It would be several months before I had the financial stability to afford my own apartment and move back to Charleston. In the meantime I started planning a visit, a way of reassuring myself that I was doing the right thing by going back, but it took forever to find enough time off from work. We had jobs lined up constantly. Most of them required at least two people to complete, and there were only two of us to begin with (the painting company was called Watkins and Co., and I was the entirety of the “Co”). In November, however, Mr. Watkins had to go up to Iowa to spend thanksgiving with his wife’s family, so we had a week off. The day after thanksgiving, I drove up to Charleston for a three-day stay at Hunter’s house.
I had only been gone for five months, but I found a very different city when I arrived. Perhaps it was just my perspective that was different, but nothing felt familiar. For one, the city seemed smaller. Throughout college I’d had no access to a car, so I had walked or biked everywhere I needed to go, which was never far. I had always felt like the city was much bigger than I knew, because I’d travelled such repetitive paths I could have drawn everywhere I ever went onto a map from memory. Now that I was back, my friends had all moved into cheaper neighborhoods, mostly north of the crosstown or to James Island, places where I had never set foot more than one or two times in four years of studying in the city. All of these neighborhoods were new and unfamiliar to me, and yet as I pulled in off Savannah Highway I considered that I could drive between all of them in a matter of minutes. It made me realize that for my four years of college I’d been living like a rat in a maze, walking in circles and spirals and back and forth in an area circumscribed by only a kilometer or two.
In my junior and senior years, I had lived with Hunter at the corner of Bogard and Rutledge, a couple blocks south of the crosstown. In Charleston there’s a famous phrase “North of Broad.” It was used as the title of a famous novel, and it signifies the division between the commonfolk and the elitists living on the south side. In my time in Charleston, the same north-south division still existed, but gentrification had pushed the dividing line two miles north to the crosstown, Septima Clark Parkway. Everything north of that was “sketchy” or “ghetto.” We rarely went there. Mostly we went to friends’ houses in our neighborhood. The house across the street from us was 69 Bogard, and we went there constantly. In those two years it played host to a variety of attractive girls, and there were parties there almost every weekend. Ironically, most of the girls that lived there were bi, lesbian, or became that way eventually. My only theory is that the street number had some sort of subliminal effect.
In our senior year, the girls on the top floor were replaced by a group of four sophomore guys. There was a Katharax addict named Paul that dropped out of school shortly after I met him, and there was a frat guy named Dylan who was friendly but vacuous. There was Bobby, whose inferiority complex revealed itself in different ways depending on how drunk he was. When sober, he was stern, humourless, and only talked to people he deemed as being high on the social totem pole. After a few drinks he became loud and excitable, and he would try to present hismelf as the life of the party. After a few more drinks, he’d become a belligerent psychopath, starting fights and assuming everyone was laughing at him behind his back. When he was too drunk to drink anymore, he’d find anyone who would listen to him, and if it was you he’d talk without stopping for as long as you’d let him, always trying to impress you with his knowledge or his exploits, which he recounted in painstaking detail.
Last but not least, there was Lee, who to Hunter and I was the best of the four. I got to know Lee quickly, primarily because he sold good weed for good prices, but also because we both liked to take poppers (bong rips of weed stacked on top of tobacco), we both had done way too many hallucinogens in the last few years, we shared similar beliefs in what you might call “fringe” or “conspiracy” theories, and we were both content to talk for hours on end about whatever ideas happened to float through our heads. It didn’t matter whether it was physics, religion, politics, aliens, you name it— if we found it interesting we would talk about it, prolonging each conversation by passing the bong back and forth and sinking further and further into our seats.
Hunter and Lee were the two people I was most excited to see when I got back, but neither of them lived on Bogard anymore. Hunter was north of the crosstown on Dewey St, a block from Rutledge and a block from a popular hipster bar called Faculty Lounge. Lee was on America St., the east side of town, undoubtedly the most dangerous neighborhood on the peninsula, but one that was being gradually gentrified anyway. The neighborhood changes weren’t so alarming, but I was thoroughly disturbed to find out what had been going on in my absence. Unbeknownst to me, the week before my visit had been an eventful one for Hunter and Lee, and in the worst way possible.
They, along with two other people I’d never heard of, had orchestrated a multi-kilo cocaine shipment that was going to be split at least ten ways, with everyone getting several ounces each. I never came to understand all the details and dynamics of it, and they were too paranoid to explain very much of it, but I was able to gather that the coke was coming from some hood connection in Atlanta, getting broken up at a trap house on Colonial Lake, then getting distributed from there. The distribution never happened, however, because the guys at the trap house got raided by the FBI. They were all arrested, except one of them was let go afterward, presumably because he was the informant who had helped set up the raid. Shortly thereafter, a friend of Hunter and Lee’s, who sold Katharax and had been lined up to get one of the portions of the shipment, wound up dead. Two goons from the Atlanta gang showed up at his house in the middle of the day and shot him twice with a sawed off as he was sitting on his couch.
Hunter and Lee, thankfully, hadn’t been arrested or murdered in their homes, but they were convinced they were being monitored. They greeted me warmly as if everything was fine, but within minutes I found that they were on edge, disturbed, and paranoid beyond belief. I’d expected to spend the weekend just hanging out and relaxing, but I quickly realized that, on this weekend, relaxation would not be an option.
TO BE CONTINUED
