Bronx Noir

Heidi’s apartment is in Hunts Point, smack dab in the middle of a thriving crack scene. Billy is the only apparent source of crystal meth in the neighborhood. As I ramble on from block to block, on my way to their building, I can’t help noticing how much this part of the Boogie Down feels like a ghost town. Warehouses and abandoned tenements line these dark avenues. On every shadowy street, thugs wearing black hoodies loiter, whistling at cars as they cruise past, running up to the few vehicles which pull up, and making sales. In murky corners, pressed against walls like statues, ebony figures appraise foot traffic. Some young bloods use laser pointers in what seems to be a code to warn of approaching cops, while shabbily dressed baseheads try to hawk everything from boom boxes to jewelry in exchange for a taste of poison. These same apparitions I will soon rendezvous with in the sullen halls of C-76, Rikers Island.

I’m looking at these streets through the eyes of a fugitive and a tweaker. The Bronx has become a carnival of flesh and bone. I step over an older white guy who’s obviously been jacked for money, drugs, or both. He’s lying facedown on the street, the back of his head smashed open and raw. It’s the best Hunts Point has to offer, a street dealing scene that would make any hustler proud. Offers of every kind fill my ears as I make my way to Heidi’s apartment. To some, these streets are neon dreams come true, but to me, a speed freak at the end of his rope, it’s a ghost town.

Billy and Heidi live the typical tweaker life in the ever-so-typical tweaker pad. Billy is a complete and brilliant idiot. When I step inside their small, musty studio apartment, Billy is scrunched over his computer like something kept in the closet. The front room is damp. Torn wallpaper covers large holes through which the scuttle of crablike creatures can be heard. Postmodern artwork embellishes the back walls.

Heidi steps from the dimly lit recesses of her closet completely naked except for a pair of electric-blue lace panties. She’s a beautiful blond nymphomaniac whose appetite for spiking speed is insatiable. At times her eyes reveal a glimpse of the lost innocent nineteen-year-old from Petaluma, California.

It’s late, almost 3 a.m., and she’s getting ready for work. Ice, she always tells me, is essential for turning tricks—all the girls she works with do it. I can’t help feeling sorry for her, but at the same time, all I want her to do is shut up and offer me a hit. She approaches me wearing a dirty-blond wig and I assume this is a request from one of her regulars. As she gets closer, I notice she’s holding something against her small chest. Curling it outward with the needle-tracked arm of a nightmarish ghoul, she reveals a glass pipe packed with crystal meth. Heidi hands me the instrument of my demise. Before she disappears into the bathroom and just as I’m about to get a taste of the sweet poison, she flashes in front of me a New York State Driver License bearing the picture of one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.

“I need to look like her by tomorrow, think I can pull it off?” she asks.

Never, I think to myself, but appease her by agreeing. At that moment I know Billy is working on something big, something with many zeros attached to it, the ultimate grift. I will be getting my assignment soon.

The first hit I take fills my lungs and makes the synapses in my brain fire off like the Fourth of July. Dopamine overflows. At the edge of my hazy percept, I can barely make out something Billy’s saying about how “hot” their apartment has become. He’s convinced a guy we work with is a snitch. This is the last thing I want to hear.

The sky in my mind suddenly grows darker. Visions of decay and violence fill me with a sense of doom. Is my paranoia rooting deeper or is it a premonition of events yet to come?

A month on Rikers Island, then I was bailed out. Like a fool, I ran. I became totally aware of my situation, of the utter hopelessness of where I was and where I would end up. All of my demons came to the surface. I got two grams of speed, then what? I pull off another one with Billy, make $2,000, then what? Now I’m back where I started.

A black chasm of despair opens inside of me. Here I am, six months later, strung out worse than ever, out of money, trying to rest my beaten body in some sketchy tweaker pad. I am miserable and want this to end. I don’t just want a break from the drugs and crime, I want to go back to before I snorted that first line of crystal, before I knew how fuckin’ amazing that feeling was, before I experienced the rush from a successful heist and tasted the pleasures of other people’s money.

Five days of being awake begin to take their toll. I feel myself getting drowsy, slipping into darkness. It’s that halfdrugged sleep that comes at the end of every run, coupled with the handful of Valiums Heidi gave me earlier. Everything fades to black.