ANGELO

Angelo is a very cagey guy. He keeps a certain distance. It’s his dope that seems like family, and it grows. I need deliveries every day, sometimes more than once. By the end of the year, I’m bringing in a couple of thousand dollars a day, at least. Angelo gets most of it.

My people who buy by the gram get a discount. My profit is all in the little stuff, in tenths and quarters of grams, so tedious. Most of the quantity customers are other dealers—Vance, Massimo, Sylvia, sometimes Dean. There’s a coke dealer named Jerome whose clients like to boost a little dope, and a small-time frog with dyed hair named Jean-Paul. The others are the regulars who can afford it, like Magna, and Claude, whose paintings are selling so well he’s now, at twenty-five, a rich man.

Angelo brings me the stuff the way he gets it, in uncut ounces pressed into rock—excellent for smoking. It’s so hard I have to spend a good hour each evening grinding it into powder for the customers, banging it open with a heavy hammer, shaving it down and chopping. For myself, I keep a rock.

“Mama mia,” I say as Angelo watches me work. “This stuff is harder than diamonds.”

He wets his lips. “You speak Italian?”

“Poco poco,” I reply, under my breath.

He smiles. His mouth is small but his lips are full and inviting. His hair curls around his head like thick black smoke. I like his eyes. They’re steady and open, happier than the abandoned, bashed-in look you usually see on a junkie. Angelo looks sort of normal.

In time, we find another bond—Angelo comes from the restaurant trade, too. He once owned a couple of places on an island in the West Indies, where he now lives on a houseboat. He bought those establishments with money earned from smuggling drugs and sold them for money to buy more drugs. Soon he’ll buy another restaurant, maybe start a chain—maybe I’ll be his chef. Ha-ha.

Angelo doesn’t do drugs in the Islands. He goes down there to relax on his boat, he says, with his wife and baby daughter. Otherwise, he’s in his hometown in northern Italy. But now he’s in New York and this is business. He picks up a pebble that’s flown off my desk, chops it with a razor. His hands are tough as a streetfighter’s.

“I wish I could speak more of your language,” I confess. “I love Italy.” I tell him about our trip, the art-and-hospital tour of the provinces, copping in Torre del Greco’s town square.

“That’s very dangerous,” he says, regarding me with interest.

“So is smuggling,” I reply. “Anyway, once you’ve lived in New York, nothing’s dangerous.”

“We’re going to make a lot of money,” he tells me, smiling again. Sounds good to me.

As the months go by, our relationship never changes. We never break bread together, we don’t go to movies or clubs. I never feel much closer to him than I did on the day we met. He brings the dope and I hand over the cash. We get high and talk. His English is nearly perfect but our common language is dope. Mostly, we just count money.

Sometimes I make a pickup at his hotel, where I meet an Italian friend of his or two, handsome guys with sly smiles and darting eyes who also have digs in the Islands. We talk about our drugs, our girlfriends, or the weather, how to get an apartment in New York. We never discuss the economy or politics or culture, whether what we’re doing is good or bad. That’s beside the point.

Every few weeks, Angelo leaves town for destinations unknown and I have to fend for myself, with Vance, or Massimo, or Daniel—I buy from them, they cop from me. We’re always trading places. When Angelo returns, business continues as before, only better. I’m the best customer the guy ever had.