Heroin Chronicles (19 page)

“Are those two still alive?” I ask, my heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my ears.

Troy lights a cigarette, expressionless. I notice blood on his knuckles. “They'll live,” he replies. “Let's go.”

We drive west on Santa Monica Boulevard in silence. The streets are crawling with cop cars. An hour ago I would have been frightened by them. Now I have to fight the urge to flag one down. The address takes us to an expensive-looking modern apartment building a block off Westwood Boulevard in the Little Tehran neighborhood. As the two of us walk into the mirrored lobby, I decide to speak up.

“I don't want any more violence, Troy. Maybe we can just scare the dude a little. He didn't seem very tough.”

Troy stares at me blankly, like a dog trying to read a novel. “Why do you hate violence so much?” he asks sincerely.

“Because it's fucking ugly,” I respond.

“The world is ugly. Always has been. Go back and read your history books.” He presses the elevator button and pulls a large military knife from his pant leg. “I'm going to do whatever the situation calls for.”

“And what if they have a gun, then what?”

“Oh well …”

We exit the elevator and count door numbers till we arrive at the unit. The door has been left open slightly which seems odd. Troy just walks in. I stand there, terrified. When I don't hear anything I head in after him. I see Troy standing in a living room, fishing a butterscotch candy out of a jar. I walk in to join him and get a surge of adrenalin. There on the floor is the young heroin dealer who ripped me off. He has a very noticeable bullet wound in his stomach. His eyes are open and blinking.

“Oh shit, he's shot?!” I exclaim, my voice shaking. I have never seen someone this seriously injured in my life.

“Yep,” Troy responds, sucking on the candy.

“We have to call an ambulance.”

“He'll be dead before they get here,” Troy explains calmly.

It suddenly occurs to me that the guy on the floor is listening to us. Before I can say anything, Troy takes a knee, leans close, and talks to him: “I'm not gonna bullshit you—we can't help you, you are gonna die here, and that's a fact. But there is something I can do for you. Tell me who killed you and stole your dope, and I promise I will make them pay for what they did.”

The guy stares up at Troy and I'm not sure he understands. Then he speaks in a dry-mouthed whisper: “Nazis … The Snake Pit …”

The Snake Pit is a located across Pacific Coast Highway from Topanga State Beach at the southern end of Malibu. It is hidden away in a brush-filled canyon and only accessible by a narrow winding dirt road. There are about ten old bungalows there, nearly all of them submerged into the ground so people have to enter through the second story. It's the result of near constant flooding over several decades and has left the once sought after real estate a den of drugs and fringe dwellers. Both Troy and I have been there on different occasions, both to buy drugs. In my case it was a month ago when I spent a sketched-out night waiting for some heroin with two Nazi greaser types, one of them holding a baby.

As we drive up the coast, I ask Troy what his plan is. He pauses so long I think he's not going to answer. Then he does, kind of. “We're going to go in there and get our drugs. Then you're going to leave and I am going to fuck shit up.”

I can't help but let out a short laugh. The situation seems surreal. “These guys we're going to see? These are some hardcore penitentiary peckerwoods. I'm thinking they're gonna be ready for us.”

Troy smiles. “Definitely.”

“I don't suppose you would consider not going?”

“We're gonna finish this.”

Troy and I sit on some crumbling steps leading down to the beach across the highway from the Snake Pit. We are waiting for darkness, staring out at the waves, surfers visible in silhouette.

“You miss it?” I ask him, nodding to the surf. “You were good.”

“Nah,” Troy responds. “That ain't me anymore.”

“It could be again.”

“There ain't nothing good left in me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was never a saint, I know that. But I'm not even human anymore.” He taps his forehead. “Shit is broken.”

“Maybe it's just gonna take some time … Dude, let's just go home. We don't need to go on with this. I'll find another way to get us some dope.”

“It's not about that, never was.” He stands up. “Besides, I promised that dead kid I would get him some justice. If nothing else, I am a man of my word.”

It is night and we are down in the Snake Pit. Troy waits behind in a tree line as I walk up to a ramshackle house and knock on a window that now serves as a door. The plan is for me to tell them I want to buy some more heroin and see who is inside. But before I am even ready, the door swings open and I am pulled inside. Someone shoves me to the ground and kicks me in the ribs. “Stay down!” a rough voice orders.

I eventually roll over and manage a glance around. There is a muscular convict type with greased-back hair and a cowboy mustache standing over me. The small room is filled with expensive goods: jewelry, high-end electronics, fur coats. And there, on a nearby table next to some used syringes and a pistol, is Betty Le Mat's gleaming Oscar. The sudden realization that I have found the guys doing the home invasions is instantly followed by the understanding that they will surely kill me.

One of the Nazi greasers I met there before walks in and looks at me. He is shirtless—the words
South Bay
tattooed across his stomach—and holding a large revolver. His eyes have a crystal meth intensity. “I remember you,” he says, then nods to the others. “Take him into the bathroom and stick him. Make sure to hold him over the bathtub when he bleeds out.”

South Bay starts to light a Camel nonfilter when a figure looms behind him. It is Troy. He reaches forward and moves a knife across the man's throat. A mist of blood sprays out and the guy stumbles forward. His gun goes off making a popping noise. As the other greasers scramble for their weapons, I dive behind a couch. The room erupts into complete chaos as men shout and shoot off guns.

I hear a crashing noise and one of the Nazis falls beside me on the floor and starts convulsing. With a new burst of adrenalin I stand and bolt through the house toward what I hope is a back door. I race through a kitchen area and out another makeshift door into the surrounding trees. As I move away, there is high-pitched screaming unlike anything I have ever heard.

I frantically claw my way up a hillside on my hands and knees. When I get some distance I finally look back. The house below is now on fire. There are several gunshots and then an eerie silence. I sit there gasping for breath as the house burns. I take out my cell phone and, with trembling hands, call 911. Troy never emerges. No one does. I hear sirens approaching and soon there are emergency lights descending into the darkness of the canyon.

In the ensuing days, a sanitized story of what happened is offered up to the public. News broadcasts tell of a decorated war veteran who lost his life single-handedly taking down an ultra-violent crime ring. And really, that is what happened. The rest is merely context. In my opinion Troy knew he couldn't exist in the civilized world anymore so he went out doing something he thought was noble. Beyond the fact that he had become a monster, my friend rescued the city.

And in the end he saved my life as well. I was literally scared straight by my day with Troy and have been clean since. That night I left the Snake Pit and drove south along the coast, eventually falling asleep on my local beach, curled up beneath the very same lifeguard stand I had slept under as a clear-eyed kid waiting to surf the dawn patrol. I held onto the sand with an anguished desperation, listening to the waves and willing myself back into a less horrific world.

G
ARY
P
HILLIPS
has edited and contributed to several Akashic Books anthologies, including
The Cocaine Chronicles
, which he coedited with Jervey Tervalon. Recent work includes
The Rinse
, a graphic novel about a money launderer; the novel
The Warlord of Willow Ridge;
and
Treacherous: Grifters, Ruffians and Killers
, a collection of his short stories. For information, visit
www.gdphillips.com.

black caesar's gold

by gary phillips

H
e had a dream, but it would have made Martin Luther King, Jr. shake his head woefully, Malcolm X tongue lash him severely, and Stokely Carmichael would have pimp slapped him. Frank Matthews, along with the other Frank, Lucas, and Leroy “Nicky” Barnes were, for a time, the kingpins of the heroin trade on the East Coast. Matthews, the self-styled Black Caesar, was a country boy like Lucas. But once he got to the big city, he went all in. Maybe Barnes could quote
Moby-Dick
and
King Lear
, but ascending from juvenile chicken thief in his native Durham to numbers runner in Philadelphia to becoming the first major drug lord in Harlem, Matthews had built an organization his compatriots admired and the Mob feared.

“That moulie's getting too damn big for that mink coat he struts around in,” Godfather Joe Bonanno was wont to observe.

For Matthews moved product like no other, a Robin Hood in the community and a terror outside of it. Unlike other smaller pushers in Harlem and beyond, he didn't rely on La Cosa Nostra to keep him supplied—as generally speaking, they controlled the pipeline. Matthews had a direct South American connection and brought in H and coke that way, cutting out the usual middleman. He invested in property under various fronts and had cash couriered overseas into tax havens.

One time in Atlanta, Matthews brought together a roomful of big swingin'-dick black and Latino drug dealers to form a combine so as to chill the growing static with the Italian mobsters. Matthews was a strategic motherfucker.

Like Barnes and Lucas, the high-flying Matthews eventually got his wings clipped and was busted by agents of the then newly constituted Drug Enforcement Administration. But different than those two, he didn't rat out his peers for a reduction of his sentence. Then again, Matthews didn't do time in the slammer, either. He liked to gamble in Vegas, these trips also a way for him to launder more of his money.

As these things happen, he had been in Vegas at the time with a beauty on his arm, losing at the craps tables but not sweating it. His plan was to soon be on his way to LA to catch Super Bowl VII between the Redskins and Dolphins. Yet unbeknownst to him, members of his South American network, along with a lieutenant, had already been arrested. The trap was closing in on him, and at McCarran Airport the DEA slapped the cuffs on Matthews and his lady friend.

“What took you so long?” he was quoted as saying jauntily.

Incredibly, his lawyer successfully argued for his bail reduction, at which point Matthews got out of jail and then disappeared. That was 1973. From Chicago to Rome, Nigeria to Atlanta, sightings of Matthews abounded. But none of them panned out. He was never found. Maybe the Mafia had him whacked or maybe Matthews had his face changed and retired to some island with a woman who liked to wear miniskirts and no underwear.

Chuck Grayson pondered Frank Matthews's fate and history as he pretended not to fawn over the too-sweet 1969 Mustang Fastback with a Boss 420 engine. Grayson had done his homework and knew less than a thousand of these particular Mustangs were produced that year. There must have been modifications to the engine compartment to accommodate the larger motor, he mused. A woman in stylish clothes and a wide-brimmed sun hat preceded him from the parking lot where several vehicles were on display. Along with other potential buyers, they reentered the main room of Stedler and Sons Auctioneers. There was a photo of the maroon Mustang tacked to a padded board with its order in the auction noted. There were other pictures of various items pinned there as well, including vases and an ivory-inlaid cigar box said to have belonged to President Grover Cleveland.

Grayson had come to the auction house because this particular Mustang had belonged to Frank Matthews. Stedler and Sons listed the car as having belonged to Ken Schmecken, a producer and shadowy part owner of three X-rated movie theaters in the Los Angeles area. Grayson was something of a Matthews aficionado and always on the lookout for items connected to the gangster. He knew that
Schmecken
, an oblique slang term for heroin, was one of the names the drug lord had used in hiding his investments.

Because the car had value as being only one of a limited number, there were several interested parties contending for it when it came up for bid. But Grayson was something of a limited edition himself.

He was a mid-thirties African American male who'd made his money as part of a start-up online entity that got sold for a nice profit to a conglomerate controlling various commercial websites. He and his friends' site was one of the first catering to the multicultural geek crowd in all things pop culture, lifestyles, and fashion. Turned out people-of-color dweebs, a group of which Grayson was proudly a member, liked to hang together.