Then the buzzing was like the muted roar of a teakettle just coming to boil, only instead of roiling, my blood began to simmer and spit, like fatty meat on a bonfire. I know I tossed my head to and fro a good bit — shaking a condemned madman’s no no no this can’t happen to me — because my neck muscles still hurt. And then the fire was there.
I wish I could describe it as an unfolding flower, the bloom of pestilence reeking revenge or a black blossom tinged red with wrath, yawning in rage. It would be much more poetic than the truth, which is that one moment I was in the void, the next I heard the buzz, and then I had porcupines rampaging through my veins. Porcupines wielding rusty, gas-powered chainsaws. They started from everywhere, spontaneously filling my world, commandeering every nerve ending in my body so that even blinking seemed to slice my eyeballs open with acidic papercuts. You would think a pain like that would have an epicenter, but it was like Daddy talked about God: there was the void, and then the void was filled, and if you blinked you missed it, and if you hadn’t blinked you’d missed it anyway, but just because you didn’t see it happen didn’t mean it hadn’t.
It was a hell of a thing to have my subconscious manning the controls while my body was begging for some action — any action — that would end the turmoil. Call 911, slit my wrists — the latter seemed a better option since the relief would come faster. I love my subconscious; I love its view of the world and the way it’s able to draw analogies between vastly segregated and seemingly incongruous events; I love its detached realization and the way it fails to marvel at its most striking discoveries, its passive and uncaring genius for observation. But as the captain of the sinking ship that was my body’s pyre, it sucked. It convinced me that the smack had intelligence, was contriving to wrest control of my body, poppies become animate. And so in the heat of battle, I shook my stash into the toilet and flushed it away, a $4,500 turd.
Chase showed up four days later (the day after Fat Tuesday, or what we in the Quarter call I-Did-Wftaf-Wednesday) looking churlish and victorious, like he’d just done the head cheerleader in the back seat of her boyfriend’s car. He wanted his money. I told him how I’d spent fourteen hours doing my best Joan of Arc and another twenty-four cramped up like a diver shot from the abyss to the surface by a nuclear cannon. How I could not have sold that smack to anyone and lived. Accused him of cutting it with Drano when the accusations got to flying.
“Yes, that’s very interesting,” Chase conceded. “But if I thought you were sincerely accusing me of intentionally misrepresenting product, I’d cut your balls off and serve them in your famous paella. Geoffery could make it Macanudo’s house special, or sell it as a take-out dish — sack in a sack.” And he spat on my floor. On the carpet.
“Hey, Chase, that’s great.” I was surprised by something I hadn’t felt in a very long time, I think since that camping trip when I survived my post-torching weekend on nothing but raw determination. After that, I figured I was pretty damn close to invincible. But I recognized the feeling right off anyway: I was scared. A man who will spit on your DuPont Plush-Lite is liable to do anything. “Only I lost my job when I was too racked to even pick up the phone to call in sick for two days.” You no-show at a restaurant in New Orleans during Carnival, you pretty much forget about asking for your back pay, much less your job.
“Damn, Creole, that’s a fucking pity. I will so miss that blackened mustard chicken.” He tisked at me the way the bad guy always mocks James Bond when he’s got 007 chained to the wall and the laser aimed at his pecker. Only I didn’t have no belt buckle grenade launcher to counter with. “Now what we gonna do, huh?”
He was on me so quickly, the knife blade fat against my throat so fast, that when I recovered enough to compose a thought, it was: Damn, let me see you do that again in slo-mo. I never saw the knife come out, or actually felt the blade under the plump of my adam’s apple. Too much adrenaline to feel anything but the air pumping in and out of my lungs. But I heard the telltale click of a butterfly being flicked open and the finger holes secured. There is no more menacing sound, not even a gun being cocked or a round sent home in the chamber. Any pussy can point a pistol at you and play chicken. But a man who’ll put a blade to your throat so tight that a hard pulse in your vein will slice you open for him, that’s a man who means business. That’s a man who’s ready to get dirty.
“Let me lay it out for you, Creole,” he whispered. It was an intimate sound, the tone of voice I’d use only with a woman I’d already seduced, the sound of a man rounding third and heading for home knowing full well the center fielder has booted the ball to the wall. “I owe Lazarus for that stash, you owe me for that stash. I don’t pay Lazarus back tonight — To-Fucking-Night — and you’ll be finding pieces of my teeth and fingernails in your andouille. Well, I’m not about to be sausage fodder, so you better stop fucking around and tell me you laid the shit off at the restaurant, or at Carnival or at your fucking grandmother’s nursing home.” His hands were shaking so wildly I could hear the cold steel clatter of the butterfly handle as it rattled between his fingers.
I kept waiting for my life to flash before my eyes, but all I got were non-sequential glimpses, like someone had tossed a couple photo albums into the air and I was watching them randomly float down. I saw Faith, and Emily our daughter, but not as we were bringing her home, or the way her little fingers encircled mine the first time I held her, or the way Faith’s soft lullaby voice used to greet me when I stumbled home at the two A.M. feeding, smelling like hickory with crawfish guts still under my nails and the raucous combination of reds and smack coursing through my brain. No, instead I saw them leaving me for Faith’s mother in Baltimore. I saw myself in the kitchen at Macanudo, but not stuffing bell peppers with trout and jambalaya, or being called out to visit so many tables the first night.
I introduced my black seared catfish in a pecan crust. Instead, I saw myself being initiated in uppers and rush and crystal-meth — anything to keep the energy flowing — by Geoffery, head chef to my sous-chef, Eve to my Adam. And I saw my brother, who pushed me into the fire and without a word convinced me to blame my own clumsy stupidity. My mother, who would later die at the hands of my father. My father, who would later die at the hands of his fellow inmates, held down and beaten to death in the shower with bars of soap cradled in towels, slings like the one David used to slay Goliath. These pictures floated by me in only a second. Failures all, except for my mother, who had dedicated her life to seeing after her children until they were big enough to see after themselves, and who had made it — though only just. And it was most likely her memory that saved my life. Her, and the way she’d stayed my father when he was in a temper.
“Chase,” I said, but I had to say it twice because the first time my voice was gravel dry and choked with the fear that if I strained my vocal cords too hard I’d slice my own throat. “Chase, I can’t pay you what I don’t have. That stash was shit. Damn near wiped me, swear to God, and I flushed it. Let me find work, the Columbia or even Antoine’s if I have to stoop to that, but I’ll pay it off. I’ll even explain it to Lazarus if you want. But Christ, Chase, you kill me and you’ll never get your money.” An appeal to logic that would have done Momma proud. She’d talked Daddy down from many a rage with that kind of thinking.
And praise the Lord and pass the pipe and all that shit if Chase didn’t back off with the blade. He shook his head and laughed the way Eva Braun must have after completing her vows, knowing how futile the whole arrangement was. “Shit, Creole. You’ve fucked me and didn’t even give me the reach around.” He got up off the floor and paced a bit, and after a minute, when he hadn’t spat again, I collected myself and tried to do the same. I stumbled a bit moving from horizontal to vertical, and suddenly was aware how badly I was jonesing. I hadn’t fixed since my smack inferno and was so badly in need that I briefly considered asking Chase to raise my credit limit.