Narcopolis

I drove a limo, and not just any limo, a stretch custom job, Rumi told the coke dealer whose name he didn’t know though they’d had business dealings several times. Sometimes I took movie producers or music industry guys to the airport and they’d lay out cocaine and cognac and I’d think, yeah, these guys are living the life. Or I took party girls out for the night, strung-out chicks who’d crash in the car, so stoned they’d fuck anybody. Sometimes I’d be on the road for days, running on speed. Change of clothes in the trunk, drive around from fare to fare, sleep at the airport parking lot and stay high all the time. It was school, man. No, said the pimp, it was better than school, you got fucked and you got fucked up. You’re right, said Rumi, for once in your life you are a hundred per cent fucking correct: it was better than school. One time I picked up a fare from the airport, older woman, maybe thirty. We get to her place and she changes her mind. She says she doesn’t want to go home, she wants to drive around some more. She’d just flown in from a concert in New York and she was still wired. She wanted to wind down. Are you a performer? I ask. Yes, she says, I’m a soprano, a coloratura soprano. I sing opera. I drove some, thinking: opera. Then I say, Listen, I know this is asking a lot, but maybe you could sing something. I mean, I’ve never been to the opera. I could see her in the rearview and I saw the look on her face, pure pity, because she couldn’t believe there were people in the world who had never heard opera. She puts her drink down and does some breathing exercises and she says, no, she’s not going to do it because she can’t sing sitting down. So I say, no problem, and I open up the sunroof. But she needs a pick-me-up, that’s what she called it, a pick-me-up for her nose. I take her to this place I know in East Venice and we walk into a house with no furniture, one broke couch, pit bulls in the yard, the works, and the singer sits down and does everything that comes her way, smoke, toot, shots of malt. Late in the night she asks me, Do you believe in ghosts? She says she didn’t either, until recently, when she came to believe that ghosts are a source of comfort, perhaps the only source of comfort for the bereaved. And then she reaches for my dick and sucks me on the couch, with these kids crashed everywhere, sucks me like it’s the first time she’s sucked dick and she can’t believe how good it tastes. Or like she’s sucking someone who just died, someone who hasn’t fully departed, and she’s trying with all her might to keep him in the land of the living. Or like she’s sucking the future, sucking it down one day at a time, the days she never expected to see, the days that would vanish in a gust of wind if she didn’t suck with all her tenderness and talent and ambition. You ever been sucked like that? he asked the pimp. The pimp laughed. What about you? Rumi asked the dealer. You ever been sucked like that? The dealer said nothing and Rumi called for a Thums Up, in a glass, with lots of ice. He said, At dawn, she woke me up. We do a couple quick lines and get into the limousine. I’m driving past the beach and it’s still dark, the street all quiet and pretty before the freaks and the fuck-ups start their daily shit — right? — the ocean on my right, and that’s when she tells me to open the sunroof and she starts to sing, so loud you’d never believe that big voice was coming out of this small woman and all of a sudden I got it, you know? The words were in German, but I got it, the function of opera, I understood that it was the true expression of grief. I understood why she needed to stand and turn her face up as if she was expressing her sadness to God, who was the author of it. And for a moment I understood what it was to be God, to take someone’s life and ash it like a beedi. I thought of her life, her useful life, and I wanted to take it from her for no reason at all. And I drove that big car better than I ever had, the sky lightening, the clean water close by, and her voice carrying up to heaven. I wanted her to sing for ever. I thought, as long as she keeps singing, I’ll keep driving.

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