ONE STICK: BOTH ENDS SHARPENED

__________

WHEN SIMA CAME home to the apartment building in South Central L.A., Old Gypsum was as usual in that half-sleep of his on the first flight of steps, his gray head leaning on the paint-flaking wall. His half gallon of Gallo family size, most the way empty, was on the steps between his feet.

“Ya’ll got some holes in your socks, Ol’ Gypsum,” Sima said. “You toes stickin out.”

He slitted his hooded eyes and lizard-looked at her, then down at his feet. “See that, child, somebody done stole my motherfuckin shoes. You steal my shoes, child?”

Then he made that Hooo! coughing sound, with lots of phlegm, that he did when he was trying to clear his breathing tubes.

“Nobody stole yo shoes, Ol’ Gypsum, they’re up there on the landing, I can see’ em up there.”

She pointed at the shoes. She was just nine years old but she didn’t miss much.

“Look at that! What them motherfuckers doin’ up there?”

“You left em up there.”

“Lord, look at that. I’m gettin’ old and forgetful.”

“You gettin’ drunk too much.”

“Well I know that.” He smiled at her; his remaining teeth were yellow and spotted, but it was a sweet smile anyway. Last smiling face she was like to get tonight if Mama didn’t get that hubba. And if Mama did her crack, the smile wouldn’t last long; she’d get all down inside herself and hard, hard if she was interrupted. Old Gypsum dug a finger in one hairy ear and said, “I didn’t see your sister, three days now. Where your sister at, girl? She go see Granma?”

“Marinda gone to stay with my Aunt Pitty for a while. She gone a week already.”

“When she come back? Your sister give me sticky rolls from school, some days. Ya’ll get your lunch for free, that school program, you could bring me sticky rolls. You bring me a sticky rolls?”

“Sticky rolls is only at the middle school cafeteria, I’m third grade, Ol’ Gypsum. Marinda don’t like ’em, she don’t like cinammon … ”

She thought for a moment about Marinda, who could say such mean things but who she missed hard, and about how Marinda could have sold her cafeteria sticky rolls to some other kid who wanted a second dessert for fifty cents, a dollar, but she brought them back for Old Gypsum and his sweet tooth. She thought about how when Mama had sold the television, Marinda had taken her to a big store to watch TV there, till they were chased out, and how they’d had fun picking the one they would get when they had their own money.

Old Gypsum rubbed his forehead, came out with another Hooo! and started his story up: “I worked in them gypsum mines, we had a chef and everything, come out there, make us a pastry. Wasn’t like those motherfuckin’ Dixie coal mines—up that gypsum mine in Illin-noise, Lord they treated us like we was val’able, not like a packa motherfuckin’ yellow hounds.”

She knew he could talk about when he worked in the gypsum mines for an hour and then reach the end of it—and start over again. So she said, “I heard that too,” and ran past him up the stairs, praying that Mama had gotten her shit.

IT WAS TWO weeks before sweeps when Brenda told him she wasn’t sure about the marriage. She was going to Europe to think it over.

Durritt was sitting in a folding chair on the set, talking to Brenda on his cell phone, and watching their second-female-lead, Tanya Rennock, as she paced out the action sequence for scene seventeen: the valiant young nurse fighting the Japanese who were over-running the hospital—courageous Selma Jamison, RN, trying to save her patients. She’d be captured, taken on a sort of death march, then sold into a comfort girl brothel from which the hero would rescue her. The Japanese Americans would protest that one—at least he hoped so. It’d be good for ratings.

Damn she had fine legs.

And Tanya was aware the show’s Executive Producer was watching her. Maybe there was just a shade more shimmy in her walk than there would’ve been if he hadn’t been watching. It was good to cover your bets.

“I’m only saying,” Brenda was saying, a little voice in a piece of plastic pressed to his ear, “that I want time to think and, you know … I mean, you just seem so totally into your work, I just feel like you don’t, I don’t know, connect with anything else and … well it’s like that pre-nup, that’s so, you know, emotionally empty, that’s so unromantic—”

Just then Durritt noticed Tanya turned to look at him—and her eyes lingered on his for just two seconds longer than necessary. Clear enough, when you’ve been in the business a few years. She wanted her own show, or something else. She was willing to make a trade.

“You know what, Brenda?” Durritt said abruptly, into the pocketfone, when he saw Trombley signaling to him, his face a thundercloud. “Don’t do me any favors.” Trombley probably had another production crisis. Maybe historically inaccurate props again. “Okay, Brenda? Go to Rome, find yourself a nice Italian fashion designer, if you can find one who isn’t gay, and party your little princess ass off. I don’t need this bullshit.”

Feeling relieved the marriage was off, he broke the connection, and speed-dialed his assistant Wendy on the pocketfone, waving to Trombley, signaling that he’d be right over. Wendy’d done well, in the last six months. He paid her half what he’d paid Medina, which gave him a cryptic satisfaction. But he might have to slip her a small raise to keep her much longer. “Wendy—no more calls from Brenda. Not ever. Tell her I’m in a meeting for all eternity.”

“You got it. The guy from the Black Congressional Caucus called about a fund-raiser. He said last year you were—”

“That was last year. I don’t do that shit anymore. No time, no way. And hold all my calls for now, I gotta soothe Trombley …”

“Okay—oh, do you want to see this VideoView Magazine? It’s your cover piece.”

“Is it flattering? I don’t need to process any negative bullshit.”

“The photos are good, Alex. The article is and isn’t—you know, sort of ‘he’s so creative, but he’s so ruthless.’ A lot of trash about what a tough businessman you are or something.”

“That’s not trash, that’s the most flattering fucking part. Yeah, leave it on my desk.” He cut the connection without saying goodbye. That was the beauty of an assistant like Wendy. She didn’t care if he chummed it up or not.

He got up and skirted the shot set-up, on his way over to Trombley. Tanya lay sprawled patiently on the ground as they set up a shot, after a Jap had knocked her stunned to the floor of the hospital.

Now she lay like an accident victim, her glossy black hair spread out on the area-rug they’d laid down over the set’s concrete floor …

He felt a kind of interior sagging and he decided it was okay to have a little boost.

HE HAD BEEN trying to stay off the blow, but Trombley loved to share the stuff, one of those druggies who didn’t like to use alone.

A little cocaine addiction was good in a director, really, if it didn’t consume him. If he kept working, not using so much he got psychotic, he’d make everybody work long hours, get the thing in under budget and on time; he’d be a ruthless autocrat—the stuff made you a vain asshole, of course, if you used it regularly, but that’d never happen to Alex Durritt. He only chipped on it. Now and then.

He hoped to God that bastard Trombley had some today.

Trombley was scowling over the scene-list clipboard as his assistant, a prissy little film student named Fiske Bundt, rather imperiously put Tanya through her paces.

Alex cleared his throat and made that nose-twitch signal that Trombley liked.

Trombley glanced up and smiled cynically. “A bee up there, ay?” (From what part of Britain had come that accent? Who cared). He twitched his nose back at Alex. “Right, Fiske, carry on. Be right back, do be ready to go for a take. Step into the doctor’s office, won’t you,

Alex?”

• • •

OPENING THE DOOR to their assisted-housing apartment was a little bit of anticipation and a lot of scared. Sometimes Mama was rolling along fine and it was alright. Other times she wasn’t home at all which was better than when she had a man in the house with her and some other strangers smoking the rock in Mama’s bedroom—because times like that, Mama was hitting the pipe and doing her business with the Paying Man in Sima’s bedroom.

But today, as Sima came into the small, mostly bare living room, she knew instantly it would be bad, because Mama was alone, and she was using a coat-hanger wire to scratch out the inside of her glass pipe in that frantic way she had, mumbling to herself, and there was a new crop of open tweak-sores on her arms.

Mama was bent over, like a burnt match, that shriveled and used up and bowed, her hands starting movements they didn’t finish, darting this way and that, her fingers now and then pinching fresh lesions on her skin as she mumbled about the fucking bugs, the fucking bugs. Looking at her, Sima remembered how she’d been walking with Mama to the Social Security office, for the look-here-I-got-a-child visit, and how Bellesa from school had seen her and said, “That your grandma?” and not cappin’ on her either. She really thought Mama was a grandma, though Mama was only twenty-eight, because of how old the crack had made her. She was down to half her teeth …

Sima had made up her mind to back out and go down the stairs, carrying that heavy feeling she got in her chest down with her, but then Mama’s head snapped up, like a blind person Sima had seen sniffing the air and cocking her head to listen, when people had come around, though Mama’s eyes worked. Only she was so sickly-stoned it seemed sometimes to make her eyes go cloudy on her. She rasped, “Sima! Get you ass over here!”

Sima froze … .

Then Mama was up, like that striking snake Sima saw in the video at school and, though Sima was halfway out the door by the time Mama crossed the room, she got a firm grip on Sima’s shoulder. She dragged Sima back in, with no more than the usual hurt, and kicked the door shut.

“Now, now you gonna help you Mama. You know, and I know, you wouldn’t be alive weren’t for me. I carried you eight month and I suffered a fourteen hour labor. You going to help Mama.”

Sima turned and looked at her, carefully keeping her face expressionless. “What I got to do? Borrow some money from Aunt Pitty? I can try that. I git over there. I’ll go over there, you don’t even have to give me no bus fare, I can git right on over—”

The slap and the shut up came so much together it was like the slap was speaking: “Shut up!”

Sima knew what to do. Just wait. Just stay stony cool, like her sister told her, and wait for the chance. She didn’t even raise a hand to wipe the blood from her nose.

“You want your mama to kill herself, she get so sick?”

“No Mama.”

“That what gone to happen I don’t get what I need now. Your daddy made me this way, and those people at that vocational school axed me to leave, and you know that it’s not Mama’s fault, so you gone do what I say?”

“Yes Mama I surely will.”

Mama dragged her into the barren kitchen. Refrigerator long since sold, only a dirty square on the crumbling tile remained. The copper pipes on the old gas stove torn out and sold though the useless bulk of the stove sat there still, angled crookedly out from the wall. The cabinets were empty, there was just one thing in the kitchen, besides the roaches: A bottle that said SLEEPEZE on it. It was one of those kind you could get without a doctor’s say-so, and Mama had tried to sleep, one time, using them, and it had reacted with the dope and made her real sick. She’d tried to sell the bottle but no one would give her anything for it. So there it sat, mostly full.

“You gone take some these pills, for me, girl,” Mama said, grabbing the open bottle with her free hand—the other one still tremblingly clamped on Sima’s shoulder. She dumped the pills out on the counter, immediately caught up a handful—making Sima think of a child playing jacks, throw em down and pick em up—and tried to force the pills into Sima’s mouth.

Sima instinctively squirmed away. “Why I got to take those?”

“You don’t ax your mama why you just do that shit, you little ho, now git onto it!”

Sima didn’t look at Mama as they spoke. The closer she got to her physically the more she was afraid to look at her. Afraid, really, of the things she felt when she looked at what her Mama had become, up close.

“You gone to wish you take them if you don’t, because we gone to do what we have to do anyway. I caint take care of you no more, and now I got a chance to get what I need and done—”

“You got that girl done yet?” A man’s voice.

Sima looked up to see Melvin standing in the doorway, a white man with prematurely gray hair, sunken eyes, a dirty REO Speedwagon T-shirt (What was a “REO Speedwagon” anyway?) that looked ten or twenty years old, jeans; prison tattoos. One of the tattoos, on his forearm, homemade in the cell by some prisoner using blue and red pen-ink and the points of opened safety-pins, was a fading Christian cross with its bottom sharpened, like a sharpened stick, stabbing a man through the heart and underneath that the legend CURSED BY GOD. The top post of the cross was sharpened too and there was blood on that like someone else had been stabbed. She knew Melvin was a dope dealer fallen on bad times, because he’d started doing his own crack, and then got behind with his source, and he was bad in the hole, he was desperate, and his Man was asking him for the money now, right now, yesterday.

“I cain’t git her done,” Mama was saying, in a voice like a crow, “because I don’t got nothing but a old steak knife, you said you was going to bring—”

“I bring it, he loan me one of his,” Melvin said. Missing most of his teeth in front; Mama was missing hers in gaps like a jack-o-lantern.

He drew something shiny and silver from his backpocket. It looked expensive and new but Sima couldn’t tell what it was at first.

“How much that worth?” Mama asked immediately.

“I ain’t selling this shit, I need it,” Melvin said. “And I’ll tell you what, she got to be still when I do this thing, because he show me how to do it and it got to be just right because if it’s damaged they don’t pay a motherfucking penny—”

“You bring me some rock?”

“I don’t bring you shit, you get what you get when you give what you give—and that’s when he pays me too.”

“I don’t get nothing until—what that bullshit about when he pays you? This my daughter here motherfucker—I want that shit as soon I give her shit over!”

“See I got it all worked out,” Melvin said. Both of them talking at once, neither one looking at Sima. “I git the money I pay off my Man—”

“—I ain’t givin’ up this part my life without that motherfucking shit and the money right out in advance motherfucker—”

“—I git a buttload more with the cash, after I pay off the Man, I buy me up a pile, and I got a way to make it into a new market—”

“—because you don’t even bring me a motherfuckin’ chip, you don’t bring me a dime, I’m supposed to trust you with my daughter’s—”

“—I’m going to sell a pound to this guy who drives for the TV studios, over there in Burbank, he steps on the shit, sells it for powder to a movie director guy he knows, who sell it to all those motherfuckers got the money in that scene, what, your actors, those motherfuckers—there so much money over there—and I can move on up out of this shit-hole, sell to them cocksuckers over there, be selling shit to movie stars and—”

“—and how you going to get that shit to Tijuana, man wants fresh—”

“—shut the fuck up woman I got an ice chest, I got jars, it’s all in there, but I’m going to need this shit from you I only got enough—that girl Marinda move at the last moment, fucking ruin her liver—got to make sure this one is asleep—”

They went on and on … and Sima looked at the thing he was waving in his hand …

And Sima stopped listening right then; most everything they said after that was all gabbledy-gabbledy in her head, like noises she didn’t understand, because she saw what that thing in Melvin’s hand was, now, it was a surgery knife, like she’d seen on TV. He had something else hanging from his back pocket like a long handkerchief, she saw now: a plastic sack. Gabbledy-gabble …

Then she started working out what they’d been talking about—bits of it, through the roaring sound that filled her head:

Fresh organs. Donors.

A clinic in Tijuana.

… only had enough from the other kids for half of his payment. The other kids …

That girl Marinda move at the last moment, fucking ruin her liver… Make sure this one is asleep …

Sima shouted it just once, that one word holding a world of stunned disbelief and grief and terror: “MAMA!”

“THING IS, WHAT you for real got to understand here is,” Durritt was saying, talking too fast, wiping the powder coke off his nose, “every woman is a parasite. I know it’s harsh but you got to consider that everything is parasitical sometime. I mean maybe me and you too sometimes.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Trombley silkily, as she chased his double hit of cocaine with a tall Scotch.

“… but see women, even if they got their own money, they’re emotional parasites, because men, check it out, dude, men cannot—”

“Check it out, dude? Here, you turn into American Pie 3 all of a sudden on me, mate?”

Durritt, who had a lot more difficulty keeping a handle on himself on cocaine than Trembley did, went on obliviously, dipping a little finger into the tiny remaining grains on the glass top of Trombley’s desk, next to the storyboards for a TV movie he was planning, and rubbed the coke grains on his gums, between phrases, “—men cannot relate on that kind of emotional level unless they’re gay so women have to force emotionality out of them, have to create conflict ’cause they’ll get it one way if they can’t get it another, they’re sucking on you—”

“—now you’re back in territory I appreciate.”

“—but sucking in all the wrong ways. I mean no matter how much money I make my ex wants more and no way I’m going to be pressured into getting married again—I mean Brenda is acting like she has to think about the marriage but you know what it is, it’s the fucking pre-nup, she’s claiming it’s unromantic but the truth is she’s thinking ahead to the divorce—“

“Might be right, mate, might be right, or you might be wrong, women is enigmatic creatures, ain’t they, but you know if you’ve got enough money it don’t matter what their agenda is, now does it? I’ve got a little something in mind …”

“You going to hit me up for investment you better lay out another couple of lines, dude,” Durritt said immediately.

“Now I’m dude again,” Trombley said. But he had the bindle out and shook out a little more of the white stuff, onto the glass desk top, began chopping it with the edge of his pocket knife.

Durritt watched his every motion fixedly.

“So what I have in mind,” Trombley said, “is that we have a bit of a comeback in Hollywood. Mr. Robert ‘I put the gun barrel in my mouth’ Downey is clean now but he was just the tip of the iceberg, and most of the iceberg can deal with its dope better than he could. Cocaine is back, and it’s our main chance—so long as we know how to get in, and get out. It’s people who don’t know when to get out of the business who go down with it. You make a million or two, you launder it in a certain overseas casino, you invest it, you live off the interest.”

“A million or two …” Durritt muttered. “Has a nice ring to it.” Would he never finish chopping the stuff?

“There is a man my driver has come into contact with, with the picturesque name ‘Melvin’, and through him we make certain deals … And who gets hurt, really? I ask you,” Trombley went on, with great complacency, as he chopped and spread out the lines and then chopped them even finer. “The usual Darwinian refuse like the talented but defective Mr. Downey aside, no one gets hurt.”

MELVIN WAS TRYING to force her down into the bathtub, banging her head on the porcelain to stun her—

Sima sank her teeth into his wrist—

And he recoiled, howling.

She vaulted over the rim of the tub, darted past him, saw her mama look up with a birdlike quickness from the small dove of hubba that she was burning in her blackened glass stem—Mama burning her thumb pressing it over the metal-meshed improvised bowl at the end of the glass tube to keep the crack in, as she started after Sima—

Sima with sense enough to go for the open window and the fire escape, not the door, scrambling through the window, pounding down two floors to where the fire escape passed the busted-out hall window, through the window, drop into the hall, down the steps—

But Melvin was thundering down the steps, anticipating her. The scalpel flashing in his hand, the plastic sack in the other. Somewhere he had an ice chest, a big jar in there with parts of Marinda in it, maybe Marinda’s pretty brown eyes … and maybe parts of that girl Chontel that supposedly run away …

Sima taking the steps three, four at a time, leaping right over Ol’ Gypsum, who sat up with a startled Hooo! as she landed in front of him—

“Child, what now—?”

Sima skidding, falling painfully on her knees.

Picking herself up to bolt for the door. Looking back to see Melvin banging down the steps, his snaggles bared. She wasn’t going to make it. He was coming too fast.

Just too fast … Marinda …

OLD GYPSUM WATCHED him bounding past—saw that perfect blade in his hand—saw the white dope dealer was chasing Sima—

“HEY boy,” Old Gypsum said, grabbing Melvin’s ankle as he thumped past.

Melvin going down, wham, on his face, the scalpel cracking in half on the tiles.

“HEY motherfucker,” Old Gypsum went on, “you the one stole my shoes?”

“Ow, fuck! You old fucking asshole!” Melvin yelled, getting up, one hand to his split lip.

But Sima was gone. She was racing down the street, running for a bus that was just holding its doors opened for her, and he’d never get there first.

Sima’s Mama came down the stairs, looking out through the door, and it seemed to Clarence, for that was Old Gypsum’s real name, that there was some relief in the woman’s eyes: relief that Sima had escaped her. Had escaped the thing that compelled her.

Melvin rounded furiously on the old man …

“Fo’get him,” Sima’s mama said, tugging Melvin back up the stairs. “Come on. We got enough. We gone make that motherfucking deal now … you see … You call the man that knows the television people … We gone make that deal right now … ”

“AND SO—DO we have a deal?” Trombley was asking.

It all looked good to Durritt now, with his mind racing in the familiar megalomaniacal circles. Hell maybe he’d even marry Brenda on her terms now. With enough money it didn’t matter, like Trombley said.

“Sure,” Durritt chattered, “I’ll help you go in to buy the shit, and we’ll move it—discreetly, always discreetly, around the studios, but we have to know when to stop, you’re so totally right about that, I’ve always known that … ”

“Yes. That way … no one gets hurt,” Trombley said. “I’ll tell my man to call Melvin …”