sports.
I parked the Eldorado near the corner of Steuben and Albany Streets and headed up Albany to see who was around. Up by Craig Street three older black guys were passing around a brown paper bag. I knew two of the guys, Carlisle Jackson and Chipper Poston, because both of them had been to the clinic and had dropped out several times. Both of them were alcoholics and heroin users.
When I walked toward them they instinctively hid the bottle until Chipper recognized me.
“Duff-what’s up?” he said.
“What’s up, Chip?” I said.
“Hey, Duff,” Carlisle said.
Both guys were gray and weathered looking. They were kind of like the jakey-bum version of Laurel and Hardy, with Carlisle at about six foot three and rail thin and Chipper a rounded five foot six. They had run together for the last thirty years, and they were somewhere between fifty and seventy-five. There was no way to figure out how old they were by looking at them.
“Duff, this is Silk, from Brooklyn. He’s Chip’s second cousin,” Carlisle said.
I exchanged silent nods with Silk.
“Duffy, what you coming up here for?” Chipper said.
“I’m curious about something,” I said.
“Curious? You comes to the Hill, you gotta be pretty fuckin’ curious,” Carlisle said.
“You guys were inside when Rheinhart was in, weren’t ya?” I asked.
“Crazy, skinny-ass white boy who killed all them kids? Yeah, we both were,” Chipper said.
“Boy kept his mouth shut and the rest of him buttoned up,” Carlisle said.
“You remember anything about him?” I said.
“Yeah, he was the only motherfucker who didn’t OD in that part of the tier,” Chip said.
“Eight motherfuckers died, another eight all fucked up vegetable-wise in the head. Crazy white boy had death all around his skinny ass,” Carlisle said.
“What was the story?” I asked.
“We was both away from that shit, but the word was one of the hacks was sellin’ some bad acid trip, ’cept it wasn’t regular acid, it was some new shit I never heard of before or since. They called it ‘Blast’ or some shit,” Chipper said.
“Shit was bad and no hack ever got caught. It was all swept under the fuckin’ carpet. Who care if inmates dyin’ anyway?” Carlisle said.
“Why didn’t Howard get into it?”
“Boy was straight-laced, man. He was no hardened criminal. I think the motherfucker flipped for a short period and then went back to be just a skinny-ass white boy,” Chipper said.
“You guys ever try ‘Blast’?” I asked.
“No man, shit came and went fast. I heard it was fuckin’ crazy shit-like meth and acid and dust times ten all at once,” Chipper said. “I’m a down head. I ain’t lookin’ for no fuckin’ Ferris wheel ride,” Carlisle said.
We kicked around some small talk and I let them know how they could get a hold of me if they needed me. With guys like this you didn’t come on too strong about getting help, but I always wanted them to know where they could find me if they had to.
I thanked the guys, gave them a ten, and headed back to the Eldorado. On the way back to the Moody Blue, I threw in the On Stage eight-track and listened to Elvis do “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.” I was thinking about Howard’s shoes and how his whole life he’d been stepping in shit with those shoes, and probably how the one time he fought back against it in his life it was the biggest mistake he ever made. I also wondered why he wasn’t getting high in prison. I knew if I ever had to live that life I would have done anything and everything to alter my consciousness away from the reality.
It felt to me like the “Blast” overdoses had something to do with something, but that just might have been my mind’s way of making something fit. It could just as easily have been one of the many fucked-up events that had occurred during Howard’s thirty-year stint in our culture’s hellhole. Elvis had moved on to “Sweet Caroline” as I was pulling up to the Blue when I saw Billy chucking his throwing stars into my oak tree. He sprang to attention as I pulled in.
“Sir!” he said.
“Hey, Bill,” I said, returning his bow with just a slight nod.
“Sir-I am anxious to resume training, sir.”
“Yeah, well Billy, uh, I haven’t felt like going to the gym much.”
“Sir, I will train anywhere.”
“Okay, Billy, but I’ve been a little fucked up lately, so I’m not sure how good I’ll be as a teacher.”
“Sir?”
“Uh… it’s just… well… never mind.”
Billy looked at me with his eyes wide open and his head tilted. It’s the same look Al gives me when I take away a shoe he’s been chewing on. I figured it would be easier to just give Billy a half-hour workout than to try to explain it to him.
“All right, Billy. C’mere,” I said. He sprang up, ran over to me, came to attention, and bowed.
“WASABIIII!” Billy screamed, snapping his fist down into a ready position.
For the next half hour I worked him on throwing good punches and pretended it was a special karate technique when in reality it was fundamental boxing. I’m not entirely sure why, but I made him drill his recoil every time he threw a punch, and I did it so much I could tell that even Billy was getting bored with it. To me, it was like some sadomasochistic medieval mantra I was doing to punish myself because I had misplaced my hair suit. I kept with it though, like it was an infected itch that I should’ve stopped scratching a long time ago.
After I dismissed Billy, Al greeted me at the door with a jump toward the nuts that I was able to dodge. He did two 360s and then lay down on the floor and farted. I wasn’t sure how to take that as a greeting, but with the way things had been going I didn’t feel like interpreting it.
I hit the machine and there was a message from Marcia.
“Hi Duff, it’s me.” She sounded full of energy, which wasn’t like her at all. “I’ve been doing a lot of work with my therapist, and she says that I need to have some closure. So I wanted to let you know we won’t be getting back together. I just needed to say that.”
Well, I’m glad she’s making progress.
You know you’re getting to a fairly low point in your life when even the women you don’t really like much are breaking up with you. Actually, Marcia had already dumped me and this call was to make sure I really got it. If nothing else, therapy was teaching her to be thorough.
Something told me to turn on the TV, and when I did I wasn’t surprised to see that all the local stations were in special-report mode. There were shots of crime-scene tape, what looked like forensic teams, and guys in windbreakers that said “FBI” on the back. In the middle of the camera shot was a large gray bag, what I guessed was a body bag. The reporter was having a very official conversation with the anchors back in the studio.
“Liz, do the authorities have any idea of the whereabouts of Howard Rheinhart?” Lance Justin of Channel 10 asked his live, local, late-breaking correspondent.
“Lance, they do not, but I have an unconfirmed source that Rheinhart’s blood was found at the scene,” Liz Priest said.
“There have been suggestions that this murder was more gruesome than the others. Can you tell us anything about that?”
“Yes, Lance, though I’d like to warn our viewers that some of the details I’m about to share are quite disturbing. This victim, a still-unidentified teenage female, had several fingers removed and inserted in other parts of her body. There were also strange puncture wounds up and down her sides as if she was being drained of blood, Lance.”
They continued the banter back and forth, saying essentially the same things over and over. This was getting crazy weird, and to have it so close to me gave me a queasy feeling like I had woken up in an alternate universe.
I actually felt sick.
