Baby Huey: A Cautionary Tale of Addiction (28 page)

I opened the door, then hurried to the bed and pulled the pillow over my head.

Alfred said, “This shit ain’t working.”

Mama’s voice: “Get up! Alfred needs you to help him with the fence in the backyard. What’s the matter with you?” I told her I had a headache and she said, “A headache never stopped a body from working. Get up!”

“This shit ain’t working.”

A chain-link fence, that’s what Alfred was putting up in the backyard--I thought he was talking wood and nails. Just looking at the post-hole digger and bags of concrete made me tired. He measured and marked the spots for the holes, then went and sat down on the picnic bench.

The sun heated my bare back as I dug one hole after the other. Mama stepped out on the back porch and asked how’s it going.

Alfred said, “Slow, but it’s going.”

An hour later I forgot everything--Spanky, Batman, the rocks under the pillow--and started concentrating on what I was doing. Alfred moaned and groaned each time he got up so I told him to tell me what to do. Near sunset thirty metal posts were standing tall in wet concrete.

I joined Alfred on the bench and he poured me a glass of ice tea.

“You remind me of my brother,” he said. “Once you get started, you’ll work. The trouble is getting you started.”
A compliment?
“Tomorrow we’ll finish up.”

Mama fried up catfish and homemade fries. Store-bought cole slaw. A lemon meringue pie for dessert. Alfred and I watched a football game on ESPN. A few minutes before ten, Mama left for work…and that’s when I remembered the rocks under the pillow.

Alfred knocked on the door just as I was falling asleep. It was almost seven in the morning. Mama would be home soon. Hours ago I’d crawled out the window, walked to Oak Street, and searched an hour before finding a dealer and buying three hundred dollars worth of crack.

“John?” Alfred said. We were on a first name basis now, but I detected irritation creeping back in his voice. “You got company. Again.”

Cindy, I thought, back to bawl me out for not leaving town. No. A man was sitting on the couch. Calvin, looking different, in matching dark-blue denim jacket and baggy jeans, the tags still on. Ratty tennis shoes, though.

“What’s up, dawg?” Calvin said, extending a hand. I shook it and he embraced me.

Something about his clothes? “Man, who you robbed?”

Calvin shook his head and grinned. “Check this out…” He started to pull something out of his pocket but stopped, stared at Alfred standing behind me. “I talk to you outside?”

As I followed him out the door, Alfred said, “Don’t forget we’re finishing the fence today.”

A red Ford Escort was parked in front of the house, a man sitting in the back seat.

Calvin pulled a bag of rocks and some money out of his pocket and said, “Dawg, I’m rolling. I got some baaaaadass bitches at my stoop waiting on me. Four of em. I need some help, dawg. You think you can handle two of em?”

“Who’s that in the car with you?”

“Uncle. I’m dropping him off.”

“Let me put my shoes on, I’m with you.”

“Dawg, you don’t need no shoes. C’mon.”

I told him to wait, and then went inside and got my shoes. Calvin was walking to the car when I got back.

“Let’s go, dawg. Bitches ain’t waiting all day.”

The guy in the back seat was wearing shades, a lollipop stick undulating in his mouth. He watched me hop on one foot lacing a shoe and then turned straight. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

Calvin got behind the wheel. I opened the door and started to get in, but then changed my mind, closed the door. Calvin got out and slapped the sunburned rooftop.

“What you doing, dawg? Let’s go! We got bitches waitin’ on us--get in the car!”

“Naw, I’ma stay here, help my old man put up a fence.”

Calvin started shouting, “A fence, dawg! A damn fence! You can put up a fence anytime. We got dope, we got bitches, money! Dawg, we got it all. Get in the car and let’s go!”

The guy in the back seat said, “Chill, Calvin.” His voice sounded funny. “Cat don’t wanna go you can’t make him go.” He stuck a hand out the window. “Ain’t that right, brother?”

I shook his hand, and he pulled me forward.
What the…
I pulled back, but he had a tight grip. Something sharp slid across my wrist.

“Remember me, motherfucker!”

Spanky! Oh my God, he defagged!

And he had a knife, a switchblade, thrusting it at me as I struggled to free my hand. Blood was spurting from somewhere. Spanky shouted for Calvin to help him. I put a foot on the door and pushed off with all my might. Spanky came out through the window, slicing the air with the switchblade. We fell to the ground. My hand was free. Calvin ran around the car, but just stood there.

Spanky yelled at him to grab me, but I was already on my feet, running to the house. Damn, the door was locked. I beat on it and shouted for Alfred to open up. He did, took one look past me at Spanky running toward the house and tried to close it…I pushed in past him, told him to hurry up and lock the door. Spanky got an arm through, the switchblade scraping the wall.

Alfred was moving too slow. I slammed into the door. The switchblade fell to the floor. Spanky squealed in pain.

“Motherfucker, you broke my arm! You broke my arm! You broke my arm!”

Alfred said, “Give him his arm back!”

I let off the door a bit and the arm disappeared. Then I locked it and looked out the window. Spanky stood in the yard stooped over, holding his right arm at the elbow, flexing his fingers. Calvin walked over and assisted him to the Escort and then they drove away. My chest hurt and I couldn’t steady my breathing. Both my wrists were bleeding, the right profusely.

Alfred, sitting in a chair, shaking, said, “This shit ain’t working. This shit ain’t working at all!”

At the sink in the bathroom, watching the water turn red, I thought,
I’m a crackhead.
Doreen was right.
I’m a damn crackhead!
The opportunity was there, all I had to do was get on the bus,
and none of this shit would’ve happened.

Alfred was picking up the phone when I came back with both wrists wrapped in gauze bandages. The right needed stitches, but I didn’t have time for that.

“Put the phone down, Alfred.” He was still shaking. “Please, Alfred, put the phone down.”

He did. “What if those boys come back?”

I trashed the switchblade and got a paper towel roll and started wiping up the blood. “Mama will be home any minute, Alfred. I don’t want her to see this. You hear me, Alfred? Mama don’t need to know about this.”

He looked twice his age now, smaller. “What if they come back?”

“I’m leaving town. They come back tell em I left town.”

He sat down. “
You
oughta call them, let them know you’re gone. Your mama and me, we old. We can’t handle folks running to the house with knives.”

“I know, Alfred, I know. That’s why we don’t want Mama to know about this. You think you can give me a ride to the bus station?” He cleared his throat. “I’m gone, Alfred, I don’t think they’ll come back.”

* * * * *

In Alfred’s red-and-white ’52 Ford pickup we sputtered down the highway, Alfred checking the side mirror every five seconds for a tail. He asked me why the boy cut me and I didn’t answer.

“Boy didn’t cut you for nothing.” He shook his head and said, “That dope worse than chains on your feet. You can knock chains off with a hammer and a chisel. Dope you need a miracle to knock that off.”

I got out in front of the bus station, got the suitcase out of the bed. “Alfred, please don’t tell mama what happened, okay? It’ll upset her.” He nodded. “Tell her I went out of town, tell her I’ll be all right.” He started to drive off and I shouted for him to stop. I reached my hand inside and Alfred stared at the blood seeping through the bandage. “Thanks, man.”

He didn’t shake my hand.

* * * * *

Downtown Kansas City, Missouri, twice the area of downtown Little Rock, triple the number of skyscrapers, several were faded brick relics built when buffalo and Jesse James roamed freely, triple the traffic and congestion, and quadruple the stench. Little Rock restricted dog food plants within city limits.

A new city, a new start. Find a room first, then a job.

On the corner of Truce and 11
^th
Street I caught a cab and asked the driver where I could find a cheap room. Less the seventy-dollar bus fare, I had a little over three hundred dollars in my pocket.

In five minutes the meter clicked to ten dollars. The cabbie said, “Here we are, the Ritz Motel, the cheapest in town.”

I took one look at the rundown, prison-gray-colored two-story building with cardboard in several windows and homeless-looking people standing in doorways, and almost changed my mind.

It was cold outside and inside the lobby, but the Arabic man behind thick Plexiglas was shirtless, a small fan blowing on his face. In broken English he said, “Nightly or weekly?”

The place smelled like a kennel. Weekly was a hundred and twenty bucks. I paid him and he gave me a key chained to a cut-off broomstick. My room was in back, he told me, ground floor, with a good view of a landfill.

A new city, a new start, I kept telling myself.

The door was open to the room number matching the key, rock music screaming from inside, and there was a naked white boy facedown on the floor, his dirty feet sticking out the door, an empty fifth of Jack Daniels near his head.

I thought he was dead, reached to shake him when a voice said, “He’s busted and disgusted, you’re wasting your time.”

I turned. A short, peach-skinned girl stood in the doorway of the room next door, barefoot, in faded jeans and a white shirt with small breasts sticking straight up.

“I thought he was dead,” I told her. Her light-brown hair was snap bean short, but she had a pretty face, big brown puppy-dog eyes, a small nose and thin pink lips.

Her hands on her hips, staring at the bandages on my wrists, she said, “I did, too. Too bad, isn’t it?”

What?

She couldn’t take her eyes off the bandages, which I’d re-wrapped in Lamar, Missouri, but still seeped blood. “Man up front gave me this room. I guess he made a mistake.”

“No, he didn’t. Doug was evicted three weeks ago. Where are you from? Mississippi?”

“Arkansas. Little Rock.”

She took her eyes off the bandages and looked in my face. “Is that right? You talk like a Mississippian. You just come to town, didn’t you?”

I nodded and then she brushed past me, grabbed the white boy by the ankles and pulled him out onto the sidewalk.

“You can’t pay you can’t stay,” she said. I told her he might freeze to death and she said, “It’s not cold enough. Do you have AIDs?”

“Naw. Why you ask that?”

“You’re emaciated.” She held out a hand and I shook it. “My name’s Blue.”

Her hand was soft. “John. How old are you, you don’t mind me asking?”

“Twenty-two.”

I started to explain the bandages she found so fascinating. Instead, I said, “It’s nice meeting you, Blue,” and stepped inside the room, an unmade bed there, dresser, and same cigarette-burned, dirty lime-green carpet as in the lobby--same dog pound smell too. No TV. I clicked off an old stereo next to the bed.

A new city, a new start.

Blue walked in and said, “You say you don’t have AIDs, so you must get high, being as skinny as you are. Crack, my guess. You don’t act like a smackhead. I got half on a quarter if you want to throw in with me.”

During the ten-hour bus ride I’d sworn to myself a hundred times never to touch crack again. It was the root of all my problems. Never in a million years.

“How much is a quarter?”

Blue said, “Twenty-five dollars,” and laughed, revealing perfect white teeth. “How far is Little Rock from Mississippi?”

* * * * *

I followed Blue to a room upstairs. She knocked on the door. The loud talking inside ceased and someone said, “Who you want?”

Blue said her name and a man peered out at us through the window before opening the door. This room was larger than mine, with a TV, a porno flick showing, thick marijuana and cigarette smoke in the air.

Four men and a woman sat on a bed before a small table littered with beer cans and wine bottles. One man had a straight in his mouth, his head tilted back, his cheeks inflating and deflating.

The man at the door told us to have a seat. The loud talking resumed. I sat down in a metal chair next to the bed.

Blue remained standing and said, “Squeaky, let me get a quarter.”

Squeaky nodded and crossed to the bathroom, left of the television, and closed the door. All a sudden the man sucking on the straight jumped to his feet and started jumping up and down.

“Get em off me, somebody!” he screamed. He flung the straight across the room. “Get em off me! Get em off me! Somebody, get em off me!”

The man closest to him snatched off his baseball cap and started hitting him with it. The other two men and the woman rushed to the far side of the room, one man shielding the woman in front of him. I stood up and stepped back.

“I got em,” the man with the baseball cap said. “I got em all!”

He must have missed one or two because the man continued screaming and started scratching all over.

“Get em off me! Get em off me!” He tried to pull a gray wool sweater over his head and fell to one knee.

Squeaky came out of the bathroom and said, “What the hell going on?”

The man stopped screaming, the sweater halfway over his head, and fell face first to the floor.

The man with the baseball cap said, “Dennis? Dennis, you al’ight?”

Not a peep from the man on the floor.

Blue walked up, knelt down and held the man’s wrist. When she looked up she was grinning.

“He’s outta here,” she said, as if she were calling a play at home plate.

“You mean he’s dead?” That was the other woman in the room, looking horrified.