Free Greetings from the Vodka Sea by Chris Gudgeon Page B

Murph his live savings — those were somewhat below zero, an ex-wife and a teenaged son would do that to you — it had substantially increased his debt load, the VU meter of his underamplified life. When he got together with his buddies for a drink or some herb, it always came back to that. What’s your debt load? How much of a burden are you? How big is your nut? It was the cost of living, in monthly instalments. Everybody had a plan. Moonie sold his truck but blew most of that in a Vegas chicken ranch. He came home, used the leftover money for a deposit on a new truck, and settled back into the faithful, forgiving arms of his debt load. Lloyd lucked out when his mother died. He got the family home, which he unwisely converted into a four-bedroom rancher in the valley, a nice little setup up for his girlfriend and her two brats. Now he’s amortized into oblivion. Dicky D did the best of all. He took out a second mortgage, then a third and was working on his banker to spring for the fourth. His plan was always the same: consolidate debt. But every time, the debt wound up consolidating him. Now Dicky hoped to die before he turned sixty-five, having no desire to endure sunset years of cat food suppers in a fixed-income flat.
    Murph had already cut the coke into six smaller sections. He’d thought to weigh it, to make sure he’d got a whole kilo, although what would he do if it was light? It’s not like there was a complaints department he could go to. Things had changed, but not that much. Murph dabbed a bit of the product with his baby finger and stuck it into his mouth, swishing it around to test the bouquet, just like they did on cop shows. Real life cops never did that. Real life cops never knew if they were getting a finger full of up or down or potassium bromide or Draino. But Murph already knew that this was the real deal. He’d done a line with that kid with the limp, the wholesaler. Double U . Not that he’d really wanted to do a line, but he felt he should, to put the kid’s mind at ease. Murph was a fresh face in a business that didn’t like fresh faces, and an old fresh face at that. His brother had vouched for him — that helped — but it was possible he could have been a narc, a stupid, shitty narc, in the worst look-at-me-I’m-a-narc disguise any narc ever concocted, so he took a line for the cause. It was like he’d never left home. The taste (not sweet, not tart, nothing you could describe because there was nothing else you could accurately compare it to: almondy, barely, that’s the best he could do), the sugary burn in his sinuses, the up that came and went with a bang. Kaboom. He’d swore he’d never do it again, back when he’d given everything up and swore he’d never do anything again. But never is a long time, and defeat is often easier to swallow (or in this case inhale) than complete humiliation.
    He hadn’t quite figured out what to do. His first thought was to process it, make crack. The wholesaler said that that would net him the biggest return; his brother concurred. He could move a point of crack for ten bucks, net five or six times his investment. The downside was that Murph had never made crack before, and he didn’t feel he had the wiggle room to fuck around with the product. Plus, he didn’t understand the market. Crack was after his time. Up he understood. He understood who used it and why. There was still a measure of respectability to it. Doctors did coke. Professional athletes. Bankers. Crack was something else, and crackheads moved in different (and, as far as Murph could make out, ever-diminishing) circles. It was the Kmart of the drug world, the bad name brand, the unwashed slut who went down on anyone and brought everyone down with her. He’d just cut it with soda and package it in Baggies. Simple. Understated. Hard to trace. A classic.
    An electric rhythm kicked from Rudy’s room.