Absinthe?"
I was tempted to ask for the absinthe out of curiosity, but decided I wasn't that thirsty. "Thanks, I had lunch before I came."
"Suit yourself, man." Clarence reached under a desk and pulled out a small wooden box. He opened it, and took out what appeared to be a piece of rolling paper and a bag of pot. He looked as me, pleased. "This is some pure hydro. Fifty bucks a gram. You can snag an ounce in Washington Square Park for about six hundred.
Sometimes you go up by the George Washington
Bridge, around 179th Street, you find some real fiends who'll sell it for cheaper, but it won't be as good. And you'd be surprised at how many of the kids from
Columbia deal right in Morningside Park."
"Thanks for the info," I said, "but I gave up smoking in college. I eat enough Cheetos these days as it is."
"Suit yourself, reporter man."
Clarence sprinkled some of the weed onto the paper.
Then he spent a minute picking through it, removing any clumps or twigs. Once the mixture was in a slight cone shape-wide to narrow-he began to roll. Clarence stared at the joint with an almost trancelike intensity. He began in the middle, using his thumbs to roll it evenly, gradu ally moving his fingers to the ends of the paper. Once it was a cylinder, he licked the top edge of the paper and folded it over. When that was completed, he took a small piece of thicker paper and rolled it tightly into a spiral.
He inserted that into one end of the joint. Clarence twisted the end without the roach so nothing would fall out.
Taking the joint between his thumb and index finger,
Clarence held it to his lips, sparked a lighter and took a deep drag. He drew it deep into his lungs, his eyes closing as the end of the joint glowed. Finally he removed it from his lips and puffed out a dark cloud that hung over his room for a minute before disappearing.
When all that was done, he opened his eyes, looked at me, held out the joint. "Best weed you'll smoke in this city."
"No, thanks," I said. "I'm working."
"Whatever. So you said you wanted to talk about my pops. What about him?"
"Your dad was Butch Willingham."
"S'right." Clarence took another drag. I noticed a small corner of his upper lip was turned up. Either he wasn't entirely fond of speaking about his father, or hadn't in a long time.
"Was he a good father?"
Clarence held out the joint. I don't think he meant it that way, but I saw that as somewhat of an answer.
"No better or worse, s'pose."
"How do you mean that?"
"I know a lot of kids my age who had more'n I did.
Know a lot that had less. My dad, he didn't have much of an education. No college, no high school. Dropped out at fourteen, spent the rest of his life slinging rock.
That's all the man knew. As far as I knew he was good at it."
"How so?"
"Kept me well fed. My moms died when I was a kid and I never had no brothers or sisters, so it was all up to him. He made sure I went to school, beat my ass if I didn't get good grades. I know a lot of dads who bought the rock my dad sold and just sunk into a hellhole because of it.
My dad never smoked, never drank. To him this was his livelihood, like someone who goes to a plant, punches a clock. He didn't take his work home with him."
"I find that a little hard to believe. I mean…" I motioned to the joint. Clarence laughed.
"Yeah, I used to do harder stuff. Crack. A little heroin here and there. The weed's a cooling-down drug. I'll get off it at some point." He took another long, deep, drawnout puff, then smiled lazily. "Just not yet."
"The sins of the father," I said under my breath.
"What's that?"
"Nothing. So do you remember when your father was killed?"
"Remember?" Clarence said, coughing into his fist.
"I was the one that found him."
"You're kidding," I said.
"Nope. Thursday nights I had me a pickup game of basketball in the park with some other kids. I was about six-two by high school, and could handle it like a dream.
I thought if I kept growing I could be another Magic
Johnson, the kind of big guy who had the skills of a point guard. Then one Thursday I came home. Picked up one of those ice-cream cones in a wrapper, you know with chocolate around the cone and nuts in the vanilla?
Carried it home with me, went upstairs, first thing I see is blood on the carpet. I couldn't see my dad, that's how big the puddle was. He was lying in the living room, the puddle had spread into the hallway. I go in there, and he's facedown, arms above his head like he was trying to fly and fell from the sky."
"You saw the words?" I said.
"Yeah. Just barely, but they were in the carpet. Lucky for us we had an off-white carpet, otherwise I might have missed it. The Fury. That's what my dad wrote while he was dying on our floor."
"I can't even imagine," I said.
"No," Clarence said, putting the joint into an ashtray.
"You can't. The cops told me they used a silencer. It took a few years until I knew what that meant."
"My brother was killed the same way," I said.
Nobody spoke for a moment. Then I said, "So once you came out and saw him, you called the cops?"
"No. First I tried to wake him up," Clarence said. He spoke slowly, the words rusty like they hadn't been spoken in a long time. His voice was soft yet gritty, and it chilled me to the bone. "I turned him over. The back of his head was almost gone. I remember seeing bone Jason Pinter and brain on the floor, but I was a kid. I figured there was always a way to put someone back together. I turned him over, saw that glassy look in his eyes, the same look you see on the mannequins in department stores. And I held my father's head in my hands and tried to get my daddy to wake up. Finally a neighbor heard me crying and called the cops. She actually reported it as a domestic disturbance, thinking my dad was beating me. Then when they came in and saw him…man, that's a picture that'll never go away."
I was almost afraid to ask, but I said, "What hap pened then?"
"The cops came and took me away. I stood outside and watched a whole mess of them go into our building, wearing gloves, carrying all sorts of equipment to bag and tag my dad. I'd seen bodies before. Even if my dad was straight, that's a dirty game, and some of his friends didn't play the same way. It's not the same when it's your kind. Whether you love 'em or not, when it's your own flesh and blood lying there, something just dries up inside of you. Drains the life out of you."
Inside, I knew how Clarence felt. Only to a much smaller degree.
"Then I got sent to foster care. Lived with a nice old family until I turned eighteen. Moved out, went to school and never seen them since."
"You graduate?" I asked.
"Cum laude," Clarence said. "I don't like to keep up appearances, but this is my crash pad. My real place of business is in Gramercy."
"What kind of work do you do?" I asked.
"Graphic design," he said.
"That's funny," I said. "Do you know a woman named Rose Keller?"
"Sounds familiar, why?"
"Friend of my brother's. Also works as a graphic designer."
"Hmm…" Clarence tapped a finger against his lower lip. "Think I might have smoked with her once or twice.
Or maybe more." He smiled.
"She's kicked her habits. I guess creative people do creative things to their mind."
"I never lose the sharpness. It doesn't affect my work."
Then Clarence rattled off the names of several mul tibillion-dollar companies. He took a business card from a pile on his desk and handed it to me. It had his name, address, e-mail and Web site URL. The tagline read