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One
White Mike is thin and pale like smoke.
White Mike wears jeans and a hooded sweatshirt and a dark blue
Brooks Brothers overcoat that hangs long on him. His blond hair,
nearly white, is cropped tight around his head. White Mike is
clean. White Mike has never smoked a cigarette in his life. Never
had a drink, never sucked down a doobie. But White Mike has become
a very good drug dealer, even though it started out as a one-shot
deal with his cousin Charlie.
White Mike was a good student, but he's been out of school for six
months, and though some people might wonder what he's doing, no one
seems to care very much that he's taking a year off before college.
Maybe more than a year. White Mike saw that movie American
Beauty about a kid who is a drug dealer and buys expensive
video equipment with the money he makes. The kid says that
sometimes there is so much beauty in the world that sometimes you
just can't take it. Fuck that, thinks White Mike.
White Mike is not looking at beauty. He is looking at the Upper
East Side of Manhattan. It is two days after Christmas and all the
kids are home from boarding school and everyone has money to blow.
So White Mike is busy with a pickup in Harlem and then ounces and
fifties and dimes and loud music and packed open houses and more
rounds and kids from Hotchkiss and Andover and St. Paul's and
Deerfield all looking to get high and tell stories about how it
is to kids from Dalton and Collegiate and Chapin and Riverdale,
who have stories, of their own. All the same stories, really.
The city is a mess this time of year, this year especially. Madison
Avenue is all chewed up with construction, and there are more bums
on Lexington than White Mike remembers. It is crowded on the
sidewalks, and the more snow, the worse it gets, and there has been
plenty of snow. On some streets when the snowdrifts pile up there
is only a salted corridor of frozen dog shit and concrete. It's
been cold since Thanksgiving, very cold, coldest winter in decades
says the TV, but White Mike doesn't mind the cold.
When White Mike first started dealing, it was summer and hot,
and he tried to go as long as he could without sleep as a kind of
experiment. White Mike already looked pale and scary to the kids he
sold to, and then by the third day his jeans and white T-shirt were
grimed out and he looked like some refugee James Dean, and the last
hours were just a blur and the cars on the street flew past so
close to him that people who saw flinched, but he had the cadences
of the city down so tight that he was fine.
At Lexington and Eighty-sixth, his friend Hunter saw him and
said, Mike, are you feeling okay, and White Mike turned to him and
there was a smear of dirt on his face and his eyes were glowing in
the neon light from the Papaya King juice/hot dog place. White Mike
smiled at him and said watch this and took off running, just
running so fucking fast up the block toward Park Avenue. There were
a bunch of private school kids walking the same direction, and when
they saw White Mike running past them, one of them said, loud
enough for White Mike to hear, Madman running. And White
Mike turned and walked back to them saying, Madman, madman,
madman, madman, and the kids got scared, and then White Mike ran
full into them, and they scattered, and they didn't think it was
funny at all, and then White Mike started barking at them, howling,
and they all ran. And White Mike ran after them, barking and
howling, and Hunter ran after him, and White Mike let them get away
after a couple blocks. Hunter put White Mike in a cab, but he had
to convince the cabbie to take White Mike, and pay him in advance.
The cabbie was jumpy and looked in the mirror at White Mike the
whole ride. White Mike had his head out the window, staring at the
pedestrians. When White Mike got home and collapsed in his bed with
his shoes and clothes still on, his last thought before sleep
was Why not? He had been awake for three days.
White Mike gets out of a cab on Seventy-sixth Street and Park
Avenue. He looks at the number of the cab: 1F17. He memorizes the
number every time he gets out of a cab, in case he leaves anything
behind. This has never happened.
Down Park Avenue there are Christmas lights wrapped around all the
trees and bushes, and the wires give the snow better purchase, so
the frost hangs low from the branches. When the lights turn on at
night the trees almost disappear between the bulbs, and the
disembodied points of light outline jagged constellations in the
dark air. It is getting past dusk, and White Mike remembers one
night, years ago, when his mother was still alive and she sat on
the edge of his bed, tucking him in for the night, and told him
about Chaos Theory. White Mike remembers exactly what she said. The
story she told him was about how if a butterfly died over a field
in Brazil and fell to the ground and made a mouse move or a tiny
shoot of grass bend, then everything might be different here,
thousands and thousands of miles away.
"How come?" he asked.
"Well, if one thing happens and changes something else, then that
thing changes something else, right? And that change could come all
the way around the world, right here to you in your bed." She
tweaked his nose. "Did a butterfly do that?"
"Did the butterfly die?" he asked her back.
The lights on Park Avenue suddenly turn on. White Mike can feel his
beeper vibrating again.
Excerpted from TWELVE © Copyright 2002 by Nick McDonell.
Reprinted with permission by Grove Press. All rights
reserved.
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Twelve