“From there, yeah, it’s easy. We got this place, see, in Building Five at Hobart Houses. I give the tenants ten bucks a month to stick their garbage in front of the back doors. Blocks it up, see. Cops can’t get through. Good place to conduct bidness. So my boys, they pop off some shots from the windows, you know what I’m saying. By the time the cops get through, poof, they gone.”
“And who was yelling about a white man with a gun?”
“Couple other of my boys. They just running down the street yelling about a crazy white man.”
“Theoretically, me,” I said.
“Theoretically,” Tyrese repeated with a smile. “That’s a nice big word, Doc.”
I laid my head back. Fatigue settled down hard on my bones. Brutus drove east. He crossed that blue bridge by Yankee Stadium—I’d never learned the bridge’s name—and that meant we were in the Bronx. For a while I slumped down in case someone peered into the car, but then I remembered that the windows were tinted. I looked out.
The area was ugly as all hell, like one of those scenes you see in apocalyptic movies after the bomb detonates. There were patches of what might have once been buildings, all in various states of decay. Structures had crumbled, yes, but as though from within, as though the supporting innards had been eaten away.
We drove a little while. I tried to get a grip on what was going on, but my brain kept throwing up roadblocks. Part of me recognized that I was in something approaching shock; the rest of me wouldn’t allow me even to consider it. I concentrated on my surroundings. As we drove a little more—as we dove deeper into the decay—the habitable dwellings dwindled. Though we were probably less than a couple of miles from the clinic, I had no idea where we were. Still the Bronx, I guessed. South Bronx probably.
Worn tires and ripped mattresses lay like war wounded in the middle of the road. Big chunks of cement peeked out from the high grass. There were stripped cars and while there were no fires burning, maybe there should have been.
“You come here much, Doc?” Tyrese said with a small chuckle.
I didn’t bother responding.
Brutus pulled the car to a stop in front of yet another condemned building. A chain-link fence encircled the sad edifice. The windows had been boarded over with plywood. I could see a piece of paper glued to the door, probably a demolition warning. The door, too, was plywood. I saw it open. A man stumbled out, raising both hands to shield his eyes from the sun, staggering like Dracula under its onslaught.
My world kept swirling.
“Let’s go,” Tyrese said.
Brutus was out of the car first. He opened the door for me. I thanked him. Brutus stuck with the stoic. He had the kind of cigar-store-Indian face you couldn’t imagine—and probably wouldn’t ever want to see—smiling.
On the right, the chain-link had been clipped and pulled back. We crouched through. The stumbling man approached Tyrese. Brutus stiffened, but Tyrese waved him down. The stumbling man and Tyrese greeted each other warmly and performed a complicated handshake. Then they went their separate ways.
“Come in,” Tyrese said to me.
I ducked inside, my mind still numb. The stench came first, the acid smells of urine and the never-mistaken stink of fecal matter. Something was burning—I think I knew what—and the damp yellow odor of sweat seemed to be coming from the walls. But there was something else here. The smell, not of death, but of predeath, like gangrene, like something dying and decomposing while still breathing.
The stifling heat was of the blast furnace variety. Human beings—maybe fifty of them, maybe a hundred—littered the floor like losing stubs at an OTB. It was dark inside. There seemed to be no electricity, no running water, no furniture of any sort. Wood planks blocked out most of the sun, the only illumination coming through cracks where the sun sliced through like a reaper’s scythe. You could make out shadows and shapes and little more.
I admit to being naïve about the drug scene. In the emergency room, I’d seen the results plenty of times. But drugs never interested me personally. Booze was my poison of choice, I guess. Still, enough stimuli were getting through that even I could deduce that we were in a crack house.
“This way,” Tyrese said.
We started walking through the wounded. Brutus led. The dearly reclined parted for him as though he were Moses. I fell in behind Tyrese. The ends of pipes would light up, popping through the darkness. It reminded me of going to the Barnum and Bailey circus as a kid and twirling those tiny flashlights around in the dark. That was what this looked like. I saw dark. I saw shadows. I saw the flashes of light.
No music played. No one seemed to talk much either. I heard a hum. I heard the wet sucking sound of the pipes. Shrieks pierced the air every once in a while, the sound not quite human.
I also heard groaning. People were performing the lewdest of sex acts, out in the open, no shame, no attempt at privacy.
One particular sight—I’ll spare you the details—made me pull up in horror. Tyrese watched my expression with something close to amusement.
“They run out of money, they trade this”—Tyrese pointed—“for hits.”
The bile worked its way into my mouth. I turned to him. He shrugged.
“Commerce, Doc. Makes the world go round.”
Tyrese and Brutus kept walking. I staggered alongside. Most of the interior walls had crumbled to the ground. People—old, young, black, white, men, women—hung everywhere, spineless, flopped over like Dali clocks.
“Are you a crackhead, Tyrese?” I said.
“Used to be. Got hooked when I was sixteen.”
“How did you stop?”
Tyrese smiled. “You see my man Brutus?”
“Hard to miss him.”
“I told him I’d give him a thousand dollars for every week I stayed clean. Brutus moved in with me.”
I nodded. That sounded far more effective than a week with Betty Ford.
Brutus opened a door. This room, while not exactly well appointed, at least had tables and chairs, even lights and a refrigerator. I noticed a portable generator in the corner.
Tyrese and I stepped inside. Brutus closed the door and stayed in the corridor. We were left alone.
“Welcome to my office,” Tyrese said.
“Does Brutus still help you stay off the junk?”
He shook his head. “Nah, TJ does that now. You know what I’m saying?”
I did. “And you don’t have a problem with what you do here?”
“I got lots of problems, Doc.” Tyrese sat down and invited me to do the same. His eyes flashed at me, and I didn’t like what I saw in them. “I ain’t one of the good guys.”