The Speed Chronicles (10 page)

“What's next?” the ancient woman asked as she leaned against the wall outside of the bathroom, leaning on that shotgun as her cane.

“I'll let you know the next time I'm through,” I said as I started past them. No goodbyes. No last words. It was done.

I could see my breath hanging in the air as I walked through the living room and out the front door. The moon was big and brown in the sky. This was the kind of night where all kinds of things come out of the woods, and out of me. They chase each other in the shadows, a game of chess played up above and down below. The moves almost always come from somewhere else. We're just here on this rock to make the moves.

KENJI JASPER
is the author of four novels, including
Dark
, a
Washington Post
and
New York Times
best seller, and
Snow
. He is also coeditor of
Beats, Rhymes and Life
, a collection of critical essays on hip-hop culture. His writings have appeared in
Newsweek
, the
Village Voice, Essence
, and on National Public Radio. His latest release is
Inter-Course: Moments in Love, Sex and Food
. A native of Washington, D.C., he currently lives in Los Angeles.

amp is the first word
in amphetamine

by joseph mattson

I
was awakened at six a.m. after a long night of serious drink chasing down seven days of too much speed. Anvil head, brain ready to splatter, body wrought with ache and despair. Wanting nothing more than some shut-eye, against the ghostwhite face of an unforgiving, barbaric narco-crash, I was brought back to the shock of life by a telephone call from an LAPD detective looking for my best friend.

“No,” I croaked into the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Yes, hello, yes.”

“Is this William O'Sullivan?” His tone had the seriousness of a doctor with very bad news.

“This is he.”

“This is Detective Roy Mendoza of the Los Angeles Police Department.”

I looked at the clock, the numbers blurry and hopeless. I began to sift through the bitter fog of my consciousness, trying to piece together any broken frames from the grim cinema that had been the past week.

“My lawyer's name is …” I said by instinct, but gravity stopped the sentence as I fell headfirst into the closet door, catching the corner of my right eye socket on the knob.

“I'm looking for Jim Grace,” he said.

“Jim Grace?” He and I had parted just hours before. But Grace would take a bullet before doling out my telephone number to the police. My paramount amigo—a true brute hero, rare and holy in the order of what is sacred. Sacred in the sordid world of those who walked our line.

“He's not here,” I said.

“I figured. It's just that I can't … get through … to him.”

The way he said it—
get through
—made me nervous. I noticed blood draining from the spot on the side of my face that took the doorknob. “He's not … here,” I said, adding my own emphasis to see what kind of level Detective Roy Mendoza was on. I'd vicariously become a seasoned veteran in playing blue-boys and criminals, cops and fuck-ups—mostly in the shadow of Jim Grace.

“We tried his phone, but it's a dead end. Perhaps we have the number wrong.”

“Look, Jim Grace and I share a mutual distaste for the telephone.” I scrounged the floor like a suckerfish, looking for something to compress the wound, the red now rolling down my neck and soaking into my white A-shirt, my face already swollen from the indulgences in modern chemistry, unable to sort out the pain.

“It's in his and your best interest to get back to me. May I give you a few numbers, in the event that you see him?”

“All right, Detective Mendoza, give me the numbers.”

“Call me Dozer.”

“Dozer. Yeah.”

I took off the shirt and clamped it against my eye, stumbling like a drunken, bucking mule through the house until I found a roll of duct tape. I tore off a long piece and wrapped it around my head to hold the makeshift bandage in place. Then I crawled back to bed.

“He's just pissed because I have a pair of his wife's panties.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Long story. Another time. Help me with this,” Jim Grace said, wrangling a huge yellow tent, trying to stuff it into a little nylon bag. “I'm thinking about taking a trip.”

“Good God, you didn't lay a cop's wife?”

“Shit no. Although she is quite a dish. But I hate that bitch. His wife ruined my life.”

“Jesus …” I mumbled.

“Forget it. I don't have time, nor do I want to explain. Dozer—fuck. He lives perpetually in the past. It's just sad. Two percent?” he asked, handing me a quart bottle of milk.

“Thanks.” I grabbed the thing.

“Coat the stomach.”

“Grease,” I swallowed, “the wheel. Where do you keep them?”

“Keep what?”

“Them. The underwear.”

“Underwear?” Grace asked, as if there had been no mention of women's underthings.

“Mrs. Dozer's panties.”

“Oh, those. In the freezer.”

“Freezer? Why for?”

“Why what? Why not?”

“Keeping a cop's wife's dandies in the freezer is rather creepy.”

“You got a better idea how to preserve them?”

“Preserve …?”

“What happened to your face?” Jim Grace asked, as if he'd just noticed it.

“Roy Dozer beat the shit out of me trying to get your phone number,” I said. “Why do you need to preserve them?”

Grace lost color in his face, then it returned to its regular bluish flush. “He went to your house?”

I didn't like the way it sounded, in on the kill, same as the cop. Or was I just paranoid, askance from becoming a consistent dope-huffer? Jim Grace was possibly the only person I trusted in this old, bad world. “No, he didn't come to my house. I got coldcocked by the closet doorknob.”

“Oh. Put some steak on that thing.”

The flashing thought of a cool, thick cow shank slapped against my head, the iron scent of bovine blood and juices sopping my cheeks, dripping slowly down my face, made me feel chilly comfort in addition to horrible nausea.

“Are you coming with me? Jeez, these things. They come in these little yellow bags and once you take them out it is damn near impossible to get them back in.” Jim Grace started punching hell into the tent, shoving his foot in, trying his damnedest to make it fit. “You want a Tecate?”

“Yes. What's it for, anyway?”

“Limes are in the fridge.”

“What's the tent for?” I asked.

“Pico-Union.”

“Pico-Union? You turning vagrant or something? What do you need a tent for to go buy speed?”

“Man, how deep in are you?” he asked.

“How deep in are
you
?”

“Deep? This is just in case,” he said.

“Just in case what? In case we wander into the imaginary gnome forest behind the Food 4 Less, or decide to make a nice little home under the freeway overpass?”

“You smartass. It's to throw them off. You never know when the eye is out.”

“Well, it's not like we're going to buy crack,” I said.

“Man, fighting with doorknobs really fucks up your brain. You're not thinking right at all. We have to expect that they are always looking. We have to be safe, and we need to blend in.”

“Blend in? How are we blending in lugging around some huge tent in the middle of the day down in some poor-ass neighborhood with barely any grass to even pitch the stupid thing?”

“That, my friend, is exactly how we blend in. If we were hauling a tent trying to score, say, near the Arroyo hills or Griffith Park or Runyon, we'd be done for. There are reasons to have a tent around those places and we'd be worked over like two-dollar strumpets. But they aren't looking for anybody camping down by Pico-Union. There is no reason for it, precisely why we'll blend in. The obvious becomes the unobvious.”

He had me. Drug rationale. Still, it was a little extravagant.

“Still,” I said, “it is a little extravagant.”

“Bah. Stay here if you want. I'm going to do this thing.”

Don't go to Pico-Union.

Not because of the general odds of being caught in gang-war crossfire, or because it's one of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, policed by the notoriously corrupt Rampart Division, beset by crime and hopelessness, but because the best shit is down there, and by best, I mean worst. The kind of wicked stuff that simulates ecstatic invincibility to its most superlative, supernova echelon—while swiftly as a calculating eagle it grips in its icy talons your heart, your skull, still pumping, pumping and gritting the amp dance, and carries them off for the final sacrifice. Harv holds there. He's a rich mother, playing both sides of the border, he knows the game. He deals two floors subterranean in a squalid slipshod tenement built into a small slope, keeping south of the radar, and also has an estate in the Hollywood Hills, a mile above Franklin. But hell. If you're going to go get drugs, then really go get your drugs. Have some guts about it. Forget the Hollywood Hills. Go to Pico-Union.

Here, you don't have to deal with the crummy debutante princesses hanging around Harv's Hills house, the ones who mistake speed for even more ego and pageantry than they were already bequeathed from their knotty-assholed, smug Black Beauty–gulping Industry parents before them. The cycle, it just does not end. Not only those godforsaken women who drape themselves ridiculously all over the place, but worse, their Chauncey boyfriends who can't even hold their drink, let alone their amphetamine. The only thing worse than people who call the stuff “spizz”—naïve fools who can't come to terms with what they're doing and try to sugarcoat it as if it were kiddy candy, when it is exactly what it is: speed—are the inane, rich parasites who try so hard to be “down” by snorting with the proletarians, when what they really should be spending their easy money and family handouts on is holy pharmaceutically clean Dexedrine and Methedrine, or just go the other way and score some pure pressed opium, or, if they must go up, unadulterated Bolivian cocaine at the very least. Leave me and my drug of choice in peace. For my money—if I had any—I'd stick with the program.

Harv must've been up in the Hills, and Nettles, his skeleton wife, wasn't keeping shop down at Pico-Union, which meant she probably found out that Harv was banging some Westside Debbie back at the ranch. None of his “lieutenants” were there either. Nobody answered. Normally,
someone
is always there.

By this time we'd caught the urge and were facing irate collapse, due to expectation.

“What now?”

“I have to piss,” Jim Grace hissed, and stormed off behind the tenement.

I leaned against the building, nauseated by the idea of going up into the Hills, when I heard a fiery “Hallelujah!” burst from the urination.

“Look at this,” Grace said, returning. “Perfect.”

“Your fly's down.”

“Thanks. Okay, so check this out …”

Jim Grace had found a nice baggied chunk of ice in his customized underwear—a secret pocket sewn beneath the hangar for his testicles and padded against ball sweat with maxi pads—that he'd forgotten about. We sliced and crushed it even, two fat crystal caterpillars the size of joints, and snorted them behind a dumpster in a trash-ridden alley adjacent to Union. Instantly, my heart jammed itself up into my throat, my eyes blew wide. All dials and switches cranked. The raspy throat of the city screamed like ancient iron daggers against my eardrums and somehow it was sexy, invigorating, a mountainous delight. Compound wizards rewiring the brain to the tune of Armageddon. EVERYTHING GOES UP. I could hear a cricket jerking itself ten miles away. I was locked in.

It was a sun-destroyed four p.m. when we made for the bus. We walked dozens of blocks in swift minutes, the deltas of our chests soaked in long, wide Vs.

“We need your wheels.”

“Wheels, yes. And MUSIC. WE NEED MUSIC, NOW!” I yelped.

“NOT SO LOUD,” Grace said, loudly.

“Yes, you're right, push the catheter in …”

“Catheter?”

“Never mind. We need to get to the number 4 bus if we want the car.”

“We can't take the bus all the way,” Grace said.

“Into the Hills?”

“Yeah, that was all I had, for sure. We got lucky. I haven't changed my underwear is all. Shit, I'd have washed that chunk later this evening. Lucky, damn lucky.”

“Let's get the car,” I said.

We made it to the car in good enough time, just before the bus ride from downtown to Hollywood, to my house, might have made my cranium explode. There were bad vibes squaring us from all sides: plump brown mamas hauling bags of groceries and the tender elderly clutching lotto tickets—entirely evil in our peculiar state. Grace and I beyond tense, our innards gnashing at the walls of our skin, probably looking to our fellow passengers like two deranged deviant gimps who'd worked each other into a spastic, primordial lust fury and couldn't wait for some serious fornicating in the privacy of our own home. Or in the tent, perhaps, which Jim was clutching like a bomb whose lit fuse was about to expire. It didn't help that we were constantly whispering gibberish into each other's ears.