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.
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