Cocaine on the Brain

I wanted to write a memoir but the connective tissue of the memoir didn't interest me. I wanted to render memories that would pop up like mushrooms and quickly vanish. I owe much to where I was raised, in a black neighborhood where people talked to each other and spent time on the porch and on the corner, as did my brothers and their friends as they smoked weed, drank Mickey Big Mouths and Heinekens, and talked all the time about the insanity of Vietnam, nuclear war, and H.P. Lovecraft, and from there they'd segue into the adventures of the many memorable characters in the neighborhood. I tried to do that here. A new installment will appear here every Saturday this and next month.

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Years ago, I had a great adventure with the admirable human being and my good friend, Gary Phillips. Over a few beers we got to talking about cocaine, not from the point of using it but from how cocaine just about ruined the world we lived in. I was too young to know much about the heroin wave, but I was there when the tidal wave of rock cocaine obliterated whole communities of color. I’m sure it destroyed white communities too, but I didn’t know any white people except for teachers and the white kid I met who had the role of Grasshopper from the Kung Fu television show. I was mostly immune from the charms of drugs because I had my ass kicked enough and guns pointed at me so that I became super cautious to the point where I was bored with myself. I didn’t want to be so damn cautious, but I couldn’t help it.

When my college roommate Uriah had his friend Henry — a guy who worked for a company that designed missile systems — visit and sleep on our couch, I didn’t mind. He wasn’t like us broke-ass college students. He had cash and he paid for everything — dinner, the beer, the movies. He was a short unattractive ogre-looking dude who was self-aware enough to know the only way he’d seduce a woman other than his terrifying (we saw photos) wife was with either a mountain of money or a mountain of coke.

Uriah, who was brilliant in his intelligence and weirdness, knew a coke dealer from his 12-step program. One night we all hopped into Henry’s brand-new BMW and drove over to the dealer’s house. I hung back thinking the guy had to be armed, but it was a polite white dude with a spacious Santa Barbara apartment and a first-rate ping-pong table in the center of his living-room. He offered us cocaine to snort, and because it was free like cheese and crackers, I decided not to be so cautious and snorted a bit and began playing ping-pong with the white guy, and within minutes I became possessed with an unhinged passion to win. 

At some point I wanted to run around the ping-pong table and choak him out or beat him to death with a paddle, but I finally calmed myself and let the game go. Henry and the guy did their business transaction and, with a little bag of cocaine in his hand, we left. Henry seemed to think that, freshly supplied with coke, he’d be able to seduce Kia. He took us all to brunch — me, Uriah, Ed, and of course Kia, who looked spectacular in her tennis shorts and top. The food was good, and the wine flowed, and we had a great view of the beach and Henry covered the bill. Even the tip. Henry was happy as though he was finally going to close the deal with Kia that she never knew was open. I don’t think she paid attention to him at all, other than the fact that he was friends with Uriah. We got into his BMW and he started the drive on the 101 back to Isla Vista.

“What time should I pick you up tonight?” Henry asked.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m already committed.”

There was an awkward pause.

“Can’t you uncommit?” he asked with some anger in his tone.

“Why would I want to?”

He was quiet for a long minute, probably calculating that he had spent close to three hundred dollars or more and he wasn’t coming close to his goal of knowing Kia in the biblical sense.

“You are such a bitch, Kia. I can’t believe you,” he said, and then he muttered “cunt” under his breath. That was the final straw. He enraged Kia and Kia isn’t the kind of person you enrage. She yanked his head back so hard that he almost lost control of the BMW at 80 miles an hour. Amazingly by being short and twisting around a lot he managed to avoid her blows and get us to Isla Vista. He parked in front of our apartment building and made the mistake of thinking she would calm down. Instead of driving away quickly he parked and got out of the BMW as though she didn’t intend to kill him. Kia sprinted from the BMW and he made a faster sprint away and they began running around the car with Kia cursing him and Henry shouting for her to calm down. Finally, she gave up trying to catch him and as we walked to my second story apartment, Henry in a final act of insanity shouted, “You’re such a crazy bitch, Kia!” 

She reached down for the hibachi grill at my front door and flung it like a frisbee with such accuracy that it shattered against a telephone pole barely missing Henry’s head. Stunned, he fled for his life, and we never saw Henry again. I can’t say we missed him, but we did miss the brunches.

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Jervey Tervalon was born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles, and got his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine. He is the author of six books, including Understanding This, for which he won the Quality Paper Book Club’s New Voices Award. Currently he is the Executive Director of “Literature for Life,” an educational advocacy organization, and Creative Director of The Pasadena LitFest. His latest novel is Monster’s Chef.

Artwork by Peter Nye