The West Village
CHAPTER EIGHT from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale
The West Village
8
People like to party. If you have what they want, they’ll do whatever it takes to ensure VIP status and gain a priority position in line.
“Why do they keep on offering me lines of coke they just paid top dollar for? It’s fucking weird,” said Petra.
Every time they scored, the Wall Street stockbrokers and their corporate clientele insisted they snort lines with them. She did not understand their methods or their newfound wealth.
“You know, we could have two horns and a tail and they’d still buy from us,” said Vincent. “You understand they’re not your friends, right?”
Petra’s knee-jerk reaction, as he cut through her fantasy du jour, was a hard shell of denial that dismissed all painful reality well before she became conscious of it.
“Maybe we should stamp a little red devil on our bags.”
It was her way of giving in to him while continuing her naïve daydream. Even as he insisted the clients were not her friends, she remained obstinate. She wanted to believe they enjoyed her company. She failed to grasp a simple fact. They sold high-grade, pure cocaine—cocaine obtainable in a safe place from unthreatening people. In contrast to the customers, she did not understand her power or how to wield it. Instead, she opted to satisfy a desperate internal longing for attention, approval, and acceptance. As a result, she disregarded the obvious. These wheelers and dealers were buttering her up just like any other client. If they could have expensed it, they would have taken her out for fancy dinners and traded stock options for product.
Her proficiency at self-deception was building momentum along another dangerous and invisible avenue. Unsuspecting, she spiraled further and further into a self-destructive, hedonistic and, more often than not, criminal lifestyle, where up became down, down became up, good became evil and evil became good.
Petra formed a solid connection with some Brazilian gangsters peddling pure cocaine from Bolivia. Word got around. The Leroy Street apartment became a drug boutique, peddling heroin from noon until six o’clock and cocaine from eight o’clock to midnight. For everyone’s sake, they did their best to separate the two antagonistic clientele.
It took almost a year of accepting a line here and there from customers for their cocaine addictions to kick in. Somewhere inside their brain matter, an invisible switch flipped to “on”, and they understood, for the first time, why people enjoyed doing coke and going out to clubs. Coming down off the stuff was a nightmare, and the only non-painful way that worked was a significant dose of heroin. Vincent continued to buy bundles daily. Because of a surge in demand, he updated his business model. He eliminated his delivery service and raised prices to include a safety and convenience surcharge. And, then, with one chance encounter, while he was enjoying some me time at a local watering hole, everything changed. Enter Kurt and Joanne, the king and queen of pure China White heroin.
Vincent had a side hustle fencing first editions for Fred. It had been going on for years, unbeknownst to Petra. Even though their overhead was low in the early years, rent and utilities still had to be paid. She never asked how he managed their basic living expenses. In the same way that she had created an impromptu business to ensure her independence, he, too, always found creative ways to maintain his financial autonomy.
The coke business belonged to her. She had oversight and control of the money and the product. The heroin business belonged to Vincent, and it was larger and more far-reaching than she had imagined. In her mind, he was still buying ten bag bundles, selling eight and getting two free. So, how was it they were doing at least four bags a day? Again, she didn’t give it a second thought.
As they became more interested in cocaine and clubbing, they required more heroin to offset its insomniac effects. There seemed to be an endless supply, and she knew from the books that it was not being purchased with cocaine profits.
“What the hell, Vincent?”
He just laughed at her inability to observe what was right in front of her face.
“Do you remember the day I asked you to go with me to the Strand to sell a book of poetry by Byron?”
She remembered. He told her that Fred had given it to him, that it was his most prized possession, but since they needed the money, he was going to have to hock it. In a dark room upstairs, a gangly bookworm examined the black leather-bound first edition with gold leaf lettering. He handed them a receipt. Downstairs, a clerk gave them one thousand dollars in cash and off they went. She thought it was a onetime deal.
He never felt right about helping his good friend sell classic literary works for a fraction of their worth but the money was irresistible and since Fred, cut off from his trust fund and addicted to copious amounts of heroin, was desperate and needed the help, he acquiesced.
Fred’s family was wealthy and had been for several generations. His grandmother had an extensive first-edition library. Each literary work had a correlating index card with its purchase date, cost, and pertinent details. Scouring the shelves for items he could lift and leave no visible indicators, he removed some very special cargo.
Vincent instructed dope-sick Fred to stay out of sight while he did the dirty work. Together they sold many rare editions, including a fifteenth-century Bible and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities in serial form. All this to say, when Vincent met Kurt and Joanne at The Whitehorse Tavern and discovered, through drunken conversation, that they had China White to sell, he had the resources to buy a substantial amount.
Kurt was German and proud of his heritage. He liked to tell them, and he told them over and over, that because he was German, he could walk into any German embassy, in any country, and demand a Heineken. It was his birthright. Did I mention he was German? Jesus Christ, Kurt!
Petra thought, “What are we entitled to? A Budweiser? Probably not. Maybe a swift kick in the ass if we act like Kurt.”
In the relationship, he was the sane one, infinitely more level-headed than Joanne. She was batshit crazy and a hundred times more volatile than Petra. He was over six feet tall, rawboned and in a perpetual off-balanced state. It was as if he was being blown about by invisible winds no one else could perceive. He had light eyes that shifted from green to gray to steel blue and sandy blonde hair. Joanne, tiny and stout, was a wiry collection of toxic muscle strands wound tighter than the inside of a golf ball. She was of Palestinian descent with long, thick, wavy black hair and eyes. Her energy was wild, unsettling, and off-putting.
Her one redeeming quality?
She loved cocaine even more than heroin. It was her drug of choice. The couples were a perfect for each other, a splendid match.
Kurt and Joanne had a small-scale smuggling business. They would fly in and out of Kathmandu, Nepal, looking just like all the other young hippie couples. There was a hiking trail they followed for several days, well beyond normal tourist treks, until they reached a village that manufactured heroin, which was then pressed into spheres, encased in condoms, and smuggled out internally. Pure, heavenly and delightful, it produced pleasant animated dream states, and was far superior to anything sold on the streets of New York City. Unlike street dope, it did not require heat, melting as soon as it hit water. The heroin was as effective when snorted, a real perk as the AIDS epidemic had reared its ugly head and was spreading like wildfire throughout the downtown art scene. Between the two of them, they could bring in enough heroin to supply Vincent, Petra and everyone they sold to for three months at a time.
Introducing such a high-grade product was devastating and their habits escalated to disturbing heights. They worried about each other’s safety while avoiding any bothersome concerns about their respective personal use. Vincent, monitoring Petra’s drug use, a constant new pastime of his, would beg her to stop doing lines and come to bed.
Kurt would implore Petra to stop trading coke for heroin with Joanne behind his back.
“Sche is lozing her mind!”
On and on they went, around and around in circles, hiding their use from each other through secret alliances, lying as they had always lied, just bigger lies and more frequent lies.
Freebasing gained in popularity, and Rockets was heavy into it. The purer the cocaine, the better the base. He upped his usual gram to an eight-ball. Petra hated selling weight. It was dangerous; it drew unnecessary attention and could lead to real jail time.
“I want you to meet my friend, Lance,” said Rockets. “He’s waiting for us a few blocks over.”
“Not a good idea, Vincent.”
Introductions to new customers made her anxious.
“It’ll be okay. It’s fucking, Rockets. Besides, it’s only an introduction.”
They lagged several steps behind him. For a big man, he moved with exceptional speed. Struggling to keep up, they watched him devour a box of fried chicken, chucking the bones over his shoulder, munching, chatting and laughing the whole way.
“How does he eat like that high on coke? You know he snorted a massive line before we left, right?…Are you sure we can trust him?”
Born to a heroin-addicted mother, Rockets was already a full-fledged member of the Methadone club by his late teens. His plethora of unhealthy habits had beaten him down, leaving him morbidly obese and missing his front teeth. Even with such a rough start, his capacity for joy and his inherent charisma were unparalleled. He was lovable, like a giant raggedy teddy bear.
The meeting went well with Lance. He was polite, dropped by at a reasonable hour, didn’t hang around and regularly purchased a half-ounce. Rockets telephoned.
“He wants the regular, but he’s in no condition to come get it. I’m going to need you to bring it to his loft.”
“We don’t make deliveries. You know that.”
“Give the phone to Vinchenzo…Hey, Vin, I can’t leave him. He’s entertaining and…well…we’re your top paying customers. I need you to do me a solid.”
On the cab ride over, Petra considered how many boundaries they had crossed with this guy.
Why couldn’t Rockets pick it up? What do you mean, he’s in no condition? It’s too much weight, and now we have to deliver?
She wanted to be home on the couch, hanging with her man, watching film noir videos on their new VCR. Instead, here they were at nine o’clock at night, in a pitch black, deserted neighborhood, without a soul in sight.
The enormous, ten thousand square foot apartment, with its sixteen-foot ceilings and solid black walls, looked more industrial than residential. Exposed pipes, of varying sizes, ran front to back, and side to side, along its entire length and width. Upon first glance, it appeared as if he used the space to house stolen electronics. Piles and piles of camera equipment, video and movie projectors, editing equipment, television sets, microwaves and toaster ovens formed bizarre aisles of merchandise. You had to navigate your way through them, the way you might wind your way through piles of magazines and newspapers in a hoarder’s house.
About two-thirds of the way into the apartment was a claw-foot tub with a curtain suspended around the back of it for privacy. As they approached, they discerned a silhouette through the opaque white fabric. Rounding the corner, they spotted Lance standing ankle-deep in six inches of bath water. A navy blue towel, decorated with tiny white sailboats, hung about his waist. In addition, completing the costume, he wore an admiral’s cap that threatened to fall off his head at any moment. In his hand, he held an elaborate base pipe, his conductor’s wand, which he used to punctuate key points of his monologue. The tub was his stage, the perfect set for his bizarre performance. Between cavernous inhales, he delivered an incomprehensible sermon to a group of adoring cult followers seated cross-legged on the floor in front of him.
Behind his enraptured fans were multiple televisions displaying live footage from surveillance cameras. Well aware that Vincent and Petra were approaching, he bolted from the tub and headed left toward a partitioned square, his makeshift bedroom. He threw on some pants and welcomed them with enthusiasm.
Money and product switched hands. To the right of the tub was a kitchen, more like a make-shift chemistry lab, complete with bunsen burners and heated glass flasks ready to turn white powder into crystalline rocks. Lance and Rockets initiated their freebase dance.
In an act of Providence, the only thing that saved Petra from death by free base was one strange thought.
“Since I smoke Camel non-filter cigarettes, smoking coke will be too hard on my already over-taxed lungs.”
Vincent agreed, “No base.”
They could see the insanity it wrought and could not afford that level of mental illness. Lance had developed a cocaine-induced paranoia which explained the layout of his place, his fortress of electronics, and his state-of-the-art surveillance system. Vincent continued deliveries to him, but Petra wanted no part of his peculiar brand of madness.
“No more client referrals from Mr. Rockets Redglare, please.”
Months later, she ran into Rockets at Danceteria. He sat at the bar, relaxed and in his element. Everyone at the club knew and adored him, always had, even before he achieved a certain level of fame. His performance as a cab driver in Desperately Seeking Susan had impacted his notoriety, much more so, than his role in Jim Jarmusch’s first film Stranger Than Paradise.
“Wow, Rockets! Fame suits you.”
In an unusual twist, he looked almost healthy. The cast and crew had taken care of him, kept him off the base, put him back on methadone and replaced his missing teeth with pearly white veneers.
“Yeah, I guess, except the chicks are all over me. It’s awful. They don’t want me, they want an actor, any actor.”
Petra understood. It was equivalent to the concern her customers feigned for her waning health. She had, by this time, received the memo. It was about getting them their white powder, nothing more.
“But I got these great new teeth.”
A big, beautiful smile. She loved this burly train wreck of a man. She saw his true nature, easier when he was off the freebase, and believed she could call him a friend. He saw her, too. They sighed, hugged and cried tearlessly on each other’s shoulders.
In the winter of 1984, Mayor Ed Koch waged war on the Lower East Side heroin trade.
He called it, “Operation Pressure Point.”
Cops inundated Alphabet City. Uniforms on top of crumbling buildings with binoculars looked for any sort of action. Plainclothes officers on the ground rounded up suspects. Total police occupation, for the good of the community.
What community? The druggies who paid minimal rent to live in uninhabitable cold-water flats? The squatters taking a reprieve from homelessness? Or the dealers, offering squalid rooms lined with dirty mattresses in out-of-the-way shooting galleries?
When Vincent held back on what Petra considered her fair share of the dope, she wandered over to Avenue D to score for herself. Serious heart palpitations began as soon as she reached Tomkins Square Park. There was nothing beyond it but wild west mayhem.
On her final solo venture, a pseudo-dealer forced her into a vacant building and manhandled her. As luck would have it, she wore bracelets halfway up both of her arms. Metal bangles and Tibetan prayer beads wrapped around both wrists. She weighed one hundred and ten pounds and joked that she needed all those bracelets to help gravity hold her to the planet. The sketchy guy, she should have known better, but desperation got the best of her, acting like a runner, handed her a couple of bags. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her into him with her back pressed against his chest. Lifting her off the ground, he had her halfway through an open doorway before her fight-or-flight response kicked in. She twisted around just enough to hit him in the face with all that metal, and again, she hit him hard. The hanging prayer beads ripped across his already bleeding face. Disoriented, he dropped her, allowing her a window to escape. She took off running for her life, only to discover that the predacious prick had ripped her off.
“Never again!”
It was for the best. Vincent was much better suited for the street.
When Mayor Koch claimed, while he was sitting over many days in an undercover van watching his guys do their dirty work, that he was protecting the people in the community, he was lying his ass off. What he was protecting was the real estate from the East Village to the river. Developers had slated it for gentrification and redevelopment. Wealthy investors purchased the buildings from the neighborhood slumlords, offering them the unheard-of chance to get out from under and walk away clean, with more money than their buildings were worth. Vincent and Petra watched as the value of the apartments in their Second Avenue building rose from under two hundred dollars a month; to upwards of twelve hundred dollars. They were fortunate. Rent control protected their apartment.
One reason they were so happy to trade with the guy who lived on Leroy Street was because of the renovations. The new landlord was buying people out and gutting their vacant apartments. It was noisy with lots of pounding, boom boxes blaring and dust-filled garbage bags lining the hallways. Even worse, every time they brought another apartment down to its original brick, all the cockroaches that had been living inside the old plaster walls scurried to a safer haven, the inside of their apartment.
“Ewe!”
At least once a year, Vincent and Petra went away for a “Cure”. They would find a beach, kick their habits, recuperate in the sunshine, soak in salt water minerals and pack on some weight.
This time, returning to the city after a month-long stay on the island of St Lucia and looking to get high, they found themselves, “Shit, out of luck.”
Kurt and Joanne had not returned from Nepal and Operation Pressure Point, now in its second month of operation, had altered the landscape. They were desperate to get high. After all, it had been an entire month. The only logical remedy? Vincent should cop some dope on the street. He did the smart thing and consulted Fred. The police had arrested him four times. If anyone knew the ins and outs of the present situation, it would be Fred.
“Listen, Vin, you’ve got to be careful. These guys are animals—they’re Nazis. I saw this one mother fucker hit a junkie in the throat to stop him from swallowing his drugs. Zero hesitation man, nightstick to the throat! You gotta go early. The new time is dawn. Don’t carry nothing on you. No works…nada! They’ll haul you in for paraphernalia. It’s all about the numbers and it’s open season on white guys. You don’t wanna to get arrested. Whatever you do, don’t get arrested. They’ll move you from precinct to precinct, cell to cell…whatever they have to do to keep you in as long as possible. Those motherfuckers want you dope sick, man. They’ll slap you around, humiliate you, threaten you for information. There’s no food, no nothin’. Be careful, be real fucking careful.”
Vincent suited up in his heavy navy blue winter hoodie the following morning and never came home. Petra got the call around 2 pm that Friday afternoon. He had been transferred by the time she arrived at the precinct. Somehow, she found him at another police station where he was waiting for transport to The Tombs. The desk sergeant confirmed they had him.
“Could you please give him this pack of cigarettes and this book?”
A paperback copy of Crime and Punishment. It was the first book she saw on her way out the door. Tan from the beach, healthy-looking, with bright blue eyes, a dazzling smile and so very Irish, she became an instant hit inside a precinct swarming with Irish cops.
The desk sergeant directed an underling to, “Take these back. Give ‘em to the Italian.”
She waited. Five o’clock, the magic hour passed, no arraignment until Monday morning.
An hour later, Vincent came out, chained and shackled to fourteen other guys, all scuffling along in a single line. No one spoke. Earlier, a giant Irish cop, at least six foot four inches tall, sat down next to her.
“What’s a nice Irish lass like you doing with a low-life scumbag? You must know you can do better?”
Tearing up, “When can I see him?”
The cop sighed and took off his big brother cap. He had seen it all before.
“We’ll be moving them in a couple of hours. As long as you sit here quietly and say nothing, you can watch him walk past. Deal?”
Convinced that she was your typical, beaten-down, Irish girl married to an abusive, junkie husband, he treated her with kindness. He had no idea that she was her man’s equal in low-life, junkie, scumbag living. As Vincent approached, she kept her ass in the seat, even though every cell in her body wanted to rise, wanted to destroy everything and anyone in a uniform, wanted to smash the chains to bits and run—run like hell, out of this helpless, out of control, situation.
He looked pretty good, all things considered. At least he wouldn’t have to kick dope on top of surviving three days in prison. She locked gazes with him. He shrugged his shoulders and gave her a big, crazy smile, which she returned through tears.
In the courtroom, the following Monday, the judge said, “Time served. You’re free to go.”
She brought him home in a cab. He was in terrible shape, dirty and bruised. He stunk. It was clear as a winter day that Vincent was not prison material. She helped him up the six flights of stairs and into the bath. After an obligatory mercy-fuck and a nap, he started talking.
It had been a difficult three days in The Tombs. The officers decided it was more satisfying and less disgusting to beat up on the Italian guy who wasn’t puking his guts out. Petra wondered if he thought much about his corrections officer father, while those assholes ridiculed and slapped him around. She never got an answer. It would have been too invasive to ask. The book and the cigarettes went a long way in the holding cell. He tore the book into fifteen pieces so everyone could pass the time reading. Anyone who needed a cigarette got one. On the bus ride to prison, the other guys let him know what an unusual sight it was, to see a woman waiting like that for her man.
The guy seated across from him said, “What the fuck? You some lucky motherfucker, man. My old lady be up in my crib, already fuckin’ some other dude.”
They stayed off the dope for about a week. The coke business was back in full swing. One of their new customers was a super fit, handsome man who any woman would find attractive, except for one tiny fact: he was a vicious mercenary. Petra was undeterred by that bit of news. Not that she was looking, she wasn’t. As a half-Irish Catholic and half-Irish Protestant, she had a strange genealogical war going on inside her, and she related to him, that’s all.
The IRA hunger strikes, with Bobby Sands at the helm, were all over the news. They were demanding prisoner of war status. She fantasized about being a gunrunner, but was unclear which side she should support. Illegal weapons seemed like the next logical business expansion and, thus, her interest in the mercenary. Nothing along those lines ever happened. It was another case of her imagination running wild.
The notion sprung from an interview she had with the CIA a couple of years back.
An ad in the newspaper read, “Central Intelligence Agency now hiring. Starting pay $100,000.”
She applied and received a letter to interview at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Anyone who has grown up overseas interests the CIA. Her Uncle Cornelius, the linguistics professor at Queen’s College, spoke 21 dialects of German and may have been an operative.
The Roosevelt Hotel had fallen into disrepair. You would think the CIA would have better digs. When she entered the room, the television was on, playing kid’s cartoons. The interviewer, seated with his back to the screen, motioned for her to sit on the edge of the bed, facing him.
Can you imagine a man asking a woman to sit on the bed, during an interview, today?
The distracting cartoons were visible over his shoulder.
She wondered, “Am I being punk’d?”
The invitation had been on official-looking stationery and their home telephone had been clicking in a weird, bugged sort of way for the last two weeks. She made it a point to be heroin and cocaine-free, in case there was a drug test and had become an absolute pain in the ass to live with. In an annoying and tedious drone, she nagged Vincent to stop talking about drugs over the phone.
“I’m pretty sure it’s bugged.”
To which he always responded, with a simple off-handed shrug, as if he were trying to conserve energy. He was not buying any of this bullshit.
The interviewer asked, “You are on top of a mountain in Central America. Tell me what is going on in the world.”
Between the cartoons, the weird-assed question and the fact that she had no idea what was happening beyond her immediate neighborhood, she replied, “It doesn’t matter what I think I know. No newspaper or journalist knows the truth. Everything we think we know is propaganda. I’m sure they will give me any information I need when I need to know it.”
Damn, the guy lit up. He liked that answer. Then he remembered who he was talking to and his countenance fell.
Somberly, he said, “Look, we’ve had to soften our stringent guidelines. We understand that almost everyone is snorting cocaine here and there, but heroin? We can’t accept it. It makes people vulnerable and easy to control.”
He confirmed her worst fears and her mind screamed, “I told you, Vincent! Goddamn it, the clicking, I knew it!”
She shook the guy’s hand, convinced that he was sad to see her go. I think we can all agree that none of that was ever going to happen. When she got home, Vincent, seated on the floor, organizing random piles, looked up.
She shrugged.
“They’re fine with cocaine. Apparently, everyone’s doing it. Heroin is a no-go.”
He handed her the kit with everything she needed to get high. Legitimate employment, be damned.
The mercenary had a friend from Lebanon, a young woman, their age, who had grown up in war-torn Beirut. He wondered if he could introduce her. She appreciated good cocaine and peddled brown heroin.
“Granted, it’s not as good as the dope you guys get. You can’t cook it, it turns syrupy, but it’s great for smoking. What do you say?”
Turns out that she, Nettie, lived right around the corner. How convenient. Since his arrest, Vincent had steered clear of Alphabet City. They stayed, more or less, clean if clean means only alcohol and pot. Neither of them could stand the idea of snorting coke without heroin. In their minds, there was not enough alcohol or Valium in the world to ease them off a cocaine binge. Nettie’s arrival changed all that. Her dope was crap, but it was fine in a pinch. They learned how to chase the dragon later that day. For a few weeks, they traded with her, smoked the brown dope off of aluminum foil, relaxed like in the old days and kept away from the coke.
Nettie had a stalker-like infatuation with Petra, who was not clear about what was driving her, but worked it to her advantage. Turned out, if she delivered coke to her and hung out for a of couple hours, without Vincent, Nettie would buy the cocaine at the asking price and give Petra the heroin for free. Win, win, everyone was amenable.
That is—until Kurt and Joanne’s return. Nettie lost her power play and, except for a few minutes, when she stopped by to score, Petra never saw her. Nettie seemed unconcerned. She was playing a long game. Nothing physical had happened between them, but Petra had tired of her constant attempts to groom and recruit her into bed. She was happy for a break, but remained civil, knowing that one day she would need the inferior product Nettie was peddling.
The dope smuggling travelers had a new cover, an adorable side gig, to make their intentions less obvious. This time, along with the usual three month supply of dope, they brought home six pure-bred Lhasa Aspö puppies. They had no intention of breeding them and were relieved to give Petra the cutest one. She named him Balu Bear. He was beige, with pure white highlights and an adorable under-bite.
“Oh my God, delightful!”
A couple of days later, Vincent got “the call” from Fred. The police had arrested him for the fifth time. They had just released him from The Tombs. He was dope sick and desperate.
“I need your help, man. Can you pick me up?”
Remembering how tough those three days had been, without the added burden of heroin withdrawal, Vincent rushed to his side, premium relief in his pocket.
If you would like to support my work, I invite you to make a donation. “Buy Me a Coffee” is a friendly metaphor, not real coffee. Each “coffee” is $5 and you can buy as many as you like. It is a one time much appreciated gift. Thank you for caring!
A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.
This autofiction (autobiography and fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.
It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.