No Angel Read Free Page A

so much TV, and the flowers die if they’re not watered. I didn’t do a good job of watering them. The balloons deflated. It’s as if these things are brought to give their meager life-forces to your recovery, dying along the way. I was being reanimated by withering roses and expiring helium. Hell, morphine makes you think funny things. I’d developed quite a taste. No doubt, I was in excruciating pain, especially the first week, but after that it was more recreational than essential. My morphine bump was self-administered but limited by a timer—I couldn’t hit myself more than once over a three-hour period. So I secured the switch with some medical tape from my IV and I’d get a narc bump whenever the timer went off, awake or asleep. I had some wild dreams. It was heaven.
    The director of ATF called. He called me his golden boy. I didn’t like being called a boy, I was twenty-six. He said he’d heard good things about me, and that if I played my cards right I could have his job one day. He told me to get well soon and get back on the job, that they needed more guys like me in ATF. I thanked him and hung up.
    At night I’d wake up from time to time. I had a funny feeling. The lights were low, the machines beep-beeped. As I got better, there were fewer and fewer of them in the room. A good sign. The feeling I got was a new one. It was a rush I’d never known. On the football field, I’d been hit a thousand times by hundreds of guys my size or bigger. I’d taken some real kill shots and always tried to get back up right away. It was a pride thing. When they dragged me out of the car, my chest spurting and gurgling, I actually pulled myself into a sitting position. It was the best I could do. The new feeling was this: I couldn’t be stopped. After being shot, I began to feel the first pangs of invincibility. The rush of near-death did something dangerous to me, though I couldn’t see it at the time. I didn’t want to get shot ever again, but I wanted to get as close to that flying bullet as I possibly could. Getting cheered by eighty thousand football fans was an incredible feeling, but it didn’t even register when compared with the rush of walking the line between life and death when no one was watching.
    I’d taken the prescribed amount of painkillers, but that didn’t change the fact that when I left the hospital I felt like a full-blown junkie. I had black circles under my eyes and puked brown tar for a week. No appetite for anything but the smack I couldn’t have. I cleaned up: shakes, sweats, tears, the whole thing.
    My wife at the time wanted to know if that was it for me. She wanted me to get out. I couldn’t blame her. I said this was why I was in it. She asked, “To get shot?” I said, “No, to go toe-to-toe with these guys. I lost this time, but I won’t lose again.” Not long after that, we got divorced.
    The director’s words rang in my ears: I could have his job . His job involved a large slab of wood and an executive-style telephone with lots of buttons and lights. Shoot, in that year, 1987, he probably even had his own computer. It didn’t appeal to me. The bullet put the rush of the streets in me and through me. It guaranteed I’d never direct anything but myself, and convinced me that large desks were for castrated dummies. I thought, Fuck that, I’m gonna be an undercover.

“YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE LOVES OF MY LIFE IS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING AT.”
    AUGUST 2001–JANUARY 2002

    IF ANYTHING, THE shooting proved that my job, and therefore my life, was not glamorous in any way. Pathetically, I’d imagined that undercover life would be like Miami Vice —full of cigarette boats, fast cars, expensive clothes, and perfect tens in bikinis sitting in my lap while I negotiated with drug kingpins. Instead, I confronted toothless strippers and disgruntled Vietnam vets, and did deals with jonesing tweakers in trailer parks while getting shot by a broke-dick ex-con who lived with his