One night somewhere in all this our front door bell rang. Denise was out on our porch. She sounded drunk. I was in Max’s old room, sitting propped up in bed reading a book
I heard her talking out there. I heard her ask, “Is Jules here?”
And Roy said, “He’s in back.”
Next thing I knew I looked up and Denise was standing in my doorway, her face all lit up with a big wide smile. She was very drunk.
“Hey, Jules!”
“Hey, Denise.”
“Whatcha reading?”
“Nothing special.”
Denise tottered into the room and fell into bed beside me, laughing. Denise was short, on the chubby side, with big chocolate butterball breasts straining underneath a too-tight yellow blouse. She had on some kind of rich, heady perfume. She put her hand on my leg, still laughing, and ran her fingers across my thigh. Then she looked at me very seriously and seemed to sober up just a little.
“You sad, Jules?”
“What, you mean right now?”
“Yeah, you know.”
“About Max?”
“Yeah.” She was coming off pseudo-bashful, like a little kid.
“No, I’m all right.”
“I was just wondering, you know, how you was and all. It’s so sad. I was thinking bout you.”
Now she was rubbing her hand over my belly, inching ever-so-not-so-subtly southward.
“Well, Denise…”
“Lemme ask you something, Jules. Am I your friend?”
“Sure, Denise, you’re my friend.”
“Yeah? You like me?”
“Sure.”
“I like you too,” she said.
Her hand snaked deftly under the front of my jeans while the fingers of her other hand played fiddle dee over my zipper. The zipper went down fast. She grinned wide, licked her lips and ducked her head.
The front doorbell rang again.
“Shit!”
I could hear Phat [one of the more notorious crack dealers in our neighborhood as well as Denise’s boyfriend] out in the living room, “Yo, Roy! Roy! Where Denise at? Yo, Denise!”
Denise ran out of the room. I heard her voice, breathless, saying, “Oh, Phat, baby, did you get it? Did you get it?”
“Sure I got it! Shit! What the fuck you doin up here?”
“I just got here this second, baby! I was just saying hi to Jules.”
“Yeah, Jules here? Jules! Yo, Jules!”
I zipped up and came out. Phat was high, feeling good. He locked me in a too-tight bear hug. “Man, we gonna party tonight, Jules! One last go, right? Man, goddam, I wish you guys didn’t have to leave!”
“We all gotta go sometime, Phat.”
He laughed. “Mebbe that’s true for you white folks but us niggas aint got nowhere else to go. We stuck right here. Denise, you goin anywhere I don’t know about?”
Denise shook her head, looking at me very seriously with big watery doe eyes. “This our neighborhood. We grew up here, we gone die here.”
Phat grew mawkish. “Aw, I wish you boys didn’t have to leave! C’mon, siddown, I brought me some rock!”
And Roy and Phat and Denise and I sat on the bare floor in a close circle as Phat produced his crack pipe and a bag of rock. Phat filled the pipe and handed it around. I was last to take a turn.
“I’ve never smoked before,” I stated matter-of-factly.
“What, you a virgin? A fuckin virgin! Whatcha know about that, Denise! Well, c’mon then!”
“Ah, I dunno. It’s funny, all the time I lived in this neighborhood and I never smoked.”
Denise grabbed my hand, almost desperately, and rubbed it like it was a good luck charm. “Go on, have a smoke, Jules, c’mon, for us…”
The three of them eyed me hungrily. They wanted to watch the newbie bust his cherry.
Honestly, what I was thinking was that Max wouldn’t like it. He wouldn’t appreciate this scene. He’d say crack was for people who lacked imagination. He’d say it lacked style. That stuff’s strictly for amateurs, he’d say.
I put the pipe to my lips. Phat lit me up. I inhaled quickly, strongly, and held it in. Instantly I regretted it. The rush built quickly–too quickly. Suddenly it consumed me. I got this fuzzed-out tunnel vision and my spine felt like it was made out of brittle glass. My head seemed to split in half, as if it had been run over by a steam train. I was physically immobilized for a full sixty seconds, head to toe, while my heart jack-hammered like crazy. I could only sit there, eyes pinned wide, hoping like hell I wouldn’t have a heart attack. The stuff was totally nerve-wracking.
Finally, thankfully, it passed.
“Have another!” Phat offered.
“Oh, thanks, but no. It’s not really for me. You guys go ahead.”
Roy and Denise and Phat began lighting up for each other in turn. In between tokes they, like all coke users, talked a lot of dithering, nonsensical shit. They talked about how we would all miss each other and it was so sad how it was all coming to an end for us as a group, it was the end of an era for the neighborhood, blah blah blah. At one point Phat actually started to cry.
“Aw, I don’t want you boys to leave, I know you’ll forget about us. You the only decent white folks we know!”
“That doesn’t say much for white folks, does it?”
Phat shook his head and rubbed the tears from his eyes. He massaged Roy’s shoulders for the fifth or sixth time. Poor guy, he was in bad shape. Denise kept sneaking little secret looks at me. I pretended to ignore them. Hell, I didn’t want Phat to shoot me right there in my own living room, not after everything else I’d been through.
“So!” I said. “What you folks gonna do with the rest of the night?”
“We goin to the card house, play us some cards. You wanna come?”
Denise nodded vigorously. “Yeah, Jules! Come to the card house with us!”
“Ah, sorry, I can’t. I gotta get busy packing, you know. I got a lot to do.”
Phat said to me, “Promise you’ll come back to the neighborhood every once in a while, Jules? Promise you’ll come see your old friends?”
He was crying again. He was very high, nearly incoherent. Denise rubbed his arm, looking up at him worriedly. “Promise me!” he kept saying.
So I promised him I would but in my heart I knew that I’d already broken that promise. I knew I’d never come back. Without Max this neighborhood meant nothing to me anymore. This time of my life was already just a dream and I was nothing but a ghost on these streets. It was over.
