Shit. That’s Jenny’s voice again. I wish I could get it to stop. The point is, our little business came to a standstill when DeMookfuck got busted. All he got was ten thousand hours of community service, probably because he was white. Back then the rumor was that he had ratted out some big dealers above him in exchange for a light sentence. All we were sure of that summer was that we couldn’t even get our hands on a single nickel bag of Mexican schwag. We couldn’t get stoned, and neither could our friends. We had no funds for our weekend antics. This got old after a couple of weeks, and eventually Josh says, Yo, Ray — that’s me, it’s short for Rehan — we should drive down to Gilbert Street to score some weed.
This was one of the worst I ideas I’d ever heard, but I just shrugged and said, Sure. Why not?
Gilbert Avenue is in West River section of Dwight, but for some reason, in the drug-addled suburbs where we grew up, the dumb-ass dope-smoking kids called it Gilbert Street. The other kids — the straight ones — didn’t call it anything, because they didn’t know it even existed. When they drove down Congress Avenue through that part of New Haven, they locked their car doors to avoid one of the mythic carjackings their parents had warned them about; their parents had learned about the carjackings from trashy movies like Grand Canyon. When I walk Ralphie around this neighborhood now, on one my forget-about-miscarriages-and-failing-school-systems walks, I can’t help but gawk at its hundred-year-old homes, most of them Victorians, most decaying or in a state of total disrepair. You stare at these elegant monsters, and you think, What a utopia this all must have been. Where did it all go? Why did it all vanish? America’s best days have passed, but we all just showed up to the dance. And you wonder why Trump has gotten them so fired up.
Don’t get me wrong, Dwight’s a bit cleaner these days, thanks to a local mosque, which has slowly but surely spruced up the neighborhood. (What do you Trump fascists think about that?) You can tell that some bureaucrats have been holding meetings about beautification and development. I notice an attempt to rebrand parts of the neighborhood West of Chapel, or some Waspy shit like that. And there are also big posters of allegedly local celebrities hanging from neighborhood buildings. There’s this one of Paul Giamatti, whose father was some bigwig at Stale. I can’t help but roll my eyes when I see Giamatti’s ugly mug grinning down upon the streets of Dwight. If I was a kid from the ghetto, I’d throw a bucket of paint on that face. I’d throw a bucket of the paint on the dumb bureaucrats who used taxpayer money to put up those bloody posters.
Stale University will probably wanna take some credit for cleaning up the area, though no bona fide New Havenite would agree with them. Stale, for example, recently took over St. Rafael’s Hospital, where yours truly slithered out into this world, and now the snotty Stale crest — a shield with the words Light and Truth — has been ironically stamped onto the placard in front of the place. My neighbor, who has a tough little beagle with a missing leg, is a nurse at St. Raf’s; she tells me that things have gone from dawn to dusk since the coming of Stale — that the university has no respect for its employees or their wisdom. You see, we are all really sick of our tax-exempt imperialist overlords here in New Haven. But when they get wind of our words, what do they say? They say, Quiet down, plebs of New Haven; the gold in our East India Company coffers is what keeps you from becoming Bridgeport. And if you’re batting above double digits in the IQ department, you’ll have to admit that the Stale folks have a point.
Back in the day, when we got up to no good down in Dwight, things were much worse. It was on the corner of Gilbert and Greenwood that I saw my first real-life prostitute. It was a total shock to me that she looked nothing like Julia Roberts. It was down by the delis on Dwight, where we’d stop to buy Snapples or rolling papers after scoring, that I learned that food stamps looked nothing like actual postage — that those fake flowers — the ones that come in little glass vases — they’re not for decoration, they’re crack pipes.
The first time we go to buy drugs down on Gilbert, my hands get cold and clammy as I steer the Civic across Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, which marks the unofficial end of suburbia. I know this is all wrong. I know we’re gonna get busted and I can imagine my stern-eyed immigrant father picking me up at the police station in one of his dust mite — infested tweed jackets, one with patches on the elbows. Josh tells us we got nothing to worry about though. He says they only bust dealers. I say, Yeah, Josh, but don’t we sell drugs? Little James chimes in here, says, Kid, we’re not real dealers. I’m outnumbered, I have no choice but to keep on driving. I pull up to a corner where a bunch of black kids are standing — some are older than us, but a few haven’t even hit puberty yet. This is all sad and troubling, but I don’t do much thinking about social ills at this point in my life. No, racist little me is waiting for a gun to be pointed at my face. For sirens to start wailing. Josh rolls down his window, and one of the older black kids approaches. He says, I got dimes and nickels, what do you want? Josh hands him two tens rolled up in a tight cylinder. I turn to my left, and a twerpy little black kid is standing there looking at me with a no-nonsense face. I think, This is it. This is when they rob us. The dealer on Josh’s side says, Yo, white boy, roll down your window. It takes me a few seconds to realize he’s talking to me, but then I roll down my window a few inches, and the little hopper outside throws two tiny bags onto my lap. The bags are blue and stuffed fat with schwag. The older guy, the main dealer, says, We all good then?
Josh says, I got a question for you, homey.
Oh yeah, homey, says the dealer. And what’s that?
I’m not thinking about Josh’s inappropriate use of the word, about how the dealer called him out on it. All I can think about is how cool and great Josh is. I’m like, How can he be so natural right now? Where did he learn how to do this? My fear fades, and I’m just proud — proud that Josh Kagan has agreed to let me be a part of his life. It feels like being friends with a movie star.
Josh says, I’m wondering, brother, can you get us some weight?
The dealer says, Kid, next time you’re down here, come straight to me. Ask for Ink, that’s what they call me. We don’t do weight, but I’ll take good care of you.
We got to know Ink well that summer. Or maybe that’s not accurate. I never did learn anything about his parents, if he had any brothers and sisters or anything. But I did find out that he was eighteen years old, because on his eighteenth birthday — July 4 — he gave us an extra nickel bag of something special, free of charge. After a while, whenever we showed up on Gilbert, the hoppers would start yelling, Go get Ink! or, Ink’s white boys are here! before we’d even rolled down our windows.
Doug E. Fresh high-top fades were still popular among black men back then, but Ink’s head was totally shaved. He had a quarter-sized blotch of a birthmark on one of his cheeks, I can’t remember which one, but I’m assuming that’s where he got his nickname from, though I never had the balls to ask. He wore two pieces of jewelry around his neck: a ropelike silver chain and a black leather string with a few beads on it, beads that had something to do with Rastafari, I think. Ink was a bit overweight, and he always had a smile for us. We’d sell his five-dollar nickels of schwag — which Josh said got you fucked up because they were dipped in something funky, maybe formaldehyde — for twenty bucks to the kids in the burbs. Which meant we were on easy street again, smoking and drinking for free, with plenty of money to spend on Sally’s pie or Paulie’s burgers.