Just Wait and See

by Will Fleming

It was the summer of 1994. I was twenty-one and on the street again. I’d left another residential treatment program in March and had been spending my days chasing nickels of heroin and coke through the streets of Spanish Harlem. One morning, the air thick and soupy, I met Frenchie in Metropolitan Hospital’s methadone line. I wasn’t in the program, but I often lingered there, listening for tips on what spots had the day’s best product. I’d seen him around before—tall and lanky, dark-skinned, a lazy eye coated in a gray film, red worm scars crawling up and down both of his thin arms—stepping off spot lines, pushing around a noisy shopping cart piled high with neighborhood flotsam, or simply leaning against a brick wall in the 106th Street project courtyard, hawking the neighborhood.

He looked me up and down, asked if I was ill. I wasn’t, but I hugged myself and screwed up my face, thinking he might offer some help—a taste of methadone or even a bloody kickback. “Yeah, kind of,” I said.

“Where you from? I been seeing you around.”

“Baltimore,” I said. “I’m new here.”

“They call me Frenchie,” he said, and then turned away.

About a week later I found him again, this time bent into a wheelchair much too small and wearing a sling on one arm. He was parked in front of the Second Avenue McDonald’s, a weathered paper cup in his good hand, a few pennies jingling at the bottom whenever someone walked past.

“What happened to you?” I asked. 

“What?”

“That.” I pointed at the chair. “What happened?”

“Oh, this.” He smiled and lowered his voice. “I found it in the park. Just sitting in the trees.” He rolled closer, flicked his eyes to each side, and giggled. “I been out here all week telling people I was in Vietnam.”

“Nice.” I was sure they’d believed him; Frenchie, like most junkies, looked at least a decade older than he actually was. 

“What you been doing, Balteemore?”

It surprised me that not only did he remember me, he remembered where I was from. “Same old,” I said. “Just trying to get by.”

I excused myself and headed toward a large woman approaching the McDonald’s entrance. “Excuse me, ma’am?” I said, smiling and putting on my best sales face. “I have ten dollars worth of coupons here I can’t use, and I’d be willing to let you have them for eight. That way, you get ten dollars worth of food for eight bucks.”

She studied me hard, glaring down her nose at this skinny, dirty white boy clutching a book of certificates. She pursed her lips. “Kinda coupons?” 

“They’re actually one-dollar gift certificates, but they spend just like cash.”

“How I know they gonna work?” 

“I’ll go in there with you and make sure,” I said. I was careful with my voice, afraid the morning’s desperation would crack through like a bray.

“Why you ain’t using them yourself?”

“Somebody gave them to me,” I said. “And I’m not really hungry. So, you know, I’d rather have the cash. I mean, if you’re just gonna spend your money in there anyway, why not do it with these, right? That way, we both win.”

She sucked her teeth and then asked if she could see them. After inspecting both sides and looking me up and down again, she said, “I’ll give you seven. But you gotta come.”

I pulled open the door and held it for her. “After you, ma’am.” 

I was getting good at these small hustles; they were all I had, my only source of income. Not an hour before, I’d done the same at a Midtown train station: three tokens for a dollar apiece. Now with this, I’d have enough for two nickels to start the day.

Back out on Second Avenue, my hand shoved deep into my pocket and palming my score, I heard, “Wait, Balteemore, hold up for a minute.” Frenchie, still in the chair, rolled himself closer using only baby steps. I noticed then that he also had a sling on his arm. “How you got these coupons?” 

“Homeless drop-in center for street kids.”

“How many they give you?”

“Few a day,” I told him. Truth was, StreetWorks was usually good for twenty dollars worth a day, depending on who was working. Most of the counselors liked me and tended to give me extra subway tokens and certificates when I asked. I was sure they knew what I was up to, but no one seemed to mind. 

“You know, Balteemore, me and you should work together.”

“Oh, yeah? How so?”

“I got some ideas,” he said. “But I need a partner.” 

I’d never been one to roll with a partner, even when I still had friends. My self-destruction was a private affair, and I wanted to keep it that way. Yet I often got lonely out there, especially at night. “What kind of ideas?”

He looked around suspiciously, as though he was sitting on a plan that half of East Harlem would steal if only they could hear it. “First, maybe you could help me out a little?” He wrinkled his face into a pleading, distressed look, just as I’d tried doing to him the first time we met. “Please, Balteemore, I’m sick.”

“You didn’t get your methadone this morning?”

He rubbed a hand over his face and stared at his lap blanket. “Nah. I trade it for crack. It’s gone.”

I didn’t know if he meant the crack or the methadone, but I assumed both. I scratched my head, looked up and down the street, then back at him. I felt a little sorry for the guy; in a world full of bottom-feeding dope fiends who’d allow little to get in the way of their blast, Frenchie seemed like one of the nice ones out here, incapable of inflicting harm on anyone but himself, and it bothered me some to see him suffering. More, I think I wanted a friend. “All right,” I said. “I guess I could hit you with a little something.” 

He made a fist with his one good hand and held it to his chest. “Don’t worry, Balteemore, this plan’s gonna work,” he said.

I started east, toward the river, worried that I was about to feed a stray who wouldn’t leave me alone. But when I looked back, he was still seated in the same place. 

“Well, you coming?”

“I need a push,” he said.

“A push?”

“Yeah, yeah, in the chair.” 

“No, uh-uh. I’m not pushing you all the way over there,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

He held a finger to his lips and looked around. “No, but Balteemore, my arm,” he said, and held up the sling. “And I’m out here all the time. I can’t let these people see me acting like everything’s fine.”

“Seriously?”

“Just over to First.”

I shook my head, grabbed hold of the handles, and pushed. He was surprisingly heavy, and the chair’s errant front wheel kept pulling us left. This was precisely why I’d always insisted on working alone.

Once we’d split a bag and done up our shots in a vacant lot down near the FDR, we shared a cigarette on a threadbare couch that smelled like unwashed feet and decaying teeth.

“Where you from, Frenchie?” 

“French Guiana,” he said.

“That’s in South America, right?” 

“Very beautiful place, but very fucked up, too.”

“Here, too,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. He was looking off into the air, staring at nothing. “All right, Frenchie, tell me this big plan of yours.”

“Oh, right,” he said, and scooted forward to the edge of the couch. “It’s not a lot but maybe enough for us to get by for a while.”

“How?”

“It’ll take some work, Balteemore, but if we do it right, I think we could make a few bucks.”

“How?”

“You’ll have to do a lot of it, though, because you white and they won’t notice you as much. But I help you.”

“With what, Frenchie? What the hell are we talking about here?” 

He fixed his good eye on me. “Flowers, Balteemore.”

“Flowers?”

“Flowers,” he said again.

“What about them?” 

“You know all those fancy buildings along Park and Fifth? Well, they all have these flower beds outside, all along the sidewalk. All we have to do is go over when it’s dark, pull up the flowers, and then sell them somewhere on the street.” 

“What?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“That’s your big plan? Stealing flowers and selling them on the street?”

“I’m telling you, man, these people down on 86th, they’ll buy them.” 

I started to laugh, something I didn’t do much in those days. I’d long ago crossed that line where this could no longer be called partying; this was my life, and little about it was humorous. But as I pictured the two of us walking around carrying stolen flowers, their roots dangling from our dirty hands like entrails, I couldn’t help myself. 

“Why you laughing? It’ll work, Balteemore. For real.”

“How do you plan on selling them? You’re just gonna hand people a flower with the roots and the dirt and shit hanging off and expect them to pay us?”

He thinned his eyes. “No, Balteemore, I’m telling you, I got it all worked out. I got the idea last week when I find a box of plastic flower cups in the garbage. And look.” He pointed across the lot to a broken-down baby carriage with a missing wheel. “We can use that to carry them around.”

I really laughed then, to the point where I had to hold my sides. I could see it so clearly: the two of us pushing around a decrepit baby stroller full of flowers, wheeling the thing up and down those pristine sidewalks of the Upper East Side. What a sight we’d be, the kind of thing someone would spot from their car window and laugh about for weeks. “You should have seen these two pushing around a baby stroller full of flowers,” I imagined someone saying. “God only knows what they were up to.”

But as ridiculous as it sounded, I also thought it might be sort of fun, an adventure. And since I didn’t have a whole lot else going on, I said, “Fuck it, let’s try.”

Frenchie smiled wide. “This is gonna work, Balteemore. Trust me.” 

As Frenchie had warned, since I was younger and healthier and white, I was in charge of most of the dirty work—scrounging around in the moist beds, pulling the flowers up by their roots, and placing them in neat piles along the dark street, while he kept watch for cops or doormen or what he called “richy white people.” Once I’d robbed a bed of all its flora, deracinating every last flower until all that was left was a level patch of moist soil, Frenchie would creep by with the three-wheeled carriage, pick up the piles, and tuck them safely into the buggy. Then we’d roll up or down the avenue to the next spot and do the same, until the carriage was so full that we both had to hold on just to keep it from tipping over and dumping our goods all over the street.

We started late on a Friday and agreed to work until the sun came up in order to get things set up for the Saturday morning shopping rush. Frenchie managed to score us a dime to share, which kept us well until morning. By the time the first light of day broke through the darkness, we had about forty different flower pots organized into neat little rows in the vacant lot. Everything from morning glories and hollyhocks to African pansies, impatiens, tulips, and marigolds. Frenchie, it turned out, had quite the knack for floral arrangement. He took special pains to make every pot look as though it had come from a real nursery, cleaning the dirt from each leaf and gently brushing the soot from each petal. On some he would even use his spit to make the leaves shine. 

I had to admit, as crazy as it had sounded at first, as we got everything ready and placed the first round of pots into the bottom of the carriage, I started to believe this might actually work, that we might actually make a few bucks.

Once Frenchie had picked up his morning allotment of methadone, which he finally shared with me, we wheeled our wares down to 86th and set up shop on a rusted and wobbly wood-grain card table we’d found in a dumpster.

“You do the talking,” he said. “You’re young and white and the ladies will buy from you. It won’t look so good if I’m sitting there.”

I began to understand something then, the differences between us: Frenchie was at least fifteen years older than I was, he was dark, and he was in far worse physical shape. Until then I hadn’t considered how much easier it had probably been for me out there. In my mind we’d been equals; class and race lines were obliterated when it came to street drugs. But I saw something unsettling in that moment: Frenchie’s future and a bit of my own.

“So you’re basically just the idea man in all this, then?” I said, trying to be funny. 

“C’mon, trust me, Balteemore, this is gonna work.” 

Business was slow at first, and by ten I was kicking myself and cursing Frenchie under my breath. “No one’s going to buy these things,” I said. “What do people want with someone else’s old flowers anyway?” I was growing impatient, worried that this would all be a waste of time, that at the end of the day I’d be no better off than I was now. “I can’t just sit here all day like this,” I said. “It won’t be long before I have to go get something.”

But Frenchie wasn’t concerned. He simply smiled his cool smile and said, almost arrogantly, “Just wait and see, Balteemore. Just wait and see.”

He was right: by early afternoon we’d sold nearly everything. We had fifty-three dollars between us, which was more money than I’d had at one time in months, and several of our customers had even asked if we’d be back with more the next day. Which, of course, we were. A few days later we even had a painted cardboard sign taped to the back of our table. “F&W FLOWERS,” it read.

Our business lasted about ten days, maybe a full two weeks, before both the flowers and the demand for them began to wither and die. We’d used up all the plastic pots, and no one seemed interested in the loose flowers we offered one day at half price. After a day or so with little to nothing in the way of sales, I told Frenchie I was going to have to figure something else out.

“We just need a better plan, Balteemore,” he said. “Something for real money.” 

I’d also grown tired of sitting around all day, manning the table while Frenchie went to cop our stuff or find more flowers. I needed to be in motion, to get back to working my little hustles again. I wasn’t interested in a new plan, one that, unless we were robbing banks, would still yield us only a few dollars a day at best. It was time to move on. “I’ll come find you again,” I said. “But I should go back downtown and take care of some things. Some people down there owe me money.”

“I’ll come with you then,” he said. “I got nothing else to do.” 

I shrugged noncommittally and stared at the street. I felt like I was abandoning a close friend or kicking that old stray back to the curb where I’d found him. But I needed to be alone again, navigating the streets on my own, finding my own means of survival.

“We could pick up cans, Balteemore. That’s what I do sometimes for money.” 

“Sure, yeah. We could do that,” I said. “I’ll come find you later on.”

He shrugged a shoulder and fixed his gaze on the ground. Finally, he nodded, and said, “OK, Balteemore. Maybe I see you again sometime.”

Twice I almost turned back, but I forced myself to keep walking.

Then I was alone again, back to selling off fast food gift certificates, subway tokens, and new needles from the drop-in center. I’d grown used to transience in those days—people came and went, they left town, went into rehab, relapsed, got locked up, disappeared, died—and I’d learned to maintain a safe distance, to keep one foot poised to run at all times, sober or not. It was simply part of that life. But in Frenchie I’d found an unexpected friend, and I missed him. 

I didn’t last long out there alone. In less than a week I was back uptown searching for Frenchie, ready for Plan B or any other ideas he might have. I’d collect cans if that’s what it took.

He was not at any of his usual uptown haunts. I went to the Metropolitan methadone line, the vacant lots, the spots on 110th and 116th, our flower stand site. I even asked a few familiar faces if they’d seen him. No one had. 

Perhaps he’d moved on to a different part of town. Maybe he’d carried himself back into another program, something he talked about from time to time. “I got to stop this shit, Balteemore,” he had told me one day. “I ain’t so young no more. Not like you.” 

Rather than encourage him, I’d said, “I’m not that young, Frenchie.”

He’d smiled and shook his head, as if to tell me I had no idea.

As I searched, I held fast to the idea that he was somewhere safe. I imagined him seated in a brightly lit room of recovering addicts, laughing about the two weeks he spent with this whiteboy from Balteemore, stealing flowers from the richy people on the Upper East Side and selling them back to the very same people.

But I knew better. It was likely something worse—a trip to Rikers, a beat-down for trying to rip off a dealer, an illness, an overdose. This is what happens to us. A few get out but most don’t. I worried Frenchie was wilting away somewhere, alone. 

I could endure only another few weeks, during which time I kept my eyes peeled, hoping each day to spot him folded into that too-small wheelchair clutching his paper cup and giggling. Finally, exhausted, scared of getting locked up, and out of ideas for cash, I dragged my still young bones back downtown and checked into another detox unit, my fifth in less than two years.

I think I always knew I’d make it out eventually. Unlike Frenchie and nearly all the other older fiends I knew, I still had options. I was young, white, and maybe just smart enough to know I wouldn’t last, not without far graver consequences. I’d heard the same story too many times from too many people: one day you wake up and realize you’ve spent your life chasing the high. I didn’t want that. I feared that, sometimes more than death. But it wasn’t until I met Frenchie that I truly understood it.

I never saw him again. He exists only as a memory, one, like so many others, that continues to fade with time and whose accuracy is always suspect. While I can still feel slight pangs of remorse when I recall his expression the day I walked away, mostly I smile when I think of him, thankful for the brief time we spent together.