Sample from You Know Me, Etc.

From Chapter One, "A Drug Dealer's Funeral," of my novel-in-progress, You Know Me, Etc.

His memorial service was at noon, but Reena had to wait for her delivery. The Abbot would understand. “Business,” he once told her, “is like getting into bed with a woman. You go out of your way to land the deal, but once it’s over, you can fuck it over.” Misogyny aside, the Abbot was a good man, and Reena didn’t think he’d hold a grudge now. Then she remembered that he once claimed, “If I get killed, I’m haunting that place and those motherfuckers.” But the Abbot hadn’t been murdered. In the end, undercooked barbeque, which led to sal monella poisoning, killed the Abbot Keith. Reena had always told him that pork would be the death of him.

She took inventory of her supplies while waiting for UPS to show. She had enough rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide to last another cook, but would need more before the next. Damn. She was just at the drugstore this morning.

The doorbell interrupted her, and she was glad. The service started in ten minutes; she would be lucky to make it before it started.

“Package for Reena Sanghavi?” She had a buzz cut, and each knee appeared to have swallowed a grapefruit. The driver – the delivery dyke – looked Reena over as she hastily signed her initials. Reena felt her skin crawl in discomfort and embarrassment, tiny ants burrowing into pores all over her body.

“Thank you,” Reena mumbled, and shut the door in a hurry. The Abbot awaited.

Reena missed getting on the train by a few moments, and she stood looking at the gaping and triumphant faces flash by until the only thing left in the station was herself and a hobo sleeping under a pile of tattered newspapers.

Great. Fucking great. Now you’re going to be lucky to slip in halfway through the service. How’s that for paying your respects to the man who taught you everything. He made you your first kit, remember? And he held your hand through your cooks for two months before you got the rhythm down.

The bum shifted under his gray paper bedspread and sat up suddenly. Reena absent-mindedly took half a dozen steps in the other direction. She began to mutter “slope” under her breath to relieve the anxiety bubbling over. It had been her favorite word since high school, and it was usually the only thing that could keep Reena from having panic attacks. Pot could probably help, but she was already too paranoid. Finally, the train blew into the station, bringing hot air and sweaty commuters with it.

After the darkness of the subway tunnel, the sun nearly blinded her as she ran up the steps to the street. But it was the heat of the city that made Reena stop when it blasted her at the entrance to the street. She tried to walk as fast as she could without giving herself a heat stroke. She passed a group of small children, cheeks flushed, one nearly purple with exertion, another who had a wrench clutched in his fingers. He couldn’t be much older than Reena’s brother. But today was supposed to be about the Abbott, so Reena pushed everyone else out of her mind.

By the time she got to the home, the service was over. She had missed her chance. The only mourners left were a couple of cigarettes lying on the steps to the entrance. But she still had to pick up the Abbot. He had prepared her for this a long time ago. “Nothing personal. You just keep your shit cleaner than anyone I know. I wanna be well dusted in my next life.”

The Abbot learned about Buddhism in the Haight, where his white hippie girlfriend had convinced him to drive to one night, stoned, two thousand miles. He didn’t really want to go to San Francisco, but she was cute and had the tiniest ass he’d ever seen in his life, so he stole a green Buick and they headed west, smoking joints the whole way. By Omaha he couldn’t stand the way she said “Jefferson Airplane.” When they stopped for breakfast in Boulder, she confessed that his lack of commitment to free love freaked her out. So when they finally, finally hit the fog-soaked city, they split and never crossed paths again. Which was fine with him.

And while the Haight-Ashbury was drenched in plenty of drugs, it was speed that seemed easiest to get hooked on, and even easier to get a hold of, because people were making it in their kitchens and sending it to his neighborhood. And it didn’t matter if one customer died or went back home, there were always three more to take his place, because overnight seventy-five thousand kids arrived, and a lot of them depressed runaways. Living there taught him one of the basic fundamentals of the business – not in a recession, not during a war, not during any catastrophe would business dry up, because these events breed depression, and when people are depressed, they turn to substances to escape. Fuck things like peace, love, and the Beatles – the Abbot Keith was, deep down, eternally, a hustler, and hustlers operate on the outside of what most people think of when they contemplate life.

His ashes had been vacuum-sealed and nestled into a small cardboard box. How they got a three hundred and fifty pound man into a box that Reena could hold in one hand was a mystery, but cremation is a powerful process. She tucked the Abbot into her messenger bag. She thanked the manager of the funeral home. His droopy Basset hound eyes gave her the sexual heebie jeebies.

Reena paused as she left the building and again faced the hot trek back to the west side. She blew out a breath in frustration. Even in death, the Abbot made her do pointless shit; surely his ashes could’ve been FedExed?

“Come on, you pain in the ass,” Reena mumbled. Hopefully she wouldn’t miss the train back. Slope . . . slope . . . slope . . . slope . . .

Sample from You Know Me, Etc.

Please enjoy the beginning of my novel-in-progress, You Know Me, Etc.

A Drug Dealer’s Funeral

. . . and it had been months since she had spoken to the Abbot, who was not really an abbot, but rather an ex-con who got the nickname while serving a possession charge in another state. After the Abbot Keith returned to society, rehabilitated and repentant, he started selling blow and later pot and shrooms to college students. But all of this was then, and now the Abbot had died.

Her mother had taught her how to act at a bar mitzvah and a wedding (say mazel tov and don’t you dare ask the bride if she’s a virgin), but never had funeral etiquette come up. Neither did birth control, but Mimsey had been very insistent on always wearing seatbelts, even if you are just driving down the street to your friend’s house and back. Then Patricia remembered her New Year’s Resolution to stop blaming things on her mother, and tried instead to concentrate on getting off the train at the right stop. She looked around the others sitting in the car with her. There were two young Arab women sitting several seats away from each other. One’s face was shaded by Gucci sunglasses, the other’s by a burka.

The funeral home’s address downtown was scribbled onto a scrap of paper that she clutched in her right hand. It was an inappropriate day for a funeral; the ninety-degree temperature and neon August sun melted Chicago’s sidewalks. But the Abbot had never been one for doing things that were appropriate. His home, which he dealt out of, was within two hundred and fifty feet of an elementary school.

She had been asked to speak at the service, not so formal to call it a eulogy, but to share her memories about the Abbot. They had been close some time ago. It abruptly ended when he married his second wife, who distrusted anyone else with a vagina, mother and sister included. Patricia didn’t hear they divorced until after she learned he died. It was very bitter (the divorce, not the death), and no one expected the ex to show at the funeral. Watching the drama unfold between the two of them was a bit like watching a car crash in slow motion, and not only did everyone else stop to stare, they also congregated to comment on the gore. So because she was a writer and because she was lived in the city, she sat on the train on a beautiful summer Saturday thinking what she should say about her dead ex-dealer at his memorial service.

Patricia still didn’t know what to say forty-five minutes later, standing in front of a room less than half-full, a line of sweat bisecting her back as it made its way down. When she agreed to speak, she assumed it would be air-conditioned. And possibly catered. Come to find out, she was wrong on both counts.

“He was a good man,” she started. “A kind man. An understanding man. A man who wouldn’t rat out his client list to the cops.” A few heads nodded around the room. She was glad she came stoned. Patricia continued. “And if you needed a hookup at three in the morning, he’d get his ass out of bed and hook you up.”

“As long as you threw in a couple extra bucks,” someone called out.

Patricia continued. “He loved line dancing, Norman Rockwell, and Coca Cola. A great American patriot, he had a bald eagle and Old Glory tattoo on his chest. He was an accomplished alto sax player who frequented local jazz clubs.” Patricia wondered if this was still true. People change, especially after they get married. “What I’m trying to say is that the Abbot will be missed.” Heads nodded around the room, either in agreement or drowsing in the summer heat. He was the only person I let call me Patty-Cake, or Peppermint Patty, she said to herself. She got lost thinking about all the things about the Abbot Keith that she couldn’t tell these people.

When the audience started to shift in their seats and glance at their watches, Patricia decided to wrap up her rambling send-off. “So, uh, here’s to you, Abbott. Cheers.” She hurried back to her seat behind a guy who used to spit rhymes about how he “split rickety Wichita” in the Abbott’s living room. She didn’t pay attention to the rest of the service, and instead stared blankly at the chair back in front of her.

She didn’t notice the couple sitting towards the back of the room, but that was exactly the point of sitting in the back. They sat together, he looking up towards the coffin, she studying the stitching on her shoes. There was a cell phone in his pocket that he had switched to vibrate but still went off every few minutes. He answered every fifth call or so, to whisper, “Yo man, I’m busy.” Each time he said this, she would sigh a little, loud enough for him to hear but not loud enough to piss him off. Finally, several minutes before the service ended, a fat white boy came up behind them and tapped the black man in Armani on his shoulder. The black man in Armani stood, and she followed him outside to the streaming sunlight. Her skin was so fair and pale that a vein stood out prominently on the back of her calf and created a blue upside-down question mark.

“Baby, I gotta go. Work,” he told her.

“I know.”

“Homeboy will drive you home. Can I spend the night with you?”

“Mmhmm.”

One hand dove into his jacket pocket. When they kissed goodbye, he slipped a baggie into her purse. She wouldn’t find it until later, but she would smile when she did. It would keep her busy until he came home.

The fat white boy tried to make conversation with her as they sat in the downtown rush-hour traffic on the way home. Behind the tinted windows, she was already snorting her way through the gram of blow in the limo while they idled near the Metro Correctional Center on west Van Buren. She lived in perpetual fear of this building. He had been in there before, and would probably be there again. Twenty-seven stories of reinforced concrete molded into a triangular tower dropped in the midst of the business district. She thought it looked more like a building for computer nerds instead of those waiting for their federal trials to start. He had told her that when the weather was good, the inmates used the exercise yard on the roof.

The First Ten Chapters of You Know Me, Etc.

I must admit, one of my favorite things about the first ten chapters of my novel-in-progress, You Know Me, Etc. are the names:
1. A Drug Dealer's Funeral
2. But No One Answered
3. Old School
4. Bad Manners
5. Fuck Happy Holidays
6. In a Place That Offered None
7. True Villains
8. Unless It's Your Own
9. Freeing Yourself from Other's Face
10. How the World Is