Baby Huey: A Cautionary Tale of Addiction (34 page)

Past the wreck, I popped the clutch into ninth gear, set the cruise to seventy-miles-per-hour.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I’d remembered that from the NA meeting Blue and I attended, and each time I thought of her I said it to myself. I’d said it a thousand times.

* * * * *

At his house in Jacksonville, ten miles north of Little Rock, Danny’s fat wife struggled up into the truck and contributed to the cancerous fog with a pack of Winstons. Danny told her about the time he woke up in Wyoming and I’d taken the wrong highway and somehow ended up in Yellowstone National Park.

“Honey, I’m looking out the window at a herd of buffalo stampeding alongside the truck. Big, humongous damn things! I say, ‘John, where we at?’ His eyes wide, he say, ‘We in hell, Danny!’”

They thought that was hilarious.

Thirty minutes later I parked the truck minus the trailer on Wolfe Street in Little Rock and got out and walked up the steps to a gray building, where the newspaper said NA meetings were held Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

The meeting was already in progress when I walked in. I took a seat, listened to talk about the eighth step, the one about making amends to the people you’d harmed. That seemed a good way to get your ass kicked: “Yo, man, I can’t pay the money I stole from you, but I’m sorry.”

Zelda crossed my mind. It wouldn’t help matters apologizing to her, but I could do something for her boys. Clothes or something.

Feeling eyes on me, I looked up into the face of a man sitting across the room. Smiling at me. A black Kangol golf cap on his head. Black shirt under a black leather coat. Black silk pants. Black cowboy boots. Eddie Murphy? No.

Fifty?

He nodded. It was Fifty. At a NA meeting? I couldn’t believe it.

When the meeting ended I walked over and he hugged me before I could speak.

He feigned hitting me in the stomach. “Look at you, done got fat. Stomach all big and shit.”

“Man, you look just like Eddie Murphy in that black shit. I looked up, thought you was him switch-hitting in Little Rock.”

Grinning, Fifty said, “You know I don’t play that shit. Only thing sweet about me is…” He noticed two women standing close by.

I said, “Let me show you something,” and crossed to the door. He followed me down the steps, across the street to the truck.

When I unlocked the door, Fifty said, “What you doing?”

“Hop in, man. I’m running this action here.” He climbed up into the passenger seat and I got behind the wheel and tapped the dome light on. “I’m a trucker now, man.”

Fifty looked around before settling his eyes on a picture of Danny and his wife taped below the air brake valve. “Cat, you stole that man’s truck. I’m the hell outta here!” He reached for the door handle.

“Naw, man. He’s the guy who trained me. What kinda fool you take me for? I’m legit, man.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. Look at this.” I took out my wallet and showed him my CDL (Commercial Driver’s License). “Next week I get my own truck.”

“Where’s the white cat?”

“He’s at home.” I turned the key and the Caterpillar engine snorted and roared to life.

“What is this, a Peterbilt?”

“No, this is a Freightliner. This baby can pull fifty thousand pounds up a hill ninety-miles-per-hour.” A lie, but Fifty didn’t know that.

“I’m looking at you, but I can’t believe you. You’ve stepped up, moved on. A truck driver--I can’t believe it.”

I turned the light off, killed the engine. “I can’t believe seeing you at a NA meeting. But it’s all good, man. Keep going. How long you been clean?”

Fifty said, “Let’s talk over a cup of coffee,” and got out of the truck.

I thought he was going back inside the building, but he walked past it to a black Acura halfway parked on the sidewalk. As he was getting in the car, I said, “They got coffee inside.”

“Yeah, but they don’t have privacy. Let’s go to a Waffle House.”

“I’ll follow you in the truck.”

“C’mon ride with me. You showed me your new wheels, let me show you mine.”

The Acura was used, over eighty thousand miles on the odometer, leather interior, heated seats. We were on Interstate 40, the speedometer on ninety, Fifty bragging about the horses under the hood.

“BMW ain’t got shit on this,” he said. A radar detector on the dash started beeping, a red light flashing, and Fifty slowed down. “Do me a favor, will ya?” He grabbed the radar detector and handed it to me. “Put this in the glove compartment.”

A gun was in there, a long gun. A .38, maybe. The door wouldn’t shut with both the gun and radar detector inside.

Fifty said, “Put the gun under the seat. Be careful, it’s loaded.”

Instead I put the radar detector under the seat and closed the glove compartment. “You out the street life, why you need a gun?”

“Protection. Say, did I tell you about Cindy? She joined the Church of Latter Day Saints. Moved to Colorado.” He took the Maumelle exit and drove to the Waffle House across from the Shell truckstop, where Danny and I had stopped a few hours earlier.

“Oh, yeah. That’s a good thing.”

“Yeah, maybe the Mormons cure her incontinence.”

Inside, in a booth, over two cups of coffee neither of us drinking, Fifty said, “What made you decide to drive a truck?”

“Didn’t have much of a choice, man. I’d just come back from KC, living at the Rescue Mission, depressed. Got into a fight with an old bum over a bunk and he started talking shit about me being young and nowhere to go, how sorry I was, that kind of shit. Next day I walked to the unemployment office and the girl told me about a trucking company hiring inexperienced drivers. I jumped on it. Graduated first in my class. I got my uncle to thank for that. He taught me the basics of truck driving.”

“That easy, huh? Bum cracks on you and you pull it together?”

I laughed. “Man, I wish. It’s an uphill battle, but I’m working it.”

“Excuse me a minute.” He pulled out a cell phone. “Hey, baby, I just got out of the meeting…Yeah…Right now I’m sitting at Waffle House with a partner of mine, a good partner…You don’t know him…Yeah…Steak and eggs, I’ll get it…I’ll see you in a bit…I love you, too.” He put the phone back in his coat. “Bitches, they think you don’t buy em something you don’t love em.”

Out the window I stared at the trucks parked across the street, a few with their running lights on, smoke billowing out of exhaust pipes; the drivers probably asleep in their bunks.

Fifty said, “How long you been clean?”

“I asked you first.”

“Two months. You?”

“Three, four months, I don’t know. There’s no way I’ll ever do drugs again, so I don’t count. Every now and then I have a dream about getting high, that’s as close as I get. If I can catch a meeting once in a while, fine, but if I can’t, no problem. I’m not worried about using again because it’s not happening.”

“What really happened?”

“I let a girl die.” This was the first time I’d talked openly about Blue.

“An accident?”

“Not really. I wasn’t fucked up on that shit I would’ve seen it coming…stopped it. The shit drives you crazy, man, and you don’t even realize it. A train bearing down on you, loud as hell, and you hear it but you don’t hear it, just sit there on the tracks waiting for the wreck.”

“You loved this girl, didn’t you?” I nodded. “More than Doreen?”

I stared at a heavyset man behind the counter, headset on, nodding to the music, flipping somebody’s burger with his bare hands. In New York all the cooks wore plastic gloves.

I said, “Two different women. I loved them both. Messed up a good thing two times.” I poured sugar into the coffee, but didn’t drink it. “You know, one of the advantages to trucking you can’t run from yourself, plenty of time to think. You’re fucked up, you either deal with it, go crazy, or start using again. I choose to deal with it.

“Long before I put a pipe in my mouth I was fucked up. Several times I thought about hitting Doreen, thought about whooping Lewis, her son. Why? Because they weren’t doing what I wanted them to do, thinking how I thought they should think. It was all about me, what I wanted, when I wanted it. I wanted Doreen’s love, respect and attention, and I didn’t want her giving that to anyone but me, not even her son. Crack multiplied all the bullshit--the fears, jealousies, resentments, insecurities--to the tenth power, and then my world got real small.”

Fifty crossed his arms. “That’s deep shit…very deep shit.”

The waiter came with a coffeepot, saw the full cups and turned.

I said, “Not really. You want deep, read
Malcom X
, the autobiography. Alex Haley wrote it.”

“You reading books now?”

“Hell yeah. Forget the movie, this man reinvented himself two times. Petty criminal to minister. He goes to Mecca, discovers Islam accepts everyone regardless of color or ethnicity, and he reinvents himself again.”

Fifty waved the waiter over, ordered steak and eggs to go. “You’re a Muslim now?”

“Hell no. I didn’t make a good Christian. And I’m never giving up pork ribs. I’m just telling you about a helluva book, man. You heard of Walter Mosley?” Fifty shook his head. “Man writes damn good mysteries. John Ridley, another brother, wrote
A Conversation With The Mann.
A damn good book.” Fifty looked bored now. I said, “Tell me what’s been happening with you?”

“Nothing much.”

“What made you come clean?”

Fifty gave me a look, the same look when he stared out the window thinking the police were sneaking up on him.

I laughed at him. “What’s up, man? I know you didn’t wake up one morning and decide to come clean. What happened?”

His face loosened up a bit. “I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. Down in New Orleans with my unc he’s got this crack hoe living with him, a fourth his age, leading him by the nose. I caught her clipping his wallet--he’s out drunk--and I put a foot up her ass, tossed her out. Month later she comes back the day he gets his social security check, tells Unc I thirsted for her nookie nectar, her exact words. I tried to put both feet up her ass and Unc jumps on her side, calls the police. A clue to get to stepping. Driving, like you say, gives you a lot of time to think. It was time for me to come clean.”

The waiter brought Fifty a box and he said, “You ready to go?” I nodded and he laid a five on the table and handed the waiter a ten. “Keep the change.”

It was foggy outside, a light mist falling, the smell of barbecue wafting from the restaurant next door. Fog was a dangerous thing on the highway.

Inside the Acura, Fifty said, “My girl lives close by. I’ll drop this off, run you back to your truck.”

“I’m not in a big rush.” He backed out of the parking lot, drove up to the red light. “Man, what you doing tomorrow evening?”

The light turned green and Fifty drove across the bridge over Interstate 40, brisk traffic east and west.

“Nothing. Why?”

Through another green light. Left a block later, past a liquor store. Another truckstop across the street from it. Road Runner.

“I’m going to surprise my mother in the morning. She don’t know I’m trucking.” Down a dimly lighted street, shotgun houses on either side. “In the evening I’ll be looking for a ride to a little town down south.” The street was a dead-end. Fifty stopped in front of a white frame house, no lights on inside it. “There’s some boys down there I’d like to give some clothes. You take me down there I’ll buy the gas, pay you for your trouble.” The fog was thicker here.

Fifty nodded, the light from the instrument panel casting a red glow on his face, the paranoid look there again, along with something else.

“Yeah, I can do that. No problem. Chill a minute, I’ll be right back.” He turned off the headlights, opened the door and stopped. “I got a tape you might like listening to.” He dug between the seats and produced a cassette tape, stuck it in the radio, got out and closed the door. “Be right back.”

I watched him go inside the house, but didn’t hear a knock. The aroma of steak and eggs floated past when I rolled the window down. Fifty had forgotten the box in the back seat.

The tape started playing, Fifty’s voice instead of music.

Fifty had recorded the tape outside somewhere. I heard children playing in the background, the sound of traffic, wind whistling. The second I heard his voice I sensed this was going to be bad, something I didn’t want to hear.

“One-Forty-Fifth social club, out there on Pratt Road, that’s where I first saw her. Eighteen-years-old, gorgeous face, knockout body. She was on the dance floor in a black leather tank top, chain-link front, leather hot pants, leather sandals going up Barbie doll legs--getting down, out there all by herself, Karyn White and Babyface singing
Love Saw It,
all the men looking at her, wanting a piece of it, all the bitches jealous, wishing she trip.

“I strolled up to her table, ignored her ugly girlfriends sitting there, took her hand, kissed it, asked her if she wanted to dance. She hesitated, thinking Who’s this old cat slobbering on my hand? But I was clean. White silk shirt, white Derby, white silk pants, eight hundred dollar white leather shoes. Yeah, I was clean. Smooth, too. Average cat on the dance floor out there doing stupid shit. But I know how to dance. Each move she made I was right there, matching her step for step, Freddie Jackson singing
Rock Me Tonight
. Damn, that was a good time.

“Closing time, two in the morning, I offered to take her to breakfast. ‘No thanks.’ I asked for the digits. Tells me she’s in college, UALR, no phone in the dorm. A polite lie. So I gave her my number. Didn’t think she’d call, erased her outta my mind. Three days later she’s on the line telling me about this college cat broke her heart. That’s all I needed to hear. Payback pussy is the best pussy. But I didn’t come at her like that. I wined and dined her. Five-star restaurants, comedy clubs, concerts, shit like that.