Crackilton One More Time: A Novel (Paperback Sample)

Crackilton One More Time

a novel by

S.E. Tomas

Copyright © 2019 by S.E. Tomas

All rights reserved.

1

Chester had a beat-up Monte Carlo. It was parked on Lottridge Street, just outside his door. Normally, we took my car to go meet the dealer, but Chester had just cleared up whatever it was he had to clear up in order to drive his car again, and he wanted to drive, now that he had his wheels back.

We got into the car and then headed east on Barton Street about ten minutes to the 7-Eleven on Woodward and Melvin. Chester pulled into the parking lot. “I’ve got to meet him by the pay phones,” he told me.

Chester got out of the car and walked over to the pay phones, which were to the left of the doors, at the end of the building. I sat in the car and waited.

It was around twelve thirty at night, but the 7-Eleven was still pretty busy because it was Saturday night. There were cars coming and going.

About ten minutes later, I seen the dealer. He was approaching from the other end of the parking lot.

I turned to look at Chester, and seen that he was suddenly being jacked up by two plainclothes cops that had just pulled into the parking lot.

I turned to see if the dealer was getting jacked up, too, but he was already gone.

One of the cops came over to the passenger side of Chester’s car. “Get out of the car,” he told me. “I need to talk to you.”

I got out of the car.

“Walk with me,” the cop said.

I walked with the cop over to the sidewalk by the road.

“Who you are guys waiting for?” the cop asked me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “He just said he had to stop here for a minute.”

“Yeah, yeah. You know you’re hanging around with a convicted sex offender?”

“What?”

“Chester. He’s a child molester.”

The cop must have seen how shocked I looked. “Oh,” he said. “He never told you that story, I guess. I can’t imagine why.”

Right away, I thought the cop was telling me this because Chester probably was a convicted sex offender and the cop was trying to deter illegal drug use and other crime at his address.

It worked. I already didn’t want to go back there.

The cop didn’t try to search me. He didn’t even ask what my name was after that. “You’re free to go,” he told me.

I walked back to Chester’s vehicle. The other cop was finished with Chester now and had released him.

As Chester and I got back into the car, the cops got into their car and took off.

“Fucking pigs,” Chester said.

I was looking at Chester now in a whole different light. It made my skin crawl, just being in his car now. I’d always thought he was kind of a creep, the way he had porn on the TV all the time when I came over there and would continue to watch it as I sat there uncomfortably, waiting for him to call the dealer. But this was a whole different ballgame. “He’s just an all-around sick fuck,” I thought.

Chester took out his phone. “I’m going to try to call this guy,” he said.

“He ain’t going to come now,” I said. “He was here and seen you getting jacked up, so he took off.”

“Oh, OK. I’ll call someone else then.”

Chester tried calling a couple other dealers, but there was no answer.

“Just bring me back to my car, I guess,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”

My car was parked across the street from Chester’s house, in the Dairy Queen parking lot, at the corner of Barton and Lottridge.

We drove back to Chester’s. By now I was really fucking jonesing. My plan was to go inside Chester’s apartment and see if his roommate Sal could get me some dope.

“I’m going to see if Sal’s back,” I said, right before Chester and I got out of the car.

We walked into the ground-floor apartment. The smell almost knocked me on my ass. It didn’t matter how many times I’d walked into this filthy place, the smell almost put me on my ass every time.

Sal was home with his girlfriend. He was standing at the threshold of the bathroom, talking to her while she got all whored up, probably to go meet a John.

Because Sal hadn’t been in the middle of smoking dope when I’d walked in the door, I took it to mean that he didn’t have any. But I asked anyway. “I guess you don’t have anything left,” I said to Sal.

“No,” Sal said. “That’s why she’s getting ready to go out.”

There was another guy sitting on the couch, waiting for Chester.

“What’s up?” Chester said to the guy.

“I need a fifty,” buddy said.

“OK, I’ll call him.”

Chester got on the phone. He started talking to the dealer and then turned to me. “Hey, Jim, do you still want that forty?” he said.

“Nah, I’m good,” I said.

If I couldn’t get Sal to get dope for me, I didn’t want to get it from Chester. I didn’t want to deal with him anymore.

I was feeling pissed off and annoyed. All that hassle and I didn’t even have any dope. I had to find somewhere else to get it.

I guess I’ll just have to go ask Marcus, I thought.

Marcus was the black guy who lived in my building. I knew he would run out and get dope for me. I’d never asked him before, but I figured he knew me long enough by now, and had seen the type of person my girlfriend Christine was, that he knew better than to come up to my apartment later and ask me if I wanted more dope in front of my girlfriend. If Marcus couldn’t get it for me, then I was just going to have to go without. I didn’t know where else to get it in Hamilton. Since the carnival season had started three weeks earlier, I’d just been going to Chester’s. I was still trying to quit and didn’t want any dealers’ numbers on me.

Chester finished talking to the dealer and then hung up the phone. “OK, let’s go,” he said to the guy on the couch.

Chester and the guy left the apartment. As soon as they were out the door, I turned to Sal. “Hey, I just heard some disturbing shit about Chester from a cop,” I said.

“What’d you hear?” Sal said.

“That he’s a child molester.”

“Oh, that. Yeah, he did five years about twenty years ago for something that happened ten years before that.”

I could tell that Sal’s girlfriend also already knew this information because she’d looked like she was interested in what I was going to say at first, but then had gone back to doing her hair.

First the cop said it. Now Sal had confirmed it. I immediately wanted to get the hell out of there. I didn’t want to deal with either one of them now, Sal or Chester. Sal was staying in that house, which, in my eyes, didn’t make him that much better.

“I’ve got to go,” I said.

“All right,” Sal said. “See you later.”

I turned and headed for the door.

“He’s not really my friend, you know,” Sal said to me suddenly.

I had my hand on the doorknob already. I turned and looked at Sal.

“This is just a place to lay my head when I need to,” Sal said. “I couldn’t care less about Chester. If someone came in here and came at him, let’s just say I wouldn’t get involved.”

“OK, buddy, take it easy,” I said. But I knew I’d never be seeing this fucking guy again.

I left the apartment. I got into my car and then headed home.

In about five minutes, I was back at my building, which was right at the corner of Ottawa and Cannon, above the Big Bee convenience store.

I pulled into the lot behind my building and then climbed the wooden staircase up to the second floor. There were three apartments on each of the two floors above the convenience store. Marcus lived in one of the end units.

There was a very dim light on in Marcus’s kitchen. I went and knocked on his door.

The curtain covering the kitchen window opened a little. Marcus peeked out and then opened his door.

I could see Marcus’s wife behind him, in the living room. Like with my apartment, you could stand at the front door and see right into the living room. Marcus’s wife’s eyes were bugging out of her head. I could tell that she’d already smoked some crack. She looked tweaked out. Marcus didn’t look high, though.

Yeah, I’m in, I thought, as soon as I seen Marcus’s wife.

“Hey, what up, Jim?” Marcus said.

“Could you get me some hard?” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll give you a piece.”

“Yeah, he’ll get it for you,” Marcus’s wife piped up in the background. “Marcus, call your cousin.”

Marcus went and got his phone. The battery had died.

“Can I use your phone?” Marcus asked me.

“Sure,” I said.

I gave Marcus my phone.

As Marcus called his cousin, he asked me how much I wanted.

“A forty,” I said.

A second later, Marcus was talking on the phone. He ordered a forty for me and then handed me back my phone.

“All right, let’s go,” Marcus said.

Marcus put on his jacket and then we went downstairs to my car.

I still didn’t know where we were going yet. As I was about to turn out of the parking lot, I said to Marcus, “Which way do I turn?”

“Make a left,” Marcus said.

I turned left out of the parking lot and then headed east on Cannon.

“When you get to Kenilworth, make a right,” Marcus told me. “Then make a left onto Roxborough. It’s a straight shot all the way up Roxborough.”

“OK,” I said.

I followed Marcus’s directions. Within a couple of minutes, I was on Roxborough Avenue, which was a long residential street.

“We’re almost there,” Marcus said once we got to Parkdale Avenue.

We’d been in the car maybe five minutes.

While I was driving, I handed Marcus two twenty-dollar bills.

Marcus put the money in his pocket. “Turn left here at this driveway,” he said.

There was a row of townhouses along one side of the street. The entrance to a parking lot was in the middle of the row of townhouses.

I made a left and then drove to the parking lot, which ran the length of the townhouses.

I pulled straight into a parking space. I didn’t even have to turn my wheels.

“I’ll be right back,” Marcus said, and then got out of the car.

I watched Marcus walk down to the end of the complex and then go inside one of the units.

As soon as Marcus did this, I turned my car around and backed into the parking stall, so that I could see what was going on. I didn’t want to be facing a fence. There was nothing more suspicious than if you kept turning your head and looking back when you were sitting in a car in a parking lot. It already looked bad enough that I was sitting in a car in a parking lot late at night. I could have looked through the mirrors on the car, but I had a lot of blind spots. And in this type of situation, I couldn’t afford to have blind spots because I didn’t know what might be coming. This was a housing project; I knew just by looking at it. Complexes that looked like this were always social housing. I just wanted to be aware of my surroundings at all times and keep my wits about me.

A couple minutes later, Marcus came out of the house and then came back to the car. “We good,” he said. “Let’s go.”

I left the parking lot and headed back the way we came.

“I told him about you,” Marcus said as I drove. “The next time we go here, you’re going to meet him, OK? That way, you don’t have to ask me to get it for you, and then my wife isn’t falling in.”

I would have preferred if Marcus would have just run for me the next time. But if he wasn’t willing, what could I do?

“Thanks,” I said.

I drove back to our building. I gave Marcus ten dollars in cash for getting me the dope, and then we got out of the car.

Marcus went back up to his apartment. I went up to mine, which was the centre unit on the third floor.

Christine was still up when I got home. She came into the kitchen and gave me a kiss. “Hi, honey, how’d it go?” she said.

“I’ll have enough for my car insurance,” I told Christine, “but that’s about it. Hopefully, tomorrow’s a better day.”

It was early in the season and I wasn’t making good money yet. But really, I’d had a decent day. I’d grossed almost five hundred dollars for the day, and I got twenty-five percent of that, so it was nearly a hundred and twenty-five-dollar day. With what I already had, I had enough to pay my car insurance, which was two hundred and fifty bucks. I usually told Christine that the spots were shittier than they actually were, but I didn’t want her thinking they were too shitty or she would have wondered how I could have made enough to pay my car insurance. I had to tell her that I was at least making some money.

“Are you hungry?” Christine said. “There’s some dinner in the fridge.”

“Thanks, baby,” I said. “I’ll eat later.”

“All right. Well, I’m going to go to bed.”

“OK. I won’t be too long.”

Christine gave me a kiss. “Goodnight,” she said.

Christine went into the bedroom, which was just off the living room, and closed the door. I knew it would take some time for her to fall asleep, so I turned on the TV in the living room, turned the volume up a little bit so that she would think I was watching TV, and then went into the bathroom to get high.

Usually, I had to take a shit when I got home with some dope, but since the season had started, I’d noticed this was happening less and less for some reason. It was kind of like when I was younger, and I’d smoke crack and not get too paranoid. Then all of a sudden, one day, I started getting really paranoid anytime I’d smoke it.

It was really stuffy in the bathroom, so I opened the window in there. Now that it was getting warmer outside—it was early May now—it was a lot warmer in the house.

I jammed the bathmat up against the bottom of the door and got my stem out of my shaving kit. I was still using the same copper pipe I’d been using all winter.

I sat down on the edge of the tub. I put my stem between my knees, broke off a piece of crack, melted it on the end of the stem, and then did a big blast.

The paranoia came on moments after the ringer and the sweating began. The Native people who lived downstairs were loud as fuck again, partying. This made the paranoia even worse.

Lately, I’d been doing my first hoot in the bathroom, and then doing the rest in the living room if the neighbours were loud and Christine was asleep.

I couldn’t stand it in the bathroom anymore with the noise from the neighbours, so I went into the living room, once I knew Christine was asleep, and finished the rest. I was too paranoid at first to do a hoot in there. I had to wait until I came down enough to do the next one. Once the paranoia disappeared, I was able to do it. I just made sure that my pipe was hidden in between hoots and that there was no dope laying around.

It wasn’t that risky, smoking crack in the living room. Even if Christine did walk out, I knew she wouldn’t see nothing. I would hear her getting out of bed and would have enough to time to lay down on the couch long before she ever opened the bedroom door.

Once the dope was gone, I didn’t play much. I pushed my pipe once, using the inside of a pen, did one last hoot, and then went to bed.

End of Chapter 1

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