The Tar Pit (8 of 9)

I was doped to the teeth with a full shoebox at risk at that point. I didn’t get high the next day, or the next day… but I did get high that next weekend, both days, and then Monday I got high with the tips I made delivering sandwiches, and that was all it took. Soon it was a week later, and I was pulling from the shoebox to round out what I didn’t make in tips or paychecks, and by the end of the month the shoebox was empty. Benzo had refused to cop for me when I decided after a week, I would be sick if I didn’t have it.

“I get what you’re trying to do for me, man… but… I got to be at work at six, and I’m going to be sick,” I pleaded.

 “You won’t be sick, you have Mr. Cotton’s dope.”

“What is that? Mr. Cotton’s dope is a waste of money, come on, Benzo.”

“Then don’t waste your money on it.”

“You’re really not going to help me out? I’ve got to work all night,” I said.

“I am not helping you to spend any of your shoebox money on heroin. You need to just take what you’ve got and go … get some detox meds, get on a Greyhound and just go… before you spend all the money you’ve got on dope.”

“Really?” I argued. “All that time I gave you clean urine so you could skate by on your piss tests and you’re not going to help me out?”

“I am helping you out,” he said.

His look said, and this is what a real friend does when asked to contribute to the demise of another friend… or maybe that’s just what I got out of it.

Now, as I stood in the window of my rented room, wiping the sweat from my eyes, my shoebox has lied empty for over two months. Some of the worst months I’ve had in weeks. Once my car broke and my jobs fell through, the bottom of the box came up quick. The rubber bands were stripped and left spent and forgotten on the box’s bottom. I’ve drug my belly across my own bottom these few months, a bottomfeeding street-carp, gasping for air in the mud of an empty lake.

I leaned my forehead on the window so I could look down on my driveway from above and pulled it away instantly. The direct sunlight had the glass heated up hot to the touch. I was rubbing my forehead with my fingertips when an unfamiliar vehicle turned into my driveway. I straightened to see who it was. I watched the tar-black Chevy Blazer pull straight in and up to the building. Who do I know that drives a Blazer?

I frowned when I saw who got out.

I watched the top of the kid’s head walk to the wooden staircase running up the side of the garage to a rooftop porch. The entrance door to our small group of servant’s quarters was up there, just passed my window. I listened to his footsteps climb the stairs. He knocked a light knuckle as he walked passed my window, but I was already locking my door on the way out.

“What’s up, Brad.” I said, pushing myself passed him and shutting the outside door behind me. “Am I glad to see you. Let’s go.”

I locked the door and shoved my balled-up fists into my pockets. My demeanor, my posture, my wrinkled and sweaty tee-shirt, the goosebumps spreading across the side of my neck, all spoke for themselves.

“Oh, you want to go to the spot?” Brad turned on his heel and followed me down the stairs.

“I need to go to the spot… in the worst way, I need to go.”

“Fuck, I was going to say… look at you. You look like shit.” He smiled and smacked his hand on my back. I jumped from the unexpected contact and a sharp pain stung across my skin. “Well let’s get you there… stat.” He jogged ahead of me and jumped into the truck. By the time I shuffled to the passenger side and climbed in, he already had the engine running.

 “When did you get this thing?” I asked, with my head twisted around, watching Brad back the truck out the driveway.

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“No, shit. I didn’t even know you got a car. Where’d you get it?”

“Somewhere on the Southside.” Brad’s bony fingers were wrapped around the top of the steering wheel as he pulled out onto Park Avenue and drove toward the Eastside.

 I opened the ashtrays and flipped open compartments, turned around and looked in the back seat, then was about to open the glove compartment.

“How much?” I asked,

“Oh, I didn’t pay anything for it.”

“What, it was a gift or something.”

“No, fool, it’s stolen. This thing’s a piece of shit. I wouldn’t pay for a crap car like this.”

“Stolen?” I said, yanking my hand away from the handle of the glove compartment. The rig in my sock became a relevant topic of concern in my brain. I looked at the steering column and noticed the lock cylinder was gone. He was somehow starting it with a screwdriver.

“Yeah, I stole it two weeks ago. Every day I just leave it on the side of a different road, and every day I come back and it’s still there, so I’ve just been driving it.”

“Well, drive it like you stole it, right?” I said, mindlessly letting the words come out of my mouth.

Brad dropped his foot on the pedal and the Blazer hopped up on to two legs and took off. “Whoa,” I shouted, as my head and my weak body flopped back against the car seat. He blew a stop sign and kept going. The trees along the sides of the road were whizzing by with an increasing speed. He blew another stop sign, an approaching car had to lay on the breaks not to hit my side of the truck. “Alright, Fuck, man. What are you doing?”

“You said ‘drive it like you stole it, so…’” He let off the gas and the truck started to slow.

“Not what I meant.” I held on tight to the armrest.

As the vehicle slowed, I started to relax, until he pulled the wheel to the right and drove up over the curb and onto the front lawns of the street we were on. “Ha Haaaa!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, laying tire tracks across a whole block’s worth of front yards. Brad made a fist and lifted it in bold defiance. “Life!” He screamed, “Ha Haaa! Am I right?”

“God, I hope so,” I said, checking my seatbelt for strength. “Drive it like you stole it? If I stole this car I would at least stay on the road.”

He pulled the Blazer back onto the side-street, but still blew the next stop sign at an uncomfortably high rate of speed. And that’s the difference between Brad and me… while I’m wiping the fingerprints off of every surface I remembered touching, Brad was sacked over the steering wheel, gripping it with gritted teeth and the wild-eyed and youthful smile of a kid who thinks he’s never going to die.

If I were directing the movie of my life, this is where I’d freeze the screen and introduce the kid that’s throwing mud up over the lawns and laughing like a maniacal hyena. Brad D’Angelo… or B&E Brad.

I met him years ago, on the courtroom steps, when I was smoking my last cigarette before voluntarily turning myself in to face the music for my University Bookstore fiasco. He walked up, introduced himself, and asked me for a smoke, and I gave him the pack. “I’m going to jail,” I said. “I don’t need ‘em.”

“I’m probably going too,” he refused the pack with his hand up, then shook his head. “But I might not. We’ll see,” he said, changing his mind and taking the box from me.

We talked for the length of a smoke, then went our separate ways once in the courthouse. Brad got a month in the misdemeanor jail for whatever he went to court for, and we ended up on the same pod. I had smuggled tobacco and rolling papers in, in the tongue of my shoe, and I smoked one with him in the small room up on the second tier with the glass windows.

Since then, we kept bumping into each other. We ran together, got high together, and once even randomly ended up in rehab at the same time, and they gave him the bed next to mine. We were in the same recovery group then, and had the same prick for a counselor, who tried to break us down mentally, scrub our brains, and build us back up in the name of the Big Book. We talked the good clean talk to each other, and I know he meant every word; that he was tired of running, and of all the things he’d be forced to do to support his out-of-control habit.

Still, one morning at breakfast, he found me in the cafeteria, over a hot cup of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal and a couple pieces of dry toast, and said, “You gotta talk me out of leaving. I’m about to go, and I don’t think I can stop myself.”

I sat next to him on a bench outside, underneath the pavilion behind the Men’s Center on the Eastside, smoking that same last-cigarette I’d given him so many years back, trying to talk some sense into him. “If I leave, I’m fucked,” he said. “My P.O. will be on me in a day or two and I’ll be back in jail, or back on the run… but I can’t stand to be in this place any longer,” he said.

There was nothing else I could say to talk him out of it, and he left.  

Brad had that gene inside, that fuck-it gene, that allowed him to ‘turn a switch’ and act without thinking, on the virtual knife-edge of instinct. I don’t possess this gene, but I’ve got several friends who do. It was a great tool while we scrambled to scrape together dope money, but it often got him in trouble, and B&E Brad would bounce in and out of jails, and rehabs, and prisons, for all of the years that I’ve known him.

I’ll write him in prison for a decade following my escape from the tar pits of addiction, after boarding a plane to Seattle with the last shot of junk I’d ever feel coursing through my veins. It will help me to stay clean to write him in prison and reflect to him ‘the good life’ without chains at a time when he’s got nothing to do but think about what he’s going to do when he gets out. That’s a distant future from where we were, tearing up the quaint, manicured lawns of Youngstown’s Northside in a stolen truck with a driver that simply didn’t give a fuck.

He was blazing down the street. The side-view mirrors of the cars parked along the curb came inches from scraping the sides of the truck.

“See, if it were me,” I said in the calmest voice possible, “I would drive so the cops didn’t know I was in a stolen car. That’s what ‘drive it like you stole it’ means to me.”

Brad blew through another stop sign at fifty miles an hour.

“Like stop signs,” I said. “Perfect example. Cops expect you to stop at stop signs… they get paid to catch you not stopping at the signs… and… I know, ‘fuck the man,’ I agree… but they do pull you over for it, and if you’re in a stolen car, say, with a rig in your sock… like me… I have a needle, with heroin and cocaine residue, in my sock… right now. And I know you got one in here too. I would at least like to get a shot off before I go to prison. Okay, so pretty fucking please… with cream and fucking sugar… Drive it like I stole it.”