Drama City

  “Thank you,” said Deanna with a smile.

  Out in her car, Rachel checked her NA schedule, which she had printed off the Internet, then glanced at her watch. There was a meeting on East Capitol about to convene. If there wasn’t much city-bound traffic, she could still catch the tail end of it, sit for a while, and relax. While she was resting, say a prayer.

  THE DOG WAS a black rottweiler with tan socks and tan teardrop markings beneath its eyes. It stayed under a rusted rust-colored Cordoba, up on cinder blocks, parked in the paved backyard of a row house in the two hundred block of Randolph Street, west of North Capitol.

  Lorenzo Brown had seen the dog before. He had left an Official Notification form on its owner’s door back in July. The shelter violation had been reported by a neighbor. Next to chaining, it was the most common call.

  Lorenzo sat in his work van, a Chevy Astra, idling in the alley behind the row house, looking through the lens of a digital camera. The dog had come out from under the Cordoba and listlessly barked one time. Now it was staring at Lorenzo curiously and without aggression, its tongue dangling out the side of its mouth. Lorenzo snapped off a shot and took note of the home address, which had been stenciled on a No Trespassing sign hung on a chain-link fence. Then he drove out of the alley and went around the block, parking the van on Randolph near the front of the house.

  As was his habit this time of year, Lorenzo left the motor and air-conditioning running to keep the van cool. Once outside the Astra, he locked the door with a spare key. He surveyed the block, a typical D.C. strip of brick row houses topped with turrets. Here, near Florida and North Capitol, the rep of drug dealing and gang activity was strong. But there was no evidence of criminal enterprise today. Construction vans and pickups dotted the curb. Spanish music, thin vocals and surging horns coming trebly from the low-end boom box of a housepainter, blared from the open windows of a house. A white girl in a pantsuit, a real estate agent, Lorenzo supposed, stood on the sidewalk, talking on a cell while she nervously smoked a cigarette.

  Several longtime residents sat on the porches and stoops of their homes, watching the white girl, their eyes showing amusement. Behind the amusement was discomfort. They realized that in the near future their corner of the world as they knew it would cease to exist.

  “Uh-oh,” said a man sitting on a rocker bench on his porch as Lorenzo crossed the sidewalk and went up the steps of a residence. “What J. J. do now, cause the police to make a house call?”

  “You see a gun hanging on his side?” said a neighbor sitting in a similar type of chair on the porch of his own dwelling.

  “I can’t even see your wide behind without my glasses.”

  “That’s the dog man, fool.”

  Lorenzo heard such commentary often when he entered a neighborhood. To the street-challenged eye he did look like some kind of police. If not police, an official, or something more than a meter man. He wore a sky blue shirt with a Humane Society badge pinned to his chest. He wore dark blue cargo pants and heavy black boots with lug soles, useful for climbing fences. He carried no form of protection, either clipped to his belt or concealed.

  Black folks weren’t shy about discussing his presence, in his presence, in the same way that they would tell a stranger, straight up, if they did or did not like his outfit or new car. On the flip side, when he entered the white, wealthy neighborhoods of Ward 3 on business, there were no Greek choruses and few questions.

  “Look here, J. J. ain’t home.” It was the one who had identified Lorenzo as the dog man, shouting from his porch.

  Lorenzo ignored the man, continuing on until he reached the house, one of a few fronted by a portico rather than a porch. There he saw detailed stonework arching the entrance and colorful tile inlaid on the floor.

  Lorenzo knocked on the door, despite having been told that “J. J.” was not home, suspecting that even if he were home, he would not answer the door. Lorenzo began to fill out an ON form, set on the clipboard he carried, as he waited. Soon he heard footsteps behind him and the voice of the middle-aged man who had called out to him from the neighboring porch.

  “Told you he wasn’t home.”

  “Thought I’d try him anyway,” said Lorenzo, keeping his eyes on the form as he filled it out, feeling the man beside him, smelling the hard liquor on his breath and the perspiration coming through his pores.

  “You ain’t gonna find him at this residence.”

  “What, he doesn’t live here no more?”

  “I’m sayin’, he ain’t never gonna be in at this hour. J. J.’s got a day job.”

  Lorenzo had met this fella before, the last time he’d come through, and he’d smelled this same way. Man in his fifties, still young enough to work, not working, drinking liquor while the sun was straight up overhead. Bags under the eyes, teeth missing, “retired” with fifteen good years still in him. He was wearing one of those tired-ass Kangol caps too.

  “Jefferson’s my name. I’m a friend to J. J.—John Jr.”

  “John Jr. got a last name?”

  “Aaron.”

  Lorenzo Brown wrote the full name of the resident on the form. It was easy enough to get from the criss-cross directory back at the office. But office time was not Lorenzo’s thing.

  “I’m a Humane Law Enforcement officer, with the Humane Society. My name’s Brown.”

  “I know who you are,” said Jefferson, in neither a friendly nor an unfriendly way. He did not offer Lorenzo his hand. “You came through here earlier this summer.”

  “Don’t look like much has changed. What I can see, the situation with his dog is still the same.”

  “He been meanin’ to get around to it, though.”

  “You say you’re a friend to him?”

  “I am,” said Jefferson with weak pride.

  “I’d like to show you what J. J. needs to do to keep his dog. I’d hate to have to take it.”

  “You mean you’d snatch that girl?”

  “I wouldn’t take pleasure from it. But I’d do my job.”

  “Damn.”

  “How ’bout you meet me in the alley?”

  Jefferson looked around the street as if to consider it, as if he had anything else to do.

  “Okay?” said Lorenzo.

  “Gimme five minutes,” said Jefferson. “I need to urinate.”

  You mean you need to have you another drink, thought Lorenzo. He nodded at Jefferson before going back to the van.

  Lorenzo drove around to the alley and waited. Five minutes stretched to fifteen. He whistled softly at the rottie, and when the dog came to the fence, Lorenzo put his knuckles through the diamond space of the links. A dry muzzle touched his hand.

  “All right, girl,” said Lorenzo. “You all right with me.”

  The dog’s eyelids had curled inward and appeared to be growing into its eyes. Besides this bit of sickness, it seemed to be well fed and in decent shape. Its owner had left a stainless steel bowl of water beside the car, though the water, most likely, had now been rendered hot by the moving sun. Health issues aside, there was no real shelter for the dog, except under that shaky car. Maybe the owner felt he had done enough. Lorenzo surmised that this was not a crime of deliberate abuse, but rather ignorance.

  The alley smelled of excrement, garbage, and something that had once been alive and was now in decay. The August heat and the lack of breeze made the smell strong and sickening.

  Two boys wearing long white T-shirts over blue jeans walked down the alley, going by Lorenzo Brown. They chuckled at the dog, which moved back a step as they passed. The T-shirt-and-jean combination was the uniform of choice for young men in the lower ranks of the drug game, but Brown had noticed both white and black kids in the suburbs, straight kids, honor students, whatever, wearing the same hookup. The suburban kids got their fashion sense out of The Source, off CD covers, and from the hip-hop videos run on 106 and Park. For all Lorenzo knew, these two could have been playing studio gangster as well. They gave him cursory eye contact b
ut made no remark as they passed. If it had been his partner, Mark, white and therefore fair game, back here, these boys would have said something, made him the butt of some quick joke. They’d have to, because it was in the contract. But Mark wouldn’t have cared.

  Jefferson came up the alley and stood near Lorenzo. He smelled more strongly of liquor than he had before.

  “Awright, then,” said Jefferson.

  “Let’s start with the shelter,” said Lorenzo.

  “Go ahead, I’m listenin’.”

  “Dog needs a structure, some kind of real shelter. And I ain’t talkin’ about leaving her to lie under that old Plymouth.”

  “That’s a Chrysler.”

  “Whatever it is. Car ain’t even on tires, could come off those cinder blocks and crush that animal. But the point is, the dog needs to be out of the elements. Needs to be protected, case some of these kids around here go throwin’ rocks at it, somethin’ like that. You understand?”

  “Some kids just be evil like that.”

  “I left a notification, last time I visited, for your friend. I detailed all this.”

  “I know for a fact he got it, ’cause we discussed it. Said he was gonna act on it too. When he got the time.”

  “Time is now. This animal needs some attention.”

  “Look at her, though,” said Jefferson, smiling with forced affection at the animal. “Dog’s healthy. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that dog.”

  “Not exactly. You see how her eyelids are growin’ in like that?”

  “She been sleepin’. Her eyes be puffy, is all.”

  “Called entropia. It’s a disease, something rottweilers are prone to get.”

  “She gonna die from it?”

  “Nah, you can treat it. Antibiotics—you know, pills. Or it can get cut out. Point is, this dog needs to be cared for.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We got a misdemeanor law in this city for failin’ to provide veterinary care.”

  “That right.”

  “And you see the feces there?” said Lorenzo, pointing to the turds strewn about the paved backyard.

  “Fences?”

  “No, feces. Crap.”

  “Dogs do that, young man.”

  “So do folks. But we don’t leave ’em layin’ out in the yard. It needs to be cleaned up, ’cause that crap there, it carries disease and attracts flies. Not to mention the stink.”

  “I’ll tell J. J. he got to clean it up. But that ain’t gonna make no difference. You know, this alley just stinks natural.”

  “I heard that,” said Lorenzo, writing on his clipboard, finishing the form. “What you’re smellin’ today is a rat. A kitten, maybe. Somethin’ got itself dead in this alley.”

  “Whole lotta shit stay dead back in here,” said Jefferson.

  “Give this to the dog’s owner,” said Lorenzo, handing the form to Jefferson. “Tell him I’m gonna be back, check on the progress he’s made with this animal. Tell him it’s gonna be soon.”

  As Jefferson rounded the corner at the T of the alley, Lorenzo turned the dial of the radio to 1500 AM for the traffic report, issued every eight minutes. He needed to get over to Northeast, down by the big wholesale food market off Florida Avenue. There was a Subway shop near there, made good tuna salad. He had an appointment in the parking lot with Miss Lopez. They could have lunch and do their business, all at once. Miss Lopez liked the tuna they made there too.

  THREE

  I WAS IN NEW YORK CITY this mornin’,” said a man named Rogers, seated in the chair reserved for the guest speaker at the head of the room. “Well, it was New Jersey, way up north in Jersey, if you want the exact location. I was doin’ some business up there, buying some automobiles at this auction, for my lots? I left out of there, like, two and a half hours ago. Now, I know you thinkin’ it takes three and a half, four hours by car to get down to D.C., right?”

  “’Less the car got wings,” said a man in a green Paul Pierce jersey, seated in the front row.

  “Oh, it had some wings on it today,” said Rogers. “Like an angel has wings. ’Cause this morning, it felt like an angel was driving the car. I mean, I was on some kind of divine mission—to get to this here meeting, you feelin’ me?”

  “Yes,” said a small young woman in a halter top, seated in the second row.

  “I didn’t care how fast I was goin’. One hundred, one hundred and fifteen miles an hour. I ain’t even glance one time at the speedometer, ’cause I just didn’t care. I wasn’t worried about no police or nobody else. I’m sayin’, I would have rather gone to motherfuckin’ jail before I missed this meeting. I’d go to prison before I’d go back to where I was. ’Cause where I was, when I was at the bottom? Boy, I was tired.”

  Now, thought Rachel Lopez, you’re going to tell us just how tired you were.

  “What was I tired of? I was tired of seein’ my grandmother staring at the floor when I spoke to her. ’Cause if she looked in my eyes, the woman who raised me and held me in her arms as a child wouldn’t see nothin’ but a lyin’-ass thief and fiend.” Rogers, gray salted into his modified Afro, snaggletoothed but handsome in a Lamont Sanford way, paused for effect. “Tired. Tired of watchin’ my children turn their backs on me when I walked into a room, for fear that I might put my hand out for a ten-dollar bill. Knowin’ their pops was gonna go right out the door with that Hamilton and cop the first rock he could.”

  “Tired,” said a few people in the group, getting into the rhythm.

  “Tired of smellin’ the shit in my dirty drawers,” said Rogers, lowering his voice dramatically. “’Cause most of the time? I had so little love for my gotdamn self that I was too disinterested to wash my own ass.”

  “Tired!”

  “Lord,” said Rogers, “I was tired.”

  Rachel sat back in the folding chair. She’d heard Rogers speak before. He’d lost a business and a family to crack, hit bottom, gone straight, and come back as the owner of several used-car lots east of the Anacostia River, starting a second family well into his middle age. Clean for ten years, he still attended three meetings a week.

  Rachel was in the back of the room, which held a scarred lectern, a blackboard, and about fifty seats. Many of the seats, situated in a four arcing rows, were taken.

  The room was in the basement of a church on East Capitol Street in Northeast. Rachel attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings throughout the city but preferred those held in this part of town. The most honest stories, both poetic and profane, were to be heard in the classrooms, church basements, community centers, warehouses, and bingo halls of North- and Southeast.

  Rachel was not in recovery, but she frequently dropped in on these meetings. The struggles, setbacks, and small victories related here gave her perspective, and a spiritual jolt she had never found in a synagogue or church. Also, this was business. She often ran into her offenders, past and present, in these halls, and kept herself involved, informally, in their lives.

  “So I just wanted to come here to thank you all,” said Rogers. “These meetings we be having right here? And you? I’m not lyin’, y’all saved my life.” Rogers sat back. “Thank you for letting me share.”

  “Thank you for sharing,” said the group in rough unison.

  After a few program notes from the group’s volunteer leader, a basket was offered for donations. When it came to her, Rachel contributed her usual dollar bill and passed the basket along. The leader opened the floor for discussion, and the young woman in the halter top spoke first.

  “My name is Shirley, and I’m a substance abuser.”

  “Hey, Shirley,” said the group.

  “I saw my little girl this morning,” said Shirley. “She been stayin’ with my grandmother since the court said she can’t stay with me no more. . . .”

  Rachel Lopez felt her stomach grumble. She was past the nausea stage and ready for lunch. She had an appointment with Lorenzo Brown, over at that Subway near the market off Florida Avenue. She liked the tuna they made at
that one, and Lorenzo liked it too. Lorenzo Brown, one of the lucky ones who had found a job above the menial level, seemed to be doing all right.

  “. . . I was watchin’ her from the corner. Well, really from behind a tree. She was goin’ off to summer school. She about to go into first grade, over at Nalle Elementary, in Marshall Heights? She had this purple T-shirt on, got shorts go with it. And a pink backpack, had little cartoon kids on it. She looked happy. I mean she was skippin’ off to school.”

  “My baby girl went to Nalle too,” offered a woman on the other side of the room.

  Shirley nodded at the woman in commiseration. Rachel could see that Shirley’s eyes had watered up.

  “I was just watchin’ her,” said Shirley. “I didn’t want to bother her or scare her or nothin’ like that. Lord knows I scared her plenty back when. I’m not ready to come full into her world just yet.” Shirley wiped at one of her eyes. “You know, it hurts me to think of how I neglected her all those years. When she’d be cryin’ for milk or food, or just to be held or loved, and me in some room with the blinds drawn in the middle of the day. Sittin’ around with a bunch of fiends, suckin’ on that glass dick.”

  “Uh-huh,” said a man, like he knew.

  “All those years I cannot get back,” said Shirley. “But my eyes are lookin’ forward now. We gonna have us a relationship, me and my girl, the kind I never did have with my own mother. I ain’t bitter or nothin’ like that. You can’t change the past nohow, so you best put it behind you. I’m lookin’ ahead. . . .”

  Rachel dozed for a second. Maybe for minutes, she couldn’t be sure. Her head snapped back up and she opened her eyes.

  “. . . so thank you for letting me share,” said Shirley.

  “Thank you for sharing.”

  A lean, hard-looking man in a dirty red T-shirt pushed the dirty Redskins cap he was wearing back on his head and raised his hand. The group leader nodded his chin in the man’s direction.

  “My name’s Sarge . . .”

  “Hey, Sarge.”

  “. . . and I’m a straight-up addict. Now, I been comin’ to these meetings for a long time, listenin’ to you all talkin’ ’bout support. How we all in this together, how we ain’t never gonna make it individually ’less we stand together, lean on each other while we walk through that dark tunnel to the other side. All that talk, that’s real good. But when it’s just talk, it’s just bullshit.”