How We Became Faux Cocaine Cowboys Without Really Trying

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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It was another New York book expo publication party that involved too much drinking and the discovery that Gary was extremely popular with the older ladies, so much so that he was a surrounded man, while I was so ignored I could have been invisible. Maybe it was the deep baritone that Gary possessed, unlike my voice that was at least two or three times lighter than his. Gary was a happily married man and I had been recently divorced but they had absolutely no interest in me. I did get to enjoy watching Gary politely fend them off while looking ever more worn down. We stayed for the free-and-flowing liquor and hors d’oeuvres before we realized we had to go. We couldn’t continue to camp at the hotel bar — Gary might have been carried away against his will by some determined older lady to have her way with him and I would have been ignored and very drunk by the end of the evening.

“Time for the interview!” I shouted to Gary, and he shook off his admirers and we made a hasty exit. Outside it was a humid night and since we had both been drinking it seemed a perfect night for a long walk instead of paying for another taxi.

“It’s only about a mile or so to the studio,” Gary said, and since I had been drinking and wasn’t thinking as clearly as I should have been, I agreed. The liquor had given me the confidence to think a good walk and saving another taxi ride was the best thing possible.

The liquor had blinded me to the grinding pain I felt in my hip, which was shot from being a bow-legged kid and my weird way of walking had put too much stress on the opposite hip. It was just a mess of bone spurs and aches. I had developed a kind of hopping way of walking that seemed natural enough unless somebody was paying me a lot of attention, they wouldn’t notice my limp. Gary didn’t notice and I was happy for that. I didn’t want him feeling sorry for me.

Eventually, the walk was painful, and Gary slowed down a bit so that I didn’t fall too far behind him. “We’re near,” Gary said, and I took his word for it. We had walked our way out of the business district into a dark stretch of a cemetery. We could see a building that was lit towards the center of it.

“This is it? I mean, our interview is in a cemetery?”

Gary shrugged. “Looks like it.”

I felt a little dejected, but it kind of made sense. We weren’t big baller writers so we had to start out at the bottom, and it couldn’t get any more bottom than being interviewed in a cemetery in the middle of the night. The gate was locked but it was low enough for us to get over it.

“So, I guess we need to check it out,” I said, hoping Gary would check it out for the both of us. With my hip aching and my fear of the undead, I thought Gary could go up ahead and get the lay of the land for me. Gary didn’t move. He stood there looking at a sheet of paper.

“They gave us the wrong address. We’re interviewing at the ABC News Headquarters. Got a walk ahead of us, but it’s not too far.”

Relieved we started out in the right direction and soon we were there, at a well-lit phallic symbol of an office building. The security folk didn’t hold us up for too long before we were taking the elevator to our interview. The office space was certainly high rent. We were ushered into a very nice waiting room with waters and chocolates and modern-not-so-comfortable couches to sit on. We waited patiently until an attractive woman came in and gestured for us to follow her. We entered the studio space, and it was spare with a round metal table with modern-not-very-comfortable-looking chairs around it. And there was our interviewer, an older white guy with a combover looking indifferent to our presence until the red light came on and he gestured for us to sit. He was focused on us and seemed interested.

I kind of relaxed and Gary seemed to relax too. This might not be so bad.

“Ok, boys we’re getting started here. This is a coast-to-coast program so a lot of people will be hearing this interview so let’s have some fun.”

He pointed to me. “How do you pronounce your name?

“Jervey.”

He nodded as though he had no idea of what I said.

“What’s a Jervey?”

“Me,” I said, and he laughed. He switched to talking to Gary and I could breathe again.

He seemed to be more relaxed with Gary than me and I was happy that he might just forget about me, and I could fly under his radar for the rest of the interview.

“We’re going live,” he said. 

Coast to coast, I thought. This will be huge.

“So how did you get into the business?”

“Business?” Gary asked.

“Yes, the trade you two do.”

I nodded pretending I knew what he was getting at.

“Your business.”

“I teach at a college, and I write,” I said.

“I write and am involved in nonprofit advocacy,” Gary said.

“And you both sell coke? Seems complicated.’’

There was a long pause.

“I don’t sell coke,” I said. “I teach literature and writing at a university,”

Gary laughed and I started to laugh, and the weird-ass host started to laugh.

“We collected stories about coke but neither one of us deals coke, and we don’t use coke.”

There was a long awkward moment and the blonde woman appeared and walked us to the elevator. “Thanks for doing this,” she said, and we started the long walk back to our groovy hipster hotel.

The next day I listened to our interview. We didn’t sound like ruthless coke dealers talking up their dangerous exploits, and I guess that was for the best. Though if we had lied our asses off, maybe we could have been kicking it with Dre and Tupac drinking Clase Azul Ultra Tequila by the pool surrounded by beautiful women and dangerous men. But naw, I was born a pootbutt and I'd always be a pootbutt and I can live with that.

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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