A Toyota Starlet
Her Brothers and Dave
Another world
Lindsey had two brothers, two and three years younger, who had followed her out to California from their parent’s home in New Jersey a few years earlier. One was in a mental institution in Fremont, maintained on a high, daily dose of Thorazine. We visited him there once. He was overweight and had long hair that looked like it hadn’t washed for a week but he seemed normal enough as we talked to him until the conversation drifted to his pet project: of committing suicide by jumping off a freeway overpass in front of a very specific make and model of a small Japanese car. I think it was a Toyota Starlet. This was so odd a statement I asked him ‘what color’. He said the color didn’t matter. And he died exactly this way about a year later, escaping the place. I don’t know if he got the car right. But he probably did.
Her youngest brother was Ali. He had an old milk truck for a van and did small carpentry jobs for a living but not much of one because he was often broke and sleeping in his van. But that seemed to be all he wanted in life. He also had long hair and looked like a vagrant. I never saw him after that first day when he brought Lindsey to me.
But I did hear mention of him. Here’s one instance: after about six months of being together, Lindsey and I had one of our bigger arguments and she packed two suitcases, called a taxi and moved out to a motel room with two double beds and contacted him (at Jim’s) and invited him to stay there the night. She was always a very loving sister. She had a large wad of cash in her purse, some eight thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, rolled up with a rubber band, and she foolishly showed it to him. She woke up the next morning without any money and he disappeared for a month. He even ransacked her wallet and all her spare change, down to the last dime, so she couldn’t even call me but had to walk two miles dragging her large suitcases along the sidewalks of Oakland to get back to me and once again, beg me to let her in, which once again, seeing her so exhausted and sad on my doorstep, I did.
We found out later that he’d driven his van to Fremont and somehow sprung his brother out of the institute and moved into a derelict hotel in the heart of downtown Oakland, (a slum in those years) called the ‘Roy Rodgers’. They lasted there about a month in a pigpen of swinish glory, spending the whole wad on booze, drugs, fast food and huge stacks of porn magazines. Lindsey told me the whole, lurid story because a few days after they ran out of money they called her up, asking her to get them out of their dilemma, arrears in room rent and starving, which she, ever-loving sister and fool, did.
She told me the room was sordid and stinking horribly from the trash of half-eaten meals two weeks rotten, spread all over the floor. She directed Ali to drive his brother back to Fremont, (the institution) and then gave him a little more money as he dropped her home. This was the H. family, or a little piece of tainted, Central New Jersey translated into California, with more than a strong streak of insanity running through their veins, as if the pollution of the place had poisoned them.
It was about a week after our becoming a couple that Lindsey first introduced me to Dave. That large bag of powder I mentioned twenty-seven pages earlier Lindsey brought to me on the third evening of her moving in. That morning, after coffee, we sat together on the couch and assessed our situation. I had some money. She had none. I told her we had only a few weeks here, as Steve would soon return. I wasn’t working at the time and didn’t really want to. I only wished to live with her in some new place and so did she. She told me she had one friend who would front us some speed and was desperate for cash. He was in Alameda. I told her I had a friend who could move any amount at the warehouse within days, probably hours. So I gave her taxi fare and three hundred dollars that afternoon and within two hours she was back.
For that amount he fronted her all he had on hand, well over half an ounce, almost three-quarters, expecting another three hundred when sold. That’s when Diane made her fateful call, asking me to be her boyfriend again as long as no drugs entered our relationship, asking this right as I was looking down at that huge heap of speed dumped on a plate. I immediately said no and hung up. An hour later I made a quick trip to my friend. The next day, after being up all night, (Lindsey in her bra and underwear), pacing the floor together or in bed making love, and long talks about our future, with embraces and kisses and lines lasting till dawn, I went to the warehouse and received much more than the money owed. An eight-ball was two-twenty. At one-eighty, an unheard-of price, the stuff quickly turned into cash and the quality was superior to the best anyone there had tasted in a long time. In one day the cash was delivered. Later that day Lindsey first introduced me to Dave, to pay him off, my money totally recouped, with over three hundred left in my pocket. Even before I met him, money started rolling in.
