I might look and feel like shit right now, but after taking a shower and putting on an Armani suit, I could talk a pretty bank teller into doing just about anything. Granted, of course, the vic’s got decent credit and hasn’t notified the bank. I sometimes wonder why they call my racket “victimless” crime. I’ve left hundreds of victims in my wake. But let me tell you, it takes balls to walk into a bank and cash a check that’s hotter than the surface of the sun. You gotta have heart, but you also need brains, wit, and charm. You have to know how to talk to people. Those stick-up kids I met the last time I was on Rikers Island would put a cap in your ass in a heartbeat, but they wouldn’t touch my racket if their lives depended on it.
It takes a good measure of intestinal fortitude to hustle banks, but I’m a bona fide addict. From the high-end hookers to the high-priced hotels, from the grams of ice to the pure ounces of MDMA, somehow I had to support this lifestyle. Ice, my drug of choice, is driving this bus. Hence the street moniker Ice T, bestowed upon me by my dealer.
Those days have lost their luster. Every bank and plush hotel in and around the five boroughs is on alert for this “multi-state offender” known to defraud innkeepers and bankers alike.
Life has taken that proverbial turn for the worse. I need a place to stay and a chance to stave off the creepy meth paranoia that’s quickly approaching. That’s what six straight sleepless nights will do to you.
The streets of the Bronx at 3, from Gun Hill Road to 161st Street, have morphed into a bizarre netherworld of voracious fiends, dealers, hookers, and the hungry. Tonight, I’m one of them.
Broke and scared, I call Heidi’s pad looking for Billy. He’s my “business partner.” Heidi is his girl and she’s a sweetheart. She spends her days smoking shards and her nights turning tricks. Sometimes I wonder if Billy is her man or her pimp. He’s my partner in crime, but hardly a friend. I’m always welcome in their home, but that comes with a cost. Any devious heist Billy has planned will now include me. Nothing in this life is free. They’re never without crystal meth, which they always share, without question. Once I hit that pipe, I will agree to whatever scam he has in mind, usually cashing some dirty check. At times like this I’ll pounce on any opportunity to line my pockets. Billy’s generous with his drugs and the loot we make. I usually get half. He’s also smart, never taking the chance of cashing checks himself.
I failed to mention that Billy is also my dealer. Whatever money I make with the check and credit card cons ends up going right into his pocket for a few grams of ice, and again I find myself at square one.
“I’m spun out and the warrant squad is on my ass,” I say with a shaky tone. Billy senses the desperation in my voice when I call him from Jerome Avenue. Visions of dollar signs dance in his head. The last thing I want is to be part of another heist. I soon would have no choice. He’s a viper with a clean face and he’s turning me into a monster like him. There’s some devil in me — he didn’t craft it, but he promised life to it if I would just ride with him.
Heidi’s apartment is in Hunts Point, smack dab in the middle of a thriving crack scene. Billy is the only apparent source of crystal meth in the neighborhood. As I ramble on from block to block, on my way to their building, I can’t help noticing how much this part of the Boogie Down feels like a ghost town. Warehouses and abandoned tenements line these dark avenues. On every shadowy street, thugs wearing black hoodies loiter, whistling at cars as they cruise past, running up to the few vehicles which pull up, and making sales. In murky corners, pressed against walls like statues, ebony figures appraise foot traffic. Some young bloods use laser pointers in what seems to be a code to warn of approaching cops, while shabbily dressed baseheads try to hawk everything from boom boxes to jewelry in exchange for a taste of poison. These same apparitions I will soon rendezvous with in the sullen halls of C-76, Rikers Island.
I’m looking at these streets through the eyes of a fugitive and a tweaker. The Bronx has become a carnival of flesh and bone. I step over an older white guy who’s obviously been jacked for money, drugs, or both. He’s lying facedown on the street, the back of his head smashed open and raw. It’s the best Hunts Point has to offer, a street dealing scene that would make any hustler proud. Offers of every kind fill my ears as I make my way to Heidi’s apartment. To some, these streets are neon dreams come true, but to me, a speed freak at the end of his rope, it’s a ghost town.
Billy and Heidi live the typical tweaker life in the ever-so-typical tweaker pad. Billy is a complete and brilliant idiot. When I step inside their small, musty studio apartment, Billy is scrunched over his computer like something kept in the closet. The front room is damp. Torn wallpaper covers large holes through which the scuttle of crablike creatures can be heard. Postmodern artwork embellishes the back walls.
Heidi steps from the dimly lit recesses of her closet completely naked except for a pair of electric-blue lace panties. She’s a beautiful blond nymphomaniac whose appetite for spiking speed is insatiable. At times her eyes reveal a glimpse of the lost innocent nineteen-year-old from Petaluma, California.
It’s late, almost 3 a.m., and she’s getting ready for work. Ice, she always tells me, is essential for turning tricks — all the girls she works with do it. I can’t help feeling sorry for her, but at the same time, all I want her to do is shut up and offer me a hit. She approaches me wearing a dirty-blond wig and I assume this is a request from one of her regulars. As she gets closer, I notice she’s holding something against her small chest. Curling it outward with the needle-tracked arm of a nightmarish ghoul, she reveals a glass pipe packed with crystal meth. Heidi hands me the instrument of my demise. Before she disappears into the bathroom and just as I’m about to get a taste of the sweet poison, she flashes in front of me a New York State Driver License bearing the picture of one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.
“I need to look like her by tomorrow, think I can pull it off?” she asks.
Never, I think to myself, but appease her by agreeing. At that moment I know Billy is working on something big, something with many zeros attached to it, the ultimate grift. I will be getting my assignment soon.
The first hit I take fills my lungs and makes the synapses in my brain fire off like the Fourth of July. Dopamine overflows. At the edge of my hazy percept, I can barely make out something Billy’s saying about how “hot” their apartment has become. He’s convinced a guy we work with is a snitch. This is the last thing I want to hear.
The sky in my mind suddenly grows darker. Visions of decay and violence fill me with a sense of doom. Is my paranoia rooting deeper or is it a premonition of events yet to come?
A month on Rikers Island, then I was bailed out. Like a fool, I ran. I became totally aware of my situation, of the utter hopelessness of where I was and where I would end up. All of my demons came to the surface. I got two grams of speed, then what? I pull off another one with Billy, make $2,000, then what? Now I’m back where I started.
A black chasm of despair opens inside of me. Here I am, six months later, strung out worse than ever, out of money, trying to rest my beaten body in some sketchy tweaker pad. I am miserable and want this to end. I don’t just want a break from the drugs and crime, I want to go back to before I snorted that first line of crystal, before I knew how fuckin’ amazing that feeling was, before I experienced the rush from a successful heist and tasted the pleasures of other people’s money.