The Hole Within

CHAPTER 42

In the morning, I came out to the kitchen looking for Tyler. There was a heavy black woman with a sawed-off shotgun laying on the table next to her. One of her eyes was milky white. She told me Tyler had gone out to score and instructed me to sit down at the kitchen table opposite of her. There was a neat pile of cocaine in front of her. "You gonna he'p me bag dis sheeit," she sneered. "Give yo'rsef uh lil bump." And she poured out a thick line before me. She gave me a small plastic tube and I sat there stunned. "Wat the fucks wrong? You dumb?" and she used her own straw to snort a fat line. I followed her example, held the tube to my nose and snorted. A bitter taste rose up the back of my throat as it went numb. Then it hit me like a jolt. I was wide awake. This was a new kind of high It was totally unlike the smooth waves of a narcotic high. I was so keenly alert and felt a rush of power like nothing I had ever felt before. My mind soared and my body hummed as I watched the woman measure out small piles of coke onto the waxed paper squares. 

Her instruction took form and crystallized in my mind. We sat and packaged the cocaine and I talked. And I talked. And I talked. The woman's one good eye watched me. She was twitchy, always peeking out of the dirty kitchen window at every sound. I was self-propelled. I did not notice her high anxiety and I did not care that she was not listening. I folded and folded the way she had shown me, stacking the finished little packets in a pile that she kept careful count of. As we were finishing, Tyler and Josh came back, the woman was counting and suddenly she grabbed the shotgun off the table and shouted, "Ah'm gonna ta kill dat motha fuckin beotch!" Stunned, I looked at her as she leveled the short gun at me. "Whoa," Tyler had his hands out in front of him, "what's going on here?" "Dere's one missin an' yo' lil beotch jacked it!" Her eyes, one dead, the other crazy, darted back and forth between me and Tyler and Josh. Not realizing the danger I was in, I told her it must have gotten lost. I dropped to the ground and began crawling on the floor, searching. I now see the scene like a movie, me, oblivious, on my hands and knees, coked up, searching on the stained and cracking linoleum. The woman with her shotgun, one dead eye shifting from me to Tyler and Josh and back again as she sweated profusely. Tyler trying to talk her down with apprehension. I finally found the little square of folded paper between the battered refrigerator and the smoke-stained wall, "Here it is, I found it!" I was triumphant. The woman snatched it from my hand, examined it and surprisingly gave it back to me, "It's yo's fo' helpin me." Shaken, I looked up at Tyler and he helped me up off the floor.

Of course, we rushed to shoot up. We had dodged a bullet, literally. Tyler told me that she always kept a live round in the chamber while she was bagging coke. I did not realize the significance of it then or understand how close I came to getting shot. I should have been terrified. This should have been a wakeup call to the dangers of the road I was now traveling. But all I cared about was getting high. All I wanted was that warm blanket on my freezing soul. I wanted to ride the wave forever.

You had mentioned snorting coke with your dads wife when a teen, so this was not your first time trying it like it implies. I would say something more like, the rush it gave me was nothing like the first time- maybe it was the quality, maybe the quantity but it was a new kind of high for me.