Snitch
They jail their five year old
daughter. There are no concrete walls or clanging doors. Instead, they stuff an
unruly toddler inside an ad-hoc prison built from detached playpen walls, thick
cardboard, and a plastic storage tub lid roofing her cell. A trash bag of
clothes full to bursting stops her from standing and pushing away the lid. I
remember seeing her moist, narrow eyes staring out at me from between the rails
whenever Marty visited for methadone. I wonder if her parents ever see her staring
at them while they cut drug deals in the living room.
Marty is selling me pot ten years by
this time and more in the six months since I quit drinking than the last three
years combined. We grow closer than ever during that half-year despite drowning
our respective brains in smoke and pharmaceutical-grade narcotics. Once upon a
time we do nothing but exchange wadded up cash and half folded sandwich bags of
weed, but now watching television and talking music makes our list. I listen to
him moan about so-called whores who just want his drugs, spit and swear about
the aunt he rents from, and drive him to pick up methadone when my money’s low.
He lays free weed on me for the trip. The five year old’s parents, a young
couple, are heroin addicts off the needle and driving twice a week to an
Indianapolis methadone clinic. Dad sells weed too and trades some of their
“take home” supply for ounces of Marty’s marijuana. We talk about their five
year old after each visit and take turns suggesting someone call Child Protective
Services. Neither of us volunteer.
“That’s just fucked up though, man,
you know? Who does that shit to a little kid?” Marty says.
I shake my head. “I don’t know,
dude. Look at their place though. It’s obvious they aren’t managing shit at
this point.”
He snorts. “That’s for fucking sure,
Karl.” I recall him turning up my car radio and the sinewy strains of The
Rolling Stones’ “Stray Cat Blues” filling the interior. “You like the Stones, right?”
I shrug and say, “Yeah, I go through
phases.”
He turns his head and stares out the
passenger side window. “My mom, man, huge
fan. She listened to albums like Exile
on Main Street and Sticky Fingers
all the time. I know you read music bios. You ever read that one Keith Richards
dope man wrote?”
I remember skimming it once in an
used bookstore. “Yeah, Down and Out with
the Rolling Stones?”
He smiles and nods at me. “Yup,
that’s it. She made me read that book when I was twelve ‘cause she got all
offended I liked that poppy Toto tune ‘Rosanna’.” I can still see his downcast
gaze when he snickered. “I lost that fucking book at school, first day I took
it. Wasn’t supposed to leave the house with it. Oh fuck, she was pissed. Whipped my ass with her
boyfriend’s belt and took my music for a week.”
The freezing violence of his
memories paralyzes me and my silence makes him squirm in his seat. He looks out
the passenger’s window again. “It’s no big deal, really.” The words come slow.
“I feel sorry for that kid. That shit with their kid, a fucking song on the
radio, I’m ready to get high… you know.”
I do know. Marty punctuates that
year’s summer with methadone runs and mid-grade marijuana. I turn thirty that
April and live in a glorified closet at my parents’ while he bears down on
thirty-six, lives in a double-wide add-on to his aunt’s sagging A-frame, and
staggers through each day in a narcoticized haze. He’s like a misshapen boulder
rolling downhill. I say nothing about it though; it isn’t what we do. I want
to, I think about how to say he worries me in a way that won’t annoy him, but no
one calls anyone out over anything and for every finger I might wag, three
point back at me.
Marty stares at methadone tablets
like a child admiring a cookie. He holds them between his fingertips close to a
light and scans each side while tracing a free finger around its edges. I watch
him drop a pill in a glass of water and remember it hissing like a basketful
of snakes. When the dissolving stops, Marty empties it fast. He closes his eyes
and rolls his head.
I see a thin line of white powder
stretching above Marty’s upper lip, let loose an outsized cough, and run a
fingertip across my own upper lip when he looks at me.
“Missed some,” I say.
Marty’s tongue shoots out from
between his lips and licks off the powder. “Leave no grain undigested,” he says
and laughs. I am still waiting to hear another laugh like it. Laughter bubbles
deep within his belly, jolts his frame, and pistons out of his mouth in bursts
like salvos from small artillery.
**
I don’t hear from him again for two
days. I’m filling out a thin pile of job applications late Friday morning when
he texts. His message is brief: downtown at the park I gotta get out of here
man. His words are packed with implied urgency more involving than any job
application and, besides, my latest bag of weed is half empty. Riding to his
rescue likely means more pot.
He’s waiting in the alley behind the
park when I pull up. I can still see how he looked that day and remember how we
always referred to our lifestyle as “partying”. I don’t know why. If battering
your brain into a blackout is your idea of a party, you’ve never known
happiness. Parties are celebrations and we never celebrate anything. He
definitely doesn’t look festive.
There’s always some dishevelment
defining his appearance, but that fall day brings a different breed of
disarray. He’s pale and sweating. It’s a sunny day with temperatures in the mid-fifties and the perspiration covers him in a slick gleam. His matted blonde
hair looks pasted to his skull. Slamming my door like someone yanking their
hand from a fire rattles the car and fills me with a warm flush of annoyance.
“What the fuck, man?”
He frowns and straightens against the
seat. “I’m sorry, just get me the fuck out of here, okay?” I can still hear him
nearly shouting and recall how emotion cracked his voice. I nod and drive away.
We are no more than a half a block out before he speaks again.
“Just take me home, alright? Cool.
I’ve been waiting downtown all morning for this one guy to deliver on some
‘dones and I’ve got fucking nothing to show for it, then all these fucking
leeches down here, always Marty get me high, Marty kick me down some bud, fuck
all those motherfuckers, kick me down
some fucking money or narcotics, bitches.
Fuck!” He slams a clenched fist down on the door arm rest and blows out a rush
of air. “Sorry again, fuck.”
“Chill out, just chill out. The guy
didn’t show. What are you going to do, you can’t change it.”
“Oh, I got a hold of him. I’ve got
to wait until around five.”
“Then you just go home and hang
tight.”
He snorts. “Yeah. Easier said than
done.”
We drive through the city in
silence. It isn’t that long ago when I felt the same as he did then. My
drinking life ends with days of hearing demonic voices from an air conditioner,
vomiting, and recurring nosebleeds. I dream of slobbering hellhounds turned
inside out chasing me down when I sleep. I want to tell him I lived through
those things and don’t anymore. I want to say he’s killing himself. And so what
if I did? I know even then, there’s no transformative moment coming on the
heels of my supposed sage advice. I will not see him arch his eyebrows, widen
his eyes, and swear off narcotics.
I settle for saying something safe.
“Marty, you’ve gotta start taking better care of yourself. It’s no good getting
this strung out. You know that, bro.”
I speak slow, soft, and measure my
words. He is looking at me when I glance to gauge their impact. I tell myself
it is too late to talk like this. He hears me, but does not listen. His milky
skin, sweaty sheen like bubble wrap, and red-rimmed eyes tell me what I don’t
want to know.
“I’m alright, Karl. Don’t worry
about me. I’ll be alright.”
We pull to a stop in the short
gravel driveway flanking his trailer. I just want to get away and go smoke a
joint. I don’t even care if he has pot to give me.
“I’ll just drop you off and see you
later. I’ve got some crap I need to go do.”
He nods and opens the door. “Cool,
man. Thanks for the ride. The ‘dones guy is bringing me a quarter pound too. I
don’t have any bud to give you right now, but get with me tomorrow afternoon.
I’ve got you, bro.”
“Okay, I will.”
I watch him shamble to his door and
step inside before driving home. When I’m home, I smoke a small joint and go
back to filling out job applications. He sends texts later that night full of
nonsensical rhapsodizing about his buzz. I call and text many times the next
day and there’s no answer.
**
I check my phone when I wake Sunday
morning. There’s an unanswered call from Marty and an unheard voicemail. Seeing
those notifications opens my overheated valves and blows off an enormous cloud
of mental pressure. I can get more weed because he isn’t in jail. I’ll see him
soon because he isn’t dead.
Someone else called me from Marty’s
phone. “This message is for Karl. I’m Marty’s stepdad Don. I stopped by today
to talk with him and found him in a coma. He’s at the hospital now. They say
there’s no brain activity. I called the police. We know he overdosed, but we
don’t know what and how much. If you know, it may save his life. Call me back
at this number.”
I disconnect. The calm voice
stripped clean of warmth echoes in my memory. I hear no worry spiking every
third word with an anxious quiver. He talks, instead, about cops and says way too much after that. We know he’s
overdosed, we don’t know what or how
much, it’s too much for me. Marty’s
inbox holds a running record of my recent drug use and I’m sure good old Don
read every word. I’m certain he passed along my eighty character pearls to law
enforcement.
My first thought is fuck calling him
back. Instead, I want to delete the voicemail and texts, smash the phone with a
hammer, and pray police aren’t soon knocking at my door. I sit on the bed’s
edge staring at the floor. The stepdad says he called cops and I believe him.
It’s an overdose. I picture Marty’s latest quarter pound of marijuana in plain
view or sitting on a detective’s digital scale. If he says the cops know, I
have to believe him and believe they know everything.
Telling his stepdad what I know may
deflect any legal blows I might absorb. You’re a rat. You’re going to snitch him out to save your ass. The
thoughts explode in my consciousness. Imagining Marty’s blind anger towards me
for telling his stepdad anything sits me up wincing. Word will spread. Everyone
will know. It’s betrayal.
I need to live with myself though. I
remember once digging cash from a dying pill addict’s pocket. His shallow
breathing never dulled my thirst for another bottle and I told everyone,
including myself, he passed out. I never tell myself no in those days. Climbing
over dead bodies for what I want isn’t new. Enduring new casualties demands the
scale of my scamper isn’t too steep.
I will call him back and cherry-pick
details. Parse facts to form a self-serving narrative. Isn’t parsing unpleasant
facts a skeleton key to sane adulthood? I will snitch but not snitch. I tell
myself Marty will understand my situation. With zero irony.
“Hello?”
“Yeah, is this Don?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Okay, good. This is Marty’s friend
Karl. I just got your message and wanted to call back hoping I can help
somehow.”
“Yeah? What drugs did he take,
Karl?”
“All I know is he complained a lot
about foot pain and told me he’d been eating painkillers to deal with it. He
never said what kind. I didn’t ask.”
Silence. “Anything else you want to
tell me?”
I’m pressing the phone hard enough
against my temple that it aches. Yeah,
man, I want to end this call right now. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Okay. Thanks for your call.”
The conversation ends within a
minute. I hear the same icy degrees present in the earlier voicemail and doubt
he believes anything I say except my name. Why should he? I didn’t snitch on
Marty. We snitched on ourselves. I roll my last joint and keep telling myself
that while smoking.
Law enforcement never visits then or
the next day. The tension machine guns my thoughts and makes my skin tingle. I
drive to Marty’s methadone dealer hoping to buy more pot. He waits for me to
bring up the obvious before telling me Marty died that afternoon. I watch him
break apart thick marijuana buds while he speaks. The five year old is still
jailed and watches me with wide, wet eyes when I leave.
Our capacity for codas contracts
after thirty. Time compresses and collapsed connections resist reconstruction.
We tumble, instead, through years of hard stops dreaming of days when
experiences ended with an ellipsis. I want to say I remember his funeral and
wished his family well. I want to say I remember something healing. I called
him friend and drug dealer and he died. Marty courted death, campaigned for it,
but no suicide frees the hook from my tongue. No code or credo absolves me from
my part, however small, in leaving him a corpse. His mom and stepdad bans everyone but family from Marty’s funeral excepting one woman he gave drugs to
with vain hopes of fucking her. She claims to be his girlfriend and Marty’s
mom, embracing the thin veneer of pathos only a breathing grieving girl
provides, offers her front row seating. He waits a year for a gravestone.