The friend’s place was in North Charleston, about twenty minutes away via the interstate. It was a long and somewhat uncomfortable ride, lots of traffic and Buddy was smoking cigarettes the whole way, blowing the smoke straight at me instead of out the cracked window. He was mumbling and rambling, mostly to himself, about how pissed off he was at getting unjustly fired from Bubba Gump. “I mean, I did stuff I shou’n’t'ah done, but I work there for, shit, three years…? And then to— they thruh me out like I was whad, the trash?”
“That’s fucked up, man,” I kept saying over and over.
Eventually I got around to asking him what he needed to go to the friend’s place for, and he answered “Drugs.”
“What kinda drugs?”
“Diff’ren stuff,” he said. “I’ll gi’ yuh some fer drivin’ me.”
The place we were going was in a decidedly bad neighborhood, and I was simultaneously alarmed and relieved to see that there was a patrol car posted about a half a block away from where I had chosen to park. Alarmed, because it meant the cop might be watching the very house Buddy was going into and that I might get arrested by association— and relieved, because it meant I was less likely to get robbed or arbitrarily murdered, which seemed to happen fairly often in this part of town.
Buddy opened his door and said, “Wait here.”
I said, “That sounds ideal. I would feel kinda—“ but he was already out and shut the door before I could finish what I was saying.
I waited there for a long five minutes, listening to my hip hop playlist with the volume really low, trying to bob my head in a lighthearted, non-threatening manner as I looked back and forth between the cop in the rearview mirror and the run-down, paintless house that Buddy’d walked into.
Buddy finally came ambling out, stumbled into a bush, regained his balance, then yanked open my door and heaved himself down into the seat. He slammed closed the door and before I could ask him how it went he’d already pulled a ziplock bag out of his pocket and said, “Look at dat, ha!” proud as I imagined a father might be watching their child walk for the first time. He studied the bag in the light for a moment, then he held it out to me to look at. I didn’t want to look because I was still worried about the cop, but I saw that the sandwich bag was full of white, M&M-looking pills with KX printed on them— Katharax— and in the midst of the forty or fifty kathies was a plastic-wrapped cocaine rock that probably weighed at least a quarter ounce.
“That’s very nice,” I said as I put the car into drive. “How long will that last you?”
I pulled into the street and started us on our way, checking the mirror to see if the cop was reacting at all, and I noticed in my peripheral vision that Buddy was pouting his lip and inspecting the bag, calculating. I wondered then and still wonder now what that mathematical function must have looked like in his mind. What were the variables? Did they include blackouts, hangovers, irresistible cravings, tolerance, the risk of an overdose? Or did he have a more positive outlook, comparing all the fun he’d be having to the number of grams of fun he held in the bag? In any case, he looked at the bag with a thoughtful expression for several seconds, and just when I thought that he had forgotten the question he lifted his ass from the seat, crammed the bag into his pocket, and casually said, “Few days,” leaving me to reverse calculate the extraordinary daily intake this estimate implied.
When we got back to the house, I went to the top floor again to look for Joe or Marv,but neither of them were home. I went out to the porch to smoke another cigarette, and, to my surprise, Buddy followed me out there, announcing his presence with the pop and fizz of a beer can. We were now standing in the exact same places we had been standing an hour before, but now the atmosphere was suffused with tension, as if the the sack of Katharax and cocaine had set up a row of dominoes that would inevitably be knocked over.
Partly because I was worried about him and partly because I was worried his self-destructive behavior would lead to more broken glasses and violent outbursts, I decided to give Buddy the same lecture I was prone to give anyone who expressed interest in Katharax. I told him about Caitlin Arnold, Friedberg, Jim Reiss, Bryan Renner. I told him about the lasting neurological disorders it caused. I told him about it’s status as a top 5 addictive substance, one of the only drugs where the withdrawals were bad enough to kill you. I told him about the overdose statistics— the highest of any prescription drug in the United States. I even gave him my personal opinion on its efficacy as a treatment for anxiety and PTSD, just as I had to Dr. Bean.
I must have talked for ten minutes straight, Buddy not refuting or commenting on anything, just listening politely and smoking back to back cigarettes after he finished the beer. When I finally finished my spiel, there was a momentary pause as he waited to see if I was going to continue on talking, and when he saw that I really was finished he said, “Yeah, but I like Kathies, and I can’t die.”
“You can’t die?”
He nodded and smiled. “Used to do five kathies a day. Quit cold turkey when I felt like it. An’ I know I can’t die cause one time— I was thirteen— stole my daddy’s truck, went drivin’ down this road, wrecked it real hard into a tree. Musta been going like fifty or so. Went through the windshield— wasn’t wearin’ a seatbelt, so I go through the windshield bout twenty yards into this field, and I’m legally dead for fifteen, twenty minutes or so ‘fore the ambulance people showed up and started my heart back up.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, they said it was a miracle, and that’s how I know I can’t die. I got Jesus lookin’ out for me, huh huh huh.”
That was really what his laugh sounded like— huh, huh, huh— completely monotone, like he was reading his laugh off this page. I laughed too, probably as inauthentically as he had, and said, “Fair enough, man, just try not to make Jesus work any harder than he has to.”
TO BE CONTINUED
