Читать книгу Hades' Melody - JD Belcher - Страница 8

On a cool, rainy evening en route to a sociology class I was taking in the Forbes Quadrangle building, I saw the person I’d been wanting to speak to for some time—a black girl who I’d seen on several occasions coming in and out of my apartment building. She was traveling from the opposite direction and carrying an umbrella, though it was only sprinkling. Her aloof nature, apparent independence, and the fact that she was one of the only girls residing in our living quarters captured my curiosity.

“Don’t you live in my building?” I asked as we neared one another. “The one on Louisa Street?”

“Yes, I think so,” she answered.

“My name’s Jovon,” I said, extending my hand. She took it loosely and told me her name was Nicole.

“Well, I have to get to class, but I’ll see you around.

Maybe we can hang out sometime.”

A few days later, I was sitting on my couch in the living room with the front door open when Nicole, and another girl with shorter hair and lighter brown skin, walked past and up the steps. I shouted out a hello into the hallway and asked what apartment she lived in. She said 18.

When I couldn’t take the suspense of knowing whether Nicole telling me the number of her apartment had been an open invitation to visit, or just a forced act of politeness, I pulled together enough courage to knock on her door. She kindly invited me in, sat me down on her white leather sofa, and we started to have the kind of conversation that two people who seem to be interested in one another partake in—one that quickly takes off like an airplane, then lasts all night long. We asked each other questions about our past, how we ended up choosing Pitt for college, and what each other’s interests were. I told her how I went to school for two years in Alabama, and she said she was a psychology major and a transfer from Ohio State. She also loved music. The Notorious B.I.G., Janet Jackson, Foxy Brown, Tupac Shakur, and Lauryn Hill were her favorites, and she owned all their music and others—an entire box of CDs and tapes. Though she made fun of my taste in Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins, we found other similarities that brought us closer together—particularly the fact that she liked to get high.

I was both intrigued and fascinated by the idea of smoking weed with Nicole, and up until that point, I had never gotten high with a girl. Simply being in the same room alone was enough, but the thought of lighting a blunt with her seemed like bliss.

It wasn’t long before I brought a bag and a box of cigars upstairs and began a process that would last long after our college years were complete. I found myself knocking on her door more often, and she gladly continued to invite me in. We listened to music, smoked, and laughed our hearts out, day after day, until the very act of meeting in her apartment became habitual. During our initial encounters, I kept my guard up, not wanting to fully undress and reveal the marijuana-addicted pot-head that I truly was, so I kept quiet about my personal preference to indulge. But Nicole was the type of girl who could read my mind.

In subsequent visits, after we’d smoke a blunt, she’d ask, “Why don’t you roll up another one?” As if I’d say no. She totally demolished my sensibilities about smoking too much weed. At the time, I thought she was sent from heaven. She was one of the coolest, most interesting people that I had ever met in my life. For the most part, she seemed like the loner-type—very self-sufficient, introverted. Yet, even in those initial stages, I sensed that there was more to her.

We got in the routine of meeting literally everyday after class up at her place or on the fire escape in the back of the building. We’d climb to the very top to smoke cigarettes and chitchat. For some reason, Nicole never wanted to come to my apartment and seemed odd-ly afraid of others. I invited her over several times, but she always refused. In response, I’d acquiesce to ease her shyness and just go upstairs.

The more I got to know her, the more I noticed that she didn’t have many friends on campus. But it didn’t matter to me, I was more than happy to spend all my free time with her. She had an allure that made me comfortable enough to talk about anything and everything.

She made me feel appreciated and wanted—I ate up all the attention. During the day, I’d go to class or to work, then round off the evening by picking up a bag of weed and meeting at her place. I stopped spending the night at my apartment altogether and started sleeping on her couch. I’d wake up in the morning, go back to my place to shower and dress, then start the day all over again. It created a waste of an apartment, but again, at the time, I thought it was well worth the sacrifice. Hell, I was living the life. I had everything I ever needed and could want while being a student at Pitt—food, shelter, woman, and weed. The one and only downside was that I began to lose touch with my guy friends, a pricey forfeiture that would haunt me for years to come.

As close as she and I were becoming, and though we had even crossed the line and once slept together, I hadn’t “officially” acknowledged our relationship as more than just a friendship. I’d go out on dates with other girls and then afterward call Nicole to see what she was doing. There were times when I’d throw small

‘get-togethers’ in my apartment where I’d invite other lady friends and Nicole. I treated her as if she was my buddy and lover but never took thoughtful consideration of how she felt about it. It was an inner issue that I had to deal with. Oddly enough, she never once complained or said she had a problem; most likely because she knew that she didn’t have anything to worry about. I was hers.

Nicole moved out of the apartment above me to one inside a complex in the trendy Shadyside neighborhood on Fifth Avenue. After Owen left school at the end of the semester and went back to Florida, I moved upstairs to Nicole’s old place because it was larger, gladly paying the $15 dollars extra per month in rent. The time that followed was one to remember. Instead of going up the fire escape to visit Nicole, I’d ride my bike or take the bus back and forth from my pad in Oakland to her flat in Shadyside, which was a much-welcomed change from the norm. I had also acquired a consistent weed connection from a high school friend who lived nearby who supplied us for the entire summer. Nicole and I did our thing, spending every bit of our free time together, squandering many evenings away watching pay-per-view movies and cooking meals with one another at her new place. Friends around campus began asking why she wasn’t with me when they saw me alone. At this point, we were having sex on a regular basis and dating exclusively, but still never discussed what our relationship had turned into.

Being certified is a strange thing. People tend to live outside the boundaries of law and order for as long as they can get away with it. That’s exactly what Nicole and I seemed to be doing. I honestly didn’t realize how much we were together and still had not yet asked her to do the “official” thing and be my one and only. We were just like those couples who stayed common law husband and wife forever, shacking up and living years and years with each other but never getting married.

One morning, near the end of the summer, I called Nicole to find out what her plans were for the day and perceived that she sounded different on the phone. I knew she periodically became depressed about one thing or the other, but from her tone, I could tell that something was wrong. I noticed how recently she’d make random references about her mother’s death, but never went into detail concerning the circumstances of how she passed.

Sometimes, she’d jokingly give hints about committing suicide when school became too much of a strain.

She didn’t know it, but I always took them seriously. So, when I hung up the phone, I flew down Fifth Avenue to her apartment on my bike. My hunch had been correct.

I found her on the couch with lime-green vomit all over her T-shirt and on the floor near her feet. Her eyes were glazed over and rolled uncontrollably in a dazed, lethar-gic swirl. The first thing that came to my mind was that she had overdosed on sleeping pills.

“You took sleeping pills, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Where are they?” She wouldn’t tell me. I didn’t think she could have told me if she wanted to, being in the condition that she was in and all. But I had to find them and make sure she couldn’t take any more. Out of nowhere, something told me to check under the couch where she was sitting. I moved the sofa, with her still on it, and there, hidden in the corner of one of the indented impressions in the carpet were the pills. After I cleaned her up and laid her down in the bedroom, I thought about calling an ambulance, but stupidly decided to let her naturally sober up. I figured that most of what she had taken had probably been thrown up onto the carpet or on her soiled clothing.

Later, I tried to talk to her about her depression, but couldn’t understand her point of view. During a conversation we had while sitting atop the fire escape on Louisa Street, for the first time, she came out and cautiously mentioned that her mother had died the previous year in a house fire. I knew the death of her mother, which happened before we met, obviously had a significant role in what she was going through, but due to her silence on the subject, I had little to glean from. I suggested professional help, but she refused. I thought all the marijuana we were smoking might be adding fuel to the fire, so I suggested that we slow down with getting high and just have an occasional drink here and there. Nevertheless, like clockwork, her depression always returned, and so did the marijuana.

AJ, the brother closest in age to me of my three younger siblings (he was older than Tre, and Tre was older than Antoine), moved in as my new roommate after taking what he called a break following his freshman year from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Right away, I saw that he did a much better job of being a so-cialite in Oakland than I had done, and I always teased him by saying that he was the most popular “non-student” on campus.

He made many friends, one of which was a guy named Dave, a Panamanian New Yorker. AJ and Dave looked like twin brothers—much more related than AJ and I. They both had curly, sandy brown hair and golden skin. My hair was straighter, jet-black and my skin a few shades lighter toward the beige side of the spectrum. As a fellow Pitt student, I understood how Dave struggled in search of cheaper housing, as most students did, so I made an agreement with him to move in as a second roommate. The three of us befriended a likable German student named Wolfe who lived across the hall, and by the start of the fall semester, all five of us—including Nicole—became a motley crew with one thing in common: smoking weed. We loved getting high together. At least four times a week, we’d meet at my apartment, ante up money for a purchase, and one of us would make a run. Night after night, we’d roll up blunts and smoke, play tournaments of Super Mario Kart on Nintendo 64, listen to music, and often cook and eat together.

But soon, the marijuana got out of hand. We all spent money we didn’t have in order to smoke. It had gotten so bad that Wolfe had even gone as far as walking to the South Side from Oakland every other week, a six-mile trip, to donate blood for money to buy an eighth of an ounce of weed.

We turned into untamed savages when we’d sit around and smoke blunts, behaving terribly and doing uncivilized things, like getting angry when someone held it too long before they passed it on to the next person.

We were especially hard on the new arrivals that didn’t belong to the immediate in-group. It wasn’t uncommon to hear someone being called out: “You wanna pass the damn blunt? Other people are trying to smoke in here!”

To curb that activity, we made a “two and pass” rule.

After two hits, the blunt was required to be sent on to the next person.

There was a knock at my door during one inconspicuous evening while we were all lounging in our usual spots in my living room, passing the weed around and playing Nintendo. I opened the door wide enough to catch the chain latch. Wolfe’s large blonde head peeked through.

“It’s me,” he said.

Dave pressed pause on the game and unlocked the latch.

“I have an announcement to make,” he said as he plopped down into an empty space on the couch. “Hey, everybody, guess what?”

“What?” we questioned.

“I got next on Mario Kart,” he said with a laugh.

“No, but seriously, I’m dropping out of school for the rest of the semester.”

“Why?” everyone asked at the same time.

He gave an unclear explanation about flunking out of a few courses and not having enough money to finish out the semester.

“Anyway,” he said after a brief retort, “I have a check for $1,200 to pay for a semester of school that I won’t be attending. How much does a pound of weed cost?”

We all dropped our jaws. Dave and I looked at each other and smiled.

“I think I might know someone who knows someone who can get you a pound for, like, a grand,” AJ said.

“Okay, that leaves me with $200, and don’t bring me any of that cheap pebbles and stems crap either. I want some mid-grade shit.”

By the end of the evening, we all sat in the exact same places as earlier, staring at a pound of marijuana in a large plastic bag in the middle of the floor. I had never seen so much in one place in my life. The thought of having access to such a large quantity was exhilarating, but the sight of it frightened me. The last thing I needed was the police rushing in and finding it inside an apartment that had my name on the lease.

“Get that shit out of here!” I yelled to Wolfe. “Now!

And don’t bring it back!”

“Well, I’ll just take my weed to my place, roll some of my blunts, and come back over and smoke them with you,” said Wolfe, holding the bag like a small baby as he walked out of the door and into his apartment across the hall.

For the next month, we smoked every day. Wolfe made an unsuccessful attempt to sell some of it but gave up because of a lack of clientele. And when he wasn’t around, we smoked weed that we “borrowed” from him.

Like crazed addicts, we’d steal from the stash he’d bring over, pinching more than we needed to roll blunts later for our own “personal smoking time.” On a dare, I had even climbed through one of the cracked windows of his apartment for some when he had gone home for the weekend. We were feigns. All that smoking had changed who we were, and we became so relaxed with the lifestyle that we had forgotten that it was illegal.