The Cocaine Chronicles by Gary Phillips

Author:Gary Phillips
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: akashic books
Published: 2005-01-12T23:00:00+00:00

Roughly a year after my rendezvous with Flash, my family moved from Pittsburgh to Philly so that my mom could take a “real job, with benefits” at Temple University. She was a clerk in the admissions office but hell-bent on the idea that if she held the job long enough, she’d somehow get smarter by osmosis. During this time we vacationed in Brigantine, a sleepy South Jersey island nearly as populated with dive bars and drug dealers as it was with washed-up sand crabs and tall, grassy weeds. There was never enough money for designer-brand clothes or frivolous food items or the slicker-looking school supplies, but somehow my mom had managed the mortgage on a small beach bungalow. She went in on it with Viki, and they alternated weekends.

Situated just across the bay from Atlantic City, Brigantine was a bedroom community for casino workers. Each evening, card dealers and cocktail waitresses, hotel maids, bartenders, and lounge singers made the trek over the bridge onto the glittering Vegas “mini-me” strip. Here, barely out of earshot of gagging slot machines spitting up coins, is where I lost my virginity for the third time, the one I count as “official.” I was nineteen, not yet aware of what had really happened with Flash, and still holding out for “that special someone.” It’s what goes on record in the annals of “important girl moments” in my mind because a) it involved another person, and b) I remembered it.

I was on coke quite literally that night—a makeshift bed of flattened cola boxes laid out discretely by a bank of sand dunes on the beach. The little nook, sandwiched between a spindly wood fence and a ten-foot-high mound of sand flecked with bits of jagged shell, was a landmark of sorts—couples tramped there after dark for some privacy—but it never received a deserved nickname, like “makeout point.”

Sean was a bartender at the Big Brown Bar, or “B-cubed” as we called it, a local dive with a jukebox that leaned toward reggae and soul, and a shabby back porch that emptied onto the beach. We’d met in a darts tournament. As I stared down the bull’s-eye, nibbling the inside of my cheek to harness my concentration, I caught Sean ogling. I reminded him of an old girlfriend, he told me later. I had the same pouty mouth.

What I came to notice about Sean, once he sparked my interest and I’d gone back, repeatedly, to B-cubed, was his erratic temperament. One night he’d be charged up and tending bar as if it were an extreme sport, all but tossing bottles in the air like Tom Cruise in Cocktail. The next, he’d be sulky and sullen, quickly irritated. But like so many of the girls who padded behind him, I sat there night after night—ingesting ridiculous amounts of greasy fried mushrooms and teaching myself to blow smoke rings from bummed Camel Lights—until he remembered my name. His mood swings would come to make sense. Sean made an okay living mixing drinks, but his rent came from coke.

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