My Best Friend Died

 

My best friend Slim, the guy with the biggest afro in Harlem started getting into the hard stuff after a while, junk. He wanted me to shoot up with him saying, 

you gotta try mainlining baby, you feel like nothing in the world can touch ya, like your back in your ma’s belly. All the shit that gets you in a flap, making you sweat, evaporates. I sell ten bags for Ricco and he gives me one, Henry answers succinctly, 

there are two things in the world that scar me, rats, and getting shots. So I’m out Slim, it’s your thing baby, I’ll hang with weed, Cuba Libres, and getting laid, that’s all I need to rock my boat.

Two months later Slim dies having scored a bag laced with strychnine from Rico.

Slim didn't have nobody, so he listed me as his guardian.  

I'm home and the phone rings, an office worker asks,

Are you Henry Lucowski? 

Yes, 

as you know your friend Slim Williams died of strychnine poisoning, he has no family so he listed you as his guardian. He was indigent so we will have to cremate him. 

There’s a long wait, but when Mr. Williams is cremated we’ll send you a small container of his ashes, just part of them. Perplexed I ask? 

What ya do with the rest of the ashes, I know there's a good size bag?  

We throw them in a secret place, probably Riker's Island.

OK dude my address is Henry Lucowski, 

20 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003, USA

Thank you for your cooperation Mr. Lucowski.

In a few months, I'm delivered a Folgers Coffee size of bone chunks and ashes wrapped ornate container. 

I walk to Willis Avenue Bridge with the fancy container of Slim Williams' ashes and a Buddhist prayer book in hand. 

Reading a short Buddhist prayer for the dead—

Through your blessing, grace, and guidance, through the power of the light that streams from you:

May all your negative karma, destructive emotions, obscurations, and blockages be purified and removed.

Then casting Slim’s ashes into the Harlem River, watching them captured in the waft of the air, going anywhere.

I  feel guilt-ridden because Slim’s send-off was shallow and heartbreaking— with the importance of a speck of dust on a sidewalk in the city. 

When I grew up my parents weren't around. My dad was a traveling salesman who drove a pickup truck with a metal cargo box on the back, driving from Pennsylvania to Maine, selling sexy garments to exotic apparel shops.

My mom was a drunk who loved black men, in Harlem bars from dawn till dusk.

I was raised by my nanny, Nil, she was 20 and I was 10.

I loved Nil as a woman, and she loved me as a younger brother.

On weekends we’d go to the aquarium, the zoo, and to Mary’s Pancake House to eat, I liked the king-sized German cakes and she liked Buckwheat cakes. 

After pancakes, we’d go to Central Park Zoo— Nil loved the birdhouse and I loved petting the baby lions and tigers. I wanted to take a baby lion to the apartment, but when the tiger grew up it'd become Siegfried & Roy size job.

Nil loved the Birds of Paradise, their colorful sapphire wing spans, and the exotic tropical plants in their cages, growing in the winter, Anthuriums, and Jasmine.

One night late my ma, Betty, came home drunk, having had a nervous breakdown. Nil called 911 and the medics showed strapping my mother into a straight jacket. She was 46 and spent the rest of her life in various mental institutions. I never saw her again, but she had psycho genes that luckily bypassed me. 

As for my old man, he was good for a check every month to cover— rent, food, clothes, and money for Nil to buy extras.  He would send the check to her account.

My dad's name was Fred Lucowski, he visited six or so times a year. I didn’t have a male influence in my life and should have been gay, but wasn't.

I was a good student in 5th Grade, tops in my class in math, science, and English, 

But I was no athlete, I was uncoordinated, and my classmates called me a spaz. The gods bless us with certain talents.

Saturday night Nil and I were bored shitless so we went out. She was a 20-year-old Swedish beauty with natural blond hair, guys eyeballed her.

Neither of us drove, so we’d walk the streets of Manhattan at night, beautifully naive, open to everything, and on the run.

Nil goes to the liquor store and buys a bottle of Night Train Express, keeping it wrapped in a paper bag. We passed the booze back and forth like two Bowery bums, taking pulls as we walked, the low-down wine got me outstandingly high because I was only 10.

In the Meatpacking District, we went to a working man’s bar called Axels, looking like million other blue-collar joints— with a wooden bar and stools, and a hard brown tile floor. 

At the bar, there was a level of top-shelve booze, and bottles of rail booze in the speed rack for easy access. 

On the back bar, there was an old NCR cash register, and gallon jars of pigs' feet, hot dogs, and hardboiled eggs all pickled.

We walk into Axels and sat at an empty table, surrounded by Columbia and NYU students dressed like truck drivers and stevedores wearing jeans and safety boots— college kids slumming it for the weekend, Sinclair Lewis and Nelson Lichtenstein readers.

Merl haggard’s song Misery and Gin blares from a large speaker hung on a thick chain from the ceiling. 

Nil walks to the bar, the guys really looked her over.

She orders 2 vodka and orange juices.

Vodka and orange juice is the type of drink newbies drink because the orange juice taste overpowers vodka which is tasteless.

The bartender, an older man wearing a checkered shirt who has bushy eyebrows pours the drinks, looking at Henry, knowing the kid is underage, not caring because New Yorkers don’t give a shit about small things.

Coming from nowhere the bartender hacks snot open-mouthed, splashing Nil in the face. Unnerved, she takes a hanky from her purse, wipes herself, yells at the bartender,

COVER YOUR MOUTH NEXT TIME YOU HAWK ON SOMEONE, ASSHOLE. 

And the fucking bartender has the nerve to say,

sit on my face and you can drink free.

Nil lets both the drinks fly on the bartender, walking to me and saying, 

Let’s catch a taxi and go home, Henry.