The bread went down. Cole stabbed at the meatloaf so hard that he broke his plastic fork. It didn't matter. He used his spoon, shoveled in a few more bites, began to savor, to taste – prodded by the mnemonic smell of the gravy, to remember.
Polacek's kitchen. A winter day, later afternoon, snow outside. An after-school snack before hockey, Polacek's mom pouring reheated gravy over bread and cold meatloaf.
Polacek. He hadn't thought of him in years, and now he found himself wondering where his old best friend was. Certainly no place like here. He probably had a job someplace, maybe even was married. Polacek with kids? Imagine.
The last year of high school they had stopped being friends over the dope – marijuana, then. Polacek really believing it was the killer weed. Didn't want any part of it. So Cole started hanging with the other guys – Reece, Baugh, Neillsen, Parducci.
Baugh was the best of them. He had even been friends with Polacek before, as Cole had. The good students through grade school, Little League, Boy Scouts. Then, after Cole's dad died, when Cole had been trying to get through that darkness, Baugh turning him on the first time. No doubt he had good intentions – that was who Baugh was – trying to make Cole feel better about life with his sister gone away to college, his dad gone for good. Hey, life isn't easy. People need to laugh, get high, forget themselves. It was an unbelievable bummer his dad dying.
'Marijuana, bfd. Come on, Cole, it's totally harmless. Marijuana never killed anybody.'
Baugh was dead now four years though.
Polacek trying to get him to stop a few times, coming around the house, worried about how much Cole was changing.
Yeah? Well, people change. Cole wasn't hooked on anything. He could stop anytime he wanted. The other guys – Reece, Neillsen, Parducci – his mom kept up with their moms. Last Cole heard, Reece had become a cop back home. He knew Neillsen worked at GM. Parducci was still playing ball, second year in Triple A, might make the bigs.
Telling himself, soaking up his gravy, 'Didn't hook any of them. Didn't hook me either. Not the marijuana.'
Another flash – the last time he saw Polacek. A party at Notre Dame. Cole had dropped out after a semester and his mom sent him up to visit his old friend, subliminal message that maybe he'd see how great Steve was doing and clean his own act up. Subtle as a cherry bomb. But he'd gone. Cole in his own mind nowhere near any kind of junkie. This is recreation, that's all – the only kind he knows anymore, constant doping. But he can quit anytime.
He's shocked at Steve, in a frat now, with his alligator shirt, drinking beer, dancing to Hootie. Just like so unaware, so naive. Whereas Cole that night, he was the king…
There was this girl, somebody somebody. By now he was into cocaine whenever he could get it, dealing a little to cover costs. So he and this girl, they're upstairs in the bathroom. They've got lines laid out and one of the dorks comes in and next thing there's Polacek, angry but calm, laying some trip about him being a guest and abusing their friendship. Cole's got to leave right now! They can't have cocaine in their house. The college could close them down. They could lose their charter.
Cole' s temper out the window – half the blow wasted now, scattered in the commotion. 'Who gives a shit, Steve? About any of this?' Screaming at him.
'Everybody here, Cole. Everybody who's trying to make a life.'
Polacek, the dweeb. Never saw him again, and good damn riddance. The best friend, though, that he'd ever had.
'Hey, Alice! You done? What's a matter? They put too much pepper in that for you?'
23
Ten years ago, when Sharron Pratt had been a city supervisor, she had lobbied to pass an obscure change in the city's law regarding business announcements in the community's newspapers. Previously, if you wanted to file a Fictitious Business Name statement, a Notice of Application to Sell Alcoholic Beverages, a Notice of Foreclosure, or any number of other legal notices, the law required that you publish this information in any newspaper with a paid circulation of at least one hundred and fifty thousand.
Sharron had persuaded the other supervisors that this law unfairly discriminated against the smaller, more 'community-based' newspapers that proliferated all over the city, and which could receive no revenue from this lucrative market. Largely as a result of her efforts, the law was changed to require filing of these notices in any newspaper with a print run of over ten thousand copies, of which the most well-known in the English language was the Daily Democrat.
As a practical matter, this change in the law made a millionaire out of Chad Lacey, the Daily Democrat publisher, a friend and political ally of Sharron Pratt. Suddenly Lacey's community bulletin, distributed for free on racks or as a throw-away on driveways mostly in the Haight-Ashbury district, found itself on the receiving end of almost three hundred thousand dollars per year in city money alone. Lacey could now afford to hire a few well-known guest columnists and to pay several full-time reporters. With the paper's new respectability, distribution went into three more districts in the city – the Sunset, the Richmond, Twin Peaks, and the Democrat became the city's premier free newspaper.
Its print run had grown to twenty-five thousand, and it positioned itself as the voice of the people – the downtrodden, the disenfranchised – the political pals of Lacey and Pratt. Before any papers had been filed in the matter, for example, the Democrat had run a five-thousand word piece on the tragic plight of a powerless and law-abiding citizen named Manny Gait, who'd trusted his landlord, paying advance rent in cash while he'd gone to care for his dying mother for a few months. He returned from this errand of mercy only to find himself evicted from his long-time residence, in flagrant defiance of human decency and the city's rent control laws, by a grasping, crooked and heartless developer named Rich McNeil. They'd run a picture of poor Manny on the front page and he had, indeed, looked very sad and downtrodden, sitting there on his motorcycle.
Now Sharron Pratt stood over her desk and punched numbers on the phone so hard that her whole desk shook. She had the speaker on so her voice would boom slightly on the other end. 'I need to talk to Mr Lacey right now. Yes, a personal matter.' This was their code phrase – Pratt wouldn't call the Democrat under her own name and appear to be giving orders to its publisher. To do so would do fatal damage to the credibility of his objective editorials. She waited impatiently, looking at her watch.
Less than a minute elapsed. 'I'm here,' Lacey said. 'How are you?'
'I'm not well, Chad. Not well at all.'
'What's the matter?'
'The matter? Oh, let's see. Perhaps it's the fact that last week we talked before my speech at the Commonwealth Club. Do you remember that?'
'Sharron-'
'Do you remember telling me you'd make sure this death-penalty decision I announced would get a lot of favorable press, editorial coverage, like that?'
Lacey didn't respond.
Pratt took a breath and softened her tone. 'And yet I notice you have rather loudly stayed silent, while your colleagues over at the Chronicle, particularly Jeff Elliot, have been having a great deal of fun at my expense.' She picked up the receiver, spoke in a still more measured tone. 'I certainly don't mean to tell you how to run your paper, Chad, but I was under the impression that you were in my camp. Have I offended you in some way? If I have, I'm sorry, but I've kind of been waiting for you to step up.'