Chapter 19: Police at my Door

After I got kicked out of the private school, I returned to the school I’d attended before, with the program for fucked up kids.

Although I didn’t attend class much. I skipped most days, sleeping in, showing up late, if at all. I was more interested in getting high. The few times I’d go were to sell weed or coke.

And when I would go, I’d snort coke in the bathroom, or smoke weed in the woods behind school.

When I’d first attended the school, I was a skinny young freshman, wasn’t exactly imposing.

(Back in my freshman year, I’d had a strange tick. I’d worn a Phoenix Suns hat the first day of school, one I’d found on a bench at a restaurant. I didn’t even like or care about the team. But I liked the hat, its royal purple color and flaming sun logo, and I wore the hat every day to school, never coming to school without it. I’d wear it in gym class. I’d wear it in rain, heat, or cold. I just felt like I had to wear it ... A girl in my class once said to another girl, “He wears that hat every day,” and my teacher asked me if I wore the hat in “the shower.” I didn’t. I just wore it to school. Every day. But when I returned to that school, I never wore it. I’d shaved my head down to the skin. It suited my “hardcore” image of the time. I occasionally wore an L.A. Raiders skullcap, however not as compulsively as the first hat.)

Returning to the school, the program, I was an elder statesman, running things. The head dealer for the school. Though my reign at the top of the school’s drug pyramid wouldn’t be enduring...

The crew I ran with had been busted by our school’s rent-a-pig security guards, outside of the school, on the football field. They’d been ditching first period to smoke a fat joint of the skunk. I’d have probably been with them too, if I wasn’t also ditching first period, as usual. To sleep in. 7:00 a.m. was far too early for me then...

As stated, I wasn’t with them when they were caught skunk in hand, but when I showed up to school later, the security guards, met me at the school’s front door, knowing I’d probably have drugs too, since I was usually with those dudes. Of course, one of the guys caught could have snitched, too. I’m not sure.

However the school knew, they knew, and a whole pack of pissed off, balding, middle-aged rent-a-pigs burst out from behind the entryway’s sliding blue doors and with their big bellies flopping, they circled me, baring their coffee stained fangs.

They certainly would find drugs on my person. But not much. Because recently, my friend Cam had been snitched on, his house raided. Paranoid I might be next, I’d cleared out most of my stash from my house, was leaving my supplies at a girl I’d been banging’s house...

It had scared the shit out of me, what happen to Cam...

More about that...

Cam, who I’d mentioned before, the first of us to drive, the dude with the VW Beetle, had blossomed into a successful suburban drug trader, an illicit entrepreneur. He started off selling small Ziploc baggies of weed to friends and classmates and moved up to selling freezer bags, ounces and keys of coke, weed, and sheets of LSD, to lower-level dealers.

He’d dropped out of high school and had made enough cash to rent himself a townhouse near the local community college, and it became the party house. Fuckup central.

The house began as mostly just stoners on couches and loveseats, beanbags in the living room doing bong hits, but as we sank deeper into coke, and Cam started moving more weight, the people, like the drugs, got more hardcore.

Like the police officer (who I mentioned before) Cam bought most of his coke and weed from, who’d come by with these increasingly scary, heavily-tatted, roughneck street types, and they’d sell variegated contraband to us and others, usually in the kitchen.

But the worst guy to turn up had to be Ben, who’d moved into one of the bedrooms. I don’t know who brought him in, or where he came from. No one I knew, aside from Cam, knew him; no one had gone to school with him. And I never asked Cam where Ben had come from or how they knew each other. It was sort of like one day, Ben just appeared, materialized like an apparition.

He looked the part, too, like a ghost, a phantasm; he looked dead. Ben was ghastly pale, pale as cocaine. Dude looked like a walking corpse, although unlike most of us, who were skinny, he was obese, huge, yet strangely agile, quick, like a sumo wrestler.

But he was no Asian. I think he was of Irish or Scottish heritage because he had fire red hair and a perpetually puffy reddish fish face full of acne. He always wore plain black shirts too small for his big belly and these tight black jeans that rode up high and showed his ankles. Like a big, white, goth Urkel.

(Although when he’d go to work, he’d wear well-tailored, solid black three-piece suits that’d be perfectly starched and creased. He must have taken the clothes to the drycleaners... )

I think he was strung out on coke before he moved in but worsened the longer he stayed. He’d snort thick, finger-size lines, too, Tony Montana, Scarface train rails.

Not only was he constantly amped, a snorting fiend, and discomfiting aesthetically, Ben also had a noticeable presence to him. One that sent a chill over the stoners. Whenever he’d enter the living room during bong hit sessions, everyone would just get quiet and uncomfortable. Like the temperature in the room would drop ten degrees.

Maybe it was because of his work. Ben was in the funeral services industry, was an embalmer, and if you went into his room, it was like entering death.

There were satanic, death and black metal posters all over the walls. Venom. Cannibal Corpse. Cradle of Filth. Anal Cunt.

He’d sit in front of his TV, which was always on, watching videos of horror movies, snuff films, documentaries about mass killings, serial killers, car accidents, natural disasters, “Faces of Death” videos, and plane crashes.

He kept the AC blasted, fucking frigid cold. His room, too, was consistently kept dark, the windows taped over with heavy black garbage bags. Ben once said something to me about hating the sun. That he believed he could eliminate time by covering the windows. That he’d read about it in a Philip K. Dick novel, and that he refused to wear a watch because it made him feel like time was chasing after him, cutting into his hand...

I was one of the few to brave going into Ben’s room. First off, because I’ve always appreciated eccentric, weird people, being that way, slightly, myself. And because he’d offered me free coke. In addition, I shared his affinity for sci fi/horror books and films.

Aside from me and Cam, none of the other folks in the house, living there or just crashing there, dared to venture into his chamber of darkness. Nor did they like him.

But, at least at first, they’d never mention anything to Cam about their disdain for Ben. Probably because they bought their substances from Cam and Cam and Ben were (for some unknown reason) tight as glue. Cam would always call Ben “his boy” and vaguely mention something about “all the shit he did for me.”

Ben didn’t leave the townhouse much, except for work, so we were all surprised when he brought home a girl, Stella, who lived with him in the house, from the day she arrived.

Stella was petite, with a small head, and short bowl haircut of sandy brown hair that hung like a halfmoon over her roundish face. Her big green bug eyes almost jumped off her skull and she had bad teeth. But she was blessed with a surprisingly supple, curvaceous body. Her skin had looked almost a wolf gray type color when I first saw her, but she got paler and whiter the longer she stayed in the house. Probably, because like Ben, she rarely went outside.

She’d often slink around the house wearing only a t-shirt, and most everyone caught passing glimpses of her hairy snatch.

And, as Ben got more and more strung out on coke, hardly ever leaving his room, even for work, Stella started to fuck everyone. All the stoners, me, the cop, the roughneck street thugs. Even Cam, though he tried to pass it off saying how he was drunk and she’d left her shirt on the whole time and it “only was a couple minutes.”

Stella, well, she was one weird, weird chick. Maybe she liked Ben because she was into death. Really into death. That’s all she talked about. Death. What happens when you die, ghosts, murders, psychic mediums, reincarnation.

She said she only liked to listen to artists who’d died because their music was more profound that way.

Hendrix, The Doors. She wouldn’t even listen to anything new, saying how she’d wait until the artist died, because then “you could truly understand them...”

The cop brought a particularly strange fellow over one day, a short stocky Mexican guy with a lazy eye, speech impediment and a twitchy arm. The Mexican guy wore well-ironed khakis, a plain white t-shirt, and a black knit cap that covered most of his eyelids. I remember he called everyone “foo” and sold us bags of PCP and meth.

Once the meth and PCP made their rounds, shit really hit the fan at the house.

Ben began to emerge from his room a lot more and had somehow come into possession of a baby pig. The animal would shit everywhere, and Ben and Stella would often walk around the house, cradling the little oinking pig like a baby, singing lullabies to it.

Ben would frequently interrupt our bong circle. He’d be in tears, brandishing a machete, threatening to kill himself or to cut off one of his fingers for one reason or another, although he was talked down pretty easily by sympathy and bong hits. I think he’d just wanted someone to talk to.

Cam, and the stoners who lived on the house’s living room couches, eventually got sick of Ben, though, his pig shitting all over, the stink of the shit, and especially we’d had enough of Ben’s crazy outbursts and threats of self-harm. A council convened and unanimously decreed he be kicked out of the house; even Cam voted him out, had had enough of the suicide threats and stinky pig shits.

Ben whimpered and cried like a bitch after being given his eviction orders. He threatened to kill himself and ran upstairs way faster than a man of his size should be able to. Then he slammed his door and locked himself in his room. We thought he’d kill himself, for real, but no one cared that much because everyone had tired of his drama. Stella didn’t even knock on the door, or go try to console him, or intervene on his behalf. Instead she spent the night getting fucked by a couple different dudes.

The next day, Ben left, willingly, taking his pig and everything, packed up his stuff in his old wood-paneled beater and peeled out. He’d left stone-faced, without incident, probably barreling off to wherever the fuck his creepy ass had come from.

A couple weeks later, vice cops and a SWAT team raided, machine guns drawn, and ransacked the townhouse, took everyone to jail. Stella broke down crying and snitched on everyone.

Cam spent a couple days in the county jail, where he wound up punching out a toothless crackhead who’d tried to scare Cam into trading Cam’s fresh Nikes for the bum’s ratty old shoes.

Cam took the fall for the drugs found in the house, the felony distribution charges. Everyone else there was charged with lesser “constructive” possession charges. After being released on bail, Cam spent $15,000 in cash to hire a hotshot lawyer and got off with only probation, fines, and community service.

The lawyer was able to get some evidence thrown out on a technicality but had told Cam his case was tough and would’ve been easier if Cam’d raped a 10-year-old girl. For real. That was, verbatim, what the lawyer said.

Cam was convinced that Ben snitched him out. Especially since the cops told him there’d been an informant who’d stated that Cam “loved” selling LSD to schoolkids. That he sought out children to sell to drugs to. That he’d hang around playgrounds, in a trench coat, full of drugs, like a drug-dealing bogeyman. That Cam’d lurk outside elementary schools, waiting for kids to come along so he could sell the kids acid and maybe molest them too.

Cam believed that was exactly the bullshit Ben would make up, and Cam drunkenly talked of hiring someone to shoot Ben, the “fat piece of shit,” outside his workplace, the funeral home.

Later Cam claimed he paid off an ex-hooker with HIV (who he’d met at an NA meeting) to fuck Ben without a condom. But again, this was over several beers and might have been drunk talk. Cam had his demons.

And Cam’s demons worsened, continued to claw away at him. After his legal issues were resolved, he had a botched dental operation that resulted in his jaw having chronic, debilitating pain. He tried unsuccessfully to sue the dentist.

Then for a time he said he’d thought of wearing a bulletproof vest and storming into the dentist’s office with an M-16, shooting everyone. Or maybe at least picketing out front of the dentist’s office with a big sign, telling everyone in the world what the dentist did to him.

Cam had moved back into his parents’ house. He’d gotten strung out on crack, was smoking it daily, and he was living down in his parents’ basement, playing video games most of the time.

I’d gone by there to visit him, see how he was. My bros and I had been growing increasingly concerned about him, seeing as he was smoking massive amounts of crack. A lot of people had quit talking to him anyway, after his house got raided and since he’d quit selling drugs.

Stepping down the winding staircase, into that dark basement to see him, I found him looking like shit. He’d lost a ton of weight. He was skinny, pale, and paranoid, thinking the cops might be back at any time. He’d also been complaining of that dentist. Complaining about the pain in his jaw, how he’d lost his sense of taste and couldn’t sleep. He’d also again talked of how he was thinking of shooting the dentist and everyone in the office.

He’d gotten armed too. Not only did he have an M-16, he had several handguns, one of which he was holding and cleaning as we talked.

Not paying attention to what he was doing, he accidently squeezed the gun’s trigger, and it fired, a bullet whizzing by my head, only a foot or so away, leaving a cloud of smoke and a bullet hole in his basement room’s wood-paneled wall.