Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [52]
Nah, he said, I’ve been swimming with piranhas all my life. I just didn’t know it. He laughed. He had a ragged, feral look when he laughed because his teeth, polished to a high gloss, were uneven. A wispy mustache in which there were glints of gray belied his youthful look. Even in repose he appeared tense and driven.
After Kate had “seen” him he began to unwind, rather quickly, to her mind. And yet, when she spoke of this to Armando he reminded her it was the yagé. And that she, Kate, had needed to be present in the circle, alert, in order to do this particular dance that Grandmother required.
He laughed. I was getting a bit weary of Mr. Young Man Let Me Stay.
What do you mean? asked Kate.
He wants to stay young forever, said Armando. Like a Dracula or like these bats we have sometimes in the jungle. They drink so much blood! From animals, from people. And only because they have a fight with old age and with death, which of course will win. He shrugged. Mr. Young Man Let Me Stay, he said again, and chuckled. Grandmother has a message for him.
I don’t know how long it took me to realize my family’s wealth came from the sale of narcotics to black people, but I think it was a long time, he said one day as Kate and Lalika crowded into Lalika’s hammock for the afternoon siesta. Because the hammock was narrow they couldn’t actually lie down; they sat facing each other, their legs touching. Rick sat near them on a mat on the floor.
Kate and Lalika had taken a liking to Rick, who had bought a charango made of armadillo hide and sometimes in the afternoons attempted to play it. He had no musical talent whatsoever, which amused them. He had surprised them by saying their liking him was both predictable and uncanny. Puzzled, they had teased him and played with him and pursued the hidden thread that connected them to this rather scrawny, bespeckled, youthful-appearing man.
Black people always like us, he said, and that is why, in my opinion, it was easy to sell dope to them. My uncles have told me that they always had black friends, but after a while it was as if they didn’t know what to do with them. They were in America, not in Italy. They didn’t know how to do hospitality to strangers as they might have done at home. And at that point I think they remembered where to draw the line. That in fact there was a line. They could sell drugs to blacks but they were not themselves to be hooked on the stuff because if they became hooked on the stuff they couldn’t move up in American society and moving up in American society was what they wanted the most. After such a long sentence Rick let out a breath. To be respectable, he added.
So they hooked their black friends?
The friends were willing, said Rick. At least at first. Only later did they realize they had to hook others in their communities, they couldn’t push drugs to white people, in order to stay medicated.
I’ve never understood it, said Kate, to be medicated on drugs, heroin or cocaine or whatever, what is the appeal? Do people just want to get high, fly away from their troubles? Are they trying to knock themselves out? What?
Rick was thoughtful for a moment. They just want to feel normal, he said. The way they used to feel. They can still remember that feeling, you know, like a sense of home within, and they keep trying to get back to it.
I certainly understand that, said Lalika. Sometimes I feel like if I can’t get back to the wholeness of myself I’d rather be dead. I feel like being dead might even approximate that feeling, you know, of being at one with myself again, of being whole.
Kate took one of her feet and began to massage it.
Umm, said Lalika.
Kate chuckled. If you’re dead you can’t feel massage.
It’s true that some people, especially on cocaine, like to feel powerful and smart, if only for a few minutes or a couple of hours. Rick laughed. But that’s because for a moment sometime in their lives they felt this way naturally, and subsequently lost it. That feeling of being powerful and smart they had, maybe after winning a spelling bee in third grade,