Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [46]
Then he led Jude through the closet under the loft—through coats and dry-cleaning bags, his old dashiki—to a padlocked door. Jude never would have known it was there. “Voilà,” Les said, spinning the combination, and opened it onto another closet, walk-in size. The smell hit Jude like whiplash. He hadn’t smelled marijuana like this since his father’s greenhouse, and the memory of that place, mixed with the heavenly bouquet of free-flowing drugs, produced in him a strange quickening. The walls of the closet were lined with shelves, which were lined with plants, which were green and farmy and rich, their leaves crawling with flowers like lavender caterpillars, the sodium bulbs beaming lovingly upon them.
From behind them, muffled through the closet, the buzzer rang. “What’d I tell you?” Les said. He picked up one of the five-gallon buckets, then closed the door and locked it, and they shoved through the hanging clothes back out into the apartment. Les pressed the intercom button by the front door, and a voice said, “Trick or treat. It’s Davis.” Les buzzed him in, and a moment later, someone could be heard clunking up the stairs and then panting into the apartment, in a ski cap and a red leather jacket, trailing frosty air. He called Jude’s father my man and flashed a gold tooth when Les introduced him. Jude could count the number of black people he’d had a conversation with on one hand. There were two black kids at his high school in Vermont, and both of their parents were professors.
“I didn’t know you had a kid, man. He’s a little man himself.” Davis asked Jude what was hanging and said he looked like his dad. Les winked at Jude and said thanks. He said that Jude had come to stay with him to experience some of his world-famous Purple Haze.
“I was just going to tell Jude that this is the only stuff on the market worth smoking.” Les sat down on a kitchen stool. “Would you agree, Davis?”
Davis nodded heartily, resting a foot on the bucket of pot. “Premium stuff.”
“Jude got in a little trouble up north. Too much of a good thing, if you know what I mean.”
“I hear you.”
“What my thinking is, is the key to enjoying reefer is moderation. You know what I’m saying, Davis—you’re a moderate fellow, aren’t you?”
“You know I am, man.”
“You’re a smart guy,” Les said, crossing his legs, ankle to knee. “You’ve got a day job. Have I ever seen you on the steps next door with a needle in your arm?”
Davis said he hadn’t been over there in years.
“Let’s be realistic,” said Les. “A fifteen-year-old kid in New York—”
“Sixteen.”
“—he’s going to find some fruit if he wants it, no matter how much Mommy and Daddy say no. And when he does, you don’t want him getting shwag from some Joe in Tompkins.”
Davis admitted he used to buy from one of those guys. A guy who carried a grenade in the pocket of his trench coat.
“So I can’t tell my kid not to smoke reefer,” Les said. “But I can tell him not to smoke other people’s reefer.” One of his slippers was dangling from a white, veiny foot. “My stuff’s safe. It’s robust. It’s cut with nothing but love. And it won’t get you arrested or dead.”
“Is it free?” Jude asked, rubbing his head.
Davis laughed and started counting out his cash. “A smart-ass,” he said. “Like his pop.”
Before, when Jude had allowed himself to imagine the city of his birth, he’d pictured it the way he’d pictured faraway capitals like London or Berlin—wide gray sidewalks choked with adults in long coats, with leather briefcases and good haircuts, no children in sight. They might as well have spoken a foreign language. It was the New York he’d seen in the pages of a social studies textbook—a woman with a mild-mannered Afro waiting for a bus, smiling at her newspaper. In the caption was the word commute.
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