Bright, Precious Days

39

A THREE-BOOK CONTRACT DESERVED to be celebrated with a three-night bender — that was Jack’s feeling. Whether he’d ever complete three more books was a mystery he chose not to plumb too deeply. Highly unlikely at this rate. For the third night running, he found himself at the Beatrice Inn, sitting at the bar drinking vodka and watching the pretty club kids dance and snort and smoke. Cara had brought him here a few months ago and it had become a habit. Crazy fucking Cara, who found him any kind of drug he wanted and let him fuck her any way he wanted. Just last night, she’d gone down on him in the bathroom here while he was bumping up. But after two nights, he needed a break and had told her he was busy. He’d picked up this groupie girl at KGB and had had sex with her back at her apartment, but afterward he was still wide awake, and he’d ended up at the Beatrice. He was still trying to decide if he liked the place or not, but the fact that they let him in and let him do pretty much anything once there gave him incentive to approach the question with an open mind. Certainly low-down enough to suit his tastes, it looked and smelled like a dive. A smoky basement full of pretty, skinny skanks and hipster boys with clunky glasses and Chuck Taylor low-tops. Everybody smoking like it was 1948 and snorting coke off their keys, off the backs of their hands, off the top of the toilet tank in the bathroom, like it was 1984. X-heads with pinwheel eyes sucking lollipops after dropping disco biscuits. It was pretty much anything goes. Some celebrities, who seemed to behave themselves better than the party monsters. And old friends he’d made last night or the night before, including that painter Tony Duplex, who seemed to be on a tear after several years of — or so Jack had been told — yakking about his struggle against addiction. Here he was again, all dressed up in some kind of tight red suit with white winklepicker shoes that almost disguised how ragged and strung out he was — sunken eyes, dilated pupils.

“Hey, Jack, whassup?”

“Same old.”

“You wouldn’t be holding, would you?”

“Barely. I was thinkin’ about calling my man Kyle.”

“That’d be cool.”

“You got a place we could meet him?” To score the drugs and do them here, he decided, was just too fucking complicated.

“Send him to my loft.”

“Cool.”

—

Twenty minutes later, they were at Tony’s so-called loft, an entire building on West 27th, where he lived and worked. A bleary-eyed assistant opened the door for them, clad in a paint-stained chef’s coat. Several unfinished paintings hung on the wall, dozens more stacked in racks. Another assistant was sleeping on a futon in a corner, curled under a dirty quilted duvet. A yellow Lamborghini Gallardo was parked in the middle of the space.

“Used to be a truck depot,” Tony said.

“I should bring my truck here,” Jack said.

“You got a truck?”

“Back in Tennessee. Black Chevy Silverado 1500 Double Cab.”

“You can park it here anytime.”

A metal staircase led up to the living area, a kind of a mezzanine loft within the loft, furnished with antiques, Chinese porcelain and Persian carpets, except for the kitchen area, which was stridently industrial. Jack had called the dealer from the Beatrice, and while they waited for him, they snorted the last of his stash. Jack laid out the lines while Tony put New Order’s Substance in the CD player.

Tony found a bottle of Ketel One and filled two faceted crystal goblets with vodka. “You ever mainlined?”

“A guy’s got to have some boundaries,” Jack said. “I figure you’re safe as long as you just snort. You?”

How does it feel to treat me like you do.

“A little. Just chipping. Rock was my downfall. I discovered freebasing round about ’85 and that was my heaven and my hell. Me and Richard Pryor. Did it with him, too. The ritual of making it was part of the cult — it was a fucking ceremony. Dissolving the coke in water, adding the ammonia, stirring, precipitating out the impurities and finally the coke itself. That was the real deal. Nothing like it. Then crack came along, which was a kind of mass-market knockoff, an inexpensive shortcut, the Kmart version. But it was easy, it was cheap, it was insanely addictive. Making freebase became a lost art, like affresco painting.”

“Whatever the fuck that is.”

“It’s like wet plaster fresco painting. Giotto perfected it. Freebase — that’s like his Cappella degli Scrovegni.”

“Whatever.”

“Then crack came along and fucked everything up.”

Jack checked his phone for texts and messages. “Maybe I should call him again.”

“Good idea.”

But the call went straight to voice mail. “Waitin’ on the man, part five hundred.”

“I hate dealers,” Tony said.

“Scum of the earth.”

“Are you sure this guy’s coming?”

“He said he was.”

“How long did he say?”

“He said twenty minutes. But that was thirty minutes ago.”

“Dealer time. It’s like dog years.”

“Don’t I fuckin’ know it.”

“Did he say where he was?”

“He said he was uptown.”

“Shit, that could be anywhere. Did he say where uptown? Like Harlem uptown?”

“Just said he was on his way downtown.”

“You can’t believe any fucking thing a dealer says.”

“Yeah, but what choice do we have, really?”

“We could just say no to drugs. You’re probably too young to remember that whole fucking campaign. That was Nancy Reagan’s big slogan in the eighties. ‘Just say no.’ ”

“How’d that work out?”

“The drugs wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“Maybe I should call him again.”

“Definitely.”

Jack dialed again, listened to the voice-mail prompt. “Fucker won’t pick up.”

“I know a guy,” Tony said. “But he’s up in Harlem, and we have to go to him.”

“Man, that’s a logistical nightmare.”

Tony pointed to the car on the main floor. “This time of night, it’s ten minutes in the Lambo up the West Side Highway, tops.”

This sounded like a bad idea, but Jack was getting desperate, and he’d never let the fact of being impaired keep him from going somewhere to get more impaired.

Tony’s assistant tried to stop them, but Tony insisted he was fine to drive and told him to crank the garage door open. Jack folded himself into the snug embrace of the cockpit as the engine roared to life.