(Gabriele’s journal – December 6, 1990)
(Nick’s narrative – April 24, 2026)
Red, Matt, had given me a lot to think about.
I hated lending money. Not the dollar and change that I lent, gifted Tito most mornings for coffee or something to eat, but the other — the five or ten bucks I knew was going directly toward buying the fix of drugs someone needed. But it was hard to see that someone, a friend, in pain and desperate. After the obligatory show of reluctance, I usually gave in. Everyone paid me back, eventually. They knew the bank was closed until their debt was paid.
Red never asked to borrow money from me. In fact, he always looked as if he had his finances, his habit, under control. Between his scavenging and theft, he must have had a reliable enough income to support his habit. Made me wonder how much of a habit he really had. The addiction may have been more to the lifestyle than to the drugs. The one thing he borrowed regularly from me was cigarettes.
I didn’t smoke when I first arrived on the Hill. Only after going to jail, where cigarettes are the currency, did I start smoking again. I didn’t kid myself into thinking that I wasn’t addicted, but I did try to transform the habit into ritual. I smoked in the tipi only when sharing that smoke with someone. I never carried a cigarette pack on me, but I would often take a single cigarette from the Winston Eagle pack in the medicine bag, and then walk to one of my two ritual sites. One site was Mister Lee’s “Crazy Wall.” The other was at a child-sized monkey bar shaped like a turtle located in a small unmaintained, unused city playground. I called it Tortuga Park.
I’m not sure what made me so obsessed with finding out about the White Boy gang, or what made me think it was my job to stop the selling of drugs on the Hill, but I was hoping to ask Red about what his friend Miguel had told me. He might be able to fill out the story. I’d wait for Red to come find me for a cigarette, an Eagle Smoke. I didn’t have to wait long. The day after we had played the Name Game, he called in from outside the tipi door, “Hey, Nick, you got a smoke?”
I lifted the door flap, and he stepped in, taking the same wood stump seat as before. I prepared the Eagle Smoke ritual without being asked. We were both quiet until the strike-anywhere match had lit each cigarette.
“You know how we were talking about names. Matt, Chief, Red and whatever, right? I was thinking. I don’t know, do you know, Ace’s real name? Or Coco’s? “
Red shrugged his shoulders.
“But Indian Jim. His real name must be Jim, right?”
Red gave a fake laugh, then added, “We all have more than one “real name.” None of us carry ID’s. If the cops catch you thieving, you don’t want them to be able to identify you. You can give them a believable fake name. That’s a crime, too, but you don’t get busted on that unless they think you’re lying. If they run your fingerprints, you’re fucked.”
“But the cops around here know who you are, right?”
“Yeah, if I’m going into the 5th Precinct, somebody’s going to know me. And Frick and Frack are running through there all the time. The assholes know I’m called Red, but they always ‘Hi, Matthew’ me. But they don’t want me busted. I’m almost their employee. Two different times they rolled up on me on the street in their Fury, robbing me of the security cameras when I was taking them to the fence.”
“Tito told me that Frick and Frack sell to the same fence that you guys do.”
“I don’t know. We got a couple different ones. Depends on the merchandise. Tito was probably talking about the clubhouse on Mott Street. We just found out that it’s Gotti’s place. The Mafia! We’ve been arguing over the price we get on stolen shit with stone cold killers!”
“Your friend Miguel, Mickey D, said the Italians had put Coco up here. Did he mean those guys?”
“I don’t know. Miguel probably doesn’t really know either, although I don’t know what he’s doing, what he’s connected to now. Well, no, he’s connected to nothing now. That scar on his neck means that he fucked up bigtime.”
“What do you think he did?”
“I don’t know, something stupid. The end story in a long line of being stupid. We were running partners a couple years ago. We lived in a squat together on Rivington. He’s a good guy, but he made a stupid choice, and that was the beginning of the end.” He started to say more but stopped. He held his cigarette up and blew the ash off the tip. He didn’t immediately take a drag. He stared at the tip as if it would reveal the answer to some mystery. Finally, he took a drag, blew out the smoke and continued.
“He started selling out of our place. His name, Mickey D, that’s his drug dealing name. He made it up. He had spray painted the McDonald’s golden arches on the sidewalk outside our squat.”
“You were living there? Were you selling too?”
“No, I’m not stupid. That’s not a life. That usually means you’re so addicted you’re willing to stay locked up somewhere, even in a little hut, like Coco is. But that’s the strange thing with Miguel, he wasn’t that hooked on drugs. He was using even less than me at the time. He was getting high on being a dealer. The place got crazy. He started letting people shoot up and nod out there. Not a place to live anymore. I got out. I got out of everything. I got into a program and out of the life for a while. Moved back to Jersey to my mother’s place.”
“Became Matt again. I mean Matthew.”
Red laughed. “Yeah, for a long six months or so. I never got a job. It gets very boring. I started coming into the city once or twice a week to get a hit. Then, you know how it goes.”
“Did you meet up with Miguel again?”
“No. When I went back to the street, Miguel was deep into the game. He was running drugs for people. The junk had gotten purer. New users were smoking it instead of shooting up. For a while there were dope baggies with a stamp of the golden arches and the brand name. Mickey D. Miguel must have thought he was living the legend of himself. Now he needs to hide – with that scar that’s with him for life. Horrible.”
“What do you think happened?”
“He probably tried to walk away from a crew you can’t walk away from.”
“The White Boy gang. That’s who he said put Coco up here. The Italians.”
Red looked distressed by what I said. He went to take a drag on his cigarette but instead tossed it into the fire pit. He leaned forward toward me, resting his forearms on his knees, grasping his hands together. His voice was low, almost a whisper.
“I need you to answer me honestly. Who are you working for? Tell me the truth. I don’t want you and Gabriele to get hurt.”
The episodes here in Tipi on the Hill are written contemporaneously with essays in the Meta-memoir section, where the memoir author examines his relationship to the autofiction narrator. The essay related to this episode is The Scroll and the Sideburns.