Текст книги "The Marijuana Chronicles"
Автор книги: Jonathan Santlofer
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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 13 страниц)
Stepping out through the gate, Crash recognized where he was. Prospect Avenue and 149th Street. The hardware store, boutique, dress factory, and pizzeria that used to make up the block were gone, replaced now by a … “superette,” an auto parts store, and a restaurant of some Mexican persuasion. (Across the street was the same story. Whole buildings were gone, replaced by houses.) Walking over to Fox Street, he used to see rows of five-story tenements all the way to Avenue St. John. Only right now he couldn’t. Fox Street didn’t have buildings. It had funky two-story houses. Small green lawns. And that was as far as the eye could see.
It was Fox Street. But it wasn’t Fox Street.
“What the fuck?” he said to a woman who paused to look at him. All of a sudden he noticed the people, many of them looking at him as he went by. Black people, and some people that could’ve been Boricuas … there were a lot of Mexicans. Their clothes looked big, jeans baggy, clumpy fat sneaks, and then the fucking Yankee caps, so many damn Yankee caps, so many backpacks, it was like a dress code. The cars! What happened to them? They looked swollen, puffy fat monsters, stubby and gray. There was a general sameness about them.
He crossed the street, checked street signs, shook his shaggy head. He was in the South Bronx. But what South Bronx was this? It was home, and not home. It was Southern Boulevard, but with different stores and shops. A cluster of teenagers by a stoop, all wearing the same kind of big jackets and leather baseball caps, reminded Crash of gangs. Savage Skulls? Nomads? No way remotely they would dress like that, but it made him wary. Whatever was going on, this wasn’t his neighborhood anymore.
Back to the corner where the entrance to the subway still was, and there, a few feet away, was a newsstand, a funky metal booth with a guy inside selling newspapers. He picked up a copy and looked at the date: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2012.
Is this a joke? He checked the dates on the other papers and magazines. Words and pictures made him dizzy. Crash closed his eyes, caught his breath. Leaned against the cool metal of the kiosk’s side. Opened his eyes. The mad whirl of buses and cars and people all around him. Not real. Real enough.
Little bits were coming back to him. They were moving the stuff, just to be on the safe side. And Pachuco would take some, and Wage and Daniel and Mike, and then they got into a fight because a few days before, Wage had been packing product for sale and came across the briefcase full of Moon Dust. He figured it was product and that’s how some of it ended up out on the street.
The Moon Dust! The special glittery weed! Crash had started smoking it! He remembered being in his bedroom, smoking the Moon Dust … and then, FLASH … he started walking up 149th Street. Where was Daniela’s Hair Salon, and the cuchifritería that used to smell up the block with its fried pork rinds in the window under a lightbulb? PS 25 was still there, but he didn’t recognize anything on the way to St. Mary’s Park. Going there unlocked a whole mess of memories. What kind of stuff was this, this Moon Dust, that made his real life seem like murky images of a remembered dream?
Up the big hill. The spot was still there, the stone steps leading down to the street and the projects, all of it coming to him in driblets. Sure, he had been busted before. Seven ounces was the safe side, and he and his boys did a wild dance with the stuff. It was skill. It was the fucken Puerto Rican samba. And he didn’t care what anybody said about it, these lambe-ojo hijo de putas—what Jose “Crash” Mendoza was doing was resistance. Was the righteous war. Was a fucken crusade against an unfair, oppressive, and racist system. Being against it was as Puerto Rican as … mofongo, damnit. It was an act of survival to sell weed in the devil’s city. He and his boys were a tight band of resistance! Sitting around the pad on St. Anne’s. Hitting Honey Bear bongs and tripping on black-light posters of black Amazonian chicks while blaring the Funkadelic.
This one day they had cleared the bushes twice already and Crash had just sent Mike back to pick up some more product. No cops in sight so they were feeling pretty loose, just smoking cigarettes and talking with some dudes over by the benches. There was this white hippie dude there, popped out of nowhere. Young, long-haired, patched-up jeans. Just when they were clear that they were all on the same resistance wavelength, the guy got down to business.
“I have an offer to make you, bro,” he said. “I represent a select collective of heads who have cultivated a rare and precious weed.”
Now Crash was open to this. He had heard about honkies coming up here to make drug deals. Sometimes they wanted to buy. Sometimes they were offering a new connection as a way to establish a presence in the Bronx, like what happened to Jelly Boy and his crew when they started getting weed from the Jamaicans.
The hippie started by talking about some pothead collective, but ended up going on about “The Doctor” and how he was rich and infiltrating the system from underneath and he was making Crash an amazing deal where Crash would get double the product and make double the bread. And as a sample, the hippie produced a small leather bag … and a briefcase …
Crash unzipped the small leather bag. There, wrapped in plastic, were some of the sweetest buds he had seen in a while. Bright green, looked fresh and hydroponic, but there was something else, something glittery. At first he thought it was the plastic, but no. There was a silvery, sparkly dust on the stuff.
“Hey, wild! What kinda psychedelic shit is that! Whass this shit on it, man?”
“It’s the future. Let’s just call it super hydro. Normal weed, you gotta smoke more to get the same high. Moon Dust builds up in your system. It has a trigger effect, like acid flashback. Except,” the hippie started to laugh, “it’s no flashback. It’s a flash forward. It accumulates, it goes farther. Until finally you cross a barrier. You time travel, bro.” The hippie’s eyes were wild and feverish. “You try the stuff. There’s a card in the bag. Call the number. The Doctor is always reachable,” the hippie laughed, “even when you’re smoked. No matter what time it is.”
Words. Slapping of hands. Then the hippie walked off into the bushes, and vanished.
Thirty-eight years later, the place was virtually the same, even the projects were still up. But there were no dealers, no action. There was no group of dudes hanging out on the benches, playing bongos and congas. It was quiet and lonely. A Mexican kid and his father kicked a soccer ball around. People strolling. Crash sat on the hill and looked down on the green stillness. This wasn’t from his imagination. None of it was. It was the Moon Dust.
The Doctor is always reachable. That cackly hippie laugh. No matter what time it is.
Crash stood up, reaching for his wallet. FUTURE TECHNOLOGIES INC., the card read. He walked off the hill and headed down 149th Street, toward Third Avenue. He kept looking for a pay phone, but he didn’t see any, all the way to Third Avenue. A busy hub as always; Crash tried to take in the changes. Hearns, the big department store, was gone, giving way to a ton of small stores, including phone shops … phones, those little things are phones!! But they’re so small … Finally found a pay phone there by the subway entrance. He popped in some quarters and punched the number out on the keypad. There was a series of clicks. A strange buzzing sound. A slow set of rings. Someone picked up.
“Future,” a woman’s voice said.
Crash was breathless for a moment. “The Doctor,” he said. “I want to speak to Dr. Robert.”
“What portal are you?” she asked.
“Portal? I don’t know.”
“What was your method of transit?”
Crash thought a moment, and grinned like he was getting it. “Moon Dust,” he said.
“Oh, right, sorry! Hold on.” There was a click. Crash waited, feeling woozy. He was making a phone call while tripping.
“Hello, this is Dr. Robert.” The voice was old and gentle, the kind of voice Crash had heard in an Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice commercial. “And how do you feel right now, Mr. Mendoza?”
“You know me?”
“But of course. You’re the only person in time that has this number. You’ve gone thirty-eight years into the future. Moon Dust is a cheap, simple way of getting people into the time stream. To violate it, corrupt it. Temporary, but effective as a means of infiltration.”
“I don’t understand,” Crash said, his head starting to spin.
“Time travel is strictly regulated and controlled. It’s against the law for people to travel through time. They fear that people going back in time can find a way to put their system out of business. Create a resistance. Fight the system.”
“I’m all for that,” Crash said. “But—”
“There’s so much more to tell you, but right now you have to keep moving.”
“What?”
“Phoning through time is traceable. Take the subway to Union Square. Whatever you do, don’t get arrested. I’ll send someone to you to insure you fade.”
“Arrested? Insure I fade? What? Hello?” There was a clicking, then, “Please deposit twenty-five cents for the next five minutes or your call will be interrupted.”
“Twenty-five cents?? Hello?”
The line went dead.
The subway station looked mostly the same. Crash always had tokens on him but there was no coin slot. He watched people going in through the turnstile. They were swiping a card. Over by the wall, he saw a lady stick dollar bills into a machine. (At least the dollar bills were the same.) She was touching the screen. Huh!? After she left, he checked it out, even touching the screen, but decided to take his chances with the token-booth clerk. The white-haired black man was hardly visible through the thick glass. Crash got behind someone and watched the guy slip a five-dollar bill in the slot. Five bucks!? What the fuck!? Crash followed suit. The clerk gave him a MetroCard. Took him awhile to swipe it right, but then he was through the turnstile and waiting on the platform for a train whose glimmery lights were already visible in the tunnel distance. The TV screens were new and he could see himself leaning over the platform to look. A train passing on the uptown side. Silver bullets on wheels, not the blue-grays from 1973. And these made a funny howling sound, all nervous jittery.
The roar and blast of subway train pulling into station. The inside of the train was brighter but felt more cluttered. Crash stared wide-eyed at the moving ads, the screens flashing messages. A solitary marker scrawl on the wall of no decipherable message, seemed like the last graffiti in the world.
He sat by the doors. The people in the car were not even looking at each other. Everybody was busy with something. The lady across from him was typing on her phone, her pretty fingers moving nimbly across the small screen. Many people wearing earphones. A girl across the way tapping the screen of a tablet. Everybody was busy. There was not one person staring into space, falling asleep, or reading a book. At least there was one guy at the end there, reading a newspaper. The mechanical voice on the PA: “Backpacks and other personal belongings are subject to random search.” The guy reading the newspaper got up and left the newspaper. Crash slid over and scooped it up. It was a copy of the Village Voice. The poster on the wall opposite showed a package beside a subway bench. Is that right, so America has a black president? Beware of Suspicious Packages. (A strange thrill.)
“I’m reading a paper from the future,” he said, needing to hear the words. The black girl across from him was looking right at him, but she didn’t react. Her eyes were glazed, head bopping to earphones. He flipped through the newspaper again.
“America’s first black president is running for reelection.” The Twin Towers in flames. “Since 9/11, America has been fighting the war on terrorism.” American soldiers in Afghanistan. “Protests call for an end to ‘Stop and Frisk.’” Who’s Kim Kardashian? “Of the six hundred thousand New Yorkers stopped and frisked last year, only nine percent were white.” American soldiers in Iraq. If You See Something, Say Something. What kinda shit is this? “The latest move from the city that’s set trends by banning smoking in bars and trans fats in foods involves banning sugary drinks sold at restaurants, fast-food chains, theaters, delis, office cafeterias, and other places that fall under the New York City Board of Health’s regulation, by March 2013.”
Crash started to feel weird. He shut the paper, looking up at an ad that showed a Mexican family. Learn English. Oh shit. The train rocked and whined. People were giving him weird looks. Something was strangely oppressive. He got off the train at Union Square, went up the stairs to the main concourse, and spotted a group of people dressed all funky crazy. One was a colorful jester, a black kid with bells on his hat that jingled. There was a jockey, a princess, and there was this pretty blonde in an Alice in Wonderland dress that walked right up to him.
“Well, well. What kept you?” Her eyes were green, her blond hair raining down in loopy curls. She looked somehow familiar to him. He wondered if it was because she had a vague resemblance to Susan Sarandon.
“Are you … ?” Crash couldn’t even say.
“Of course,” she answered, laughing, turning, and pulling someone over. “And here’s the Doctor!”
A young guy in a doctor’s suit, white and clean. Obviously not the old Dr. Robert! He pressed his stethoscope to Crash’s chest, took a listen.
“Yes,” he said, “definitely alive.”
“I love your hair,” the Princess said, almost touching it.
“Hey, man,” the Jester said, his bells ringing, “you a real sight. “You lucky they din’t stop you, lookin’ like that.”
“What does that mean?”
“New York cops got the hots for people of color,” the Jester said.
“What the hell’s people of color?”
“Thass you, dog.”
“Dog?” Crash frowned. “Hey, who the fuck are you people? Why are you dressed up like that?”
“We’re going to a party,” Alice said. She hooked her arm with his. “And we’re bringing you. It’s a costume thing, see? Jockey, Doctor, I’m the Alice, see? You’re ’70s Dude. And we even have a Jester and a Princess.”
Crash looked from one to the other.
“Are you people on something?”
They laughed, a drunken swimmy laugh, a rollicking happy vibe that irritated him.
“We kinda make you less conspicuous, don’t we?” Alice winked. “Come.”
They started walking, the Jester’s bells ringing, the Jockey twirling a walking stick, the Princess swinging her star on a wand. “Manhattan ain’t nothing anymore but a mall for NYU students,” Alice said. “The action’s in Brooklyn.”
L train. Sips from a canteen of rum and cola.
“Do you have a portal?” the Doctor asked. A young white guy, the boy next door.
“I don’t even know what that is,” Crash said.
Alice held a round mirrored disc in front of his face. It was the size of a coaster. Just a little round mirror.
“This is a portal,” Alice said. “Moon Dust? It’s made from this.” Alice was looking at Crash and just smiling, a weird spirit thing. Crash was feeling it. Like the almost-touch of acid. “Moon Dust is just one of many ways the Doctor has … invented … to introduce people to the resistance.”
“But why?”
“You see the way things are now. They’re going to get worse.”
“But there’s a black president!”
Their laughter drowned out the roar of the train pulling into Bedford. The station was crammed with young people. There were more white people there than he had ever seen in one place, except for maybe that Ten Years After concert he went to at Randall’s Island … that bevy of girl asses in skimpy shorts going up the stairs … On the street, a throbbing energy of lights, bars, cars, girls in tight pants and short skirts showing off long nylon legs … Crash was swimming a little from the rum maybe.
Bar after bar along the street, music blaring through open windows, and this one especially, blaring Hendrix.
“Now you’re talkin’,” he said.
Alice nodded to the others and they all went into the bar where Hendrix was singing about crosstown traffic. Alice bought Crash a beer. The Princess was dancing in a corner with the Doctor. The Jockey was poring over the pizza menu with the Jester.
Alice clinked beers with him, words coming in snippets and bits. Crash had too many questions. “I can’t answer all that.” But her eyes. The way she looked at him. Somehow, the promise of an eternal fuck. The music went from Hendrix to Cream, from Cream to the Rolling Stones. How was it Santana all of a sudden, doing “Samba Pa Ti”? The lilting congas and that crooning guitar. Pressing close, slow moving, and she was feeling fine against him. When the song ended, her hands slid up his shoulders and around his neck. Her swimmy eyes closed beautifully slow. She kissed him. It was a sloppy, sudden kiss, but not rushed. It had sincerity.
“I don’t even know your name,” he said.
“There are things I’m supposed to tell you this time.” She had both his hands. “My name isn’t one of them.”
“This time?”
“Yeah.” She was squeezing his hands. “The Doctor looks for people, special people. Like you, Jose.”
“Oh yeah? And what makes me so special?”
“You’re Puerto Rican,” she said.
“Look, man, I know how it feels to be picked on because I’m Puerto Rican, or picked OUT because I’m Puerto Rican, but this being chosen thing …”
“You don’t understand. You’re Puerto Rican,” she said, “from a time when there were Puerto Ricans.”
“What does that fucking mean, man? You tellin’ me there ain’t no Puerto Ricans where you come from?”
She held his hands, didn’t say anything. Her face glowed with something grown-up and painful.
“Hey, you’re scaring me …”
“I wish I could promise you a future, but I can’t.” Her eyes glistened wetly.
“But what happened to the Puerto Ricans?”
“Every person we bring in has a chance to change everything for the better. It might be your destiny. To change destiny.”
Crash was feeling a weird heat burning his face.
“Are you saying something bad is gonna happen to my people?”
“I’m not supposed to.” Why were her eyes wet? “You may fade soon, so …” Pretty eyes, quick blinking.
“What does that mean?”
She laughed, then spotted something over his shoulder.
“Fuck,” she said, “fuck fuck fuck! Adrian!” she yelled over the music to the Doctor. “Arriverderci, Roma!”
“What’s going on?” Crash asked, turning to look.
She was gripping him frantic. “It’s the fuzz, jack!”
Crash glanced around, frantic. He wished the music would stop. The Jockey, the Princess, and the Doctor were nowhere in sight. When he turned again it seemed the Jester had vanished with a clink of bells.
Alice touched his face, her eyes determined and strange.
“I’ll find you again,” she said. A peck on the lips. Then she shoved him. He fell against an empty table, chair crashing to floor, people scurrying. He didn’t see where she went. Someone grabbed his arm as he was getting up.
“Well, well,” a voice said. “If it isn’t 1973.”
It was a tall thin man holding his arm, a man peculiarly dressed in a bowler hat and pinstripe suit.
“Who the fuck are you?” Crash shook his arm loose.
“They portal’d out,” explained another one, who was larger but dressed the same. Partners.
“Time cops?” Crash said it like he was spitting out soap. “Are you serious?”
“You should be grateful we’re not time cops,” Killy said, “because you don’t want to know what they do to accidental time trippers like you. No, you don’t.”
“Get your hands off me,” Crash snapped, giving Killy a shove that sent him reeling backward. Then he felt a burning heat strike him like a blow.
4.
FLASH … to wake up heavy with a dream he couldn’t remember, just bits of image and face … He woke up, rethinking it over and over as he sat in his bed … Crash felt like he couldn’t breathe. He opened the window, all the way up with a jarring noise that blurred the street below for a moment. It was Fox Street, looking east toward Prospect Avenue. It was rows of rows of grungy tenements, of people in the windows and kids on fire escapes and people on stoops. And the crack of a stickball bat and the rush and squeak of sneaks on asphalt. And that sound, it was in the air. Not just laughter and pots and pans … it was trombones it was timbales it was Puerto Rican salsa music. It was Héctor Lavoe singing and every Puerto Rican household saying, “Oh yes, come on in.” The sound was everywhere, in the walls and upstairs and out in the alley. Crash couldn’t say why his eyes filled with tears. Something here, and not forever.
Walking out into the living room, the usual picture. Mike was sprawled on the couch, sucking on a Honey Bear and watching the TV. Pachuco was playing the O’Jays on the stereo. Wage was sitting out on the fire escape doing his “post” routine. Crash went over to the corner, where there were some garbage bags on a table. He checked through them, the baggies of buds, packed product, ready to move.
“Hey,” Daniel said. He had just come out of the kitchen. “You sure were out for a long time.”
“Some kind of dream,” he said. “I can’t remember, but …”
Crash was trying to process all the bits of image and picture and face, sparks from a twitching live wire. The general commotion of the guys collecting their stuff and heading out, splitting up and meeting up, all prearranged and flawlessly perfected, little sidesteps to keep the man guessing. Crash fell into the routine and it was good, doing something calmed the jittery confusion in his head. And then there was a flow, and he hardly noticed time going by at all. They had cleared the bushes twice already and Crash had just sent Mike back to pick up some more product. No cops in sight so they were feeling pretty loose, just smoking cigarettes and talking with some dudes over by the benches, when this little white girl appeared out of nowhere. She was young, blond, a sort of hippie in flared, patched-up jeans. She didn’t seem uptight about being in the ghetto, and the guys were all lighting on her. Pachuco even cranked his portable cassette player to increase the vibe and maybe get her to dance, but slim hips only had eyes for Crash. The way she looked at him. Somehow, the promise of an eternal fuck. The music went from Hendrix to Cream, from Cream to the Rolling Stones, as Pachuco searched the tape for the proper soundtrack for the white girl. How was it Santana all of a sudden, doing “Samba Pa Ti”? The lilting congas and that crooning guitar. Her tongue twirling redly around that Charms Blow Pop.
“I have an offer to make you,” she said, opening her purse. A beaded thing. Crash peeked inside. Saw the weed all glittery sparkling.
Now Crash was open to this …
