Hot Pink (11 page)

This puffy-eyed woman with a bluish dewlap used to order three mugs of coffee at a time every weekday morning at the Highland Park Denny's. When servers gave her looks or told her that refills were free and unlimited, she'd answer at a volume that begged overhearing, “I have trouble waiting.” One time I was seated in the booth beside hers and I noticed a white, rectangular pill lying on its side next to one of the mugs. I was all but certain it was a bar of Xanax, a top-three favorite, but I couldn't read the markings. The woman caught me squinting, and I could see by the way that she pinkened and slouched that she thought I was judging her. What did I care? I guess I cared a little. I said, “Is that a Xanax bar?” Then she started talking fast. She didn't love Xanax. It allowed her to sleep well and made her less anxious, but the trade-off was fogginess and boring thoughts, and her boredom made her sad, so she'd chug down coffee till her brain started firing, but then she'd get anxious all over again and require more Xanax. “Unfixable,” she said. I nodded sympathetically and looked her in the eyes and, before I'd even gotten the French toast I'd ordered, she'd said she'd gladly trade half her sixty-count bottle for a quarter ounce of weed to anyone who'd take it.

My cost on a quarter was just thirty dollars, and Xanax bars, at that time, went for six apiece, minimum. It was nonetheless dim to consider the offer—I didn't know her—but middle-aged women seemed harmless to me, and I'd been selling marijuana since my freshman year of high school without any trouble.

We settled our bills and went to her minivan. The bull's-eye on the SuperTarget sign across the strip mall flickered, and the woman, eyes averted, digging around in her purse for her keys, asked me, “Can I feel your muscle?”

She had to be fifty-five, sixty years old. I bent my arm and felt stupid about it. Her fingers, which she'd managed to get into my jacket and under the sleeve of my T-shirt, were icy. “You're strong,” she said. “Do you want to smoke with me?”

“No,” I told her.

Whenever I smoked marijuana, I'd stare, and whatever I'd stare at would seem important. All images became imagery, sophomoric imagery, the symbolic meaning of the non-symbolic things on which my eyes fixed wholly independent of their actual functions. Cigars not just cocks, but primal cocks—the primal cocks of the patriarchs. The last time I'd smoked pot was a year before; a girlfriend had convinced me I could like it again, like I'd used to in high school. When I woke at my desk a few hours later, the new scrolling message on my monitor read
IMAGISTIC METAPHORS HEMORRHAGE ANALOGIES WITHIN THE CLUTCHES OF MY HEAVY HANDS
. Before I could delete it, the girlfriend saw it, took hold of my shoulders, and told me, “That's trippy plus also creative,” then detailed the ways it was trippy and creative, and I counted off a week before breaking up with her. In short, marijuana made me hate everything, but I'd long since quit explaining even that to anyone. Most people, when you tell them you're not into their vice, they either assume you're afraid or don't like them. If you're selling them the vice, they know you're not afraid. Those few who do take what you say at face value see you're different from them, which undermines trust. And my bags were light—I made ten “eighths” of every ounce. If someone ever pulled out a scale, I'd be fucked.

Still, I could have said more to the puffy-eyed woman to nice up my “No,” and normally I would have—I'd have said I had an exam in an hour, or was heading to my parents' house to drive them to the airport—but I didn't feel like lying. That muscle-squeeze had siphoned off my will to accommodate. Nice wasn't in me.

“Really?” said the woman.

“Really,” I said.

A throaty, clogged sound joggled her dewlap. “It's okay,” she said. “It's really okay. I understand I'm disgusting. I'm old. I disgust you.” Tears cut trails through her blush and powder. She did disgust me. Her weeping was cunning. She was cueing me to tell her she was young and attractive. What she wasn't doing, though, was backing out of the deal.

The summer I'd worked for him, cold-calling prospects, my father, an insurance man, had more than once warned me, “Brusqueness doesn't help anyone's sales.” About that he was right, but the distinction between
not helping
and
hurting
was, I was thinking there in the Denny's lot, a pretty big one, at least when it came to selling drugs.

The flesh-colored tears clung to some fuzz along the woman's jawline, then trembled, elongated, and splatted on the pavement. After three or four splats, she saw she'd failed to cue me.

“You're cruel,” she said. “A cruel person,” she said.

I watched the wet spot widen on the pavement.

“A cruel person,” she echoed. She had had this conversation before. The big distinction between then and now, apart from my being an entirely different human being, was that the last guy had insisted he was not a cruel person. She couldn't figure out what to say to him at the time, but as she'd driven away from him (I could see her chewing her waxy lower lip, jerking her head in tiny, neck-cramping nods), she'd come up with a retort that she'd hoped to use the next time—this time. But I'd fucked it all up for her by failing to protest against the accusation, and now she was stuck repeating herself. “A very cruel person,” she said. “You're cruel.” By the seventh repetition—by then she was whispering—I started, despite my disgust, to feel bad for her, guilty for repelling whatever small victory she needed to save the face she'd lost the last time.

“Hey, look,” I said. “I'll have a cigarette with you.”

“Only because you feel sorry for me.” She said it through her teeth.

“Do the cruel,” I said, “feel sorry for the crying?”

“No,” she said. “I guess they don't.” All at once, she stopped her crying. “You're a strange kid,” she said. “You're clever,” she said, and, tagging my shoulder with a friendly open palm, she told me, “Have your ciggy while I roll up a j-bird.”

Her minivan's interior smelled of scented kleenex. She pulled a sleeve of papers from a cassette slot in the console and slipped her body sideways through the space between the seats, her forehead smearing across my jaw as she ducked and contorted toward the bench in the back, where the windows were tinted. “Sorry,” she said. I stayed shotgun and pulled two “eighths” from my jacket. I emptied one baggie into the other and handed both back to her. She rolled a small joint and licked it shut, her tongue long and coffee-stained, and fired up her lighter. She said, “Should I call you when I get the refill?” I told her my number and she repeated it back to me while writing it down, then continued to write, singsonging, “For wee-eed.” Once she'd finished her joint, she tapped thirty pills from an amber bottle into the empty baggie I'd given her, and drove me to my car, ten spaces away. Just like that, I'd made a hundred and fifty dollars.

Fifteen minutes later, traffic-stopped for something, the dunce got arrested for possession. The next day, detectives came by with a search warrant (quiet suburb, bored police force). I'd been waiting for a pizza to be delivered, and I opened the door without checking the peephole. My drugs were stored in my box of comics and there was no way to flush them—I was made to sit in plain view on the couch—and there was no way the cops would fail to check the box, so I told them where to look, thinking my willing cooperation might minimize damages. I told them that, too.

“In your dreams,” one said. “This ain't some movie. We don't like you, and that haircut.”

“It's a real stupid haircut,” another one said.

They trashed my beanbag, sifted the styrofoam filling for pills. Then they dumped my comics out of their dust bags, ripping the covers off both my mint-condition
Lobo
#1s—my first investments. At age twelve, I'd bought two so I could eventually sell one and still have my cake. The purchase occasioned a fight between me and my father. He didn't like the idea that I saw comics as an investment in anything other than my “imagination.” From then on, I had to use my allowance to buy them, and my collecting behavior ended pretty quickly, and all for the better—my father'd been right.
Lobo
#1 was a huge bestseller. There were thousands of them in plastic dust bags with cardboard backings, in cardboard boxes in closets. The last I'd checked, they were worth less than half the price on their covers.

The cops found the Xanax and three “eighth” bags—luckily all I had at the time. The lawyer my father hired—old friend, deep discount—had me check into a six-week outpatient rehab program at a clinic in Highwood. They all knew I was faking, except the psychiatrist, Dr. Manx. I'd had Manx as a professor during the previous semester—Behaviorist Methodologies: An Introduction—and he liked me. He told me it was clear to him that I was angry, and that I suffered from chronic stress. In court eight weeks later, I pled guilty to misdemeanor possession, the lawyer argued I was a benzo and marijuana addict, and Manx said I used drugs in order to manage my anger and my stress.

I was a “self-medicator,” Manx told the judge, but I was twenty years old, my whole life ahead of me, and now I was clean.

I was fined $2,500 and given three years probation and a one-year prison sentence suspended on the condition I underwent weekly urinalyses and attended a twice-weekly anger-management group at the locale of my choice. I picked Highland Park Hospital. It was nearby and I could piss in their cup on my way out. Plus, the brochures said it was behavior-focused, and I liked B. F. Skinner. I'd been reading him steadily ever since the Manx class.

At the start of the first meeting, Jane Tell sat across the group circle from me. She kept her eyes on her knees, her hands in her lap, and her parted red hair fell thick past her shoulders. She scratched at her palms nonstop. Anyone else so slumped and ticky would have read timid, but Tell seemed spring-loaded, extra-alive. It was impossible not to watch her.

The therapist, in his homemade sweater, spoke the stilted-mushy English of a Martian diplomat. He told us the meetings were broken in two. The first hour was experiential, meaning topics weren't scheduled and we would talk to one another about whatever was on our minds. The second hour was instructional. “Not that I am some kind of pedagogical heavy,” he said, “but if you will be patient with me, I think I can teach you one or two things.”

Aside from Tell and me, there were two women and three men, squint-eyed office workers in their mid-to-late thirties. They had imitation-leather day-planners and adenoidal difficulties. Their sense of humor was desperate, their jokes delivered in the voices they suppressed during staff meetings. They fell apart for the spoken italic. Indignant up-talking left them in stitches: the
just… okay?
punchline; the biting sarcasm of the
yeah, right!?
The last one of them to self-introduce to the group closed with the phrase, “And kicking the fucking copy machine when no one's
fuck
ing looking, I'll tell you what,” and they all laughed wildly at the enunciation of the second curse's first syllable, the fluorescent overheads splotching oily patches on their over-pink faces, high shine in the spit-creeks of their off-white teeth.

Tell said she was nineteen and had dropped out of art school. She lived in Deerfield with her mother and stepfather. She called her mother “Peggy” and her stepdad “the Otter.” She fought with them viciously, and they had threatened to kick her out if she didn't get treatment.

I told them I was a junior in college and I'd go to prison if I didn't show up. A few of the office workers expressed discomfort. The therapist praised them for their openness and referred to me as a “mandated client.”

“Mandated clients,” he said, “tend to be resistant to the group process. Helping them to feel a part of the group is one of the activities that can make the group stronger and more helpful to all its members. We welcome you, Ben.”

During the break, Tell approached me at the refreshments table. She bugged her eyes out and nodded me toward her.

“I'm Ben,” I said.

She said, “I know your name. Don't be such a Steve.”

“What's a Steve?” I said.

“No,” Tell said. “Ask something braver.”

“You want to hang out?”

“Isn't that what we're doing?”

“Elsewhere,” I said. “In the future. On a ‘date.'”

“Don't do it with air-quotes.”

“On a
date
,” I said.

“I've never been on a date.”

“Few have,” I said. “Let alone with me.”

“Where would we go?”

“Denny's,” I said. “Or the railroad tracks. Maybe even Denny's
and then
the railroad tracks.”

“That's some fancy date.”

“You…”

“What?”

“I'm a…”

“What?”

“I'm trying to come up with something to make you laugh, but we keep saying ‘date,' and I'm a mandated client, and I'm spending all this energy resisting the reflex to shoot for a pun.”

“‘Let me take you on a really manly date,' or something.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You deserve a lot better.”

“That's nice,” Tell said. “It's a nice thing to say. Probably you can just skip all the funny now and offer me a smoke.”

The designated area, on the parking-lot sidewalk, was a bus-stop shelter with columnar ashtrays. I sat on the bench and handed up a Marlboro—Tell remained standing. She bent toward my lighter, hair tucked behind her ears, cigarette lipped. She touched her fingers to my knuckles to guide the fire. Free from the dinge of those overhead fluorescents, I could see she was perfect, except for a round, red scrape on her cheek. Before I had a chance to say anything, she was standing up straight again, offering her hand. I took it, held on. She said, “It was nice to meet you, Ben.”