One Hit Wonders Page 6

  Snuffy looks away just in time to catch the waitress crossing the floor. He whistles to her through his front teeth and signals for two more pints and two shots.

  “If your buddy isn’t here by the time we finish these, I says we moves on.”

  Gosse says nothing.

  “Or not.”

  7

  I FEEL LESS dirty after that. A second pass through the murky precinct inhabited by Snuffy and Gosse assures me that they are the result of very ordinary circumstances. Bred in poverty, they see money as the only means of improving their lot, and crime as their only way to earn. In other words, they belong to the most ancient order of the upwardly mobile.

  My friend Ted, who spent several years on the justice beat for a local newspaper, says that few criminals perceive themselves as bad people. Rarely, when it comes to sentencing, do they find themselves agreeing with the judge. Yes, your honour, lock me up and smash the keypad. It’s what I deserve. As far as the criminal is concerned, he did what he had to do, given his circumstances. To be caught and sentenced is always a miscarriage of justice. Thieves, wife abusers, pimps, drug dealers, and even murderers are unanimous on this point. Even after being reduced to the most passive position possible, even after years locked up in jail, they still maintain their innocence. What can they mean?

  Lila told me once after a brief stint as an office temp—it was something she did out of boredom, not because she needed money—that in life you may as well go for the prize because the competition and backstabbing is as fierce in the secretarial pool as it is in corporate headquarters. The trick in climbing the corporate ladder or the social ladder is to understand that while each level has the same goal—to reach the top—the means of achieving that goal varies greatly with context. To put it in simple terms, the poor can move up if they have brains or skills. But there are still barriers and unofficial quotas. And the rules are likely to change at any moment. Only a few will get through in any generation. Knowing this, the unlucky majority get on with it, placing faith in bingo tickets and lotteries. A bitter—and perhaps righteous—few take up crime. Arrested and prosecuted, the criminal naturally feels there has been a miscarriage of justice and that the law upholds a hypocritical double standard.

  I am feeling dirty again. Empathy is making me complicit. So what if poverty robbed these small-time criminals of agency? It’s the same sad story for millions around the world, most of whom don’t turn to violence. Empathy would have me say that we are not responsible for our actions, that we are all compromised by circumstance. Bullshit.

  I picture Lila’s dead body: her head, wedged between the baseboard and the heater, forced downward, giving her a double chin. Her arms crossed Tutankhamun-like in front of her chest, her legs drawn up into an almost fetal pose. How misshapen and vulnerable she looks. How she would have hated the thought of anyone seeing her like this. She is dressed in her rose tracksuit with the two white stripes down the side, her new expensive Adidas sneakers still on her feet. I read somewhere that when people die violently their shoes always come off. A playground story, no doubt. Her keys poke out from under the couch. It was as if she was walking or running for the door when she pitched forward into the corner of the living room.

  Snuffy knows not to challenge Gosse. He knows they are on the verge of something big, something they have been building towards over all their years of partnership. His nerves are going ballistic. He wishes he had some blues or reds, wishes he had gone to the doctor and picked up some new scripts.

  He pictures Dr. Onan’s waiting room, a windowless holding pen with brown indoor-outdoor carpet. He pictures the three rows of plastic chairs, the Plexiglas wicket and the jaded receptionist. He smells disinfectant.

  His first ever visit to Dr. Onan was the day he came into possession of a cure for the sinus troubles that had plagued him since childhood. It was also the day he and Gosse decided to take their working relationship to a whole new level. The two events are inextricably linked in Snuffy’s mind.

  Snuffy’s nickname came from his battle to control two yellow-green glaciers of snot perpetually moving southward from the pole of his nose. The only time he stopped sniffing was when he was concentrating, which was exactly what he was doing that morning as he stood in the reception area of the doctor’s office, composing a story that would blend all the symptoms of a serious back injury into a single compelling narrative.

  The waiting room was full of disappointed-looking, grey-haired matrons with dark pouches under their eyes. Now and again, one would share with another a grin or a grimace of commiseration, but they mostly kept to themselves, flicking savagely through magazines. A few stared into mobile phones. Those without media to distract them looked away, their gazes slowly turning inward, to the murky site of trouble, where perhaps a tumour, like a cankering potato, sprouted milk-white feelers.

  Snuffy spent exactly three minutes with the bored-looking Dr. Onan, a woman so broad of shoulders, and so laden in heavy foundation that he found himself wondering if she had not at one time been a member of his sex. Pumped to deliver his lines, he felt let down when it became obvious that a performance would not be needed. The doctor began writing on her prescription pad before he even finished describing his symptoms.

  “Snuffy friggin’ Pacino I gots ta start calling you,” Gosse said, when Snuffy dropped around to see his friend an hour later.

  “I’m out of aw-dah, you’re out of aw-dah, this whole goddamn town is out of aw-dah,” growled Snuffy.

  “How did you tell her you hurt your back?”

  “I used me words.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Told her I was a roofer.”

  “That explains the clothes.”

  Snuffy was wearing filthy black overalls that may once have been white. His denim jacket was shagged with dried-out smears of paint and tar. His crepe-soled shoes stuck to the floor when he moved.

  “Even rubbed some blacktop on my hands. Look. And get this, the whole time I was there I walked forward on the balls of my feet, like I spends all day every day working on a pitched roof.”

  “You missed your vocation, b’y.”

  “So how much for the scripts, Gosse?”

  Gosse scratched his jaw. There’s plenty of Parasol with Codeine around. Buddy, Doc Silverman, down on the corner, is still handing it out by the fistful. Then again there’s always demand. But this new neuromuscular blocker, Lumbax—hard to say—could be a novelty item. The fags might go for it. An ass loosener. Thing is, I’m richer in gear than cash these days. How about a trade?”

  “Depends. What are we talking about?”

  “I can do you a gram of coke, weighed.”

  “Right on.”

  Gosse pulled a sizable plastic bag of white powder from his jacket pocket. He dug into his pants for his wallet and removed a square of patterned grey paper. “Japanese,” he said. “Gets it at Michaels. Goes over big in the clubs.”

  From the top of the fridge he removed a small weighing scale and plugged it in. A display flashed digital numbers in red. He put the piece of paper on the stainless-steel pan. The display showed 0.02. Carefully, with a long-handled plastic cocktail spoon, he transferred white power to the paper until the display read 1.0. He went to remove it.

  “It should say 1.02.” Snuffy pointed out. “You have to factor in the paper.”

  Gosse shrugged, adding a few more grains. When the scales showed 1.03 he wetted the tip of his little finger and touched it to the conical pile of powder. The scale settled at an even 1.02.

  “Son of a bitch,” Snuffy said, but half-heartedly. He was used to his friend’s skinflint ways. Truth was, he could barely hide his excitement. Having coke was a big deal for both of them. It meant Gosse was moving up the chain.

  “Son of a bitch, what? I’m doing you a solid here, my man.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean this here weighed gram would have been two grams by the time it hit George Street tonight. It’s the good stuff. Strai
ght from the man, almost pure, not cut with nothing.”

  “What do you cut it with?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “C’mon, man.”

  “This batch is going to have Sugar Twin, laxatives, and some deworming powder that cost me extra from the supplier.”

  “No shit. Did you ever have worms when you were a kid? One time when I was out in the woods, I had to take a dump outside…”

  “Enough already. Take the stuff and get out of here.”

  Snuffy slipped the packet into his wallet. “Think I’ll keep this for the housewarming party next week. You’re still going to help me move, right?”

  Eight evenings later, Snuffy, Gosse, Hank, Will, and Tibor crowded into Snuffy’s tiny living room to watch Hockey Night in Canada on the floor-model television that had come with his furnished bachelor apartment. The massive set was on a swivel stand and kept turning to the right, following the slope of the room towards the harbour. Tibor placed a case of beer next to it to stop it from moving. The solution worked until the number of full bottles in the box dipped below six, at which point the TV turned shamefacedly towards the wall again. But by then it didn’t matter. The game was already out of reach for the Maple Leafs.

  Gosse sparked up a joint of BC bud. “A new shipment, b’ys, primo stuff.”

  Snuffy had a few draws and immediately gravity entered his bones. He had done most of the moving by himself, Gosse having strained his back in the first half hour as he tried to bend the box-spring around the third-floor landing. Snuffy suspected his friend of faking it, even though Gosse had a history of back trouble. He wanted to let the matter drop, but being tired always made Snuffy a bit obsessive-compulsive. When a second joint made the rounds, he took a deep draw and held it in, waiting for THC to start drawing happy faces on his platelets. Good dope usually made him feel sympathetic to the world. Lately, however, he had noticed it was getting harder to achieve that desired state of being. It was hard to say whether this meant the world had intensified in ugliness or his tolerance for strong weed had increased. He thought it might be the latter. When the second joint passed around a second time his thinking did an abrupt one-eighty. It occurred to him that he had wronged his friend. If anything, he owed Gosse for even trying. Dude had a bad back and he was still willing to kick in. He owed Gosse a party.

  “Gotta take a piss,” he said, exiting the living room. On the landing, he dithered before turning left—all his life he had turned right when going from his living room to the can. Once inside the bathroom, he closed the toilet lid and sat down. Almost reverentially, he removed the doll’s house envelope from his wallet and tipped its contents out on the counter. A drop of water he hadn’t noticed began to eat into his stash, dissolving about a quarter of it. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” He used his Metrobus card to scrape the remaining powder to a dry patch of Formica, where he divided it into tramlines.

  Fifty-three seconds later, transformed into an athlete, Snuffy speed-walked back to the living room, where he adopted a power stance before the bricked-up fireplace, and held forth on any and every subject that entered his head.

  “Birds. Starlings. I saw a flock of them up in the park the other day. They were tearing the shit out of a flower bed like someone had dumped a handful of John Cougar melon seeds. They were attacking each other too. Wings flapping. Beaks jabbing. And I got it. I suddenly got what they were saying on that TV nature show—David Honda-Kawasaki-Suzuki—ever notice how them Jap bikes are named after the sound they makes. I suddenly could see clear as mud how starlings were once dinosaurs. They say that dinosaurs were covered in feathers. That’s what the starlings were like. Little T-Rexes but without the tiny arms and with beaks instead of big jaws full of teeth. And then I thought—what if we go that way as well? What if, after a nuclear war or something, we gets smaller and like a million years from now we are these little three-inch people hiding behind rocks or living in flower beds in the park and thinking we’re in a forest? Reminds me of that song. Remember that gangly fucker with the long hair who used to play the ukulele, really high voice—Tiny Tim? I used to always think he was singing ‘tit toe through the tulips’ and it always gave me this mental picture—like a cartoon—of a human foot, only you’re seeing it through plant stalks—tulips, right on—only the middle toe on the foot has no toenail on it at all, it has a nipple instead….Whoa! Incoming! Picture the same foot only this time the middle toe is a rocket. Missile-toe, get it? Shit, man. People don’t remember how to have fun. They’re all programmed like computers or something. Caught up in the 9-5 every week. Wearing jeans to work on Friday because they are told to and pretending it’s some kind of expression of individual freedom. Makes you think. Why can’t we have a day when no one wears underwear to work? Why not? Call it Commando Tuesday. Everyone shows up for work in the usual suits or skirts or dresses and the game would be to guess who is and who isn’t. Could catch on. Worth a try. Betty Lahey than never, I always says. That was a bad one. Reminds me of the one I got off in the diner the other day. The waitress gives me my coffee and then slides a bowl full of creamers down the counter towards me. Stops just in front of my mug. Perfect weight. Like she was a professional curler. So I picks up one of the little containers, tapped it on the edge of the bowl until I got her attention, then I holds it up to her and says: you may say I’m a creamer, but I’m not the only one. Had to love the way it came to me right on the spot. There was something in the air that morning. Two fat ladies sitting just down from me, both of them stuffing their faces with lemon pie when one of them orders a second slice. You can’t have that, says the other, not with your diabetes. Fucked if I care, says the one going for seconds. I’ve lived a betic and I’ll die a betic. People are cracked. Like that big drag queen, RuPaul. The balls on him. Bet you didn’t know he had a sister, Rhu-Barb. Or that the actor Billy D. Williams was nicknamed ‘fully defrosted’ on account of his hot temper. But seriously now…”

  And on it went: Snuffy free associating, gesticulating wildly and fist-pumping the air when anyone agreed with him. No one dared disagree with him. Cocaine would be his drug of choice from then on. It unleashed in him a dark river. He would wade in, swim, become a white-powder evangelist, the John the Baptist of nose candy. Certainty was his new domain. And it lasted exactly twenty minutes, until the bottom fell out of his high, a sensation he later compared to the feeling of pulling out the bath stopper and sitting there as the water drained out. Things got heavier and heavier. Colder. He went from God-like confidence to desolation. The high had been so pure and clean he’d been convinced he wasn’t high at all. The truth, when it hit, was a forty-floor letdown, worse than dreaming of winning the lottery only to wake up in the same shitty room.

  Retreating to the bathroom, he tried scooping up the drop of water that had dissolved some of his precious powder. He rubbed his slick fingertip on his gums, but felt no tingle. His psyche opened a new box of emptiness. Desperate to change his mood, he went back out to the living room where Gosse, who had been quietly monitoring the situation, handed him a bottle of Lamb’s and a shot glass. Snuffy drank six shots in rapid succession, slurred something about demonic possession and passed out.

  He woke up late the next morning face-down on the couch, horizontal to the perpendicular view of beer bottles and glasses on almost every surface. The television was still on, but with the sound down. Barney the purple dinosaur was doing his best to dumb it down for the toddler set. Snuffy tried to lip read, but it was impossible. Barney had no lips.

  There were high-rises of CDs piled around the stereo. Despite the considerable evidence of recent debauchery, Snuffy felt good. He felt proud to be waking up for the first time in his very own place. The terrible letdown of the night before had passed. He didn’t even mind the hangover. He knew how to take care of that.

  He went to the kitchen and popped a Parasol with Codeine (which he had bought from Gosse at the discounted price of $7), washing it down with orange soda. He sat on his only kitch
en chair and watched a calico cat perform a tightrope act on the backyard fence, its left front leg and left back leg on top of the rounded tips of the vertical planks and its right front leg and right back leg a few inches lower on the horizontal crossbeam. The cat was making sure progress until a seagull, high overhead, flew between it and the sun. Snuffy watched the bird’s shadow zip across the garden, its trajectory intersecting with the fence at the precise spot where the cat was standing. The startled animal lost balance, half fell, and had to claw its way back into an upright position.

  Snuffy laughed. He knocked on the window to let the cat know he had witnessed its undignified moves. The rattle of knuckles on glass made the cat lose balance a second time. He laughed all the harder. It was only then he noticed something was different about him. A forceful breeze escaped his nose in rhythm with his less-nasal-than-normal hee-haw. His typical morning congestion was absent. No need to hork and blow. He sat up straight in his chair and took deep breaths, in through his nose and out through his mouth. Not even a whistle. His hangover began to lift. He felt a growing sense of well-being.

  “It’s a miracle,” was Gosse’s response when, later that day, Snuffy reported to him the clear condition of his sinuses.

  “It was the blow. Had to be,” said Snuffy.

  “It’ll cure what ails ya.”

  “What? You don’t think it was the blow?”

  “Could of been, but probably it was because you spent your first night ever sleeping in a room that wasn’t rotten with mould.”

  “What? My old room wasn’t rotten with mould.”

  “Sure it was, b’y. Half an hour in there and I’d be blocked with snot. Why do you think your house always smelled like wet dog?”

  “I thought that was the clothes Mom hung up to dry in the bathroom.”

  Gosse shrugged and pulled a mug.

  “Nah,” said Snuffy, “it had to be the blow. I mean like last night wasn’t the only time I ever slept anywhere else. I used to sleep over to Marie’s all the time.”