I walked home with my pockets full of cigarettes and lighters, plus a Hustler for good measure. My feet stepped crooked, muscles wobbly all over my body, everything from the coke, having snorted so much of the stuff that the only thing that would stop my shaking was to do another line. That would stabilize my movements somewhat. And for some while. Then the trembling would return. But for now, my spirits were up, energies rising—something that is part of myself: if left alone for a little while, my mind would clean itself up and what was left in the aftermath was basically me.
In the living room was Charisma’s grammy watching television with Wendy asleep on the couch. The pit bulls thankfully recognized me by now, accepted me, and saved their barking for someone else—they could tell it was quiet time and after they jumped all over me, Chuck and Seymour returned to their beds in the kitchen.
I traipse upstairs and in through the attic door. Charisma comes right up to me and says, “Is everything alright?”
I drop my wares onto the mirror table.
“I’m good. Everything is good. I ran into somebody who knows me at the 7-Eleven. We talked about his plans for the future, Hustler, and East Dayton—” (bitches—I censored myself here) “—his name was—”
“Sprinkles,” Rambuncto said. “We know that Flamin’ Hot Limón pansy ass bitch!”
“Oh, you’ve met him!” I say.
“We know his type,” Rambuncto says. “He’s the type you’ve gotta watch out for in the shower. That fool is an ass-washing son of a bitch!”
“Was he in jail with you?” I say.
“No but boys like him be all over that place.”
“I guess Sprinkles is strong enough to kick your ass.”
Charisma looks “caution” at me. Brooklyn adjusts her seat. Rambuncto stands up to me.
“What you tryin’ to say?”
“Just that if some Sprinkles-type character was in jail with you, you certainly would have kicked his ass if he wanted to wash yours.”
Rambuncto sucker punches me and I don’t flinch. With coke, I am between time.
“Tell your boy to lay off me,” Rambuncto said to Charisma. “He may’na know this but he’s about to start a fight up in this biotch! Think you can say things like that to me..”
Brooklyn says, “Charisma and I were talking about doing that one thing, the second thing, that we have hid up in—”
“That’s fine,” I say. “That’s no problem. But on one condition. No more talk about Sprinkles. Ok? Sprinkles is not exactly my friend, either. But I respect him and you run into all kinds of people like that where I come from and I’ll never back down from getting the back of a motherfucker like that. Ever. Sprinkles ain’t my cup of tea but a motherfucker like that’s true blue. He’s as American as any of you motherfuckers.”
“Ah-ha!” Rambuncto said. “No he ain’t!”
“Well, maybe if you’re flying confederate flags like everyone in this neighborhood—!”
“Ok!” Charisma said. “Let’s get that second eight ball! Some things you boys don’t understand are inappropriate conversations that are happening under me and Brooklyn‘s roof—”
“We don’t mind if you two talk about it. Girls are gonna have cream puff friends and that’s ok. But when he talks about it, that makes us worry.”
“So the fuck what,” I say. “What if I was gay—Would that bother you so much that you’d refuse to be a guest here..so much that you’d refuse to snort our coke and prevent everyone in the room from saying they’re friends with Sprinkles? I don’t want to fuck him. I just want to lay down some words while I’m paying for your cigarettes.” I snap a pack of Parliament Lights into his chest.
He catches them before they fall.
“Are you two done?” Charisma says.
Brooklyn comes out from between two sheets of wall covering.
“I don’t find them,” she says.
“What??” Charisma says.
Charisma and Brooklyn trade places. In a minute Charisma sticks her head out.
“There’s nothing here,” she says.
My mind instantly runs to which one of these girls has intentionally hid away our shit but one second later I corrected my thinking against that as a probable error.
“Let me get back there,” I say. And I’m back there, feeling the shelves nailed to the back of the makeshift door.
Charisma says: “I put them on the top shelf.”
I feel around the top shelf, taking dust into my hands. Feel around the other shelves.
“Did you find it?”
“Not yet.”
I kneel on the floor, discovering that the shelves are quite tentatively attached to the door. Behind the bottom shelf, on the floor, is our precious eight-ball of cocaine.
I smile, holding up the bag for everyone to see.
Charisma says: “It was on the top shelf, right?”
And I say: “Yes.”
Brooklyn takes the bag from me and I smell her armpits. Her brown hair. Look down her skinny tube of a shirt. She looks down my body, I guess looking to see if I had popped a b but I had not—and she ended up saying, “If you’re gonna be up here, put some shoes on.”
Brooklyn sits down.
She and Charisma cut us all some lines. The six of us take them down, one by one, until we’re half-finished with the eighth. Then, droopy from the excitement, Rambuncto declares us all losers against the winner (coke) and we leave everything on the table and go downstairs. I’m using the bathroom when the house shakes. I follow the mumbles to the back yard where Charisma is seated behind the steering wheel and she has the car dog-piled up on the hoarder’s stash—the car is stuck and Charisma is hitting her head on the car’s horn.
“Charisma! Get out of the car!!”
“Who else is gonna drive?” she says. “Brooklyn doesn’t have her driver’s license. Maybe Rambuncto.”
Rambuncto shakes his head. “I’m on parole.”
It turns out his crew is also on parole or probation—not allowed to do coke or other illegal drugs. None of us are allowed to do coke but the person with the fewest previous offenses is me—mine totaling zero.
We scrunch into the car—me and the girls up front. Rambuncto and his boys in the back.
“Can you drive stick?”
“Yes. I can drive stick.”
“Can you drive on coke?” Brooklyn asks.
“I never have before,” I say. “All we have to do is look good, not break any laws, and there would be no reason for anyone to stop us.” I kept to myself stories where I had avoided cops by tricking them into driving past me when I’d been speeding. I kept to myself stories of pulling into a McDonald’s when a cop had faced me eye-to-eye and where we had been smoking weed in the car and I just turned off the car and waited them out—I knew they had no reason to come up to me as I sat in that parking lot with my two girlfriends. I didn’t mention any of that, just drove exactly the speed limit across the city, taking Riverside up north to where Rambuncto’s parents lived. I thought I was the one who had snorted the most coke and I knew that if we were stopped by police that night that I was going to jail, that I would miss my flight back Sunday and not having any money left I would be stuck in Dayton, Ohio for some number of weeks or months. I couldn’t think about that clearly, though—as far as I made it was I was driving totally high on cocaine and I would definitely go to jail. My family was no longer in Dayton and they weren’t in LA either. The only person who would care I went missing was my friend Mike, my film school buddy (and no stranger to drugs)—I guess that’s who I would call.
But nothing like that happened. The gods interfered and we didn’t see any cops that night. I shook all the way through dropping Rambuncto and friends off at Rambuncto’s—the coke had done wonders on my muscles. I couldn’t stretch out comfortably. Couldn’t relax either. My muscles were fucked. My mind was confused and scattered, and when Brooklyn went inside Rambuncto’s parents’ house and came out minutes later I had no feeling for the interval: I had to trust the dash clock to say that it was less than two minutes and as Brooklyn got in the car, she shrugged and opened the window and Rambuncto stuck his head out the house door and said, “I told her it was gonna be quick!” and I imagined the whole thing in my mind and wondered at our culture’s demand that men cum 100% of the time, followed distantly by a woman cumming some second-place position behind that.
Brooklyn squished her puss against the leather seat and leaned out the passenger-side window (her butt dirty like a little kid’s) and I saw in Rambuncto’s cum the reflection of a streetlight—bright and streaky.
I started the car and undertook the drive of the three of us back home.