This is an excerpt from my novel-in-progress A Long Slow Aftermath, coming out in January. This scene is the very beginning of the work in which we meet Preston and his friend Toshi, his friend-and-landlord’s girlfriend. This is a work in progress so any feedback appreciated!
“She used to let me crash at her place,” said Preston. “Back when I was couch surfing between places. Curb. Sometimes she would make these big huge pots of, curb, spaghetti, in one of those large metal kitchen pots and we would chow out on, hydrant right, spaghetti leftovers for the rest of the week. Curb.”
It was a sunny day with a few long and thin clouds streaking across the sky. A light and cool wind wafted by as they made their way to the high-end high street, about a ten block walk from where they lived.
“That’s just so weird,” said Toshi. “I can’t imagine living in a warehouse.”
“You grew up in Montclair, right? Lamp post right.”
“Yeah. Up in the Oakland hills.”
“Shoot. The only time I ever went to the hills, curb, is when I had work up there for a contractor. Stairs.” They walked up the short concrete stairs and crossed the parking lot to get to the coffee shop. “I lost touch with Thea when I moved to San Francisco. Door.”
Toshi reached out for the door just as someone from inside opened it.
“Someone open the door?” asked Toshi as she waved her hand around.
“Yeah.”
Several people who were waiting for their coffee parted for Preston and Toshi as they entered the cafe. Preston led Toshi up to the end of the line as she kept her white seeing-eye cane close to herself.
“Long line,” said Toshi.
“Everybody wants to get their caffeine.”
Preston scanned the line as a few people glanced in their direction.
Preston could not help but feel conspicuous. He was wearing his black Crass shirt, as it was the least offensive of his clean band shirts. He had on his better pair of black jeans, but they were starting to fade. He felt it was quite a stark contrast to Toshi who was wearing a light gray blouse and a long gray skirt that looked as if it came from an exclusive clothing store.
He also had very little hair. He had been cutting it shorter and shorter until it was almost a buzz cut. Toshi’s long black hair was tied back into an elegant pony tail.
Toshi screwed up her face. “Smelling that coffee when I can’t drink it yet is torture.”
“Tell me about it.”
“So you lost track of Thea when you left for San Francisco?”
“I lost track of just about everybody I knew in the East Bay when I went out to San Francisco. That’s when I got deep into the scenes.”
“Oh yeah, the…”
Toshi stopped herself.
“Kind of a long story,” said Preston. “Kind of.”
After getting their coffee, Preston led Toshi out of the cafe and to a table in a far corner of the market hall quad, away from the general crowd.
“I got deep into the speed scene,” said Preston. “Like, really deep.”
“Speed? You mean meth amphetamine?” asked Toshi as she held her coffee aloft in an effort to cool it down.
“Yup.”
“So you were using it all of the time?”
“Not at first. When I first starting using it I only did it occasionally, like once every other month or so. But then I started using it more often, say about once every other weekend. And eventually that became once a weekend. And then I binged on the weekend and started doing maintenance lines during the week.”
Toshi sat back. “Maintenance lines? Because you were craving it so much?”
“Naw. To keep myself awake at work.”
“Awake?”
“Doing that much speed on the weekend means you’re burnt out afterwards. You need to keep doing it to function.”
“What kind of work were you doing?”
“I worked at music stores, selling musical equipment. Mostly guitars.”
Toshi tried taking a sip of her coffee. She winced as it was a still too hot. “You were that burned out from using it on the weekends?”
“You don’t sleep when you’re on that stuff. Or eat.”
Toshi’s eyebrows went up. “You don’t eat when you’re doing the speed?”
“You got no appetite when you’re high on meth. In fact the idea of eating food is kinda gross. I mean, yeah you do eat a little so you don’t like die, of course, but eating is not much fun when you’re wired.”
“Wow.” Toshi held her coffee cup out in front of herself. “My coffee is still too hot,” she said as she waved her hand over it.
Toshi tossed her head. Her pony tail hit Preston on the side of his face.
“Gah!” yowped Preston.
“Did I smack you with my hair again?”
“Y’all whip people with that long hair.”
“I like having long hair.” Toshi took a gentle sip of her coffee.
“It would be easier to drink if you put some milk in it.”
“I like it black.” Toshi turned her head around. “You haven’t described the scene to me yet.”
Preston looked out over the the shopping hall crowd, checking out the people sitting at their tables and walking by. “It’s pretty crowded. Mostly just plain Janes and Joes. I think there are a couple of college students of by the cafe though.”
“Any dogs?”
Preston squinted as he scanned the area. “Mmm, nope. Not seeing any. Wait, there’s one little white doggy. A middle-aged woman is holding onto him. She’s sitting at a table and he’s poking his nose out of her jacket.
“Aw. I wanna small doggy I can carry around in my jacket.”
“If you got a dog, wouldn’t it have to be a seeing eye dog?”
Toshi tilted her head as she thought about it. “Maybe I can have both. One big seeing eye dog and one little dog I can carry.”
“You could always have the little dog ride the big dog like a horse.”
Toshi waved her hand towards the quad. “So really, what’s going on today?”
Preston leaned forward with his coffee. “Just a lot of yuppie scum. A few suburban college students. Nobody really interesting.”
“That’s a shame.” Toshi put her coffee down on the table and leaned back. “Thanks for taking me out again.”
“Ain’t no thang. I need my coffee.”
“It really is a drag being all alone in that house.”
“How many times has Thea gone out of town this year?”
Toshi leaned forward and picked up her coffee. “I lost count. She goes on some business trip or conference thing at least once a month. This latest trip is the second time time this month she’s had to run off.”
Preston looked out over the quad. He looked at the shops, the gourmet markets, the all-too clean high end home improvement store, and the clothing shop that looked as if it had not one spec of dust inside of it.
They were all stores and businesses that he could never afford. He thought to himself that he would never patronize such places in the first place, even if he did have that kind of money .
Toshi leaned towards Preston. “Do you mind if I ask you more about the whole speed thing?”
“Naw. I don’t mind. It’s not anything I’m hiding.”
“So you kept using it when you were working at the music store?”
“Yeah, at Levigate guitars. And then later at the Underfed Artists store.”
“You just kept using it more and more?”
“I started go-betweening for my friends and coworkers.”
“Go-betweening? You mean dealing?”
Preston leaned on the table. “It wasn’t really dealing. Dealers like to keep themselves insulated, so I would take people’s money and go to my dealer and make a buy, buying for my friends as well as myself.”
“You mean you would take other people’s money and buy for them?”
“Yeah.”
“And they trusted you with their money?”
“Well, maybe. More like they were willing to trust me because they really wanted their drugs.”
Toshi sat back and paused for a moment. “Sounds like dealing.”
“I wasn’t making any money off of it, at least at first, but eventually I started buying in bulk and selling to people I knew. That got me started. Over the next couple a’ years I was selling more and more and making new connections, and eventually I had go betweeners coming to me for supplies.”
“Then you were a dealer.”
“For like a year or two. And then those go betweeners started buying more and more from me. I eventually moved on from being a dealer to a small time supplier.”
“A supplier?”
“A drug dealer for drug dealers. Someone who sells in bulk.”
“Where did you buy your drugs from?”
Preston shuffled his feet. “I got my dealer to introduce me to his supplier.”
“You mean someone who sold even more drugs than you did?”
Preston turned to Toshi. “I’m talkin’ about the guy who knew the guy who actually made the stuff.”
“Wow.”
Toshi held onto her coffee as she took in what Preston had told her. Preston turned and looked around the quad, trying to see if he could spot anything interesting that he could describe to Toshi.
“I hope my questions weren’t too personal,” said Toshi quietly.
Preston turned to Toshi. “Naw. It’s not a big deal. I don’t hide the fact that I’m an addict. I mean, not to people I know at least.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Go ahead.”
“Were you still using it while you were dealing more of it?”
“Hell yeah I was. The more speed I sold the heavier I got into it. Eventually I started smoking it, and that’s when I went really nuts.”
“Nuts?”
Preston put both hands on his coffee as he quickly glanced around to make sure no one was close enough to hear him. “I was using it so much that I started to have crazy mood swings, and sometimes I started to hear things, like voices and the sounds of people moving around, and sometimes I heard entire conversations from people who weren’t even there.”
“Oh my God. That stuff was making you hallucinate?”
“It was from all of the wear and tear, and lack of sleep. I’d look down the street and see people staring at me, just standing on the corner and looking up at my apartment. I was convinced they were narcs or cops or scumbags who wanted to rip me off. I would look around and check it out, and a lot of those people hanging around outside of my house turned out to be mailboxes, or fire hydrants, and sometimes nothing at all.”
“My God.” Toshi moved her head around as if she were looking out over the quad. “Seeing things that aren’t even there sounds worse that not seeing anything at all.”
Preston leaned on the table again. “It probably depends on what it is you’re seeing.”
“I never tried anything like meth,” said Toshi as she leaned back.” “I tried cocaine once. It made my face all numb. I didn’t like it.”
“Trust me. Meth makes cocaine look like Bud Light.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Preston shifted around as a couple took a table somewhat close to him and Toshi.
“I’ve been partial to weed myself,” said Toshi. “And an occasional cocktail.”
“I don’t do any of that stuff anymore,” said Preston.
“Not even weed?”
“Not even weed.”
“That sounds rough.”
“It can be,” said Preston as he looked out over the quad.
You can read about Preston’s early East Bay adventures in The Falling Circle, available on Amazon. (A prequel if you will to this novel-in-progress!)
Other books featuring Preston as an ensemble or supporting character:
Preston’s first appearance in my first ever novel Gutter Folklore. Preston is a member of an ensemble cast featuring characters living in San Francisco in the eighties. This is also the first appearance of Skye Wright, the star of my books Crash Shadow, What the Hell Ever Happened to Yuri Rozhenko?, and my newest novel Stella Maris.
Preston makes an appearance during his drug dealing days in my novel The Clubber, about a self-absorbed anti-hero artist in 1980’s San Francisco.
Preston is also a major character in my novel Crash Shadow, a story about two dug addicts taking completely different paths.
