The dealer is a giant with a body like a bear’s. I’m a good-sized man but the dealer is taller and substantially heavier than me. Big as he is, his voice is even bigger and compels you to listen to it. There’s something else that’s special about his voice. When he talks you believe what he’s saying, at least initially, which gives him a tremendous advantage. It’s a voice of absolute confidence.
I met him at the regular basketball game on the playground in Center City. At first he was just one of the players. On the playground the dealer told lots of jokes, mostly dirty ones about women, which made the other players laugh. I laughed too, but mine was forced. The dealer claimed he used to be a radio DJ in Boston, where he knew lots of famous people in the entertainment and sports worlds, and was now the lead singer in a local rock band. He had one of those lives where you never knew what was true and what wasn’t. It was just one strange thing after another—like a parade of strangeness—but the rock band part I knew was true. The dealer had a good singing voice, actually, and would often show it off in the most incongruous places. It was something I could never do.
His whole approach to basketball was different from mine, too. I pass, hustle on defense, scrap for every loose ball, but the dealer was only interested in scoring. When we played on the same team he would shoot too much, especially from long range. He was a streak shooter, but he shot as if he thought he was always hot. I had to hide my irritation that he didn’t pass the ball to me enough, which made me nervous, but worse still was when we played on different teams and I had to cover him. He’d use his strength to camp out in the key and when he got the ball, back me down till he got a lay-up. Sometimes, it was too much for me, and I had to call a three-second violation on him, which he didn’t like. More often than not, I tried to cover someone else.
When we introduced ourselves he said his name was “Dash.” He told me his stage name but never his real one. I was pretty stressed when I met him, having just broken up with my girlfriend. I’d also recently been transferred to a new division of my company that allowed me to work almost exclusively at home in my new condo. I thought I wanted that (I was making more money at this new position, as well), but after my ex left, being alone so much began to weigh on me. I didn’t have use of my driver’s license either (which is a long story), and Dash used to drive me home to West Philly. That was nice of him, I know, but during the rides he’d often sing ’80s rock songs at the top of his lungs or talk right-wing political stuff (Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh were two of his heroes), always trying to convert me but never succeeding, or else talk about all the women he’d had sex with. One time I told him I wasn’t doing well with drinking and wished I knew a way to get pot. I explained that I hadn’t been in Philly for a long time and didn’t know who to ask. The dealer said maybe he could help, and that’s how it all began.
Whenever I’d ask him how his music gigs went the dealer would say, “Primo, great,” something like that, yet he never seemed to have any money. Then I learned that he wanted to be paid in free pot from the stash I bought rather than in cash, which might explain, in part, why he was so hard up financially. As far as the pot went it worked this way. I’d give him the money (eighty to a hundred dollars up front) then wait for him to come back from his source. Then I’d give him about a third of the pot outside in his car, then run back to my place with the remainder. The good part about this method was that I got to stay home. The bad part was he almost always took two to three times longer than he said he would.
During my wait I’d become hyperconscious of time, staring at my watch dozens of times till I’d get his call. It wasn’t so much that I was craving pot as that I feared Dash would just run off with my money and never return. I’d have to give up basketball as well as pot then. It would be too humiliating to face him on the playground if he stole my money.
One time, he didn’t call me until four hours after he said he would. He explained that something had come up but that he had my stuff and would call me the next day to arrange a drop off. Turns out five days passed before he finally gave it to me after basketball, admitting he’d already smoked a little of it himself. During those days while I kept wondering if he’d call me or not, I became ultrasensitive to the sounds in my condo as well. I was on the ground floor and had rarely heard the elderly lady with bright red hair who lived directly above me and who I’d nicknamed Birdwoman to myself because she was thin and talked very rapidly, as if she were always being chased by someone. But during those waiting days I started hearing every step she took as she’d walk from room to room, restless bird that she was. Bottom line—I had a lot of trouble sleeping and had to waste some of the pot I did have left just to finally knock myself out.
Next time we talked, I told Dash I wanted to ride with him on his drug runs, which meant getting dropped at a gas station / car-wash that had a convenience store as well, until he came back with the stuff. (He’d never bring me to the source, of course.) I thought this would make it harder for him to take off with my money, but it had its drawbacks too. Sometimes Dash would return empty-handed, saying the source wasn’t there. Once I said, “Why don’t you call him before you drive over to be sure he’s home?” “I do, brother,” he said, “but he doesn’t always answer his phone.” He went on to explain that the source (who was an electrician) generally didn’t do much once he got home from work, but sometimes he got emergency calls to fix something. “Then he’s gotta split right away in his car. … On the road again,” Dash suddenly sang, but more like Freddy Mercury than Willie Nelson.
Waiting at the gas station for him to return was nothing I enjoyed. It was like a mini-mall for the unsavory. A number of times I saw some hookers hanging around there, sometimes with their pimps, other times I thought I saw drug deals going down. Worse still, about a third of the times I’d see parked police cars. The bottom line is waiting there I often found myself worrying about getting mugged or getting busted.
The dealer worried a lot too. He’d been arrested before and once had to wear a wire for the FBI as part of his deal to stay out of prison. He’d had some really harrowing experiences as a result of that wire—one that involved sending his ex-wife to jail and her lover into a gunfight with the cops, who “blew his brains out then scattered them in all four directions,” as the dealer put it, looking me right in the eye. He worried more about getting caught than anyone I’d ever bought from, which wasn’t a bad thing really because it made him careful in lots of ways, like never mentioning what we were doing on the phone, or never using anyone’s real name. It made me feel better about our odds of not getting caught. But it’s also true there’s a thin line between productive worrying and paranoia that the dealer sometimes crossed. For instance, his always wanting me to smoke while we were together, even in his little blue convertible. I thought it was reckless and said I didn’t want to do it. The next time we went out riding (it was in the afternoon after basketball this time) he asked me again, and I told him I didn’t want to get messed up in the middle of the day, ’cause I had work to do and I wanted to save my stuff for when I really needed it. It wasn’t until the time after that (which was only a few days later) that I finally understood. We were driving toward the source when he suddenly said, “Are you a cop, Jeff?” looking me straight in the eye again in that dramatic way he had, like he was a detective on a TV show interrogating me.
“You’re kidding, right?” I said, half laughing.
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
“Why would you think that? You’ve known me for months, you’ve been to my place. You know what my job is.”
“You never smoke in front of me, OK? If you smoked in front of me I’d know you weren’t a cop.”
Next thing I knew he produced a joint and somehow lit it while he drove.
“Come on, brother,” he said, “you have to smoke this now.”
No man likes to hear the words “have to” from another man. But he was my only link to pot and the other drugs I was also sometimes taking, so I gave in and smoked.
Things went along all right for a while but then the dealer began having trouble with his girlfriend, Maryann. He lived with her in a pretty nifty apartment in Center City, which I saw one time. She was a good-looking woman with an excellent body, but she was almost fifty, nearly fifteen years older than him, and the dealer liked younger women. Maryann had some pretty serious bucks, though, and he was living with her for free. He claimed he loved her and bragged that he was being “almost faithful” to her. I thought, when you’re economically dependent on someone things can get confusing and it’s hard to separate love from money, but I kept that opinion to myself.
As things got worse with Maryann I could see he was getting worried. She didn’t want him smoking for one thing. She probably also sensed he could never be monogamous. Soon he began calling me to do dope runs every three or four days. Even though more than half the time the source wasn’t there, I was still buying too much pot, and keeping so much in my apartment was making me nervous. I knew that if you got busted your punishment was determined by how much pot you had in your possession. “One or two small bags probably won’t get you put in jail,” Dash had said. But I had a lot more than two bags. As a result I began smoking more so I’d have less in my possession if I were ever caught—which seemed logical at the time. As a result of that, however, I was spending too much on it and told myself I’d have to just stop answering his calls for a while and skip basketball for a while too—which would hurt—or else just say no to him on the phone and risk getting him angry, maybe so angry that he’d stop buying for me. The dealer was already saying from time to time that he was gonna quit soon. “You better start buying more ’cause I’m gonna stop doing this soon, it’s just not worth it,” he’d say, though I never fully believed him.
Just as all this was reaching a crisis point the dealer went away for a while. He’d gotten a minitour for his group—three or four gigs in small towns in Missouri and Wisconsin. It was like the sudden removal of a loud, relentless noise and my first reaction after he left was, paradoxically, to feel disoriented, nervous. But after a jittery first day, my normal sense of time returned, then my normal sense of hearing, though I could still hear Birdwoman puttering around. It was as if once I started hearing her a few weeks ago I would always hear her. But with the dealer gone it was comforting, in a way, to know she was there to potentially talk to, if only I could, like the dealer, take more of the initiative.
For the first time I found myself wondering about Birdwoman’s life. So far we’d talked mainly about condo issues (there were only the two of us in the building), like where to put recycled trash, or about the condo fees I’d forget to pay. A couple of times she’d met me in the hallway outside my condo and helped me install a new fuse she gave me. It felt good to have someone do something for me without paying them. My mother was maybe the last person I’d experienced that with, but she was far away now, so it was really nice.
Soon I found myself wondering what Birdwoman was doing upstairs, how she spent her time. I knew she didn’t work and had once been a professor. I think the real estate agent told me she was a painter to reassure me that her noise level would be low. Once when I gave her a copy of my keys I stepped inside her place for a minute or two and was dazzled by its elegance—at least in comparison to mine. I remember she had lots of paintings on the walls and that many of them were hers and were very good as far as I could tell. I wished I’d told her so then, when I had the chance, but not wanting to reveal that I didn’t know anything about photography, I said nothing. I did compliment her place but didn’t think that would matter much to an artist who put so much of herself into her work.
I was disappointed in myself, at how stingy I was to her, especially considering her age (probably late sixties to early seventies) and how few times she would probably ever hear her work praised again. I promised myself to tell her how much I liked her work but so far I hadn’t found the right time. Unfortunately, that’s the way I am. I often know what I want to do but aren’t able to struggle enough to be able to do it. It was like my relationship with the dealer, who, like a magician, had suddenly appeared again.
“I’m baack,” Dash said to me on my cell phone, sounding in his clowning way like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
“Hey, how’d the gig go?” I said, trying to sound light-hearted.
“Fabulous, primo. They loved us.”
I congratulated him. I was suddenly full of congratulations, like Santa Claus with his bag of toys.
“I’m going over there now, you wanna come? It’s no biggie to me if you do or not but I’m only gonna do this one or two more times, so if you do it, you have to buy in quantity.”
“Is one hundred OK?”
“One hundred’s OK. I’ll be over in fifteen minutes, then we’ll take a ride together.”
I wanted to ask him if he’d actually spoken to the source first but I held my tongue. While he was away I’d secretly worried whether I’d ever hear from him again, being afraid he might move to the Midwest or else truly have his much-threatened change of heart about dealing, and now that I finally had him on the phone I didn’t want to aggravate him.
Meanwhile, Dash was telling me more information about our trip. “We’re gonna go straight there, I just have to stop at a Kinko’s to check my e-mail—unless you have a computer I could use at your place. Do you?”
Reluctantly, I said yes. The dealer had only been in my condo once before and even that was over my protests. Instinctively, I didn’t want to ever have him over. The first time I did he commented on how big my place was and asked me what the rent was, not understanding that I owned it. I told him it was five hundred a month less than it would have been if it were an apartment and he believed me. In some ways the dealer was naïve (like the way he believed everything Bill O’Reilly said). This time he said almost the same things as before.
“Look how long the hallway is,” he gushed, as he lumbered bear-like toward my computer room. “Look how big the rooms are. How much money you make anyway?”
I could feel my heart beat as I mumbled something incoherent.
“Turn left for the computer room,” I finally said, and then quickly changed the subject. Fortunately, it was easy to do that with Dash, who I think had ADD or something close to it. He also seemed to have a belief that socializing was something he had to do in business, even the cut and dried business of dealing. That’s why he kept me waiting so long when he was with the source. He felt he had to chat up the electrician, and, to a lesser degree, he did it with me too.
“This won’t take long, brother,” he said as he sat in front of my computer. “I just need to go through my mail while I was gone. … Hey, how ’bout those Red Sox?” Dash added. “Isn’t it a drag how they blew that last game?”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
“You watched it, right?”
“Of course. I felt like committing suicide afterward.”
“Oh well, if we hadn’t traded Manny, we would have won it, right?”
The dealer and I were both native New Englanders. I’m from Brookline, which borders Boston, and he’s from Stowe, Connecticut, so we’re both Red Sox and Celtics fans. He’d use this connection relentlessly when we talked, but a part of me enjoyed it, I have to admit. It isn’t easy to leave your hometown, especially when you’re over thirty-five, as I was, and then find yourself in a new, bigger city like Philly that doesn’t even know you exist. In spite of what he was doing, the dealer was a naturally friendly guy, which I appreciated.
Predictably, with all our talking plus his insisting I check out the pictures taken from his latest gigs on the Internet, it took much longer than he said it would before we hit the road. During our trip the dealer made one call after another on his cell. Between the calls I realized that he’d been ripped off in his Missouri gig. Basically, the promoter claimed 251 people showed up at the concert and offered him a check based on that number, while Dash said it was more like 600 people, at least, and rejected their offer. Just before he dropped me at the gas station I said, “So you didn’t get any money at all for your concert?”
“Don’t worry, I will. I’m gonna sue their ass and get twice what they owe me.”
He pulled to a stop by the convenience store and I got out.
“I’ll call you if I have to stay a long time,” he said before driving away.
It was cold out and already getting dark. I didn’t want to look around at the dealers or cops, and kept my eyes straight ahead like a soldier while I paced. My ex used to make fun of my pacing. She made fun of my worrying too. “What’s a big guy like you worry about so much?” she’d say in the friendly, sexy way she used to tease me during our first few months. Then, toward the end of our relationship, her tone of voice completely changed as she’d run through my defects. Also, it suddenly became a much longer list. Of course, those kinds of changes always happen when things go bad. I was shocked when she left me, yet I’d always worried that she would, that I wasn’t enough for her. I used to smoke pot to help feel confident with her. Then I got her to smoke with me while we made love and it was out of this world sweet. But when we started to argue (I never trusted her with men) the pot made us paranoid at times and we’d have to take ’ludes to calm down. That reminded me that I forgot to give Dash the money for Quaaludes, forgot to even remind him to ask for some from the source.
“Shit,” I muttered, then looked up and saw Dash’s car, back already.
“Get in,” Dash said. “He wasn’t home.” I wanted to make him promise right then to never drive me there again unless he talked to the source first. That just because you wanted someone to be home didn’t mean they would be, but I held back. The dealer’s depression was obvious. He made more cell phone calls in the car, obsessively going over the details of how he was cheated. Then, a block from my condominium, he asked me if he could use my computer again and I said OK.
“I’ve been a real pill to be with today, brother,” Dash suddenly said as he parked. “First I take you for a ride, then I make all those phone calls and barely talk to you at all and now I need to use your computer again.”
“Don’t worry about it, that’s nothing,” I said.
“Thanks, bro,” he said, as he disappeared into the little room that seemed barely big enough to contain him. “I’ll only be about five minutes.”
I paced the hallway while he used my computer, periodically looking at my watch. When seven minutes passed I ducked into the room and asked him how things were coming.
“Check this out,” he said, indicating the screen that was full of photographs of women. “I’ve already boned two of them on this screen alone.”
“Who are they?” I blurted, trying to hide my irritation.
“They’re from Match.com. They’re a gold mine of pussy, man, you should check it out.”
“Yuh,” I said softly, thinking of my own experiences with Internet dating, which was full of much less happy stories. “So how are things with Maryann?”
“It’s all over,” he said, as he flicked to another screen full of young women.
“I’m sorry.”
“We’re still best friends but I’m not doing her anymore. Yeah, I’ve already moved out of her place.”
“So are you staying in your office?”
“No, there’s mold there now. The last storm it got flooded and now there’s mold. Hey, you’ve got a lot of space, you want to rent me a room, Jeff?” he said, turning in my swivel chair to face me with a big, hopeful smile on his face.
I looked down at the floor for a moment. It was what I always feared.
“No, that wouldn’t work. I’ve got a new girlfriend now who’s coming over tonight so …”
I let it trail away as if what I were saying were so obvious it didn’t need to be spelled out. But I felt he didn’t believe me. Though he congratulated me, I thought he knew I was lying.
“I’ll have to go on Priceline, then,” he said, turning back to my computer. “I can get a hotel on Priceline for fifty bucks but it’s gonna take me fifteen minutes. No more than fifteen and I’ll find one, OK, bro?”
“No problem,” I said, feeling temporarily relieved as I stepped into the hall and resumed my pacing.
Twenty minutes passed, then forty-five. I asked him how things were going with Priceline and he told me he couldn’t find a thing but was still trying. I looked at the computer and saw that he was really looking at hotels this time and not women. It had gotten dark out. It was mid-November, and I could feel it getting colder. I thought I’d maybe drop a ’lude and watch some TV but I stayed in the room and watched him in silence.
“Jeff,” he said after another five or ten minutes, “Are you sure I can’t crash here just for a night? I promise I’ll flush the toilet and clean up after myself, ha ha, cause it’s looking like your place or my car, OK? I’ll pay for the time I stay, I promise.”
When you take drugs they produce the drama in your life so your dramas are very short and controlled, lasting only as long as the high does. But people who take drugs, myself included, like or maybe need it that way. We crave excitement as long as it’s part of a routine. With Dash in my house I tried to adjust by accepting new routines as long as I could know their results in advance. Here are some of the things I knew would happen that did happen after I let Dash stay that night.
1. He stayed longer than one night.
2. He never paid me any money, nor did I ask him to.
3. He increased the number of drug runs that we took.
4. I hid my cash, credit card, and drugs that I used to keep in my bureau drawer deep in my hallway closet and found myself checking them all four to five times a day. (As far as I know he never stole anything from me.)
5. He asked to smoke with me every night and sometimes during the day and more often than not I agreed and never charged him.
6. He monopolized my computer.
But things I didn’t know would happen happened too. I hadn’t shared a place with a man since I was in college, so there were bound to be surprises. One night he called me from a bar. I didn’t answer the first time, but as usual he started repeat calling me as if he knew I was just pretending to be away from my phone until I finally answered.
“Hey bro, I’m at my favorite pussy bar and I just scored a really hot one. You don’t care if I bring her over, do you?”
For some reason my mind went blank and I heard myself say, “It’s OK, you can use my room.”
“Thanks, bro. I’ll be over in ten minutes.”
I dropped my cell after I hung up. Then I paced around my place looking into my rooms as if half expecting that they’d disappeared or were radically rearranged. Finally, I stopped to take a Quaalude. Then I rehid my money and drugs in a new place, went into the living room and, anticipating that there’d be noise coming out of my bedroom soon for the first time since my ex left three months ago, turned on the TV.
I was watching a political talk show—one of those where the host keeps interrupting the guest as if he’s really interviewing himself—when I heard my door open and only then remembered that a few days ago I’d let Dash talk me into giving him a key. I could already hear them laughing and talking, so I turned up my TV and shut off the lights.
Then I heard the door shut. Don’t come into the living room, I said to myself, not wanting to see who he’d picked up. Just take her straight to my room.
“Hey, brother,” the dealer said, in a voice that sounded more drunk that stoned, “come out and meet my girl.”
I ignored him. Maybe he’d think I was asleep.
“Come on, bro, I want you to meet my girl,” he repeated.
I knew if I didn’t get out of my La-Z-Boy he’d bring his trophy into the living room and show her off to me there, but I still stayed in my chair. I didn’t want to walk out there where it was lighter and have to stand next to him like his little brother and have her see how much bigger than me he was.
“Bro, come on, say hello to your new houseguest.” This last time there was a little edge to his voice so I hit the remote, went forward in my La-Z-Boy, finger combed my hair and checked my fly in the dark as I walked out to the living room.
“Jeff, this is Maggie, named after the Dylan song, right? But I’ll tell you, bro, Dylan was wrong about her ’cause I’ll work on Maggie’s farm any day. Yah, I’ll plow that farm anytime.!’
The dealer was cracking himself up, only louder than usual because he was drunk.
“Shut up,” Maggie said, laughing a little herself, as she mock punched him in the shoulder. She was wearing a short black leather skirt and stockings and a black shirt with the top two buttons open. Her body was about as good as I figured. (Though he was overweight, the dealer had to have women who weren’t.) It was harder to evaluate her face because she wore so much makeup and a lot of it seemed to be smeared around, giving her a kind of blurry look. “You keep making those jokes, I’m gonna change my fuckin’ name to Margo.”
“Hey, that’s not nice,” Dash said, spanking her pretty hard on her bottom, then looking at me to check my reaction.
“What was that for? That hurt a little, Bubba.”
“That’s for using a bad word.”
“What? What’d I say?”
“Women shouldn’t use the ‘f’ word in public …”
Maggie looked profoundly confused for a moment. She was pretty drunk too, I figured.
“I’m just kidding,” Dash said, “Geez, I really had you going there.”
Except I knew, right-wing nut that he was, he was only half kidding.
“So what do you think of my brother Jeff’s place? Pretty nice, huh? Yah, he’s got some serious bucks. Works for a big company that’s very impressive. Plays good basketball too.”
She looked at me with a bit more interest now. “It’s very nice … lots of space,” she added as vaguely as if she were talking about the sky.
“OK, time to mosey over to the bedroom,” Dash said smiling, then winking at me as he put his thick arm around her while tapping her bottom a couple of times. “Say goodbye to brother Jeff,” he said, as they started walking down my hall.
“Goodbye,” she said, turning to wave.
I walked back in the half dark to my La-Z-Boy. A few seconds later I turned the TV on pretty loud, hoping of course to drown them out, at least for most of the time (though I imagined his orgasm would sound like a whale bellowing during a tsunami), while hoping I wouldn’t wake up Birdwoman upstairs.
My TV, and the acoustics of my condo, did succeed in blocking them out for the most part, and therefore in helping to keep me from thinking about or visualizing what they were doing. Oddly, I kept thinking about what Birdwoman was doing instead. How did she pass her time up there, flitting from room to room by herself in what looked like an art gallery more than a condominium. She’d mentioned once that she had a daughter, but I gathered that she lived pretty far away and in any case I’d never seen her. In fact, in the eight months that I’d lived here I’d only seen three or four people going into or out of her place.
I knew she used to be a professor, the real estate agent told me that. I knew from looking at her mail, which was often mixed in with mine on the floor that she subscribed to a variety of art and other cultural publications. So she must keep herself informed, yet I never heard her TV or radio, not even once, nor a note of music. She was trim and very active, which were good indicators about the quality of her life, yet her rapid-fire high-anxiety speech patter made me think she didn’t have much peace of mind.
Generally I’d see her, albeit only for a few seconds, almost every day. Sometimes I’d see her picking up her morning newspapers from the front lawn (one Philadelphia Inquirer, one New York Times) like a bird gathering its birdseed, then climbing up the flight of stairs to her home. I’d feel bad then, more often than not, and wondered if I shouldn’t bring the papers up to her doorway myself. It didn’t seem like much of a sacrifice to make for a nice older woman, but I hadn’t yet done it.
Finally I did start to hear laughter mixed in with sex sounds coming from my bedroom, but luckily it was after my Quaalude kicked in and in a little while I was asleep. It was a short dreamless sleep. When I woke (and it was probably what did wake me up) I heard the heavy strides of the dealer walking toward me until he stopped two feet in front of my chair.
“Hey, bro, you awake?” he said.
“Kind of. What’s up?”
“Come with me now and I think she’ll do you too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maggie. I got her all sexed up and doing whatever I say and I told her to suck your dick and she said she would. How’s that for sharing the wealth, Dash style? Better than Obama, huh? Ha ha. Come on, we’ll end up banging her together. It’ll rock.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think so. I’m really tired and I took a lot of pills to sleep.”
“Are you sure?” he said, in an incredulous tone of voice I’d never heard from him before.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Wow, you just blew it, bro.”
“Just enjoy her yourself.” I said. “I really need to get to sleep. I’ve gotta work tomorrow morning.”
“OK, bro, your call. Don’t say I never did anything for you, though. She’s got an incredible bod.”
Then he walked away. In the silence I soon began to wonder why I didn’t do it. I could certainly use the release, but I knew I couldn’t bear to perform in front of him, couldn’t stand to have him see me naked (I was convinced by now he must be very well endowed) while I tried to come. It all felt like a setup somehow.
The sex noise came back a few minutes later but mercifully I fell asleep. When I woke up it was the next morning and Dash and Co. were quiet—either asleep or gone.
I tiptoed over the hardwood floor and pulled open the Venetian blinds in my living room. A light snow almost as transparent as dew was falling on our little front lawn. It was early for it to snow, which reminded me that the whole summer and especially fall had seemed colder this year. But didn’t that contradict the global warming theory that I’d argued about with Dash? Then I remembered seeing someone on TV who explained the reason for it but I couldn’t quite recall what he said. I had to realize that it was just another thing I didn’t understand, any more than I understood how television itself worked, or how my own brain worked that chose to watch television and why it made the decisions it made, such as last night about Dash and Maggie, or why, for that matter, I kept acting in a way that I knew would drive my ex away even though I thought I wanted her to always be with me.
I started thinking about Quaaludes again. (I certainly couldn’t smoke if Dash was still home or he’d immediately smell it with his supersensitive nose and then find a way to join me, after first talking with me about the Celtics or how cool Cape Cod used to be.) I had more or less decided to take a ’lude when I saw Birdwoman, in a sweater and jeans, walking in her hopping sort of way to pick up her morning papers. I raced back to the living room, put on my bathrobe and slippers, and met her in the yard a few feet from the door. She had her typical, hypervigilant birdlike expression, maybe a smidgen more startled than usual since I’d never gone out of my way to greet her before. It was an expression that all but demanded to know what I was doing outside like this, as she clutched her newspapers to her tiny, palpitating bosom.
“What do you think of this snow?” I blurted, trying to cover up my embarrassing lack of purpose. She produced no words in response, but did nod her head rapidly a couple of times.
“I was going to bring your newspapers up for you.”
“There’s no need to do that,” she said, clutching her papers more closely to her birdlike breast. “I like the exercise.”
Of course you do, I thought. The worst thing you can do to a bird is to make it stay still. She even looked slightly hurt that I should doubt her capacity to gather up her papers, and I felt myself start to panic.
“By the way, I wanted to tell you how much I admired your paintings. I really think they’re … superb” was the word that finally emerged.
“Thank you, Jeff,” she said, smiling so widely I could see her teeth. Yet I had to admit she looked very pretty while she smiled.
That was my magic moment in the snow with Birdwoman. I don’t remember the few more words we said. Her smile really said it all and I reentered my condo temporarily oblivious to the two lovebirds who were still, as it turns out, nesting in my bedroom.
Eventually I figured out that the real reason I didn’t join the dealer and Maggie in a threesome was that I was afraid he’d want Maggie to live with us too and that he’d try to addict me to her sexually to achieve his goal. But like so much else in the world I was apparently wrong about this as well. Late the next afternoon after Dash took Maggie home and perhaps checked into his office, or perhaps not (he’d admitted to me that during his days with Maryann one of the chief functions of his office was to hide his stash and more often than not to smoke it, but now he had my place to use for both of those functions), he walked into the computer room where I was trying to work and started talking. That wasn’t surprising but what he said was.
“Hey, bro, you were a prince last night, I gotta thank you for being such a prince among men.”
I checked his voice for sarcasm but couldn’t detect any.
“What?” was all I could finally manage.
“I’m talking about last night when I asked you to join us in bed and you turned me down. You knew I was bombed outta my skull.”
“I suspected something like that,” I said with a smile.
“Yah, you knew and you protected me from myself. I mean I never would have said it if I wasn’t on pot, booze, and a little E too.”
“Ecstasy?”
“Yah, bro, E rocks. And by the way, no offense, but she never would have done it with you if she wasn’t just as high as me. She feels embarrassed about it now, ’cause she knows I told you she wanted to.”
“Of course,” I said, “I knew that.”
“Ask me why this matters? Ask me why I’m talking about this to you now?”
“Why?”
“Because I just had the most fuckin’ beautiful day of my life with her and I don’t just mean sexually, bro. I mean beautiful. Yah, Maggie really touched my heart—really, truly, deep in my heart, and we’re both crazy in love man, it’s true.”
“Wow, that’s great,” I said, trying to sound as earnest as possible and not remind him that his whole day had, of course, been completely created by drugs. I even wondered if he’d still feel any real enthusiasm for her a couple hours from now when more of his high would wear off.
I remember talking easily with the dealer that day. We talked about the Celtics, about women, a little about politics, too, during which the dealer surprised me by saying, “I’m going to respect Obama, you know, because he’s our President and that’s what we should do.” We also talked about our families, he about his big one, me about my small.
“I love all my brothers,” he said, “all my sisters, too. Love ’em to death.”
There was a passion and a kind of laughter in his eyes when he said it and I knew it was true.
“My father was a helluva guy. I only wish he were still alive.”
I said I felt the same way about my parents and that I was lucky they were both in good health. I told him I only had one sister, who I sometimes heard from, who lived in a small country town in western Massachusetts. Sure enough the dealer had been there. “I love Massachusetts almost as much as Connecticut. I’ve traveled in Massachusetts a lot.” That remark led to a conversation about towns in Massachusetts where we’d both spent time, from Falmouth and West Harwichport in the Cape, to Lenox and Lee in the Berkshires.
We talked about a lot of things that day and I didn’t mind not using the computer much, though it meant falling further behind at work. I remember wanting to tell him about Birdwoman and how I’d finally told her I liked her paintings and was planning maybe to try and buy one from her, but I didn’t. Just didn’t get around to talking about it, but I could have.
Dash made a lot of calls on his cell later that day, all about his lawsuit over the gig in Missouri, but he kept his voice under control and he washed the dishes after his usual dinner of cheese ravioli. I was even going to suggest we fire one up and smoke together when he walked back into the living room and said, “I’m going to Maggie’s.”
She has a place? I almost said.
“I’ve been missing her real bad and I need to be there. Don’t wait up for me or anything. I’ll probably end up staying there.”
“OK, bro,” I said.
Dealers are probably the most vulnerable people on earth. I had trouble sleeping that night while I waited for Dash. Somewhere around 2 a.m. I realized he wasn’t coming back. Nor did he return the next two days. I tried to keep from worrying about him but I couldn’t help it, the way he threw himself at her, or at what he imagined her to be. He was like a child that way, always chasing his dream. Whether it was imagining he was a better ballplayer than he was or that Maggie was a better person than she was, a person with whom he would finally find love. It’s not like I didn’t do the same thing to a degree, but I already was thinking a lot less about my ex (who I now realized I no longer wanted back) and saw myself quitting drugs in the near future, whereas Dash was the type who would always “love” someone and never give up and so would need to take drugs forever.
On the third day he came back in his old electric blue convertible to take his things. He was moving in with her. “I’ve never loved anyone like this,” he said.
“How big is her place?” I asked.
“We only need room for a bed,” he said, laughing. Then he told me a couple of dirty jokes—he never ran out of jokes. When he said goodbye, he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll see you at basketball and we’ll still take our trips together”—meaning to the electrician’s. “I’ll always be grateful, bro. Your decision that night saved my relationship with Maggie, probably our friendship too. You’re a wise man, Jeff.”
It was the first time anyone had ever called me wise, and then he left. I returned to the silence of my condominium. I watched it get dark and it started to hurt. I thought how I’d let a dangerous person stay at my home, but it turned out that after he left it felt more dangerous than before. Then I thought about going upstairs to visit Birdwoman but didn’t have the will. I was gonna take a ’lude but I didn’t want to wait thirty minutes for the high so I smoked a joint instead, put on TV, ate my food, fell asleep. My usual pattern. Only I didn’t sleep for very long. I had a crazy dream that I had a different body. It was me but I was taller and stronger and strode around the playground like a giant. I saw the dealer shooting baskets at the other end of the court and began walking toward him wanting to see if I was as tall as him, when I woke up.
For the longest time (though it was probably only a minute or two of marijuana time) I couldn’t shake the feeling that my body really had changed. It made me sad and happy at the same time as if I’d finally found the reason for my life being the way it was. I thought about seeing Birdwoman but worried I might scare her to death if she saw me in my new body. Anyway, she wasn’t someone I could talk to about it, but Dash was. It’s strange what you end up missing about people. You could talk to Dash about almost anything. I’ll give him that.