Sans Famille’s busboys and dishwashers weren’t unwitting of the action on Hoyt. More than a few made their way to Lady’s threshold on their city-regulated ten-minute breaks.
Once he proved himself untrustworthy for taking vials on the street, Dose accepted his obvious fate, the slot for which Lady might have pegged him the moment they met. He ran her door. Not the lookout window, he’d not plummeted to that ignoramus level. He was a dealer still, just one trusted to go no farther than his hand could reach through the security-chained door. Money in and product out, Dose touched it all as it passed and kept barely anything.
He unchained the door for the cops when they came. They came just in time. He was going to die if he kept Lady’s pace.
The gun was nobody’s in particular, hidden in a drawer, but it stuck to him. Dose had to be philosophical. It was in the nature of an arrest situation that a floating gun attached to the individual bearing a manslaughter rap.
He’d been six months at Riker’s and was up to a hundred and thirty pounds when he pled out and was moved upstate to Auburn, then Watertown.
Auburn.
His first tour, Dose had been prodigal, an advance man for a generation destined inside. Now it wasn’t just Riker’s which brimmed with faces from the neighborhood or the yards. It was the big upstate houses like Auburn, too, as though the system was inadvertently reassembling the city and its factions here, 1977 trapped in the amber of incarceration. Writers were reunited with their crews, none having seen each other since back in the day, since they’d spun from teenage affiliations into lives more burdened and serious. Yet those adult lives seemed stripped away by their failure. What remained were thirty-year-old teenagers joshing in prison: Ho, shit, man, it’s you! This my boy Pietro, from DMD! Or: Damn, I used to see your shit on the 6 line, you were with Rolling Thunder Crew, right?
Lines of enmity dissolved. Any connection was a good one, here in the woods. Dose met a couple of boys from a once-upon-a-time-terrifying Coney Island gang. Some summer ago, Dose and two others from FMD had gotten on the Coney crew’s bad side by making a dumb mistake: they’d tagged inside a bunch of apparently clean D-train cars in a yard’s dim moonlight, using black ink from heavy-flowing fat mops. When the trains ran the next day, Dose and his mates saw with horror what moonlight hadn’t revealed: the D-train interiors had already been covered with the Coney Island crew’s clunky tags in pink ink. Black now overlapped the pink everywhere. How to explain the pink hadn’t even been visible? Impossible. They thought Dose had deliberately backgrounded them. Dose spent that summer watching over his shoulder for the Coney gang, marked as prey.
Now it was all hunky-dory, good for a laugh. Dose was one of the famous names, so the Coney crew recalled the incident as evidence they’d once been significant writers.
Dose was ambulatory history, and brothers wished to claim some for themselves.
“Yo, Dog, you remember me? I wrote Kansur 82, you used to background me all the time.”
“Sure, sure, I remember you,” Dose would say, if he was in a generous mood.
Other times he’d withhold the glory of being linked to his name, just to see their frustration: “Why would I trouble to background you, blood? What was you to me?”
“I was a toy, I know-you was right to go over my tags.”
Dose would deny it, tormenting their minds: “You claiming you got up somewhere before me?”
“You used to go over me!” the younger writer would insist.
“Nah, man. You used to go under me.”
Surgery.
Of course it would be Horatio, clownier than ever, who turned up in Auburn’s visitor’s room talking around the subject, not saying what he meant. Barry was illing-well, Dose knew that already. No, truly illing, like in the Long Island College emergency room a couple of times. His father needed Dose now, in some way Horatio wouldn’t explain. Dose agreed without understanding what he’d agreed to.
A week later he was escorted to Auburn’s infirmary for consultation with a surgeon who acted like Doolittle among the savages, brow furrowed in reproach even as he spoke at moron rpm. Did Dose grasp what he was offering? Yes, sure, though he hadn’t until then. There was no certainty it would work, Doolittle warned. Tests were required, to check the match. His and his father’s candidacy had to be examined. Dose, old hand in passivity by now, submitted to three weeks of fluid donations, spinal, bile, and shit. The results: Dose was a hundredth-percentile shoe-in to rescue his father’s putrefying blood.
Doolittle, chafing at being instrument of a back-channel exception, prison strings pulled by Andre Deehorn and others in the Philly scene, advised Dose against the procedure. The kidney could fail within five to ten years-that was a successful outcome.
Dose would have given heart, or hands, or eyes.
Recovery took six days in Albany Presbyterian Hospital. Dose and his father lay in side-by-side narcotic slumber, with a holstered guard in the room patently thrilled with the assignment, full of Playboy dreams of nurses.
The day before he was returned inside, with both Dose and Barry up and running, having demonstrated renal function to Doolittle’s satisfaction, the four of them-son and father in cotton pajamas, and Horatio, and the guard-escaped through fire doors to the hospital’s roof.
There they smoked a joint Horatio’d smuggled in, conducting their own tests on that new kidney-what else was it for?
There, as they squinted in the glare off Albany’s toy skyline, his father’s fund of disappointment was proven bottomless. Barry could help himself to Dose’s extra kidney and still not meet his eyes.
When he learned how famous the organ donation made him at Auburn, Dose wanted no part of it, and requested the transfer to Watertown, to finish his bid in anonymous peace.
Watertown.
Dose shed it all. No jailhouse artistry, he’d left that behind years back-a million guys could execute the graffiti style now. He had no illusions about stockpiling cigarettes. Old-school eminence held nothing he wanted, it signified zip to the time he had to do, played no real factor in the endurance of the mind. Claiming this or that alliance outside- Yo, I know that dude, younger brother of Fitty Cents, that nigger’s King of Wyckoff Gardens, he gonna set me up when I’m sprung -looked thinner every day. Duck ensnarements and arrears at any level, this was Dose’s campaign. Beguiling COs was of use only if you wanted something a CO could give you. They could give you nothing. A protector like Raf mattered only until you understood there was nothing to protect.
Invisibility, intangibility, Teflon eyes.
Yet he had one last error of affiliation in him.
Robert Woolfolk was the same hectic proposition he’d ever been, only stretched and torn by fifteen years more on the street and inside. Gold-toothed, arm-crook scarred from vein hunts, one ear nipped, Robert staggered on, decades beyond adventures that ought to have been his finish if he hadn’t had so many lives, like Wile E. Coyote still climbing out of the crater and dusting himself off, rubbing his hands and grinning in conspiratorial glee. You wanted to put the man to bed.
Dean Street had come to Watertown, like a radio signal wandering through space, a hit song from 1976 become sole sign of life in the galaxy.
So Dose took him under his wing, as though he had one.
Robert Woolfolk was dealing trees within a few weeks of appearing at Watertown, against Dose’s advice. If you wished to smoke, smoke. Be a customer, laying low. Nope: Woolfolk began dealing two-for-ones, betting against guys’ commissary checks coming in on time, juggling debt. Then slicing trees open and stretching them with stale tobacco. This was tolerable, a line Dose had seen men walk for years, a line he’d walked a few times himself, merely to keep himself amused at Riker’s.