I stepped out on the porch in time to watch Leo creep around the corner of the abandoned bungalow next door. Sam stood off to the side; he hadn’t joined in on the stomping but apparently hadn’t felt the need to stop things either.
“Hey,” Moe said. He jerked his chin in the direction Leo had disappeared in. “You saw? Beat in, beat out, that’s how the 18th Street Crips roll.” He darted a glance at me as if he wanted me to think he needed my approval. “Just like in Oakland, right? He was getting high on his own supply. Bad for business.”
I started after Leo. “Don’t waste your time on him, old man,” Sam called softly behind me as I rounded the corner of the next door bungalow.
Leo was nowhere in sight but the front door was off its hinges and I heard a furtive noise from inside. I peeked around from the stoop, into what passed for a living room.
Leo squatted against a graffiti-covered wall next to a rolled-up sleeping bag. He’d just set a used match book on the floor, its cover folded back with all the matches burned up.
He had one sleeve rolled up – tracks ran up and down his arm. Dried blood was crusted around a few of the holes; he wasn’t even washing up between hits anymore. A boot lace was wrapped around his bicep.
He put a piece of cigarette filter in the blackened spoon to use as a cotton, to strain out any cut sediment in the load he’d just cooked up. With practiced fingers he picked up his syringe and stuck the tip of the needle into the cotton. He worked his outfit one-handed, holding the tip of the needle steady as brain surgery in that puddle of chiva while drawing back the plunger to load up the syringe with his shot.
Leo set the spoon down, gripped one end of the boot lace between his teeth to keep it snug, and pumped his fist a few times to get his flabby veins fat enough to register on. His eyes glittered as he got ready to slide the point home into his rigidly outstretched arm. He looked like he could see God in that needle.
Part of me kept visualizing Angela in front of me instead of Leo, watching him play out the exact steps she took the day she did up the hot shot that finished her. Angela, my beautiful girl, down on her knuckles in her own Gethsemane with me nowhere around.
Leo became aware of my presence and stared at me, rig poised and ready. “What the fuck you want?”
I stepped into full view, a peeping tom busted in the act. “I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you,” Leo said. “A brother has no chance in your cracker world.” He gazed longingly at his ready needle but he wasn’t quite degenerate enough to do up right in front of me. Yet.
“I know you don’t like me Leo, but you don’t need to. You’re not a victim, that’s all you gotta know.” I gestured vaguely at him, groping toward whatever it was I was trying to say. “You got to be bigger than this, Leo; you can’t give up. Don’t let them make you weak, young blood.”
“I don’t care what you did at that school,” Leo said, his voice jittering and shimmering. “Don’t mean nothin. Don’t change shit.” His eyes glittered, flickered from side to side. “Hell, man, why couldn’t you have been black?”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, unsure what I was apologizing for.
Leo jumped to his feet and lunged toward me pulling his hand back fast, and I tensed for him to throw a blow. But instead it was the syringe he threw. The outfit broke apart as it hit next to me and the liquid inside splashed onto the wall.
“Blue-eyed devil,” Leo screamed, trembling. “Get the fuck away from me.” Then he looked at what he’d done to his own rig, his own stash, and an expression of abject despair crawled across his face.
Nothing had changed because of my interference here; Leo was a junkie through and through, and would be for the foreseeable future. He started to cry and I creeped back around the corner and out the door, ashamed of this whole wretched fiasco.
Ashamed for him? Ashamed for me? For the life of me, I couldn’t tell you. Death row had eaten both our daddies alive but we had nothing for each other.
I wondered, though, what the career options were for a street dealer once he’d been chased off his corner. The Life was a bitch – always had been, always would be.