The Cocaine Chronicles

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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The Cocaine Chronicles anthology that Gary Philips and I edited was born out of the knowledge that cocaine found its way into my life, even though I had no use for it. The memory of wanting to kill somebody over a ping-pong game stayed with me and reinforced my cocaine sobriety. That and listening to Richard Pryor, and later Dave Chappell, about the dangers and seductions of the white powder. Then the way it mutated from an expensive addictive high to rock cocaine that transformed people into night-of-the-living-baseheads addicts was all the motivation I needed to embrace sobriety like it was a cross to protect me from vampires.

A project based on cocaine seemed unavoidable — the drug kept coming at my family and the world like Marvelous Marvin Hagler. It would not be denied. 

So, I brought up the idea of an anthology of cocaine inspired stories to Gary Phillips, who’s got to be the hardest working guy in the writing world. He’s always on a literary project, from television to graphic novels to crime and mystery paperbacks and everything else. I was relieved that he was down for the project. I had met Johnny Temple, who ran a record label and decided to get into book publishing. We asked if he’d be interested in publishing a book of cocaine stories and he said yes. We just needed to get the word out to the writers we wanted to contribute to this cocaine inspired anthology. It was an easy pitch. Everybody had a story for us; some of them were beautifully tragic and some were wildly funny. It didn’t take long for the anthology to come together.

Johnny Temple flew Gary and me to NYC for the book expo and put us up in a hip hotel with extremely small rooms. Gary and I are big guys, and the room was so small that Gary kept hitting his head on the television that was mounted to the wall. Weirdly, the bathroom was as spacious as the room was tiny. The room being small didn’t matter much because we were on the literary party circuit, which wasn’t particularly easy for me since my knee was shot, but we were on adrenaline highs with parties and interviews and all.

Gary and I got a taxi to the hot publishing party for the night, and it was at a swank restaurant that had a spacious bar humming with many white people and a handful of us colored folk. A woman who seemed as uncomfortable as I was started a conversation. She was an editor at Yale’s poetry imprint, and she was relieved as I was to have someone to talk to since Gary had disappeared. 

Later into the night, a handsome guy appeared with a beautiful woman on his arm. Someone said he had inherited a boring publishing house that he turned into an imprint of edgy books, and that he had a reputation of being a big coke user. Gary returned with a whiskey and a beer for me. I pointed at the guy and Gary laughed.

“That guy has loot,” Gary said.

I made a joke about getting him to publish the Cocaine Chronicles 2. Then he saw us, the two big black guys at the gathering talking to an attractive white woman.

“Watch,” I said to the Yale poetry editor. “He’s going to come over to us and say it’s great to see you here. We need more diversity in publishing.”

“What?” she said, confused.

“The rich guy is going to come over to us because we’re the only black people here. He going to say a few words, get a photo taken, and disappear and never talk to us again.”

She looked incredulous until the guy beelined to us and shook our hands and had a photo taken with us and said exactly what I said he’d say.

“I’m glad to see you here and it’s a positive sign in publishing.” 

I nodded politely, but I knew that guy wouldn’t buy a book from us if we paid him to publish it. I got the impression that not many black folks were invited to these events, or maybe they chose not to go. Soon as he and his beautiful date left, the woman from Yale looked at me with surprise.

“How did you know he’d say those things?”

I laughed. “That’s what you expect when you’re one of the few people of color at these parties. You kind of learn the lay of the land.”

She walked away looking a little bewildered, and it made me feel like a magician who performed a successful magic trick to someone who had no idea of how the race game was played. And why should she?

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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