Idiot Wind Page 2

I flashed him a grin and nodded. ‘Just give me a few minutes, Dave,’ I said. ‘I’ll get back to you.’

  This was a good sign. I hadn’t even had time to shuck my pack and take off my coat and already I had my first order. Now all I had to do was duck downstairs to the basement storeroom and get busy cutting the coke and portioning it into packets. Then I could open for business.

  The door to the Raccoon’s basement beer-storage room was posted with a sign that said ‘Employees Only’. I paid it no mind. I wasn’t on the payroll at the Raccoon, but I served as the unofficial ‘bar-back’ on busy nights, fetching cases of beer whenever the bartenders needed to restock. My efforts were repaid in free drinks, and – more importantly – in unfettered access to the storeroom whenever I needed a little privacy to package up some coke. As long as I came upstairs toting a case of beer, no one got suspicious. I was part of the scenery, as inconspicuous as the dusty framed photos of Jackie Gleason hanging on the bar’s wood-panelled walls.

  The beer storeroom occupied the building’s former coal cellar and extended partway under the sidewalk in front of the bar. Up top, there was a metal hatch covering the hole through which the coal used to be dumped. Now the hatch was used for keg deliveries. The beer-truck drivers would open the hatch and drop the barrels of beer straight down through the hole onto a cushioning pile of old tyres arranged on the floor beneath the opening. It was a handy system.

  Fruit flies infested the storeroom much of the year, but fortunately they disappeared once the weather turned cold, so I didn’t have to worry about getting black specks in the coke I was about to cut that night. But as I unloaded my pack onto the top of a stack of beer cases and laid out my supplies I discovered I had a bigger problem. My bottle of cut was practically empty.

  I shook my head in disbelief. What a dipshit I was! My only recourse was to hit the street again and hustle over to the smoke shop around the corner on West Broadway, where the turbaned Pakistani who ran the shop did a booming business peddling drug paraphernalia to the neighborhood’s burgeoning population of cokeheads. I knew he stocked jars of powdered vitamin B. I’d bought from him before. I prayed the shop would still be open. Otherwise, I was fucked.

  I hurried upstairs and was immediately buttonholed by Dave, who was impatiently waiting to collect the gram he always ordered. ‘Slight snag,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got to run out and pick up a pack of Sno-Seal papers. Hang tight, I’ll be right back.’ Which was a lie, of course, but ‘cut’ is a word best left unsaid when talking to a customer.

  My heart sank when I turned the corner onto West Broadway and saw the smoke shop’s security gates already locked for the night. The smoke shop must have closed at six. I’d missed my chance by minutes. What the fuck was I going to do now? I knew of another shop in the Village, but there was no guarantee that place wouldn’t be closed, too, by the time I could get there. Besides, I already had a good buzz going, thanks to the Akvavit and the lingering effects of Bobby Bats’ free sample. Why ruin it with a fruitless trip uptown? Better to just stay put and bite the bullet. I could sell a few grams of uncut coke to Dave and whoever else was lucky enough to take advantage of my stupidity. Once I had a little walking-around cash in my pocket I would close up shop for the night and hold on to the rest of my stash until I could replenish my supply of cut when the shops reopened on Saturday. It would put a crimp in my timeline for recouping the cash I owed Bobby Bats, there was no denying that. But with any luck I could pick up the slack over the next few days. At least that’s what I told myself.

  Back at the Raccoon, I returned to the beer cellar and got busy creasing Sno-Seal papers and weighing out coke on the mini-scale I kept in my pack. When I was done, I had six half-gram packets ready for sale. For my personal use, I scooped out another half-gram, loading it into one of those little glass vials every cokehead carried back then – the kind with the tiny brass coke spoon attached to the screw-top by a short length of chain. The remaining ten-plus grams I stored away in my pack, cursing myself all the while. It was galling to think how much business I’d be passing up before the night was over.

  Before heading back upstairs I helped myself to a couple of bumps from my vial, which improved my mood. Then I stashed my backpack in a dim corner of the storeroom for safekeeping and grabbed a case of Bud longnecks to carry up to the bar.

  ‘Thanks, Pete, you read my mind,’ Ace said when I set the case on the corner of the bar. ‘What are you drinking?’

  I ordered another round of Akvavit and Rolling Rock, and while I waited for Ace to bring my drinks I caught Dave’s eye and nodded toward the men’s room door. He got the message and nodded back. Two minutes later, we crowded into the single-stall bathroom, locking the door behind us.

  ‘You’re going to love this shit, Dave,’ I said, with painful confidence, as I passed him two half-gram packets.

  ‘Well, let’s see, shall we?’ he replied, smiling through his wiry black beard. ‘Join me for a bump?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say no,’ I grinned back. When had I ever said no?

  ‘First things first,’ he said, pulling five twenties from his pants’ pocket. They were bunched in a damp roll. He must have been clutching them tight in one of his clammy palms the whole time he’d been waiting for me.

  I unpeeled the bills from the roll and slipped them into my wallet, while Dave opened one of his packets and produced a sip-straw from the breast pocket of his rumpled Wall Street suit. He snorted two good hits and I could see his eyes light up as he handed me the straw.

  ‘Damn, Hat, you weren’t kidding! This shit’s the real deal.’

  ‘Told you,’ I smiled, and helped myself to a couple of bumps.

  After stashing the straw and the packet of coke back in his breast pocket, Dave checked his nose in the stall’s mirror and rubbed away any telltale traces of white. I did the same. Anybody seeing us emerge could probably guess what we’d been up to, but there was no sense being sloppy about it.

  ‘We good?’ Dave asked.

  ‘We’re good,’ I answered.

  ‘Okay then, let’s go,’ he said, unlatching the door. ‘We’ve got drinking to do.’

  I waited a respectable minute after Dave left the bathroom, then slipped out the door myself and joined him at the bar, where he was surreptitiously tucking one of the coke packets into his wife Andi’s pocketbook. It was her turn to powder her nose. She excused herself and headed for the ladies’ room while Dave ordered us all a round of beers.

  ‘To the Giants,’ Dave toasted, clinking his bottle of Bud Light against my Rolling Rock.

  ‘To the Giants,’ I repeated.

  The party was under way.

  By seven-thirty I had sold the four half-grams I was holding, which left me with cash in my pockets but, regrettably, nothing for the latecomers. All I could do to soften the bad news was to offer the unlucky ones a few hits from my personal stash, discreetly passing them my vial so they could visit the bathroom on their own. I figured my largesse would pay off in the long run. Looking at the grins on their faces when they returned from the john, I knew they’d be back for more tomorrow.

  As the night wore on, the number of freebies I was doling out began to add up at a rate that should have been alarming. That is, of course, if I had been in any condition to heed an alarm. But I had long since morphed into Mr Magnanimous, heedless of anything but the cokehead’s prime directive. Keep the party going! Whenever the vial came back empty, I’d duck down to the beer cellar and reload.

  And a good time was had by all.

  The rest of the night whizzed by, and next thing I knew the bartenders were shouting last call. Dave and Andi greeted this announcement with a good-natured chorus of boos. It was four in the morning, and they’d just spent ten hours straight in the Raccoon Lodge, but they were still raring to go. As was I. So when Dave proposed we move the party elsewhere, he didn’t have to twist my arm.

  ‘Houston Street?’ Dave suggested, as he dropped a twenty on the bar for the tip cup.


  ‘Works for me,’ I replied, and threw a twenty down myself. ‘Let me just grab my stuff from the cellar.’

  ‘Meet you outside,’ Dave said.

  We didn’t have to wait long for a cab. There were always plenty of taxis cruising the streets of Tribeca at closing time. Dave flagged down a yellow Checker and we all piled in.

  ‘Corner of Houston and Mercer,’ Dave instructed the driver.

  ‘The after-hours club?’ the cabbie asked. Every graveyard-shift cabbie knew the place.

  ‘You got it,’ Dave replied.

  The Houston Street after-hours was a Mafia-owned club on the northern edge of SoHo, housed in a former auto mechanic’s shop – a windowless, single-storey cinderblock box, totally nondescript. There wasn’t a sign anywhere on the building, just a small brass plaque on the reinforced steel door that opened onto Mercer Street. Members Only. That was it. Like Bobby Bats, the club did its best to keep a low profile. You could have walked past the place a hundred times and had no clue what went on in there. Unless, of course, you happened by the place at four in the morning. Then there was a long line of nocturnal specimens queued up on the sidewalk, all waiting their turn to stand in the glare of the spotlight mounted above the entrance and present their ID and membership cards to the hard-guy leather jacket working the door.

  The doorman turned away anyone without ID and a club membership card. If you had no card but showed up with someone who did, that person could sponsor you, and you’d be sent upstairs with your sponsor to the loft office. There you’d have to pass muster with the no-nonsense lesbian who managed the place. If she deigned to add you to the membership rolls and issue you a card, your sponsor’s name would be linked with yours in the ledger; in the event you caused a problem, you weren’t the only one who’d be called to account.

  Of course, the whole operation was completely illegal, so it made sense to be careful who you let through the door. But as difficult as it was to gain entrance to the club, to me the more difficult part by far was getting out once I was in. In that shadowy space throbbing with jukebox bass, the time–space continuum ceased to apply. You’d pop in at four for a nightcap or two, nothing more, and invariably get caught in the club’s quicksand till the houselights came up at 10 a.m. and the bouncers bum-rushed you out the door into the merciless light of day.

  You could have made a killing selling sunglasses on that corner.

  Dave, Andi and I were card-carrying members of the club, and when the shuffling line finally delivered us to the door we were waved in quickly. ‘Watch your step on the stairs,’ the doorman cautioned. His standard warning. The two steps that led down to the sunken floor of the club were notorious for sending people stumbling. The management purposely kept the place as dark as the opium den in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Which was exactly how the night owls who haunted the club preferred it.

  The shadows offered cover. Cover to indulge in indiscretions – both sexual and pharmacological – you would never get away with elsewhere. Couched in the candle-lit gloom of one of the high-backed booths that lined the club’s west wall, you could lay out lines on the varnished pine table and discreetly snort coke to your heart’s content. Or, if you preferred, you could treat yourself to a hand-job from one of the coke whores who hovered around the booths like fruit flies over a beer keg. As long as you didn’t cause a ruckus, the bouncers would just let you go about your business.

  There was a price you paid for all this laissez-faire treatment, of course, and it was exacted every time you stepped up to the bar. Even if you ordered nothing fancier than Pabst, and maybe the occasional shot of schnapps, you could easily drop the better part of a hundred bucks in just a few hours. I knew that all too well. I’d done it many times over the years. And here I was, with a wallet full of cash I should have been saving for Bobby Bats, on my way to doing it once again.

  No worries, whispered the idiot wind. You can make it up tomorrow.

  The club was filling fast when we arrived, but there were still a few unoccupied booths and we grabbed one while we could. I dumped my stuff on one of the seats and told Dave and Andi to hold the fort while I fetched the first round from the bar. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I spotted some familiar faces on the raised dance floor at the back of the club, where the jukebox was pumping out Billy Ocean’s ‘Caribbean Queen’ at full volume. Bartenders and waitresses, mostly, out to unwind a little after working the night shift. I could never predict who I’d run into at Houston Street, but I’d been knocking around the West Village and SoHo and Tribeca for so many years that it was a safe bet I’d run into somebody I’d shared a drink or a hit of coke with in my travels. And, sure enough, tonight there were plenty of candidates giving me the nod as I made my way to the bar.

  I was happy to see my favourite bartender working. Gwen was a blonde with a Rubenesque figure, and her quick smile and sunny disposition always made the club seem a little less sepulchral. Like me, she was a Norwegian ‘squarehead’ born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and we’d been swapping bad lutefisk jokes ever since I started hanging out at Houston Street back in the mid-seventies. That night, however, the frown she turned on me when I stepped up to the bar told me she was in no mood for jokes.

  ‘Well, well, look who finally decided to show his face,’ she said, sounding miffed.

  For a split second, I stood there wondering why. Then it dawned on me.

  Oh, shit, I still owe her two hundred bucks!

  The last time I’d seen Gwen I’d been scrambling to cover a debt to Bobby Bats, and I’d hit her up for cash, with the promise I’d get the money back to her within a week. That was more than a month ago.

  No wonder she was pissed.

  ‘I know, I know, I’m a fucking asshole,’ I said, feeling mortified. ‘I’m sorry, Gwen, what can I say?’

  ‘How about, “Thanks for the loan, Gwen. Here’s your money”?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, grinning sheepishly as I pulled out my wallet. ‘Thanks for the loan, Gwen. Here’s your money.’

  ‘That’s more like it.’ Gwen finally smiled. ‘What can I get you?’

  Glad that she wasn’t one to hold a grudge, I ordered three beers and three shots of peppermint schnapps, and when I settled the bill I guiltily tipped Gwen an extra twenty before heading back to the booth.

  ‘Thanks, Hat,’ Dave said, as I set the cork tray down on the table. ‘Next round’s on me.’

  It better be, I told myself. One trip to the bar and my wallet was close to empty. I’d definitely have to make some kind of move in the club before the night was over, there was no getting around it. First, though, a drink.

  ‘To the Giants!’ we toasted, and I quickly downed my shot of schnapps.

  ‘Freelance dealing’ was one of the few activities not tolerated at the Houston Street club. The Italians had their own people moving drugs in the place and anyone they caught poaching on their turf would quickly get the boot (or worse). I knew I’d be taking a risk if I tried moving product in there, but I was so strapped for cash at that point I was willing to take my chances. And so, when Andi dragged Dave off for a spin on the dance floor, I hunkered down in the booth, keeping a wary eye out for the roving bouncers, and fiddled around in my pack on the seat beside me until I had three Sno-Seal packets filled with what I hoped was no more than a gram each. Fooling with a scale would have gotten me caught in a heartbeat. All I could do, under the circumstances, was to eyeball the amounts and pray I wasn’t being overly generous.

  When Dave and Andi returned to the booth, I excused myself and started making the rounds. Miraculously, within a half-hour I managed to discreetly unload the three grams to some of the people I’d spotted on my trip to the bar and the bouncers were none the wiser. And suddenly the pressure was off. Once again, I had money to burn. And before the long night was over I would burn through plenty.

  Predictably, the party kept right on cranking along until the house lights flared at 10 a.m. and sent us scurrying out into the streets of SoHo li
ke so many startled cockroaches. The three of us were starving by then, so we caught a taxi back down to Tribeca and had the cabbie drop us at a Greek diner on Hudson Street, where our motor-mouths made short work of three huge breakfast platters. Six thousand greasy calories later, we finally parted company. Dave and Andi flagged a cab and headed downtown to their harbour-view apartment in one of the new high-rise buildings that flanked the World Financial Center complex. I set off south down Hudson to pay a visit to the smoke shop. It was just past eleven and he’d be open for business and happy to sell me a bottle of exorbitantly over-priced vitamin-B powder.

  Outside the smoke shop, I stashed the bottle of cut in my backpack and headed up the block to Chambers Street and the Bond Hotel, an SRO flophouse where the hallways reeked of roach spray and bad hygiene, and the bathroom faucets spat out rust-red water for the first few minutes after you opened the tap. Like the down-and-outers who made up its customer base, the Bond Hotel had seen better days. But it hadn’t always been a flophouse. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, when the hotel was built, it was called the Cosmopolitan and it catered to a posh clientele. Then in the late 1930s the building had gone up in flames, a victim of arson. The place was eventually refurbished and renamed the Bond Hotel, but it never regained its former glory and by the 1980s it was as dreary a place to stay as any hellhole on the Bowery.

  The Bond, however, still had three things to recommend it. First, it was close to the Raccoon Lodge. Second, its rates were as cheap as you could find anywhere in Manhattan. And third – but not least – its rooms had solid doors and sturdy locks, which is something you come to value when you need a place to process illegal drugs. All of which made it my flophouse of choice whenever I could spare the cost of a room.

  I would hardly have called myself a regular at the hotel, but I had stayed there enough that the desk clerk recognised me as a familiar face, which helped me convince him to rent me a twenty-dollar room several hours earlier than the customary check-in. I was grateful for that. I’d already been up for more than twenty-four hours. The sooner I could hit the rack, the better.