Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

“C’mon,” he said.

“How can you see a damn thing in there?”

“I cain’t.”

“So how do you walk?”

“Jus’ trust your feet. They know how to do it.”

I scooted through the small opening, then did my best to navigate the dark, trash-strewn room. Maybe Red’s feet knew. Mine were tripping over everything.

I followed Red’s voice into the hallway, where there was an array of candles casting a dim light. There were also two old mattresses and assorted flotsam and jetsam-a box of Ritz crackers, one woman’s high-heeled pump, a brass lamp that looked like it once belonged to Aladdin, bloodstained rags, and trash. Lots of trash. There was so much trash it was hard for my eyes to focus on what exactly it was. I was suddenly glad it was cold. I didn’t want to imagine what this place smelled like in summertime.

A human form was lying on one of the mattresses.

“Mary,” Red said. “Hey, Mary, wake up.”

Mary rolled over, slow and drowsy. Her eyes got huge the moment she saw me.

“What you bring a cop in here for!” she shouted.

“He ain’t no cop,” Red said. “Mary, this here a reporter. He doin’ a story on that nasty sum’bitch that jus’ got hisself killed. And then he said he gonna get us something to eat.”

Red turned to me. “This here Mary Moss. Folks call her Queen Mary, ’cause she been ’round here so long she like the queen.”

Queen Mary, Ruler of Refuse, Regent of Building Five.

“Hi, Mary, it’s a real pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’m Carter Ross from the Eagle-Examiner .”

“Oh,” she said. She propped herself up on her elbow. There wasn’t much to Queen Mary, maybe a hundred pounds of loose skin and brittle bones. Her hair was a tangled, matted mess-easily one of the worst bed heads in human history.

“Did you know a drug dealer named Tyrone Scott?” I asked. “He went by the name Hundred Year.”

“Yeah, I knew him. Bastard.”

“I hear he sold a particular brand of heroin. Do you know what his brand was?”

Queen Mary peered at me blankly. Her face was so skeletal it made her eyeballs bulge halfway out of her head.

“You know how there’s a stamp on the bag?” I continued, making large gestures as if I were playing charades. “What did the stamp look like?”

“Oh!” she said. “Yeah, yeah! It was. . You know. . umm. . Oh, damn! I just. .”

Mary kept mumbling to herself until I remembered; I had a product sample in my pocket. I pulled it out, then picked up one of the candles so Queen Mary could see it.

“Did it look like this?” I asked.

Suddenly, from somewhere deep within the parts of her brain that still functioned, you could see about ten thousand neurons fire off at once.

“Yeah!” she said. “Yeah, that’s it! Hang on.”

She crawled off her pad and started sifting through the trash, then produced a torn dime bag, which she handed to me. Sure enough, I could see the familiar eagle with the syringe clutched in its talons. It was The Stuff.

“You mind if I keep this?” I asked.

“Depends. You really gonna buy us some food?” she asked hopefully.

“You bet.” I smiled and pocketed the empty packet.

With that, Red Coles, Queen Mary, and I collected ourselves, climbed back out the window into the night, and made our way to the corner bodega, where I bought them all the fruit juice, crackers, and cookies they could carry.

It was the best $37.12 the Eagle-Examiner could have spent.

The Director knew how crucial it was to maintain his brand’s quality. He understood it far better than any of those business-magazine cover boys.

The car company that once boasted “quality is job one” should have tried out the heroin trade for a few weeks. If automakers were as accountable to their customers as the Director was, they never would have needed a bailout. Fact was, an automobile manufacturer could skimp on the kind of head gasket it used, and it would take years for the buyers to notice-if they ever did. Likewise, soft drink companies freely switched between sugar and corn syrup based on whatever was cheaper at the moment. Consumers were never the wiser.

The Director’s customers noticed everything, immediately. A hard-core junkie may not know what day, week, or year it is, but he knows the instant someone is messing with his heroin. He knows from the way it makes him feel, from how high he gets, from how long the high lasts. He knows the instant it starts coursing through his veins. He knows because the drug has essentially turned his body into a finely tuned device for measuring heroin quality.

That was the entire principle behind The Stuff: that junkies knew. That’s why the Director had to guarantee The Stuff was the best, purest heroin they could find. If-and only if-he could establish and maintain his brand in that lofty spot, he knew he could eventually control the entire Newark market.

It was an ambitious goal, one others had tried-but failed-to achieve. Their mistake was attempting to control the supply side, thinking that if they simply crushed every other source of heroin coming into the city, they could own it. But the Director understood that the job couldn’t be accomplished with simple muscle.

The Director took a different tack, one that focused on the demand side of the equation. If the customers came to want The Stuff and only The Stuff, refusing to buy from any dealer who didn’t carry it, they would give the Director a monopoly all by themselves.

And once he had Newark, there was no telling what the Director could accomplish. Newark was the conduit between New York and Philadelphia, the linchpin of the entire East Coast. He could make countless millions.

Yet it all hung on the quality of The Stuff. The moment anyone started diluting it, the junkies would stop associating it with high quality and it would get lost amid all the other brands.

The Director had put Monty in charge of quality control, but was constantly checking on him. Was he sending enough straw buyers into the street for samples? Was he having the samples tested and retested for purity? Were the samples coming back as close to 100 percent as they had gone out?

Monty seemed to be doing fine. He had, after all, managed to catch the four dealers who had been cutting. He had told the Director about it immediately and the Director had acted accordingly.

It was unfortunate to lose four productive dealers. But the Director would kill many more if he had to-as many as it took until the rest got the message:

The brand was sacrosanct. And it would be protected at all costs.

In most aspects of my life, I have little use for the concept of karma, the universal cycle of cause and effect, or anything that might help me achieve total consciousness. Total un consciousness just suits me better.

Yet when it comes to reporting, I am a deep believer in karma. It is the only way to explain the following phenomenon:

There are days as a reporter when you can do no right, when no one will return your phone calls, when all the elbow grease you put into a story gives you little more than tendonitis. Then there are times when you’re the King Midas of the newsroom, when you can get the Holy Trinity on a conference call for quotes, when everything with your story falls into place so perfectly, you start to convince yourself maybe you really are that good.

But, no, it’s just the karma. Eventually you start to accept that for every time you subject your hindquarters to four hours of deep freeze in some nasty project-and end up with nothing to show for it-there will be a time when some strung-out homeless lady named Queen Mary tells you exactly what you need to hear.