The Substitution Order, page 18
“Here you go, sweetie,” she said, and lifted a miniature spoon cradling a white bump. It was apparent she planned on holding the scoop below my nose rather than handing the coke to me. She pressed closer, her chest against mine, her leg angled so it was wholly exposed through the slit in her skirt.
“I’ve never used cocaine,” I said. I snorted the powder, and it burned my nostril, and the fire traced into my sinus and encircled my eye and then began conquering my cheek, and within seconds, a dose of energy and clarity hit me, a surge so pronounced and vivid it was as if someone had switched out my batteries and I was suddenly boosted and retooled and sublimely fueled. “Holy shit,” I blurted. “This stuff comes as billed.”
Cheryl built another spoonful, dipped from a tiny, ornate box. “Can’t fly with only one wing,” she purred.
“I’d say I’m pretty much soaring.” I laughed. “So listen,” I told her, pointing with my index finger, “you’re a fun, attractive lady, and I’m having a ball, but you have to understand, I love my wife, and that’s an immutable, so you and I can be pals and buddies and paint the town, but we can’t go any further. Period. I don’t want to take your drugs under false pretenses.” I smiled at her.
“Let me know if you change your mind,” she replied. “Until then, we’ll just enjoy the bedroom tension and double entendres.”
In the days to come, I absolutely embraced cocaine. I was that guy. It pushed every button, filled in every blank, matched my list to a T. I also quickly learned that it would dial back the bourbon, mitigate my buzz and any sloppy decline, so I could max-drink, hit my peak, then pump the brakes with coke and start all over again, a high and happy failsafe. Permaphoria.
I felt majestic strolling down the elaborate stairs that spilled into the casino. Cheryl offered me her hand for the last two or three steps, and I guided her onto the gambling floor, the men all in jackets or suits, the women all smartly dressed. The cards ran in my favor, and soon I was betting black chips, a hundred a hand, and I kept winning. I relished the cards themselves. The clubs and diamonds impressed me as little works of art, especially the queens and kings, and everything—the people passing by the table, the ice in my highball glass, the red stone in a lady’s necklace—was distinct and illuminated.
After an hour, Cheryl leaned in to whisper that we might need another trip to her powder room, her flat hand on my thigh as she spoke, her lips brushing my ear for the last few words, and the contact caused me to get hard, just like that, crazy, sitting there in public, at a blackjack table, and my dick was ready to go, as if I were twenty again.
I immediately missed Ava, wished she were with me, wished we could have sex, and I buttoned my jacket, left the table and called her from the bathroom. I explained it was under two hours from Roanoke to the resort, and I could be in bed with her by midnight, and she laughed and said it was sweet and endearing that I wanted her to sleep with me, but it sounded as if I’d be passed out well before midnight. Cheryl and I visited the powder room again, and we were the last two people in the casino when it closed at four in the morning. We ordered room service before dawn, and I fell asleep on her sofa, still in a suit and tie, no hanky-panky, not even a kiss on the cheek.
I lied to Ava for the first time later that Friday, told her I was staying all weekend because the seminars were interesting and worthwhile, and then Cheryl and I embarked on a booze-and-coke spree that lasted until she hit the road early on Sunday. We fly-fished for trout while we were high and admired the wild rainbows’ red bands and matching gill plates. We went falconing while we were high. We visited the spa while we were high. We danced in a disco while we were high. We took a carriage ride while we were high. We dressed to the nines and nibbled appetizers under spectacular chandeliers in the main dining room while we were high. We played more cards while we were high. We took a shot at bowling while we were high, cracked Big Lebowski jokes the whole time. “It’s a league game, Smokey,” I said after a gutter ball, and we thought this was knee-slapping hilarious.
I realize my drugged gallivanting with another woman wasn’t doing right by my marriage, but—as I swore to Ava when I confessed months later—on my mother’s grave, I never came close to having sex with Cheryl. I hugged her goodbye on Sunday morning, thanked her for the romp, wished her the best and didn’t so much as exchange phone numbers. I was enamored of the cocaine, smitten by how it took me aloft, as if I were a Rockefeller or Jay Gatsby floating through the Greenbrier’s grand rooms and mahogany bars with their twenty-dollar drinks. She was intrigued by the challenge, by a man telling her no but elongating the refusal over three idyllic, chemically endless days.
By Saturday morning, for me, the vibe between us was akin to boy-and-girl cousins on the family’s last big summer camping trip before the eighth grade, an only-so-far affection born of board games, inside jokes and adolescent Truth-or-Dare secrets. I told Ava just that, but she was having none of it: “What an asinine thing to say when you were wasting our money on an old nympho with a coke habit.”
Driving away from the sprawling white hotel, waving at the security guard, returning to the mundane world, I felt shabby and guilty and shaky, sickly, and I blasted the air-conditioning and vowed to myself: “Never again. Line drawn.” A few miles from home, I tried to choke down a fast-food hamburger and couldn’t take more than a bite, and leaving the restaurant I thought about—imagined—a smidgen of coke, a remedy that would no doubt cure me and iron out the rest of the day.
The last Saturday in May, I drove to Richmond and met a seedy high school friend nicknamed Wizard and bought a thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine, enough, I rationalized, to dabble in on weekends for months and months. I used it the day I bought it—needed to test the quality. The following Tuesday, I snorted a little in our garage. Twice. Soon, the euphoria didn’t always arrive on schedule, and a single blast didn’t always deliver the goods, and the high never persisted like it had at the Greenbrier, but I began craving the shit. The morning of my forty-second birthday, June 28, I was in the basement bathroom with the door locked, and when I jerked my head up from an 8:00 a.m. countertop inhalation, I saw my reflection in the mirror, skin starting to sallow, eyes nested in dark smudge pits, hair a shaggy rat’s nest—a corroded version of myself.
I was smart enough to realize I was screwed: the it-can-happen-that-quickly-to-anybody addict, rattlesnaked. The day before, the dope had made my nose bleed. I sat on the floor, wearing only boxers, the tile cool against the undersides of my bare legs, and the birthday cocaine started to creep into my senses, and I closed my eyes and gave in to it, lay flat on my back on the tiny throw rug, a wretched snow angel.
I didn’t dare appear in court or attempt anything complicated at my office, and I never failed to give a client my sober efforts. I set appointments only between ten and noon on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and on those days I didn’t use. Other days, though, I’d often get wired after lunch, gild the high with a swig of bourbon and play pinball—Monster Bash and Twilight Zone—at a bowling alley over in Vinton. I rescheduled cases and depositions and motions hearings, and initially, owing to my reputation, everyone accepted the routine excuses at face value, no worries, but then Judge Carson noticed how disheveled I looked at an early-morning July 6 infant settlement hearing. I’d already completed the work weeks before and was showing up simply to collect a hefty check for my client, but the judge, an old friend, was concerned and invited me into his office and asked, “You okay, Kevin?”
“Overworked and underpaid,” I said. In preparation for court, I’d gone three days without alcohol and coke, and my head felt like it was under siege by a swarm of hornets. I had to clasp my hands in my lap to keep them still and steady. “Slammed at the office and can’t shake the flu. Or whatever it is that’s going around. Thanks for asking, though. Do I look that bad?” I laughed and tried to play it off, but I sounded weird and furtive. I did a line in my car the moment I arrived back at my office parking lot.
By August 15, a lawyer who for nearly two decades was usually in one court or another every day hadn’t seen a trial or meaningful legal appearance in six weeks. My staff realized that something was terribly wrong, and Ava couldn’t have been sweeter to me, gently quizzing me about work problems, asking if she’d disappointed me or hurt my feelings, and then, as I became more erratic, pleading with me not to drink, even scheduling a weekend vacation—that I refused—so we could clean the slate and I could cure my Maker’s Mark woes.
The Monday before I was arrested, she and my doc, Gary Simonds, appeared at my office, and we discussed Antabuse and twelve-step programs and the fact that alcoholism is a disease, same as any other sickness. “Seriously,” I told them, “I don’t have a drinking problem. I’m just going through a little melancholy patch, and everybody dwelling on it only makes it worse. I’m okay.” Ava never knew I was hooked on coke, always figured it was booze, though the night before my collapse, she asked, “Is there something else, like pills or drugs? Or maybe you’re having an affair and trying to push me away?”
On August 25, Wizard, for an extra hundred in “carrying charges,” agreed to meet me at a Roanoke roadhouse called the Coffee Pot and deliver another grand’s worth of dope. I spent the afternoon before our meeting sequestered in my office, perusing the Internet for the best rehabs, and decided—in true junkie fashion—that I’d suffer through another week of coke, just one more, and finally tell Ava, yeah, I’m drinking too much, and then fly to Minnesota and get clean and sober, wash my sins away in the river of twelve-step redemption.
I didn’t want Ava to see a thousand bucks in cash withdrawn from our checking account, so before leaving the office, I took my key, unlocked the money drawer and grabbed twelve hundred dollars, mostly in large bills. I didn’t realize the money was a retainer, trust-account funds I hadn’t yet earned, a fee dropped off ten minutes before closing by a regular client, Christina Phelps. Mismanagement of trust funds is lawyer poison, simple and easy for the bar to detect, and always guaranteed to prompt a license revocation. No matter how high I was, I never would’ve pulled a trust-account fee and used it as my own. Never.
Keisha, my paralegal, had been unable to make it to the bank before five, and in a rush, she’d stuck the cash in the drawer for safekeeping, intending to deposit it in the proper account the next morning. Following my arrest, I promptly refunded the cash to Christina—with a tiny amount of interest—and she wrote a letter defending me to the bar, described how her new attorney had charged a higher fee and “just done what Attorney Kevin Moore had already told me I needed to do.” Keisha cried and apologized and also wrote to the bar, but it was my fault for any number of reasons. I was the lawyer, the boss who was responsible for “office management and accounting protocols,” as that portion of my suspension notice worded it.
Wizard was already at the Coffee Pot when I arrived, seated at a table with a pitcher of beer and an order of chicken fingers and fries. Two women were with him, an unexpected complication. I didn’t want to be seen with a drug dealer, and I assumed their hanging around would slow down our deal. I wanted to pay him, get the coke and be gone.
Wizard—whose given name is Stanley—was wearing what we in the business call a probable-cause ensemble: a tight tan suit, cowboy boots and a blue linen shirt with the top three buttons undone. His hair was gathered into a ponytail, he was sporting a single diamond earring, and he’d ditched his high school glasses for contacts. Imagine the guest villain on a season-three episode of Miami Vice crossed with a 2008 J.Crew catalog.
“My man,” he said as soon as he spotted me. Wizard is not attractive. He’s skinny and potbellied, and his features—especially his nose—are a size too small for his face, as if God’s installers received the wrong hardware packet but pushed through the job anyway.
“Wizard,” I said with no enthusiasm.
“I told you we’re amigos,” he crowed to the ladies. “For years. Ever since tenth grade.”
“I read about you in the paper all the time,” one of the women said. “You’re famous.”
“Not really,” I answered.
“Take a load off and have a beer with us.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
Wizard pinched a fry, dabbed it into a spread of ketchup, bit it in half and talked while he was chewing. “These goddesses are Amber and Tracey,” he said, nodding at each lady as he introduced her. His angle was apparent: He’d bragged to the women about his long friendship with a high-flying lawyer, and he hoped to ride my coattails and leverage this connection, plus, of course, some free dope, into sex with one or both of the girls, and this was dismal news for me, because it meant I was in line to pay extra dues and sell the ladies on Wizard Stanley.
Still, I took a fling at ending my business and escaping the Coffee Pot. “So, Wizard,” I said, “how about I buy you a shot, you and me, at the bar? A gift from an old bud.”
“Hell, just have ’em bring me a Corona over here,” he said. “Let’s put this party in high gear.” He tapped the table in front of an empty chair. “It’s early. Sit with your friend. And order some more of those purple shots for the goddesses—right, ladies?”
“Sure,” Amber replied.
“Thank you very much, Kevin,” Tracey said in a silly, ingénue’s voice that didn’t square with her pierced nose and snug cut-offs.
I ordered two shots, the beer for Wizard and a straight bourbon on ice for myself. I gunned half the liquor before the waitress finished serving the table, while she still had Wizard’s cold bottle balanced on her tray.
“Have you ever lost an important case?” Amber asked, pushing back her hair on both sides. Her several bracelets rattled. Her T-shirt tightened and slid up past her navel when she raised her arms for the hair show. “I bet you win all the time,” she cooed.
She was about twenty-five years old, a hothouse orchid, lovely and ephemeral, a perfectly gorgeous woman by any measure, thick blonde hair and a starlet’s smile, but you quickly sensed she was a beauty on borrowed time, and soon enough she’d wilt, maybe lose a tooth or gain a scar, and by forty, there’d be liver damage and yellow skin and a handicapped parking placard. Right now, though, any sad ending was miles away, and she was a carpe diem gal, living pretty while it lasted, Purple-Hooter-Shooter Cinderella.
“I’ve lost more than I’ve won,” I replied. “It’s the nature of the business.” I was in an anxious, pissy mood, and the bourbon wasn’t taking my edge off yet.
“How about you and I have a little powwow in my office?” Wizard said, jerking a thumb toward the toilet.
“Sure,” I answered. “I need to use the restroom anyway.”
“You girls please excuse us,” he said. “Help yourselves to more drinks or food, on the Wizard. With much more to come.”
“Man,” he whined as soon as we were in the small john, “you need to, like, chill with my girls. Come on. I’m sure you get more pussy than you can shake a stick at. It won’t kill you to pull some wingman duty for your old pal.”
“Listen, Stanley. I have no interest in the girls. None. They’re hitting on me, not the other way around. The sooner I leave, the better off you’ll be. I just want my package. I’ll pay you and vanish.”
“Then I’ll look like a loser. Like I’m a stupid drug dealer and that’s my entire thing. Seriously.”
“You’ll need to make it worth my while. I didn’t sign up for this.”
“Sure,” he said. “Okay, okay. I’ll forget the extra hundred. Free delivery.”
“And…” I stretched the word.
“What?”
“Reach into your pocket and give me a sample before I have to return to the table and do my best lawyer’s closing argument for these women. Consider it a fee.”
“And you’ll party with us? But not snake the girls?”
“Twenty minutes,” I said, “then I’m outta here, and the ladies are all yours.”
“Perfect. Fair enough. Aren’t they foxes, Kevin?”
“Foxes? Christ, Stanley.”
He locked the entrance door, and we jammed into the single stall, the commode between us, and we each took a snort. I felt improved when I returned to the table, and noticed Amber’s chair was much closer to mine. I sipped the bourbon. I made up a story about how Wizard, as a senior, had cleverly hoodwinked our English teacher into giving us both an A for our last semester and allowed us to skip the final exam. Amber laughed, and she swayed and brushed against my shoulder. They all ordered another round, and the coke was partnering nicely with the liquor and erasing my ill temper, so I told them I’d have one for the road.
“Cool,” Amber said.
“What do you ladies do?” I asked. “Workwise, I mean.”
“We’re dancers,” Amber said. “That’s how we know Wizard. From the club in Richmond.”
“As in gentlemen’s club?” I asked.
“Yep,” Tracey replied. “As in.”
“But I’m planning to start college,” Amber added. “Get my associate’s in medical technology. I’d like to be an X-ray tech. Or something in the medical field, so long as there’s no blood.” She pushed away her empty shot glass with her index finger. “Can’t strip forever. Nobody wants to see sags and cellulite.”
“Well, no worries about that,” Wizard gushed. He was damn near drooling. “I can promise you these two knockouts are as sexy as can be. I’m a personal witness to how built Amber is. No hearsay, Kevin. You can’t object.” He grinned big at his own wit.
