The Marijuana Chronicles, page 8
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 …
DEAN HASPIEL is an Emmy Award winner and Eisner Award nominee. He created BILLY DOGMA, illustrated for HBO’s Bored to Death, received a residency at Yaddo, and was a master artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Haspiel has written and drawn many superhero and semi-autobiographical comix, including collaborations with Harvey Pekar, Jonathan Ames, Inverna Lockpez, and Jonathan Lethem. He also curates and creates for TripCity.net.
MAGGIE ESTEP is the author of seven books. Her work has been translated into four languages, optioned for film, and frequently stolen from libraries. She lives in Hudson, New York.
zombie hookers of hudson
by maggie estep
One morning, his head looked too small and I asked him to move out.
Why? He stared at me.
“It’s just not working,” I said. I didn’t mention that his head suddenly appeared small. You can’t say that to someone. It’s not right. “I’m not happy,” I said.
Martin’s eyes drooped and then he shrugged.
He’d only been living with me three weeks.
He packed up his stuff and, just like that, he was gone.
We’d started as strangers, we were ending that way.
Then it was just me and Alexander Vinokourov, my one-eared pit bull, Vino to his friends.
I sat on the floor with Alexander Vinokourov in my lap, his head wedged under my arm. His head is too large for his body, but I like that. Imperfections in dogs are beautiful; in humans they’re a fault line that you want to put a jackhammer in.
I sat like that, numb and quiet, for about thirty minutes. I was like a cow needing to be squeezed for reassurance before going into one of the humane slaughter chutes designed by the admirable Temple Grandin. Vino was my sixty-eight-pound squeezing machine. Except I wasn’t heading to slaughter. At least not that I was aware of.
I stared at the empty drawers where Martin’s stuff had been. I thought about his last words to me.
“I really liked you, Zoey.”
“I liked you too, Martin,” I had said. This was perfectly true. I did like him. I just didn’t like his head.
Eventually, I made Alexander Vinokourov get off my lap so I could stand up. I opened the drawer where I keep my socks and underwear. I pulled out the powder-blue plastic wallet with Wyoming emblazoned on its side.
There’d been a time when I thought Alexander Vinokourov and I might move to Wyoming. I’ve had ideas about moving to many places and have in fact moved to most of them. Lately, though, I just keep drifting around a hundred-mile radius of upstate New York. It’s pretty here and the people aren’t all morons. My rent is cheap and I can get by doing odd jobs.
I put the blue plastic wallet in the back pocket of my jeans, attached Vino’s leash to his collar, and out we went.
It was hot outside and, even though it was close to dusk, the sun was a burning gold coin.
Vino and I walked up to the top of State Street where crumbling buildings rested their crooked frames against newly renovated ones.
The guy with hooks for arms was sitting on his porch and called out: “Beautiful dog!”
I said, “Thank you,” like I had made Alexander Vinokourov myself.
We reached the periphery of the cemetery, where the sign reads, Cemetery closed during hours of darkness.
We walked in through the oldest section, where half the tombstones have toppled and time has rubbed off the dead people’s names. We crossed to the far side, past the war veteran’s area where there’d been a big kerfuffle when vandals had started stealing all the flags off the graves. Video surveillance had been set up to catch the perpetrators in the act and had caught … woodchucks. They were stealing the flags and taking them to their woodchuck holes. They liked the taste of the cured wood the flags were attached to.
Vino and I walked to our favorite spot, a wooded, quiet area lying between the cemetery and the new artificial sweetener factory, the building which had caused nearly as big a kerfuffle as the flag-stealing woodchucks.
But something was wrong. An excavator had been here and dug up a huge swath of earth, maybe half an acre, and there was now a gaping maw where Vino’s favorite grassy knoll had been.
We went to stand at the edge of this big mouth in the earth. I saw pieces of broken-up wooden boxes strewn around in the dirt below.
I didn’t like it. Didn’t like the artificial sweetener factory, didn’t like that Vino’s favorite grassy knoll had been dug up for reasons I wasn’t sure about—but probably had to do with the sweetener factory.
I didn’t like much of anything that day.
I took the Wyoming wallet out of my back pocket, sat at the edge of the hole in the ground, dangled my legs over, and, as Vino flopped down and started panting, I took my small stash of weed out of the wallet and rolled a joint. This was excellent weed. Had a tense, earthy smell, almost exactly like the big dirt hole I was staring at.
I lit the joint then coughed. Alexander Vinokourov’s head swiveled toward me, making sure I wasn’t dying. I’m never sure if his concern for my well being is entirely altruistic. If I die, he’ll have to go back to scavenging from garbage cans and escaping thugs trying to trap him and turn him into a fighting dog.
I took another hit and coughed again, but this time Vino merely flicked his ear, listening for sounds of serious distress before bothering to turn his entire head.
My own head was taking a beating from the inside out, the weed making me feel like I’d had an involuntary hemispherectomy, the two sides of my brain operating independently of each other which, I was pretty sure, would lead to something unusual and very possibly unpleasant.
Then, just as the letters of the word unpleasant drifted through my mind, something reached up from the pit in the earth and grabbed my ankle.
I screamed.
Alexander Vinokourov was next to me in an instant and we both looked down to see a horrible mud-covered woman with her hands around my ankle.
My heart hammered. Vino was trembling. Adrenalin coursed through me, but it was paralyzing rather than giving me superhuman strength. I stared at this creature with her fingers digging into the flesh of my ankle. I tried to shake my leg free before this freak pulled my ankle out of its socket.
I screamed for help but there wasn’t anyone to hear me.
Then, suddenly, the woman made a sound, like a cat coughing up a large hairball, and let go of my ankle.
I turned around and ran, slowing down only when I was about a hundred yards away. I looked back, expecting to find the muddy woman coming after me. She was not.
I stood there, my body flooded with fear chemicals, my mind burning with curiosity. Then I heard an unmistakable cry for help. The voice was reedy, small, pathetic.
“Please. Help,” she repeated.
I guess I was more stoned than I realized. I walked back over to the edge of that maw in the earth and peered down. The woman had dirt caked in her hair and was wearing what may have once been a dress but now looked like the Shroud of Turin.
Her eyes met mine. She looked very sad.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She didn’t answer right away and she was staring at something, maybe Vino, maybe something past me.
“May I have some, please?” she asked.
“Have some what?”
“Some tea,” she said, motioning toward the sky.
I looked up at the sky too. It was just past dusk, almost all dark up there, a lemon slice of moon starting to show itself.
“Tea?” I said looking back down at her.
“Tea,” the woman repeated, pointing, it seemed, at my hand.
I looked at my hand too. The joint. I was holding the half-smoked joint. I had some dim memory of pot being called tea. Like in the 1950s.
“You want a hit of this?”
The muddy woman nodded.
Was this really happening? I relit the joint and passed it to her, reaching down just far enough so she could take it but couldn’t pull on any of my body parts.
She smiled. She had dirt between her teeth.
She took an enormous hit. She didn’t cough, but her blue eyes bulged. Eventually, she tried passing it back up to me but I declined. She might be contagious.
“Could you help me get out of here?” she asked, then.
She had a strange way of speaking, not an accent really, but a lilt. She was reaching up toward me like a little kid wanting to be lifted up onto a parent’s shoulders. I actually felt sorry for her.
I reached down and took the woman’s dirty wrists into my hands and pulled.
One of my odd jobs is as a dog handler at the local animal shelter. I routinely lift very large dogs up onto examination tables. This woman didn’t weigh much more than Henry, the mastiff who was endlessly scraping himself up.
She clambered up, her bare feet finding purchase in the wall of earth. Then, exhausted from this effort, she fell belly-first in the grass. She looked dead. Alexander Vinokourov went over to sniff the air around her. I was about to nudge her with my foot when she rolled over and sat up.
“Are you all right?” I asked, squinting at her.
There was mud caked in her eyelashes.
“No,” she said simply. Again, she tried passing the joint back to me.
I looked all around. The woman was, after all, at least half-naked and totally covered in mud and we were just a few feet away from Newman Road, the street that skirts one side of the cemetery and leads to the dump. Some guy in a pickup truck was bound to drive by at any moment, get turned on at the sight of my muddy friend, and come running over.
There was no one around though. The road was quiet and my lust for the joint outweighed any concern about contagion. I took another hit and felt a little calmer.
