The Cocaine Chronicles Part 6

At the taqueria, the woman behind the counter watched her, waiting patiently. Her mop was already wet. It stood up behind her, at the back door. Her night was almost over. The carne asada was dry and stringy in the warming pan.

Just a lil piece of meat. And a warm tortilla.

She still had the bag of ramen but Victor would be asleep now. He was seventeen. He was about to graduate. He stayed up late studying and fell asleep on the couch, even though he knew she might bring someone home if she had to. The only one who always insisted on coming to her apartment was Chess. He liked to sit on the couch and drink a beer and pretend they were married. She knew it. He would watch TV like that was all he came for, laughing at Steve Harvey, like this living room was TV, too, and there were sleeping kids in the bedrooms and a wife.

"Look at your feet," he would say, like she'd been working at 7-Eleven all day. Convenience. "You should get your feet done like Sisia. Look like they hurt. And get your toes did. Ain't that how y'all say? 'I done got my toes did did.'"

Glorette smiled.

Victor was afraid of fingernails. He'd cried when he was little when Sisia came over and Glorette didn't know why. Sisia wasn't pretty. She was dark and her cheeks were pitted like that bread. Pumpernickel. What the h.e.l.l kind of name was that for a bread?

Sisia was a brick house, though. She liked to say it. A real mamma-jamma-36-24-36 back in the day. More like 36-30-36 now, but still Glorette heard men say, "Close your eyes, man, and open your hands, and you got something there, with that woman."

But it was the fingernails that Victor cried about. Long and squared-off and winking with gems or even a ring through the nail. Lynn Win had to bore a hole through the tip and hang the jeweled ring.

Claws. For animals.

But now only women were supposed to fight with them. You could scratch a man's face, but then he'd probably kill you. You could scratch his back-some men wanted you to dig nails into their backs, like you were out of control, and that made them lose it, their whole spines would arch and tremble. But some men, if you dug your nails experimentally into the wider part below their shoulder blades, the cobra hood of muscle, just frowned and elbowed your hands off. "Don't mark me up and s.h.i.t," they'd say, and then Glorette knew they had a wife or woman at home.

But Glorette just used her regular nails. Her claws. The ones G.o.d gave her. The ones Victor said were designed different from apes and chimps, and different from cats and dogs. "I don't think we ever dug," he'd say. "Not like badgers or rabbits. And we didn't need the fingernails to hold onto food or anything. So it must be just for fighting, but we didn't have teeth like the cats or dogs to bite something on the neck and kill it.

"I think they're just leftover. From something else."

Sere had a vein on his temple, from his hairline toward his left eyebrow, like twine sewn under his skin. When he played his flute or drums, the vein rose up but didn't throb. It wasn't red or blue under his brown skin, not like the white baby Glorette had seen once at the store whose skin was so pale that blue veins moved along its head and temples like freeways.

But Victor's temples were smooth and straight, though he thought all the time, read and wrote and did math problems and studied for graduation tests and played music and didn't just listen but wrote down all these bands' names and dates and song t.i.tles. He asked her once, "This one, the one you like so much. 'Poinciana.' What is it?"

She thought for a long time. "A flower? I don't know."

One crystal of salt from a cracker on her tongue. The cracker exploding like hard-baked snowflakes and pieces of rock salt on her molars. Then a white sludge she could work at while they walked.

She had to have saltines when she was pregnant with Victor.

Sisia's aunt used to eat starch. White chunks of Argo. Only one she wanted. That box with the woman holding corn. Indian woman. Corn turned into k.n.o.bs of snow that squeaked in the teeth. Like new sneakers on a basketball court Like new sneakers on a basketball court, Chess used to say when they were young.

The corn husks were green skin when they peeled off. The kernels milky white when pierced by a fingernail. How did that turn to starch?

The leaves of the coca wherever those Indians grew it. And how the h.e.l.l did it turn to little chunks of white? Baby powder cornstarch flakes of Wite-Out powdered sugar, not crystals, not cane sugar and mola.s.ses, like her mother would only use, like Louisiana. They cut the cane and crushed it in the mill, her mother said. Mules going round and round. Then the juice had to boil and boil and boil and finally sugar crystals formed. Diamonds of sweet. Diamonds of salt. On the tongue. But this chunk-which she picked up out the empty dryer drum while Jazen watched, her twenty in his pocket-she couldn't eat.

It had to turn to gray smoke inside her mouth, her throat, her lungs. Insubstantial. Inconvenience. The convenience store. Controlled substance. Possession of a controlled substance, but if you smoke it or swallow it if they pull up, you ain't in possession. It's possessin you. Ha. Sisia laughing. Chess laughing. Come on.

Let's go home.

He liked to pretend her couch was home.

Swear he would ask her to make grits. The tiny white sand of corn. Not crystals. Not chunks.

Call it cush-cush back home, her mother used to say.

Victor had eaten grits at his grandmere's house and loved to call it that. Cush-cush.

Victor was sleeping now. His math book open on his chest. Sere's brain. My brain? He had the third highest grades in the whole d.a.m.n school. His ramen was in her hand. The plastic bag handles were rolled into pearls by now.

She walked down the alley behind the taqueria, more for the smell of the put-away beef than anything else. Ain't no charge for smelling. She paused beside a shopping cart parked against the chain-link fence. The slats of vinyl worked through the fence. Sideways world. She smoked her last rock in a pipe the man had given her. Pipe made of an old air-freshener tube blown larger with a torch.

The chunk was yellow and porous. Small as aquarium rocks. The fish in the pet store went in and out of the ceramic castle. Her head was pounding. Maybe he gave her some bad coca. A bad leaf.

Someone was behind her. Sisia. Sisia was ready to quit for the night. Glorette was tired now. She had Victor's ramen in her hand.

She heard a voice kept up all behind front teeth. "Old crack-head b.i.t.c.h," the voice said. "See if that hair real now. One a them fake falls. Drink yo d.a.m.n soda? You ain't gon pop n.o.body now."

Not Sisia.

Fingers dug into her braid, at the base of her skull, and pulled hard enough to launch Glorette backwards, and then the silver handle of the shopping cart was beside her eyes, and the girl was tying her hair to the handle.

"Real enough," the girl said. "But this ain't the eighties. You ain't Beyonce. You some old J.Lo and s.h.i.t. You finished."

She was still behind Glorette. Her footsteps went backward. Was she gone?

Glorette couldn't untie her hair. Her hands shook. She was bent too far. Spine. So far backward that she could only look up at the streetlight just above. She felt pain sharp like a rat biting her heart. Teeth in her chest. A bad leaf? I tasted salt I tasted salt. A crystal. The teeth bit into her chest again. Just a muscle. Victor says just a muscle like your thigh. Flex Flex. She closed her eyes but the streetlight was brighter than the moon. Yellow sulfur. The sun. Like staring into the sun until you were blind, until the thudding of your heart burst into your brain and someone slid chalk sideways into perforated stripes across your vision until you couldn't see anything.

Andrew Brown

JAMES BROWN is the author of several novels and a memoir, is the author of several novels and a memoir, The Los Angeles Diaries The Los Angeles Diaries (Morrow/HarperCollins). (Morrow/HarperCollins).

the screenwriter

by james brown

The Las Palmas Behavioral Modification Center is located on the outskirts of Palm Desert, not far from its more famous counterpart, the Betty Ford Clinic, in the neighboring community of Rancho Mirage. Both cities are renowned for their spectacular eighteen-hole golf courses, plush landscapes, and million-dollar retirement homes. But water is not natural to this otherwise barren land, and without it everything but the indigenous snakes and lizards would shrivel up and die. In the summer months temperatures reach 110, often higher, and in the winter come the powerful winds that darken the sky with clouds of dust and debris. Life here stops where the water ends, and it's that borderline, on the cusp of survival and devastation, that strikes me as exactly the right place for the alcoholic and addict who spends his days constantly navigating between the two.

From Los Angeles, depending on traffic, it's a good two hours or more before you escape the congestion of the San Bernardino Freeway and turn onto the less traveled Highway 111. From here it's a narrow two-lane blacktop that cuts through Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage and takes you still deeper into the desert. The land is flat and dry and the distant mountains are steep and rocky. A few miles past the city of Palm Desert, you turn off the highway and onto another stretch of blacktop that twists and bends and leads you, finally, to the Las Palmas Behavioral Modification Center.

It's a sprawling, Santa Festyle structure made of stucco and adobe and painted white. Outside the main doors is a rock garden with cacti and desert flowers and a small waterfall. At first glance it looks like it might be one of those trendy, out-of-the-way desert spas for people in the know, a quaint hideaway for L.A.'s hippest, but as you come closer, when you step through those front doors, you recognize it for what it is: a hospital for the mentally unstable and those wrestling with their own self-destruction by way of alcohol and drugs. The latter group comprise the majority of its patients, though many of us fit neatly into both categories. Directly after my release from St. Mary's Hospital in North Hollywood, where I was treated for second-degree burns on both arms and a host of contusions from head to toe, I take up residence at the Las Palmas BMC.

I arrive in the late morning, accompanied by my best friend, Tim O'Neill, who's taken it upon himself to drive me here. It is also at his urging that I choose this rehab over dozens of more local ones. According to Tim, it has a high success rate with its patients and an excellent reputation within the film community for its discreetness.

Unlike the Betty Ford Clinic, there are no photographers lurking behind the bushes, no National Enquirer National Enquirer, no news cameras.Even executive-level alcoholics and addicts can pa.s.s unnoticed through its doors and return clean and sober with no one the wiser for it. Why my friend thinks I need protecting, however, I have no idea. My place on the totem pole of movie making is just a notch above the caterer in the last of the rolling credits. And it's not like my drinking or using is or has been any secret for quite some time now.

"This is the best thing for you," he says, as we climb out of his car. He drives a Mercedes SUV, exactly like my ex-wife's, only a different color. "Like it or not," he adds, "this is your home for the next twenty-eight days. Don't get any bright ideas and try to bolt."

Given that it's in the middle of the desert, I a.s.sure him that I won't be going anywhere in the foreseeable future, particularly in my present condition. It's been nearly two days since my last drink, and I'm beginning to feel really sick. I'm beginning to sweat. "Clean up your act," he says, "and as soon as you're out of here, I know I can get you some work. A lot of people still believe in you." I know what kind of work he means, the kind I used to turn down. TV dramas. Cop shows. Sitcoms. Of course now I'd be grateful to get it. As for Tim's mention of those who still believe in me, he's talking about my meteoric rise to the higher echelons of screenwrit-ing, followed by my equally meteoric descent years later when the drugs and alcohol took ahold of me. Tim, on the other hand, is a screenwriter turned TV producer, and he's at the top of his form by any measure. He slaps me lightly on the back. I can see the concern on his face.

"Are you okay?" he asks. "You're not looking so good."

"I'm all right," I say.

"C'mon, let's get you inside."

As with any hospital, the amount of admitting paperwork is staggering, and the Las Palmas BMC is no exception. Had I been in better health, the process may not have seemed so overwhelming, but soon after Tim leaves I feel the shakes coming on. I'm a real trooper, however, and instead of asking the head counselor if we could postpone these admission procedures until I can at least hold a pen steady enough to sign my name, I push forward. I follow the man down a long, wide hallway to his office where I take a seat across from him at his desk. He's around my age with thick gla.s.ses and a bushy mustache, and while I sit there, sweating, I wonder what he thinks of me. I wonder if to him I'm just another casualty in that long procession of drunks and addicts who pa.s.s through his life, few probably ever staying sober for any real length of time. It has to be frustrating, and I wonder if he cares anymore. I wonder if it even matters. He glances down at my arms, which are both wrapped in white gauze from the burns I suffered in the accident.

"What happened?"

"I burned myself."

"How'd you do that?"

"It's a long story," I tell him.

Reaching into one of the drawers, he takes out some sort of form, or questionnaire, and lays it flat on his desk.

"I have to ask you some questions," he says, "and I need for you to be completely truthful. How long has it been since your last drink?"

"About two days."

"How much, on average, would you say you've been drinking?"

"About a quart a day."

"Of hard liquor?"

"Vodka usually. Sometimes bourbon."

The mere mention of liquor triggers my thirst. I want a drink, I want it now, and I want it badly. My hands are shaking, so I hide them in my lap.

"What about other drugs?"

"Like what?"

"Let's start with heroin. Do you use it? Have you ever used it?"

"I've done it a few times," I tell him. "But not in the last few years."

"Intravenously?"

Needle users always look the worst, and it's a b.u.m rap because it's the most cost-efficient and expeditious way to get it into your system, offering the biggest bang for your buck. But I leave that part out, not wanting him to get the wrong impression.

"Sometimes. Yes."

"How old were you when you first started?"

"Heroin? I was fourteen. Drinking? I'd say ten or eleven."

"What about cocaine?"

"I've used lots of it. Too much."

"How much is that?"

"When I'm bingeing, I'd say three or four grams a day."

"And how often do you binge?"

I shrug.

"I don't really keep count," I say. "Maybe a couple times a month."

As we talk he is taking notes and checking off boxes on the form. He has on a sport coat and a red-and-whitestriped tie that he likes to tug on now and again between questions. I'm starting to feel nauseated. I wipe sweat from my brow with the back of my hand.

"How long is this going to take?" I ask.

He smiles. "What's the hurry?"

But he knows d.a.m.n well.

"I need something to steady my nerves."

"That'll be up to the doctor," he says. "Tell me, when was the last time you used cocaine?"

"On Christmas Eve."

"Any methamphetamines?"

"Only when I can't get c.o.ke."

"But you use them?"

"Yes."

At first, when he started asking these questions, he struck me as nonjudgmental. But as the process continues, and I admit to more abuse, he appears to grow irritated. He looks at me and takes a deep breath.

"Let's try another approach," he says, "and see if we can't save us both a little time. What drugs, Mr. Lewis, haven't you abused?"

I have to think about this for a while.