“Boy kept his mouth shut and the rest of him buttoned up,” Carlisle said.
“You remember anything about him?” I said.
“Yeah, he was the only motherfucker who didn’t OD in that part of the tier,” Chip said.
“Eight motherfuckers died, another eight all fucked up vegetable-wise in the head. Crazy white boy had death all around his skinny ass,” Carlisle said.
“What was the story?” I asked.
“We was both away from that shit, but the word was one of the hacks was sellin’ some bad acid trip, ’cept it wasn’t regular acid, it was some new shit I never heard of before or since. They called it ‘Blast’ or some shit,” Chipper said.
“Shit was bad and no hack ever got caught. It was all swept under the fuckin’ carpet. Who care if inmates dyin’ anyway?” Carlisle said.
“Why didn’t Howard get into it?”
“Boy was straight-laced, man. He was no hardened criminal. I think the motherfucker flipped for a short period and then went back to be just a skinny-ass white boy,” Chipper said.
“You guys ever try ‘Blast’?” I asked.
“No man, shit came and went fast. I heard it was fuckin’ crazy shit—like meth and acid and dust times ten all at once,” Chipper said. “I’m a down head. I ain’t lookin’ for no fuckin’ Ferris wheel ride,” Carlisle said.
We kicked around some small talk and I let them know how they could get a hold of me if they needed me. With guys like this you didn’t come on too strong about getting help, but I always wanted them to know where they could find me if they had to.
I thanked the guys, gave them a ten, and headed back to the Eldorado. On the way back to the Moody Blue, I threw in the
On Stage
eight-track and listened to Elvis do “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.”
I was thinking about Howard’s shoes and how his whole life he’d been stepping in shit with those shoes, and probably how the one time he fought back against it in his life it was the biggest mistake he ever made. I also wondered why he wasn’t getting high in prison. I knew if I ever had to live that life I would have done anything and everything to alter my consciousness away from the reality.
It felt to me like the “Blast” overdoses had something to do with something, but that just might have been my mind’s way of making something fit. It could just as easily have been one of the many fucked-up events that had occurred during Howard’s thirty-year stint in our culture’s hellhole. Elvis had moved on to “Sweet Caroline” as I was pulling up to the Blue when I saw Billy chucking his throwing stars into my oak tree. He sprang to attention as I pulled in.
“Sir!” he said.
“Hey, Bill,” I said, returning his bow with just a slight nod.
“Sir—I am anxious to resume training, sir.”
“Yeah, well Billy, uh, I haven’t felt like going to the gym much.”
“Sir, I will train anywhere.”
“Okay, Billy, but I’ve been a little fucked up lately, so I’m not sure how good I’ll be as a teacher.”
“Sir?”
“Uh … it’s just … well … never mind.”
Billy looked at me with his eyes wide open and his head tilted. It’s the same look Al gives me when I take away a shoe he’s been chewing on. I figured it would be easier to just give Billy a half-hour workout than to try to explain it to him.
“All right, Billy. C’mere,” I said. He sprang up, ran over to me, came to attention, and bowed.
“WASABIIII!” Billy screamed, snapping his fist down into a ready position.
For the next half hour I worked him on throwing good punches and pretended it was a special karate technique when in reality it was fundamental boxing. I’m not entirely sure why, but I made him drill his recoil every time he threw a punch, and I did it so much I could tell that even Billy was getting bored with it. To me, it was like some sadomasochistic medieval mantra I was doing to punish myself because I had misplaced my hair suit. I kept with it though, like it was an infected itch that I should’ve stopped scratching a long time ago.
After I dismissed Billy, Al greeted me at the door with a jump toward the nuts that I was able to dodge. He did two 360s and then lay down on the floor and farted. I wasn’t sure how to take that as a greeting, but with the way things had been going I didn’t feel like interpreting it.
I hit the machine and there was a message from Marcia.
“Hi Duff, it’s me.” She sounded full of energy, which wasn’t like her at all. “I’ve been doing a lot of work with my therapist, and she says that I need to have some closure. So I wanted to let you know we won’t be getting back together. I just needed to say that.”
Well, I’m glad she’s making progress.
You know you’re getting to a fairly low point in your life when even the women you don’t really like much are breaking up with you. Actually, Marcia had already dumped me and this call was to make sure I really got it. If nothing else, therapy was teaching her to be thorough.
Something told me to turn on the TV, and when I did I wasn’t surprised to see that all the local stations were in special-report mode. There were shots of crime-scene tape, what looked like forensic teams, and guys in windbreakers that said “FBI” on the back. In the middle of the camera shot was a large gray bag, what I guessed was a body bag. The reporter was having a very official conversation with the anchors back in the studio.
“Liz, do the authorities have any idea of the whereabouts of Howard Rheinhart?” Lance Justin of Channel 10 asked his live, local, late-breaking correspondent.
“Lance, they do not, but I have an unconfirmed source that Rheinhart’s blood was found at the scene,” Liz Priest said.
“There have been suggestions that this murder was more gruesome than the others. Can you tell us anything about that?”
“Yes, Lance, though I’d like to warn our viewers that some of the details I’m about to share are quite disturbing. This victim, a still-unidentified teenage female, had several fingers removed and inserted in other parts of her body. There were also strange puncture wounds up and down her sides as if she was being drained of blood, Lance.”
They continued the banter back and forth, saying essentially the same things over and over. This was getting crazy weird, and to have it so close to me gave me a queasy feeling like I had woken up in an alternate universe.
I actually felt sick.
21
With the latest murder
I had this feeling that I needed to pick up my pace and stop spinning my wheels. It seemed like every day I didn’t find Howard put some high-school kid at risk. This whole thing felt like a puzzle, and the only thing that seemed to make sense to me was to pick one of the pieces and start seeing where it might fit.
I’d never heard of this Blast and I’ve been working with street addicts for a long time. Sometimes drugs come and go but more often drugs get new names, or slightly different versions of them appear mixed with something new that alters the high. I met some guys once who combined Benadryl with some prescription narcotic, and they said it was their best high ever.
With not a whole lot clogging up my day planner, I dropped by Rudy’s office at the hospital. His office was buried back in the corner of the second floor, and it was filled with stack after stack of papers, textbooks, and interoffice envelopes. I walked in without knocking.
“Excuse me, Doctor, I have this hemorrhoid I’d like you to look at,” I said.
“Geez, you are a hemorrhoid,” Rudy said without looking up from his desk.
“What do you know about prison medicine?”
“What are you, making a documentary? Look, kid, I’m really freakin’ busy—why aren’t you at work?”
“There was an incident.”
“There always is with you—it didn’t have anything to do with my new tenant Sanchez, does it? I can’t believe you had me lie to social services.”
“No, it’s not that. Rheinhart was on my caseload and I’m trying to find out about what his prison time was like. A bunch of his tiermates OD’ed back then on something they called ‘Blast.’ You ever hear of it?” I asked.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact I have. A guy in my practice did some rounds at the prison during that period. It was a synthetic hallucinogenic with some narcotic characteristics. The high was supposed to be like a combination of acid, heroin, and crank,” Rudy said.
“Wow, now there’s a trip for ya. Where’d it come from?”
“That’s the thing, no one could ever figure it out. The other thing was that once it built up in the system it was very quickly fatal. Turns out that it metabolized into something very similar to strychnine. The inmates who died had only done it three or four times.”
“Could they’ve made it themselves?”
“Unlikely. This wasn’t a bathtub crank, it was more like graduate-chemistry shit. Some of it broke down with different half-lives and that prolonged the high while something else broke down more rapidly to accentuate something else. It was pretty complicated shit.”
“Have you ever seen it turn up since then?”
“No—hey, Duff, this is all pretty interesting, but unless you want to go check on the seventy-four-year-old guy with the colostomy with me, I got to go.”
I thanked Rudy and got the number of his doctor friend. As he was leaving he gave me the rundown on his friend.
Dr. Manuel Pacquoa was about sixty-five years old, four foot eleven, and had an expression on his face like he just took a huff of a rotting fish. His specialty was infectious diseases and in his home country of the Philippines he was seen as a deity for the work he had done with the poor people. He still traveled back there three times a year to treat as many of the street people as he could. Later in his career, he added psychiatry and his work in the prison was part of his certification process.
He greeted me in a friendly way that was more customary politeness related to his friendship with Rudy than it was because he was glad to see me. Rudy had explained to me that when Dr. Manny had some visa problems he had lent him a hand, and the Filipino never forgot his gratitude. He brought me coffee and fussed a great deal about making me comfortable.
“Dr. Rudy tells me about the favor you did for your patient without a home,” Dr. Manny said. I was surprised that Rudy would’ve bothered to share such information.
“Yeah—it was nothing really. I hate to see a guy get screwed by the government for stupid reasons,” I said.
“You are a good man. I understand the man is from my homeland?”
“I think his mother was, anyway.”
“Thank you for helping him.” It was an interesting response. He clearly saw a favor to a member of his country as a favor to him. “Someday, if I can return your favor, I hope you allow me.”
“I’m good at allowing people to do favors for me,” I said. The doctor didn’t laugh.
I asked him about his time in the prison, what he remembered about Howard, and about the deaths related to Blast overdoses.
“This Blast was very addicting and very exciting, especially to those with thrill-seeking tendencies. I believe the monotony of the prison life made it appealing.” He took off his wire-rim glasses and ran a hand through his thin black hair.
“It was like the crack drug that is popular now, but it had hallucinogenic qualities as well.”
“Do you have any idea where they got it?”
“We never found out because the inmates died, all within three days of each other. Then, it abruptly stopped.”
“Any guesses?”
“It would be only a guess, but there was a graduate assistant that left without notice during that same period. I never saw or heard from him again.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“It’s not that I don’t remember it, it’s that I didn’t ever know it. I only came in two times a week and then I saw patients back to back. I just remember the rumors.”
I thanked the doctor for his help, and he thanked me again for helping Sanchez.
“Please remember me when you need a favor,” he said.
22
In all the years
I’ve been training in either karate or boxing, I never took much time off. I never saw it so much as dedication as just something I did, like taking a shower or going to the bathroom. Not going felt weird, and I felt out of sorts both physically and mentally.
On the way back from Dr. Pacquoa’s I found myself down by the Y. I didn’t get there on purpose or totally by accident—it was more like I got there on instinct. I went past the parking lot and saw Smitty’s Olds, and I got a sick feeling in my stomach, kind of like when you see an old girlfriend with someone new. He wouldn’t call me; I’d have to show up or call him, not because Smitty was stubborn but because he always contended that boxing wasn’t for everyone. He’d often say that it wasn’t the healthiest way to spend your free time and the minute you wanted to leave it behind that was okay with him. He didn’t like guys who were ambivalent, but he respected people who made clear decisions based on their conscience.
Right now, I was feeling ambivalent and that’s what was keeping me out of the gym. I circled the block to kill time and to think, and as I came around Union Street on the back side of the Y, I came across the karate guys again. This time they were talking to someone in another SUV, and I parked far enough away so they wouldn’t see me. Both their heads were close to the driver’s side window so I couldn’t see whom they were talking to. They kept up the conversation for a few minutes and then the driver handed Mitchell a shoebox. The three shook hands, and as the driver pulled away I got a look at him.