The Pen

The Pen

‘Is this a date?’ I thought to myself as I was driving up to the house, I felt finally uninhibited. All good. All perfectly normal social and internal conversations pre-date. Or non-date rather. Who really knows what this is? I thought to myself. It’ll be revealed. Yes, I’ve had a cruiser. I’m feeling liberal. Talking in my head. Yes. YaS! I am okay. I have stuff to say, I am entertaining. People like me. And other mantras to that effect.

I parked on a neighbouring street to elude my would-be security squad. I already expected that I may be followed, or in the event of a drunken evening, being collected by one of my traditional Indian parents would necessitate me having to create a series of alibis and falsehoods that could not be overtly corroborated but at least deliberately evaded.The ability I had to plan for a preposed catastrophe surprises me now to this day, creating convections of truth.

I trundled through the house. Grotty white tiles in the living room, oh-so inviting. A half used pine bookshelf, and some old family portraits blurred in my minds’ eye as I surveyed the surrounds. The venetians were slightly bent out of shape like some child, or small animal, or some animal of a child had been peering out from them, wresting them into a sort of origami at two-foot high level. The blue fabric couch looked like whisky had been spilt there on more than one occasion. And no-one needed to make any explanations for it.

After all this was the house of a B-grade drug dealer.

I walked up closer to the bookshelf, noticing a picture that was so early 90s in its posterity I nearly gasped. Three women; obviously related; sporting giant hair of neopolitan colours: blonde, brunette, redhead were perched arms akimbo on something that resembled carpet, nay, sheepskin. The photograph, was characteristically smudgy at the edges, so that all the faces took on an angelic and ethereal glow vaselined glow.

‘Who’s this guy?’ I said pointing at the one lone ranger in a grey painted frame on the side. He had an awful haircut, trimmed at the sides like some sort of skiv, wearing a long ribbed cream turtleneck sweater and a left gold earring.

‘OYYY, that’s my dead brother!’. The drug dealer said appearing out of nowhere like some magical Cockney leprechaun.

Damn! Of course! Single photo, man looking out of place, out of time. His thin lipped mouth not smiling, but paused, and eyes transfixed on something beyond me and the remnants of memory.

Of course it was a monument. A shrine to some fallen relative. I froze. In my effort to remain ‘cool’ I shrugged, as if it were a get-out-of-jail-free card.

‘I generally have no filter’. And it was true, my humour was always pressing the borders of shock value, a quippy wit whose delivery was often reliant on the speed of my retort rather than the strength of my final observation. Although in most cases, I could get the best laughs, this was one where my verbal propensity to evacuate the contents of my first neural connection was sorely out of place.

‘Gotcha’. Said the drug dealer. “He’s dead, but he aint’ my brother.”

‘Come on through, I’m Nick. This is my place’.

‘This is Janie, he said’ introducing me to his drug mole wife-partner.

She was the blonde in the previous photograph. Pretty as a picture, but with a degree of scepticism in her eyes, and probably an air of ‘been here before’. A kind of low level annoyance in having to interact with strangers, or..any humans. One of the two. Having a child at fifteen could do that to you, but also probably living with the imminent threat of rupture of the rug being pulled out from beneath your middle class drug-financed lifestyle.

‘So Ben likes the chocolate, does he?’

‘What?” I was thinking. Already reduced to the ethnic other, before I could open my mouth.

‘His last girlfriend was Chilean’.

‘Oh, we’re not going out, we’re just friends’ I clarified. Cool as a freakin’ cucumber.

Finally, and as if on cue, Ben appeared, sniffling his nose, perky as a caffeinated puppy ready to lap me up.

All the boys are round the back, come on through. We navigated the narrow tiled corridor, a pokey kitchen and appeared at the glass rear sliding doors that led out to the back brown-paved patio.

I walked out to a sea of unfamiliar and expectant faces.

‘This, is Charmaine’. He declared.

They were all there, glazed in the heat and smoke. I smelt marijuana. A bottle of Jim Beam sat proudly on the glass table, a totem in the central arc of beer bottles that sat spokes off the wheel.

Four dudes, one hooded, and two beached glanced at my direction. Beachy smiled. And cockney got off his white plastic chair to come up and give me a handshake. ‘Nice to meet you mate!’ ‘Oh she’s a pretty young thing too, he said, ribbing Ben in sternum.

Cockney was the best of the lot, a jovial and mad guy brimming with a sense of insatiable goodness and an unwavering hopefulness that party-times were literally just around the corner at any given opportunity.

His face also bore the telltale signs of such festivities. His skin was a little sallow, even for a Brit, and of the constellation of teeth I saw when he smiled in the moonlight, most were blackened or greyed with decay shadowing beneath a thinning veneer of enamel.

Don’t worry about Dwayne, he said, eyeing me to the direction of the smiling Beachy. He sat candy-caned in his plastic chair, eyes glazed, mouth a little slackened. His skin was so tanned and taut, like a old volleyball out in the sun, his hair wild and sun kissed, I continued to stare at him past a socially appropriate time. He looked back at me, and smiled. ‘I’ve had 14 pills today’.

‘Pills?’ I thought. No, he couldn’t mean ecstasy.

‘And you’re not dead!?’ I remarked.

Nick laughed. ‘He had 21 the other day and was hospitalised, but Wayne has been like this for a very Very long time.’ he said pointing at his drugged dogged form. He’s actually been awake for almost 3 days.

‘Lost my two front teeth in a surfing accident’ he disclosed without warning, using his tongue to flick a partial denture of two front acrylic teeth up and down like a bizarre magic trick. Even as a dental student I knew this was a strange looking gesture watching the central incisors nose dive toward his bottom lip and then remain suspended for a moment, and lurch back up spring like right to where teeth belonged. I smiled.

Nick sat down, ‘Beam?’ he proposed to me. I assented. I couldn’t iterate the truth of the matter, that my lips had only ever sucked down, or chugged down cheap wine, cheap spirits and beer like a seasoned parlour maid. I had never even had a drop of bourbon before. Never tasted such a sweet and sickly liquor. Even the thought now, transports me back. The cola liquid, the raw saccharine, and the look of death all gleaming through backyard patio dimness, my retinas and a browning kaleidoscope of light through a short glass.

Nick himself was a beautiful human being. With shorn dyed-blonde hair, shaved right to the sides and a narrow elongated face. He was hardly handsome in a traditional sense. Every time he spoke he at once proclaimed to his willing audience a collection of teeth all huddled like lost orphans desperate for family and light. His laugh was loud, boisterous and you could get lost in all the varied decibels of sound. He was one of the most friendly and genuine people I had ever met. Gracious and loyal, he was loved by friends and his suppliers alike. HIs face was a kind of mangled surrealist picture, dripping in edges and lobes which almost placated other people into a sense of comfort. He’s normal, you would think, or at least abnormal enough for me to feel normal. And for a drug dealer dealing in all kinds of humans and agency, his face was a great and alluring calling card.

White plastic chairs, a white plastic table. Brown bricks. Dim Lamp light. Cymru flag. A marijuana plant sitting erect like topiary, wafting scent and descent all at once, simultaneously.

I looked beyond the surfaces and saw in the right rear corner of the backyard a small shed, with sliding doors, and glanced at Ben taking his hand. The bourbon still felt fresh on my tongue, and I looked at him with a sense of wanton abandon and felt free. ‘Take me there’, I asked pointing to the luminescence of the shed.

Upon entering, the room was more than a mere shed, it was a kind of old shipping container converted into a room fitted out with plush cream carpeting, a long singular fluorescent light continued to flash me beyond the shutting of eyelids. Right in the centre of the room stood a large table tennis table. Clean and new and green it took up prominent residence leaving only the corners and sides for someone to edge through and take up position.

‘Ever played before?’ he smiled at me walking over to the opposite end with a look of defiance and glee.

‘Not much really’ I replied, blissful.

‘Prepare to meet your doom!’ He countered.

My eyes shined with the petite and coy look of a novice, yet in reality I was a person that wanted to dance with him and get him to a point of sheer surprise. As children, we had a ping-pong table back home, and my brother and I would play incessantly in the back patio of our own suburban home. My brother was a terrible loser and at times, I would deliberately flail my limbs and give in spectacularly if only to prolong our interactions and ensure that he wouldn’t feel slighted. Wouldn’t feel a sense of despair of his younger sister’s prowess. In any other normal interaction, I probably would have done the same with Ben. I would have dived in some sort of balletic arc and consciously made a choice to let him feel in control. But tonight was different. I had drunk bourbon and my competitive streak was unwilling to relent.

We played with a speed that was reserved for Asians. Mid-way, He presented a small clear plastic bag of amphetamine on the table.

‘Well go on then, cut it’ I said as if I even knew what I was saying to him.

‘Okay he said, taking out a bankcard, and slicing and preening through the clumpy powder, edging and chopping like a teppanyaki chef on the green stovetop of a ping-pong table.

The fluorescence made everything have a pale blue and sleazy glow, and in the haze of cheap bourbon and the departure of my senses I was willing to let it go. Forego my senses and take in the offerings of the night.

It was on that night, that Ben asked me to take the $20,000 in cash for Nick’s boss. I was happy to oblige him, as in all the ways.

And that was the unravelling.

I sit here now, recounting these moments on my small slimline black notebook, leather bound and pressed. Clean edges, blank pages. Crisp and clean. I have nothing else to do, but write this story.