking heavy equipment.) She saw men on the street who might have been Joseph Mattia but were not. Yet she felt that she was drawing closer to him.

She told herself,
I have nothing else to do. This is my only hope
.

Her husband would be dismayed! She could hardly bring herself to think of him, how he would feel about her behavior now; how concerned he would be. He’d promised to “protect” her—as a young husband he’d promised many things—but of course he had not been able to protect her from his own mortality. She’d been a girl when he’d met her at the University of Michigan. Her hair dark brown, glossy-brown, and her eyes bright and alert. Now, her hair had turned silver. It was really a remarkable hue, she had only to park her car, to walk along the sidewalk—here, on Trumbel Street—to draw eyes to her, startled and admiring.

Ma’am, you are beautiful!

Whatever age you are, ma’am
—
you lookin’ good
.

Ma’am
—
you someone I know, is you?

These were women mostly. Smiling African American women.

For this walk in Trenton she wore her good clothes. A widow’s tasteful clothes, black cashmere. And the cloche hat on her silvery hair. And good shoes—expensive Italian shoes she’d purchased in Rome, the previous summer traveling with her historian-husband.

They’d also gone to Florence, Venice, Milano, Delphi. Her husband had brought along one of his numberless guidebooks—this one titled
Mysteries of Delphi
. She’d been astonished to see, superimposed upon photographs of the great ruined sites, transparencies indicating the richness of color of the original sites—primary colors of red and blue—and extraordinary ornamental detail that suggested human specificity instead of “classic” simplicity. Of course, Agnes should have known, but had never thought until her husband explained to her, that the ancient temples weren’t classics of austerity—pearl-colored, luminous, stark—but varicolored, even garish. Ruins had not always been
ruins
. Like most tourists she’d assumed that the ancient sites had always been, in essence, what they were at the present time. Like most tourists she hadn’t given much thought to what she was seeing and her ideas were naïve and uninformed. Her husband had said,
The way people actually live is known only to them. They take their daily lives with them, they leave just remnants for historians to decode
.

He had opened that world of the past to her. And now, he himself had become
past
.

She thought,
He took everything with him. No one will remember who he was
—
or who I was
.

She was beginning to feel very strange. A lowering of blood pressure—she knew the sensation. Several times during the hospital vigil and after his death she’d come close to fainting, and twice she had found herself on the floor, dazed and uncomprehending. The sensation began with a darkening of vision, as color bleached out of the world; there came then a roaring in her ears, a feeling of utter sorrow, lostness, futility …

At the intersection of 7th Street and Hammond, out of a corner bodega he stepped, carrying a six-pack of beer.

He was older, of course. He must have been—nearly forty.

His dark hair threaded with gray was longer than she recalled, his eyes were deep-socketed and red-lidded. His skin seemed darker, as if smudged. And he was wearing civilian clothes, not the bright blue prison uniform that had given to the most hulking inmates a look of clownishness—his clothes were cheaply stylish, a cranberry-colored shirt in a satiny fabric, open at the throat; baggy cargo pants, with deep pockets and a brass-buckle belt riding low on his narrow hips.

She saw, in that instant: the narrowed eyes, the aquiline nose, the small trim mustache on the upper lip. And something new—through his left eyebrow, a wicked little zipperlike scar.

He stopped dead in his tracks. He stared at her, and then very slowly he smiled as a light came up in his eyes, of crafty recollection.

“Ma’am! You lookin’
good
.”

L
INDA
Y
ABLONSKY
is the author of
The Story of Junk: A Novel
. As a journalist and critic, she covers the contemporary art world for
T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Artforum, W, Elle, Wallpaper
, and other publications. Current projects include a memoir of life in New York during the 1970s, and a new novel.

jimmy o’brien

by linda yablonsky

O
ver the winter of 1980, I caught hepatitis and had to stay home for a month. No drinking, the doctor said. He didn’t say anything about smoking pot.

If your thinking tends toward the dark side even when life is sunny, hepatitis can feel like the end of the world. You can’t get out of bed. You read depressing books. No one wants to come near you. Not that you want anyone to see you with a pimpled yellow complexion and jaundiced eyes. Then there’s the bloat of your belly. That alone can make you want to die. Spoon the pain of inflammation into your cup of humiliation, and you have a flawless recipe for despair.

Jimmy O’Brien was my savior. He nursed me from a safe distance. Five thousand miles, he said. He had left New York and was living on the Big Island in Hawaii, growing Mary Jane. His mother in New Jersey had seen an ad for the land and invested all her savings.

During my illness, his phone calls and the product he sent me, ostensibly to sell, made all the difference. Smoking his weed lifted my spirits. It relieved my discomfort. Watch the mail, he’d say. I’m gonna send you a present.

Jimmy was always nice to me. Up until the time Alice shacked up with him, I thought he was gay. What else was I supposed to think? He was with Johnny Giovanni every time I saw him, and Johnny was undeniably queer. Don’t tell my girlfriend, Jimmy would say, but it wasn’t an affair. It was theater.

Johnny called himself a “body artist” and Jimmy was his foil. They went around town together just for show. Photographers dove after them. They were both six feet tall and kinky, in a comic sort of way. The fashion crowd adored them. The tabloids reported their escapades. We looked. We lusted. We laughed.
Oh God
, Alice would say.
Who are they?

Johnny was a prancing spider, thin and swarthy. He cultivated a scruff of beard. On the street, his jacket opened on a bare, buff chest that he shaved and polished. He tied leather straps across it, pulling them taut under his nipples. No matter what the weather, he never wore a shirt. Just quilted black jodhpurs, wraparound shades, and, usually, a skullcap of black leather that was more like a hood. We had mutual friends. They looked after him. He had genuine talent, but he couldn’t take care of himself.

Jimmy was an Adonis, an angel cake of manhood, light on his feet. He moved with a swing of his narrow hips and a toss of his long blond hair. It fell past broad, square shoulders as chiseled as his jaw. I could never take my eyes off him. High cheekbones, blue eyes, wide mouth set in a permanent grin, he titillated and growled, he giggled like a girl. He could also pose a threat. Danger lurked in his hands. Hardly an hour would pass without him offering to punch a guy out.

He wore the same outfit day and night: a white T-shirt, black leather pants molded to his muscled body, black leather cuffs, and a black leather jacket that set off the golden rain of his hair. In hot weather he traded the leather pants for jeans just as tight, a Bowie knife tucked in his boot.

We’d meet up at Johnny’s for a drink and a toke, and go dancing, except that Jimmy didn’t dance. He’d get a drink and rest his head in a woofer, feeling the beat. No music could be loud enough.

Jimmy always had his ear to something. A telephone, mostly. It’s my girlfriend, he’d say as he dialed. It’s my bookie. It’s my mom. He didn’t have a job. His work was being Jimmy.

He lived with the fashion model who supported him. She was often out of town on a shoot or in Europe for the collections. He knew all the models because of her. He liked pretty women. If you saw them passing a joint, chances are they got it from him, along with diet pills, tranquilizers, and cocaine. He always had a roll of cash. He didn’t worry. He didn’t have to think.

Never take the subway, he said one night when we couldn’t find a cab. The subway was beneath him in more ways than one. He was a king.

I saw him eat now and then, usually breakfast at five a.m., after the clubs had closed. Generally, he lived on drugs and drink. His usual routine was to stay up for eight days and then take a day of rest. Alice called him a miracle of modern medicine. Her father was a doctor and after he met Jimmy he said the same thing.

Alice was divorced. She lived in a suite of rooms on the second floor of her father’s sprawling duplex on the Upper West Side, on the park. She kept a full bar in her sitting room. She had cable TV long before the rest of us. Her mother had been an alcoholic who died young, and Alice was moving in the same direction. She worked in a boutique off Fifth Avenue, modeling swimsuits and designing displays. One afternoon, Jimmy stopped by with a bottle of champagne. The sales staff gathered around him with the customers in the store. When the boss arrived, Alice was fired. Jimmy was her consolation.