“How’s school?” I’d ask, and she might not answer immediately. “It’s fine.” There was a catch in her voice, and if any light came through the window, or from a candle, it might have caught the deep concern in her eyes. She just couldn’t stand what was happening to me, worst of all the idea of a wall between my parents and me.
“Go back to Mom and Dad,” she’d say. “Just go back home and tell them you’re sorry.”
“I can’t do that, Lori. I’m not wanted. Mom told me they never wanted to see me again.”
“Come on, Robby, you know how she is. She gets angry, but she doesn’t mean that. She and Dad are hurting badly over this. They’re missing you. Just go home. Get some help. Look, Pawpaw’s birthday is coming up in May. The whole family is getting together. You’re not going to miss that, are you?”
I wouldn’t talk about any of it, and Lori wouldn’t stay long—she just couldn’t take it, and I knew she’d be weeping before she made it to her car. But on the way out the door, she’d take my hand and I’d feel the folded rustle of cash. It would be a fifty or even a hundred. I knew she didn’t have that kind of money, but she’d find it somewhere. She wanted to think maybe I’d get the heat turned back on, or the power. Or at the very least, get a meal.
Instead, of course, the money went into the hands of the local dealer. I wasn’t evil. I wasn’t apathetic. I was just completely enslaved by a master that never relented.
A couple of weeks passed by, then a couple of months—time didn’t have a lot of meaning. But life had ingrained the New Orleans calendar in me, and I knew Mardi Gras was becoming a distant memory. Also, in the back of my mind was my grandfather’s birthday—my whole family would be together, and I knew what my absence would mean. I felt a deep yearning to see them.
That’s when Rodney showed up back in town from San Diego on one of his expeditions.
“Dude!” he said on the cellphone. “Are you ready to party?”
He described the new tattoo he’d just gotten inked on his arm. It was a scene of a dragon and a castle. “I can’t wait for you to see it.”
“I bet it looks amazing. Did you bring any—”
“You know it!” Rodney always came in town with no fewer than fifteen bottles of ketamine. Special K is a horse tranquilizer and, for people, a powerful hallucinogen.
I said, “It’s going to be a weekend we won’t forget. Where are we meeting?”
“Downtown, Dustin’s apartment.” Dustin was our cocaine connection. “I’m going to throw myself a welcome home party. Make sure you’re there.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
That night something came up. I was running late to the party—never made it, actually. I got a phone call on the way from Dustin. “Robby—Rodney’s dead, man,” he said.
“What? What did you say?”
“Rodney is dead.” He was crying as he spoke. “Don’t come here. We have to get rid of all this stuff immediately.”
I knew the drill. Sadly, we’d been there before. Someone overdoses, you have to call the ambulance, and the police are going to be involved. It’s a possible crime scene until everything is sorted out, so there’s a lot of “evidence” to clean up. The detectives will be going over every corner, every inch with a fine-tooth comb.
After the call, I sat and thought about it. Rodney liked being high, but he wasn’t reckless about it, like some. He had just started a new life, was finally happy. He was into some serious money. I heard what all was in his system, but Rodney knew how to pace himself through a party. It didn’t sound like him.
What I also knew was that he had all those bottles, liquid gold. It was worth a whole lot of money on the street. Nobody seemed to be sure what had happened to all of his stuff during the “cleanup.” And then I thought about the guy who hosted the party—a coke dealer, a guy who had nobody’s complete trust. We called him friend, but that term was thrown around loosely. There was something shady about him—okay, there was something shady about all of us. But there were too many whispers about this guy. I had to wonder about his involvement in Rodney’s death.
I also had to think, This could have been me. Maybe should have been. Maybe will be, next time. That’s where my head was during those cold, hard seventy-five days.
Though I had my suspicion, the official word was that Rodney had been up for three days on crystal meth while traveling. He’d been using ketamine and cocaine. Whatever the details, his life was over. A little group of us went to the funeral home to pay our respects. We walked in quietly, through all the nice furniture and polite company. We signed the guest book, and we looked up to see our own faces in a photo collage—Rodney with his friends; Rodney as a happy child; Rodney with his family.
How does someone get from there to here?
In the parlor set aside for his loved ones, I wanted to see his body, to know it was really Rodney, my friend. It didn’t seem real to me somehow. Somehow I got it in my mind that I needed to see the dragon and the castle on his arm. I wasn’t thinking straight, of course; he was unlikely to be in that coffin in a short sleeve shirt. The mortician wouldn’t have said, “Man, let’s show off his tats!”
Still, I was making my way to the front when I saw there was no coffin. “He was cremated,” somebody told us. And that was that.
For some reason, that really upset me. They burned his body to ashes before I
