Danny Believes in God
Danny and I led the way on the walk back up the park path. Carrick asked Champ for a cigarette. They stopped, so I did, too. Champ shook the pack until a few butts protruded, and silently offered them to Danny and me. Danny took one. I shook my head. The three of them shared a match that Champ cupped against the wind. Carrick told me later that she was sure I was going to take a cigarette. I had quit smoking, for the last time, about ten years before. I'd told Carrick several times that it was even harder for me to quit using nicotine than alcohol. For the last five years of my addiction, I smoked a pipe, but inhaled. On one of my birthdays, I gathered Carrick and her brother Duncan, who is five years younger, in front of our wood stove and ceremoniously tossed my half-dozen briars in the flames. I probably did entertain the idea of lighting up when Champ extended the pack to me. Maybe there was a tinge of hesitation in my voice that Carrick picked up on. My lungs often jump at a whiff of cigarette smoke. Carrick later told me that she was very relieved I said no.
“I would have lost my respect for you if you'd taken the cigarette,” she said.
Danny and I talked. He asked me if I believed in God. I said not in the sense that most people do, but that I respected many religions and thought that anything that helped people was good. I was spiritual, I said, but not religious. He said he couldn't imagine that there was not a God. He said he was in recovery himself, from drinking and drugging. He was going to meetings again after having slacked off. The streets were tough, he said. A popular kid in the neighborhood had died a few weeks before when he shot up some dope laced with rat poison. Everyone knew the pusher responsible, but he'd disappeared.
“When we find him,” Danny said, “he's dead.”
Danny told me that he'd seen Carrick snorting heroin in East River Park the night before with the girl she was with, whom he had not seen before. I was surprised - not by the fact that she had taken heroin, which I'd already become resigned to, but because it was evident that, like a small village, everybody seemed to know what was happening to everybody else in Losaida, as the neighborhood is known.
Danny said he'd had a tough life himself, but he wasn't complaining. His father had owned several nightclubs and was prosperous, but he got into drugs and lost everything. Danny used to fish with his father, he said, and they loved each other, but he died several years before. His mother drank, he said, and beat him. She had thrown him out of her apartment in the Jacob Riis public housing project, but he was on his way to see if she'd take him back because he couldn't stay with his girlfriend any longer. We shook hands at the corner of Ave. D and East Tenth St. I gave Danny a twenty and wished him luck. He said that if I ever wanted to know more about the neighborhood, just ask for Danny. Everybody knew where to find him.