TIMEezine at l'atelier bonita
established since december 2002
ONCE
UPON a
TIME
ezine at l'atelier bonita
established since december 2002
| Cocaine Poker Party
by Heather M. Borstel “There was a car accident,” Kemper said while chewing a bite of the peanut butter and BBQ sauce sandwich he was eating on a dare, “wanna see the victims?” We were all sitting in my next-door neighbor’s living room, which we did almost every Saturday night, Kemper, his sister Tallie and I, waiting for Saturday Night Live to come on. I was going to spend the night there, which I always enjoyed because it was a quite different atmosphere from that of my family’s home. For example, tonight there was a drug deal going down in the dining room (none of those in my house). Kemp and Tallie’s mother Ludie was presiding over the elaborate measuring and weighing of several ounces of cocaine that someone had brought over earlier. There had been much discussion of street value and the moral implications of dealing in upper-class dope (it was decided to be all right if you sold it to regular people for low prices, therefore sticking it to the man). Several people had then left the house disgustedly and the remaining four adults had pushed the cocaine, which I had found rather pretty since it was so white, and the big piece of blue marble it was piled upon, off to the side of the dining room table forgotten. Then they’d started playing a game of Scrabble. I was completely unfazed by this rapid change of subject. This sort of thing happened all the time in the adult world. They were really hard to figure out sometimes. “C’mon, do you or don’t you wanna see the victims?” “OK,” I answered, knowing what was coming next, since I had invented the joke, but not wanting to spoil Kemper’s attempt at high drama. He stuck out his tongue, upon which rested the amalgamated remains of his sandwich and shook it around so we got the full effect. Then he spit it onto the front of his shirt. That was a nice original touch, since the mess looked like blood. “You are disgusting, pig boy,” Tallie stared at her brother in disgust. Kemper wiped his hands on the mess on his shirt and thrust them at her face. “Gaaaaaaaa!” “Mom! Kemp’s being a disgusting little pig! Make him stop!” There was a long pause. Finally, a tired voice drifted over from the dining room like a distant sigh. It was Ludie, a woman who was nice enough to have a bunch of kids sleep over her house almost every weekend, but who seemed to be getting more exausted with every passing childhood crisis. “Kemp,” she said slowly, “Don’t be a tar baby. Wash…your hands and cut it out right now.” “No way, man,” Kemper replied, shaking his head violently from side to side, “N-O spells no!” He’d been pitching that particular retort since he was three years old, and it had served him well in many an argument. Tallie punched him in the shoulder and called him a pig. Instantly his face got red and he began breathing heavily, just like the Hulk before HIS transformation. I’d seen this a hundred times before, so I got up off the couch where I’d been reading Rolling Stone (“The Boss Sits In With James Taylor: A New Supersession On The Way?”), and ran into the dining room. I’d seen Kemper and Tallie fight UP a staircase before, and once in the crotch of the tree in our backyard, so it was prudent to vacate the area. Soon you could hear the sounds of violent struggle and lamps being knocked over. Sam, Ludie’s boyfriend, got up out of his chair and walked to the living room doorway. He was a tall, rangy, taciturn Texan, but when he got angry it was intelligent to listen to him lest he get really angry. “Cut it out,” he said quietly, and the noise stopped. “That’s more like it”, I said sitting down in a chair near the stereo speakers and thumbing through a book, but really listening to the barbed comments the Scrabble players were tossing at each other. They were arguing scoring questions and whether “auger” was a real word. The player who had just put down “auger” was Ludie’s friend, Marianne, a woman with a Continental air and a razor-blade gravely British accent. The player who was disputing it’s word-hood was a younger guy with a scraggly black beard and leather jacket, whom I knew as “Tom Boyle from the Blues Festival”. He always got named with both his first and last name to differentiate him from “Tommy Dodge with the truck”, who also had a black beard, but was considerably older. Tom Boyle had a rakish Black-Irish air about him and was building an impressive tower of Lowenbrau bottles on the corner of the table as he drained one after another. He also was leading the game as he only had seven letter tiles left. “Mo-o-m! Can we play some records?” Tallie asked from the living room. Ludie sighed and took a drag on her cigarette. She seemed to be weighing the advisedness of letting her kids take control of the stereo system. Finally, she answered in the affirmative, adding that they’d better pick something everybody would like. Marianne lit a cigarette and stared at her tiles. She had spent the earlier part of the evening telling Tallie and I of her days back in ’68, when she’d done street theatre in Amsterdam with an Avante Garde group of political activists. “You would’ve liked it there”, she told me, and I had to agree. Unlike most of Ludie’s friends Marianne still had a bit of residual coolness about her, even if she now sold Spirulina and cocaine for a living. She wasn’t an irrelevant old hippie just yet, besides we all worshipped her son, Alix, who was 16 and like a god to the rest of us. As a matter of fact, Alix was supposed to have been there showing us his new motorcycle, an event which had filled us all with bubbling anticipation. What kind of bike would it be? Would he take us on rides with him? However, it was now nearing ten o’clock and it looked like Alix wasn’t going to show up at all. From the living room, the Beatles sang of how it was twenty years ago today, when Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. Tom Boyle grabbed his last three tiles and looked slyly around the table. “I’ve got you alllll where I want you,” he said in a stagey foreign accent, “got you allll where I want you right now!” “Oh, Jesus Christ, Tom, just put down the letters, love”, Marianne glared at him, annoyed. Tom looked sheepish, and put down his letters. “Angelus”, he said, “triple word score, and I am all outta tiles, baby.” He winked at Marianne, who sighed and took another drag on her cigarette. Now that, I thought, is a true gentleman. I liked Tom Boyle, he had style. I realized he was handsome in a drunken, ruined way. I gave him a hand of applause as Ringo started singing in the living room of the troubles he’d face when he turned sixty-four. Tom Boyle got up shakily out of his chair and bowed theatrically. “Thank you. Thank you verrry much.” Kemper walked into the dining room. He still had the BBQ sauce and peanut butter stain on the front of his shirt, but now it just looked like he’d rolled in the mud, which was not an uncommon occurrence. He was bored. Tallie was bored. It was still two hours before Saturday Night Live and Alix didn’t look to be coming over. He asked if we kids could play Scrabble, and Tallie made a crack about how all his words would be single letters like “A” and “I”. I had just watched a movie called Five Card Stud earlier in the day, so I decided that we should all play poker. None of the adults had any objection to my suggestion, so Sam went looking for a deck of cards. He found some cards with red paisleys on the backs and gave the deck to Tom Boyle to shuffle and deal, “Here you go hotshot.” I got the feeling that Sam had resented Tom Boyle’s showboating over “Angelus”. Tom Boyle shuffled the deck and then tried a fancy magician’s fan move but was way too drunk for magic and the cards flew all over the table. One card hit me in the head. “Good God, Tommy, try not to kill any of the kids, OK”, Marianne said, laughing. Tom Boyle winked at her, gathered up the cards and dealt out five to each person at the table. “Now that we’ve played 52 Pickup, let’s play us some poker. The Joker…is wild!” I fanned out my cards in my hand and saw that I had two Queens, a six, a seven and a two. That seemed like a good hand. I was pretty sure that Dean Martin had gotten a similar hand in the movie, just before he shot poor little Roddy MacDowell (who looked a lot like Alix, and who I loved from his roles in My Friend Flicka and Thunderhead, Son Of Flicka). I attempted to assume a poker face. Tom Boyle pulled two quarters out of his pocket and tossed them into the center of the table. Kemper looked at his cards and asked for two new ones. “Man”, Tom Boyle told him, “ you’ve got to ante up something valuable before you can get any new cards. Come on. Put something in the pot.” Kemper took a bottle cap from the table and tossed it on top of the quarters. Tallie put in a Chinese Jack she had in her pocket. Ludie added an empty box of cigarettes. Marianne bet one dollar and a packet of Spirulina. I was next. “I reckon I’ll bet”, I drawled out in my best Dean Martin imitation, but then I stopped, because I had nothing in my pockets at all. “Come on, you gotta bet something”, Kemper said, nudging me with his elbow. Ludie sighed. The Beatles were now singing about a benefit to be held for Mr. Kite, on trampoline. “You’ve got to ante up something’, Sam said, “just pick anything.” “How about some cigarette butts”, Tallie added helpfully. I scanned the table for something I could use. “While we’re young”, Tom Boyle said, chuckling at my gambling ineptitude. That was it, I was looking like an idiot. My ears started burning in embarrassment. There had to be something on the goddamned table I could use to bet in the stupid game. And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz. At that moment my eyes alighted on the hence forgotten cocaine, that had been such a topic of conversation a few hours earlier. It was still sitting on its blue marble slab in the corner, arrayed in six perfectly symmetrical lines. I’ll bet that’s worth a whole lot, I thought. I leaned past Tom Boyle, brushing his leather jacket with my cheek as I did, and slid the piece of marble towards the center of the table. “I reckon I’ll bet this little piece of marble here.” “Finally”, Kemper shouted, “gimme two new cards!” In the next room, John Lennon read the news today, oh boy, two thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire. Every adult in the room fell silent as they stared at the piece of marble and it’s valuable passenger. Alix had finally arrived and was knocking on the door. At the sound they all burst out laughing. John Lennon knew how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Tom Boyle was practically howling. “Heather”, he laughed, wiping the tears from his eyes, “you just bid way too much, kid.” ©2003 Heather M. Borstel _____________ Heather M. Borstel was born in San Francisco, California, at the dawn of the 1970s. She lives in the shadow of Twin Peaks, went to Catholic school and San Francisco State University, and is of average height, build and appearance. She enjoys contract bridge, falconry, Gandhian nonviolence and whipping up a nice pot of Vegetable Medley. Her favorite song is "Superstar" by the Carpenters, which she sings without shame at karaoke bars, and her favorite book is Anna Karenina. Heather was once said to have a wit which rivals that of Bennett Serf by her third grade teacher, but she has yet to find any evidence that Bennett Serf was witty. She has never had the stigmata, curses like a stevedore, and makes a mean White Russian. Heather would like the phrase "I told you I was sick!" chiseled on her tombstone. |
ONCE
UPON
a TIME
ezine at l'atelier bonita
established
since december 2002