2.29 You gonna be cheap?

Jean sent me a message shortly after he had returned from the trade show in Tôkyô:

“Santa made a list, checked it twice, and I am happy to inform you, my friend, that you have been a very, very good boy . . . Expect a nice rock for your stocking, and it’s not coal! Busy?”

I was, but I could make the time.

How many times had a fellow gaijin come to me and bragged that he had scored some "killer bud"? More times than I can remember, and I had never once been impressed. They thought of themselves as players, but compared to Jean, they were hopeless dilettantes. Weed was more common than perverts on commuter trains, but cocaine? That was a completely different story.

"I don't know if I should even give this to you," Jean said when I hopped into his car. "It's too damn good."

He pulled two plastic Ziploc bags out of thigh pocket of his cargo pants and handed me one.

He wasn’t kidding: it contained a rock, tightly compressed and pearly white. My mouth watered, my heart raced wildly.

The two of us looked at each other, grinned broadly, and broke out in maniacal laughter.

“Let’s head back to my place,” Jean said, hanging a right at the traffic light. “You have time?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Turning up the car stereo, Jean asked if I’d heard of U.F.O.

“Unidentified Flying Objects?”

“No, man! The DJs. United Future Organization.”

“Ah, right. Yeah I have heard of them, but never heard them.”

“Well you have now,” he said, extending an open palm towards the stereo.

Jean in his untiring capacity as mentor and teacher would explain that U.F.O. was a trio of DJs, two Japanese and one Frenchman, originally based in Fukuoka that was on the forefront of the acid jazz/nu-jazz movement ripping through the hippest clubs in Japan.

“UFO’s in town playing at O/D tonight.”

“O/D?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of O/D!” he said, banging his hand against the steering wheel. “Man, I shudder to think what kind of life were you living before you met me.”

I confessed it hadn’t been one to brag about.

We pulled up to an über-modern apartment building, exposed concrete with odd flourishes of steel painted in primary colors on the outside. Bauhaus founder Gropius meets Le Corbusier at a cocktail party and bumps into Terence Conran who sells him a garden shovel for a hundred bucks. To be honest, it was a little over the top for my taste, but impressive all the same.

“If the car hasn’t got their pussies wet,” Jean said, turning the motor off, “by the time they’re in my apartment, they’re tearing their panties off.”

“I bet.”

Once in the apartment--I kept my boxers on, hiked up to my nipples like a pensioner, thank you--Jean locked and chained the door, then showed me to his dining room. Not the largest dining room around, but what it lacked in spaciousness, it more than compensated with good sense. In the center was a vintage white Arne Jacobsen table, surrounded by six Eames shell chairs, originals from the 70s, covered in lemon yellow vinyl leather.

“And I thought I had a nice place,” I said, deeply impressed.

“You like?”

“And how! Need a roommate?”

Jean laughed. “C’mon, take a load off.”

I sat down, the shell chair fitting the contours of my body perfectly.

“Now this is a chair,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

“A friend of mine owns an antique furniture shop,” he replied, closing the window blinds. “I’ll introduce you to him, if you like.”

“I would. Thanks.”

When the blinds were closed, I took the Ziploc bag out of my pocket, opened it, and dabbed my finger into the powdery bit. Tasting it, my whole mouth became instantly numb.

How long had it been since I had good blow? How long since I’d had blow period? Too, too long.

"C'mon, you gonna be cheap or you gonna make some lines for me, too?"

Without answering my friend, I sprinkled some of the coke onto his dining room table. Then, I dug into my back pocket for my wallet, fishing out a ten-thousand-yen note and a credit card. Chopping up a small lump of the coke, I divided the powder into separate piles, splitting one up into four generous lines, each an inch long.

"What the hell are you doing?" Jan protested. "You're just asking for it."

He took the credit card from me, cut the lines up into thirds then, with his own ten-thousand yen note rolled tightly, meticulously, almost beautifully, inhaled the first of his smaller lines, then a second, before moving out of the way.

"You'd better enjoy this, my friend, because we won't be getting anything nearly this good for a long, long time."

Bending over the table, and placing my best nostril forward, I took in the whole of my line.

"You're a junkie, man!"

I smiled back at my friend before going after the second line. And then it hit me. “Woa!”

"My Columbian friends told me it was from their own stash. They don't waste their time with anything else."

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.