Getting Higher Read online

  Crank nodded. "Too bad you couldn't make it, man. We had some good shit, plenty to go around. It was wild." He finished his beer with a gulp, then marched away to get another.

  "So, Joe, you workin' lately?" Rocky leaned against a chair and watched the pool game intently. Buzz was still shooting, slipping his skinny cue back and forth over shaky knuckles to line up the shot.

  "Nah, why bother?" said Joe. "There ain't no jobs in Brownstown, anyway. Where the hell you been?"

  "Well, to tell you the truth, I been up in Bartlett. Heard there's work there, maybe."

  "You find any?"

  "Not yet, but I applied at a few places. Some dude at Donaldson Trucking told me they might hire in May."

  Joe finished his beer. "Think you got a chance?"

  Rocky shook his head, still staring at the pool table. "Fuck, how do I know? I been laid off from fuckin' Global since they closed down the foundry, what, 'bout two years ago. Who the hell knows anymore? All I know is my unemployment's runnin' out in July." Rocky frowned, lips and mustache tight over his picket fence teeth. "I don't mind not workin'. I mean, I don't at all miss bustin' my ass all day for scale. I'd rather hang out around here. You know, play some pool, get fucked up. Only problem is, I like to eat."

  One of the men at the pool table, a skinny guy with greasy brown hair and a cigarette, whistled sharply. "Hey Rocky," he yelled, "your turn, right?"

  "Yeah, yeah, I'm comin'." Rocky walked over and picked up a cue stick, eyeing the felt table as he moved.

  Crank eventually returned with two beers and gave one to Joe. They drank and watched the pool game for a while, saw Rocky and Buzz go at it again.

  By the time they left Tap's Bar, it was dark outside, and they were both drunk. It was still raining.

  *****

  Chapter Five

  When the bottle came his way again, Joe took a long, hot swallow, then sat back and smacked his lips. The whiskey was cheap, all that he and Crank could afford at the time, but together with the dope, it still made Joe feel good. His head spun, turning endless, airy cartwheels within itself; he felt like he was floating in midair, though in truth, he was sitting on the floor of Crank's apartment with a bottle between his knees. He felt good, high, free from the stingy, strong pull of Brownstown.

  "So man, this is the right way to spend an evening, y'know?" Joe laughed and took another drink. Crank was also on the floor, sitting against the crate he used for a table. He was facing Joe, and was also feeling pretty high from the whiskey and dope. In his arms, he cradled his marijuana pipe, and every once in a while, he sucked on it absent-mindedly.

  "Yeah, yeah, you got it, pal. This is what it's all about." Crank took a deep tug on the bong, then leaned over and handed it to Joe. "Wanna' trade, man?"

  Joe laughed, then took the bong and passed Crank the bottle. The two had been doing this for the past two hours, ever since they had come home from Tap's. On the way back, they had picked up the whiskey at the liquor store, and Crank had dug into his secret stash for the dope; then, they had gotten right to business. They had already been drunk when they left Tap's, and after two hours of guzzling whiskey and smoking pot, they were both stoned senseless. They were sprawled in ragged limp piles on the floor, grinning stupidly in the dim light, their conversation fading into unintelligible garble.

  "So, you f-feelin' good, Joey?" Crank swallowed some whiskey, wiped his mouth on his hairy arm, and belched.

  Joe sucked deeply on the pipe, then leaned back and closed his eyes. He held his breath, trapping the warm, acrid smoke in his lungs. "Oh, yeah...," he mumbled, losing a wisp of smoke through his teeth. "Oh, yeah..."

  Crank chuckled, pointing a stubby finger at Joe. "Oh, rnan...you shit-faced sonnuva' ...bitch...you're...oh, you're losin' it, man. You're fallin' asleep, man, you're losin' it! Ha ha!"

  Joe's eyes blinked open and he laughed, too. "No way, you...you jackass. I ain't done yet ...not...not yet." Slumped like a boneless man against the wall, he had to crane his neck to suck on the bong again. As he did, a blissful expression crawled over his face. "Oh, this is great, y'know? This is a party...for sure."

  "Yeah, bud," rumbled Crank. "We sure know how...to get it all together, right?"

  "Yeah. We have got it all together...no two ways about it." Joe smiled and stared at the ceiling. "So, whatta' you think, man?"

  "About what?" Crank looked puzzled as he lifted the whiskey bottle to his chubby lips.

  "I don't know. Whatta' you think?"

  "Watta' I think about what? Booze, dope, what? There's a shitload of things to think about. Narrow it...down, man."

  Joe kept watching the ceiling. His eyes, though hazy with whiskey and pot, seemed thoughtful. "About...umm...whatta' you think about..." His voice trailed off in an inaudible mumble.

  Crank was starting to look annoyed. "What th' fuck, man? You...fallin' asleep already? Wake up, damnit, wake up." At that, Crank's booted right foot thrust out and cracked Joe's kneecap. Joe yelped, then jerked forward like a catapult and grabbed his leg.

  "Ahhh...damnit Crank...what th' hell's...your problem, man? That fuckin' hurt!" Joe rubbed his knee gingerly, wincing. "I was awake, you asshole!"

  "Yeah, Joey, you looked like it. Uh-huh...wide-awake, for sure."

  "Screw you, man." Joe gestured angrily at his friend, jabbing the middle finger of one hand up in the air. Then, he turned and plucked the bong from the floor, where he'd dropped it when Crank kicked him. "Oh well, this'll make it feel better. Yeah." He took a long drag on the pipe and again slumped back against the dirty wall.

  "Hey Joey, you wanna' know what I think? I think this damn bottle of booze is empty. That's what I think." Crank turned the bottle upside down and a shiny clear trickle of whiskey ran out on his lap. He stared dumbly at the wet spot on his pants for a moment, then at the bottle. "Time for garbage, little bottle." Twisting around, he heaved the whiskey bottle in the air; it flew across the room, then shattered against a wall. Joe jumped at the sharp, tinkling crash it made.

  "Ahh, man, less noise, less noise. What'll the neighbors think?"

  Crank snickered and rubbed his hands together. "Do I look like I give a fuck, Joey? Here, gimme' that pipe, man. That pitch took a lot out of me. I'm burned out, now. Gimme' a toke."

  After taking one last hit, Joe handed over the bong. "Here, man, get into it."

  For a moment, the room was silent as Crank sucked on his bong and Joe stared at the ceiling again. The only sound was the rain outside, peppering the windows with a ceaseless tapping. It was still pouring down hard, even worse than it had that afternoon; the Stonybank River was slowly climbing its banks and the streets of the city were filled with puddles. Thunder drummed in the distance.

  "Say, Crank, watta' you think...about Rocky?"

  "Well, personally...I thought the movie...sucked."

  Joe groaned, his eyes still on the ceiling. "Not the damn movie! That dude...you know, that dude that's always at Tap's."

  Crank laughed. "I know who it is, dumb shit. That was a joke...don't you get it? Ha ha ha...you dumb shit! Boy, are you…stupid!"

  Joe ignored the wisecracks. "Rocky said he's gettin' a job in Bartlett, maybe with Donald...Donald Duck trucking..."

  Suddenly, Crank roared. "Oh, geez...ha ha! It's Donaldson, not Donald Duck! Ha ha ha...you stupid sonnuva'..."

  He started laughing hysterically, uncontrollably. Soon, he was rolling on the floor, clutching his side; the bong clattered to the floor, fine dark dope spilling out of the bowl. "Donald Duck, Donald Duck...ha ha ha ha ha!!"

  It seemed that Joe didn't even notice his friend's performance. He just sat and stared upward, mumbling on to himself. "Haven't you thought...you know, about...like, about a job?"

  Crank just kept tossing and giggling on the floor and didn't hear a word Joe said. "Well, whatta' you think?"

  His laughter subsided a little and Crank rolled over to look at Joe. "Hey, Joey...ha ha ha...how many Pollocks does it take...ha ha ha...to screw in...ha ha ha...a
lightbulb?" He roared, as if that were the whole joke and there was no punchline.

  Joe kept talking. "Only problem is, there's no...no fuckin' jobs to get in the first place. Who gives a shit, right?"

  In five minutes, Joe forgot what he was saying and fell asleep. Crank was still laughing.

  "H-hey, Joey...ha ha ha...I just...I just shit my pants, man!! Ha ha ha ha! I laughed so hard...I...shit...my pants!! Ha ha!!" He laughed and laughed for a long time; then, he drifted off to sleep, too.

  *****

  Chapter Six

  When Joe and Crank awoke the next morning, they both felt miserable. Joe woke first, his head beating and his belly churning like a motor; before he realized what was happening, he was heaving all over the floor, all over himself, and, in his struggle to stand up and stumble to the bathroom, all over the sleeping, puffy body of Crank. Once he reached the gaping toilet, Joe plunged to his knees and puked violently into the bowl for a long time.

  After a while, Crank came around, too, roused by the sound of Joe in the room. As he rolled over onto his back and jimmied his sticky eyes open, Crank slowly became aware of his own dismal, sickly condition. His head was rushing and swirling like a blender, his neck was pierced with a needle of pure, cold pain; his mouth was glued shut, and his body seemed so heavy that he could not move.

  After a few minutes, moaning and clutching his skull, the fat redhead somehow pulled himself up and steadied his vision...only to look down and see Joe's vomit festering all over his clothes.

  "Sonnuva' bitch," he groaned, turning away from the sight. "Oh, sonnuva' bitch."

  Then, he threw up, too.

  It was a long time before Joe and Crank could think, see, and walk straight. When they could, they cleaned up a little, splashing some cold water on their faces and wiping the vomit off their clothes. They didn't bother to change their clothes, though they were all filthy and smelly and wrinkled like wadded newspaper; for one thing, they were still too sick to try, and for another, they didn't have any other clothes to change into.

  At about three o'clock, they decided to go out and meet their pushers. It was Wednesday, the day they made deliveries for the local drug dealers; at the time, it was the only job that either of them had. They were paid forty dollars a day, together, for working Wednesdays and Mondays, and split the money between themselves. It was easy work, as long as they didn't get caught, and the extra money on top of their unemployment checks helped them make it through the week.

  The pushers were a couple of guys who lived across the river, in a run-down neighborhood in the South Side, and ran their operation from a basement in one of the tenements there. They had a quiet, low-profile business, dealing with a small number of customers in a small part of the city. They had never been caught, and tried their best to make sure they never would be.

  Walking over the Franklin Bridge, Joe and Crank crossed the river into the South Side and reached the pushers' ramshackle building around three-thirty. Ignoring a bunch of wild kids wrestling on the front steps, they weaved inside and descended to the basement.

  The basement of that building was hardly ever used, except by the dealers. The place was huge and drafty, stacked with junk that was left there by tenants; most of the stuff was abandoned, just cheap, overused belongings forgotten by poor families scrambling from one dump to the next. The pushers only used one small corner, in fact; they hid their merchandise behind stone blocks they could remove from the walls, and set up a card table from which they did business. There was little chance that they would ever be found, hidden away in that vast, black cellar, tucked in a musty crevice behind mountains of furniture and boxes. Their customers would never turn them in, and the people in the rooms above knew better. That was why they used the place.

  Slowly, Joe and Crank approached the pushers' corner, pushing aside boxes and junk to make a path. As they went, Joe crinkled his nose at the smell of the place, a wet, slimy, mildew odor that was so strong it almost made him sick. The air was damp and stale, hanging in the dark cellar like stagnant fog, never moving, never mixing with fresh air from above. Aside from the pushers and their associates, almost no one opened the door at the top of the stairs, so the stink and chill were trapped forever inside. The air down there was probably the same stuff that had filled the place when it was first built, many decades ago, only now it was old and rotten.

  "Ah, shit!" Crank tripped over a box on the floor and almost fell over. "Somebody oughtta' clean this damn place up!" He turned and kicked the box, bringing a dull rattle from its contents.

  As Crank shambled on, Joe glanced down. The box that had tripped his friend was full of old toys; a big toy dump truck was sticking over the edge, raising its blunt, rusty nose in the putrid air. Beside it was an old, broken hula hoop and a naked doll with one arm.

  After wading through some more junk, Joe and Crank finally found the right corner. Crank flicked away a row of blankets slung over a clothesline, and he and Joe were face-to-face with the pushers.

  "Hey, dudes," he said, wiping his hands on his polyester slacks. "We're here."

  The three men said nothing. They just sat there on rickety old lawn furniture, watching Joe and Crank. The pushers looked threatening in the dense, oily darkness; they sat in a row behind their card table, with a single kerosene lamp glowing dimly on the floor. Their faces were shadowy, their features practically formless in the thick jelly black. Joe and Crank had to squint hard to see them through the basement darkness.

  These three figures were the men Joe and Crank worked for, the men behind the drug business in that part of Brownstown. One was a mechanic in a beat-up garage, a guy they called Monkey; the other was an unemployed steelworker, formerly a lathe operator at Global, called Shack; the last was a bloated human zeppelin named Fart, who used to be a welder at Global. Neither Joe nor Crank knew what the real names of any of the guys were, and only ever heard them called by these nicknames. For all they knew, Monkey, Shack, and Fart might be their real names.

  Shack was the first to speak. "Hello Crank, Joey. We got some stuff for you to do." The man tilted his chair back against the wall. "Three deliveries today--two in South Side, one in Hoover. Forty bucks, as usual, if you come through."

  Crank nodded curtly. "You got a list, addresses?"

  Suddenly, Fart shouted, startling both delivery boys. "No fuckin' way, man! No more lists, there's too much heat. They busted some guys in Bartlett just last night. They catch one a' you shitheads with a list, and everything's screwed."

  "Right," agreed Shack. "From now on, you get smart. We tell you once where you gotta' go, you make the drop. We ain't takin' no more chances with this shit goin' down." Shack's twiggy body ticked back and forth in his chair. He was a thin, bony man, who had little in the way of hair or muscles, and was losing what he had. He was probably in his thirties, Joe figured, and was already going bald. Almost always, he wore plaid flannel hunting shirts and bell-bottom jeans, and baseball caps which hid his thinning hair. That day, he wore a scraggly old cap with a Los Angeles Dodgers insignia peeling off the front.

  "What if we forget?" asked Joe. "1 mean, should we come back here, or take the stuff home, or what?"

  Fart laughed. "You won't forget, shitface, 'cause we know where you live."

  "I just got evicted today, so you don't, man," chuckled Joe.

  Fart leaned forward and glared. "Don't get smart, fuckface. Don't make me mad."

  "Back off, man," said Shack. "These guys'll do their job, don't worry." He stood and walked around his chair to the wall. He jammed two spidery fingers into a crack between cement blocks and started to pry a block out. As the cold stone scraped and shifted, mortar dust loosened and trickled to the floor.

  As Shack worked on the wall, Monkey picked up a crinkled slip of paper and read from it. "South Side," he mumbled, his dull voice so low Joe could barely hear it, "120 Maxwell Street. It's a side door in an alley off some bar. There'll be a black guy named Teddy. Give him the bag on top, he'll pass you an
envelope." Monkey clawed a hand through his greasy black hair; his hair was so dark and slick, it looked like he'd dumped a quart of oil on it.

  Joe and Crank stood for a moment, committing the address to memory. "120 Maxwell, 120 Maxwell," whispered Joe as he tried to memorize. "120 Maxwell, 120 Maxwell, 120 Maxwell."

  Monkey looked impatient and restless. "Got it?" he drawled, tipping his knobby, clefted chin in the air. Joe nodded briskly and Crank shrugged. "All right. Next one goes behind the gate at the old wheel plant at Global. Dump your package in an old garbage barrel beside the gate. It has a big, black 'X' painted on the side, you can't miss it. There'll be an envelope in the same barrel for you to pick up."

  "Okay, yeah...the wheel plant. That one's easy." Crank brushed his hand through the air in a cocky "nothing to it" gesture, then spread the other hand wide and ticked off the deliveries on his fingers. "120 Maxwell, the wheel plant at Global. Got it."

  "Good. Last package goes to Hoover." Monkey checked the paper he was holding, then cleared his throat. "You guys know where the old YMCA is?"

  "Uh, yeah, right," said Joe. "Isn't it over by the bridge, uh, over on Rachel Street?"

  "Yeah. You cross the bridge, go down Rachel for a block, then it's on your left. It's right beside Willy's Bar. You can't miss it." At that, Monkey ripped up the slip of paper; as he talked, he plucked a matchbook from his shirt pocket, pinched a single match from inside, and lit it. One gangly arm dropped the paper scraps to the floor, then set them aflame. "Now," he continued, "where are you dudes goin' today?"

  "120 Maxwell, in a alley, some guy named Teddy. Old wheel plant at Global, by the gate, barrel with a 'X' on it. The old YMCA in Hoover." Joe stopped and thought for a second. "Wait, whatta' we do at the Y? Who's our contact?"