By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Chapter Thirty
July 22-27
So much keeps happening and I want to write it all down, but... the roommates are always hanging out in the TV Dinner Room (I’m still the only one who calls it that). And, usually, by the time I get home, I’ve walked or biked the absolutely empty and spooky dark streets that lead up here...the last stretch of Park is especially dark and especially spooky...and so to sit down and joke with everyone or drink beer or trade the type of gently sarcastic barbs that you can when you’ve known people for a long time settles things back to normal. The creeping sense of fear subsides, but so does the need to go up to my room and shut the door and write down everything that keeps happening. Then, of course, more happens and washes away the previous set of happenings...and it all starts over again. It’s like trying to ladle soup with a strainer.
And, of course, by the time everyone does go to bed, I do go upstairs and put the light on at my desk and say, “Now I’m going to write everything down,” and I write for five minutes and suddenly I’m drowsy, or worse, dozing right there at my desk and I swim back to consciousness to find that I’ve written things like, “Tonight I went to dinner with Dani at Tobs sil irld...”Letters that spell nothing forming words that mean nothing coming together in sentences that can’t be spoken or read. It’s like what happens to the memories of the happenings themselves.
* * *
It took me several anxious days to talk to Jean about Teddy and Frank’s stakeout. Luckily, Jean is on the outs with Frank and hasn’t been calling or going over there. All we needed was for the police to tie our house to what’s happening at Teddy’s house; then, maybe, we’d all go to jail again. And I’d start dreaming of that lizard again.
And I had to wonder how likely it was that my group of friends would have the trouble from the riots and whatever this trouble was all in the same few weeks? Was it bad luck? Was something singling us out? Was it the type of people we are?
Jean hasn’t been home much lately anyway. She’s been hanging out with people from a house down the street. I think that a couple of them, are helping Jean put together some sort of grrl fanzine. They are going to call it Grist. It’s a good name, very hard-edged and sinister. I’m bracing myself for the content. I can just feel my penis being insulted. Not personally, but as a category of organ. In that context, the word grist makes me squeamish.
I’d left Jean a note on her pillow. It was very straightforward: “I need to talk to you right away,” and I’d underlined, ‘right away.’ Of course, the next day, and the day after that, the note was still in the same place on her pillow and her bed was still made up in the same precise way that it had been when I’d placed it there.
When I did see Jean again, it was on Mt. Pleasant Street. I was riding passed the 42 stop right as she got of the bus. She didn’t see me so I rode up behind her and tried to surprise her, but after following her for bit, she said, without turning around, “I know you’re there, Nathan. Get off the bike and walk with me.”
I did as told.
“So,” I said. “You’re bed hasn’t been touched in 3 days.”
“How do you know?”
“I left you a note. It’s still sitting there just like I left it.”
“I shouldn’t have left my door open.”
“Probably not.”
“So, what did the note say?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Funny. OK, so now we’re talking.”
“Yeah. True.”
So, I told her everything about the stakeout and everything I knew that the police knew.
“Do you really think that either of them would be part of a drug operation? With their political beliefs?” she asked as soon as I told her what was going on.
“Well, I don’t know. Frank knew those anarchist assholes. Maybe they’re financing some serious idiocy and using drugs to do it.”
“They both want to do some good, that’s all. Frank is disgusted by drugs...”
“Yeah, he doesn’t even drink,” I chimed in.
“No, he doesn’t," Jean said, her voice softening and her face grimacing a bit as she looked down at the sidewalk. "And you know that Teddy all the time says that drugs are 'the scourge of Black America.’ He’s serious about that too, but you know how your police like to twist things.”
“They’re not ‘my police’.”
“You know them. You like them.”
“Yeah, they’re doing their jobs...just, you know, badly. Can you imagine the world without police? But come on. I saw what they did to Tiny. I saw the way they cracked down on the protest when they didn’t have to. It made no sense, but still, there’s some scary people out in the world. Not everyone is as well-intentioned as we are.”
“That’s all that Teddy and Frank are, well-intentioned...I do, you know, know what’s going on with them,” she said.
“Are you going to spill?”
“OK, but you can’t try doing anything. It’s Teddy’s thing. If something happens, it’s still his thing...There’s this guy in the projects up the street from Teddy’s who’s a bootlegger. He resells stolen beer.
"Whenever the local stores are closed, Teddy will walk up there. The bootlegger lives in one of those big towers, on a high floor. I went with him and Frank once. We knocked on the door and a skittish guy in a track suit answered. He looked tough and was holding a baseball bat, but he gave Teddy one of those nods people give when they know you.
"We were ushered in and it was like a warehouse in there. Box after box of beer and the bootlegger sitting in a lawn chair next to one of the biggest piles. Two little kids, his kids I guess, were playing with matchbox cars on the floor near the lawn-chair. They were having races. The bootlegger greeted Teddy like an old friend. He even leaned up in the chair.
“Teddy was talking and we weren’t doing what we were supposed to be doing: buying the beer and leaving. Finally, I told Frank that I was going to go ahead and go. Boy did that make him mad.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I didn’t have a clue until later.
"But, Frank tapped Teddy’s shoulder to let him know that I was ready and he told us to wait and then he told the bootlegger that we were getting antsy so we bought the beer and stuffed it into some duffle bags we brought. Then we left. We had to walk back through back streets and alleyways to avoid the police...A few days later, the bootlegger asked Teddy if he wanted to get in with him on the business, be ‘his man’ in that neighborhood.”
“Did he do it?”
“No, he didn’t, but Teddy told Frank...and Frank jumped at it. When I thought about it, that’s why Frank was so anxious to appear cool in front of the bootlegger. He’d wanted this all along.
"At first, probably just for my benefit, he seemed to agonize about whether to do it. Later he said that the people who were drinking were going to keep drinking so why not use the money to buy equipment so that he could pass the word about social justice?”
“So, it’s not drugs. It’s beer?”
“No, things got more complicated. One of Teddy’s favorite kids is named Jonas and Jonas went over to Teddy’s about a month ago with a black eye. He was crying and wouldn’t say anything. Teddy kept pressing him to talk so he could find out who’d hit him, but Jonas would only cry.
"Finally, Teddy got fed up and went over to Jonas’s house. The door was wide-open and the place had been torn apart like on TV when a house gets ransacked by people looking for something. That’s exactly what it looked like. Jonas’ neighbor said that some men had come and taken Jonas’ father and brother away, but the neighbor had never seen them before and couldn’t tell Teddy what was going on.
“Jonas spent that night at Teddy’s and the next day, he’d stopped crying and told Teddy that DeShaun, Jonas’ brother, owed money to his boss and DeShaun’s boss had broken into the house beaten up DeShaun, Jonas and Jonas’ dad, then taken DeShaun and Jonas’ dad away. The whole time they were shouting, ‘Where’s the money. Where’s the fucking money. Get us the fucking money.’ Jonas knew the words, but he didn’t know what money they were talking about.”
“How old is DeShaun?” I asked.
“Fourteen.”
“Did Teddy find out what happened?”
“He did, but that’s a really long story,” she said as we arrived at our front door. “Let’s go in and get some food first.”
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2005 Me Three
