Ten minutes later, Carmine and the main capital woman were driving downtown in his pickup truck to score. She was a friend of a friend, Carmine assumed she’d take a cut in one way or another, a cut from a source Carmine assumed was already cut with lactose or spillover from a fictional price tag, or both. That’s if he didn’t get burned altogether.
She seemed hip to all the latest dope news: “…largest bust in history last month in The Bronx, The Dope King got sentenced to 25 years in a California prison. Now there’s a lady pushing a baby stroller in Union Station who deals, all you got to do is…” Carmine wished listening to this rot was her cut alone, but he was a stranger in town and his friend was doing him a favor. Hell, this lady probably thought she was doing him a favor, maybe even the dealer.
His money was worthless, apparently; all these people must be helping a stranger out of the kindness of their hearts. He remembered a line from The Horse Soldiers: “Medicine is where you find it. Even in Andersonville.” They got to the place, an old hotel; she ran up, he waited in the truck. Across the street, a Mexican family was piling into their car. The mother made eye contact with Carmine. She knows exactly what’s going on, Mexicans are pretty good that way, he thought. But Carmine was no jerk; when the main capital woman finally came back, he drove away before she had the chance to pass him the score—that way, if there was a cop ambush waiting around the corner, maybe they’d just take his vehicle and not charge him for possession. Smart thinking, he told himself, anything to pump creativity into this dour errand.
On the ride away, with the radio busted, she tried to bring him out of his shell: “You wanna hear some of my dreams? I write them down…” She took out a small notebook from her jacket pocket.
Carmine grunted.
She squinted at her microscopic handwriting. “I have to leave my house in Los Angeles because the police are coming to arrest me. I don’t know why. I am going to drive a white van to Northern California (possibly T’s van, Snowflake). Helicopters passing overhead as I drive. I stop and hide at a friend’s hut, high in Griffith Park. Is my house on fire? Who lit my house on fire? Did I light my own house on fire? To what extent are the police aware of my identity?”
“Yes, you lit your own house on fire. You’re a criminal.”
He looked through his reflection, at the circuit’s skyline, hyperbolic rotation. We live at the bottom of a bowl, the macula of the eye, with atoms of onions, the remnants of some absent regent’s brunch. The syncopated lamplight parade led the way.
Ten minutes later, in a cube lined with tapestries and host to a mobile of fruit flies, the Two folded their limbs in exasperation and ingested the king’s ransom.
Some animal sulked under the couch, black-lipped and suspicious. The radio spoke.
“The fury of confession first,
then the fury of clarity:
It was from you that it was born,
hypocrite, obscure sentiment! And now,
let them accuse my every passion,
let them sling mud, call me deformed, impure,
obsessed, amateur, perjurer:
You isolate me, you give me the clarity of life:
I’m on the pyre, I play the card of fire
and I win this little immense good
I have, I win this infinite,
miserable compassion of mine
that makes even righteous anger my friend:
I can do so, because I’ve suffered you so!”*
