Red Devils

Malice was a real wild dude. I brought him to a Halloween party in 1996, about ten months after I transferred schools. The party was being thrown by Jennifer, who had been my girl during my last semester at the private Quaker school. I was still sort of friends with the people from my old school, and this just being about 10 months after I had left the school, I was still sort of considered part of their social group even though I was starting to roll pretty exclusively with the Terminally Ill cats (Malice & Tech.) I rolled up to this Halloween party with them, and I was dressed as Flavor Flav (and this was ten years before Flavor of Love so don’t give me the Gas Face!) The truth is, I didn’t even know costumes were required until I called Jennifer from Malice’s house to tell her we were on our way. It was too late to go shopping for anything so I just took Malice’s clock off the wall, tied a string to it, and grabbed the nearest pair of sunglasses. I was less Flavor Flav and more some wild looking raver kid wearing an antique wall clock around my neck, and some corny 1980′s Ray Ban’s on my face.

I didn’t know this, but these cats had come from a more trife background than me. Malice and his sister Tanya had just moved to NYC from Providence, RI, where they had been into hard drugs, robbing people, etc. whereas I was still relatively sheltered at that point. They were interesting characters and I never got tired of hearing their stories. Malice had been into the rave scene since its infancy and had been to some of the most famous parties ever; parties in hotels, forests and deserts. I was starting to gain some life experience, but Malice’s stories of Ecstasy fueled orgies and Tanya’s stories of robbing crystal meth dealers by luring them into alleys, and having a partner sneak up behind them to smash them over the head with a cinder block totally blew my mind. What was especially crazy to me was that people with such sketchy stories were in reality cool, down to earth people, who were just new to the area and looking for friends. Tech also had a colorful history which consisted of being the only white kid in a Chinese gang, using credit card fraud to steal thousands of dollars worth of collectibles and computer equipment through internet contacts he had with people working in middle eastern banks, racking designer clothes from department stores on a daily basis, and by the time I met him he was already a bit of a celebrity at the Limelight, and this is during the time that the Disco Bloodbath Murder took place.

I was a pothead and I had done mushrooms and acid a handful of times, but I was still relatively inexperienced. My ex girl Jennifer had recently taken up selling drugs, not because she needed the money, she was actually a spoiled rich little blond Barbie doll princess type; she had started selling drugs because she thought it was cool. Anyway, she was bragging to the whole party about her “drug box” where she kept her product and profit, and showing if off, and so on and so forth, not realizing that there was a pack of wolves at her sheep-shindig. Tech took her aside and told her to stop showing off and she laughed, “I trust everyone here” she said dismissively. Malice, Tanya, Tech, and I had all taken Ecstasy that night but I was the only one who was trying it for the first time. The pills were little red joints called Red Devils. Malice, being the over the top lunatic that he was, had taken about 8 hits. Halfway through the party he started looking a little green. “I think I’m gonna puke yo” he said, and stumbled into the private bathroom in Jennifer’s bedroom. He threw up all over the bathroom, getting more on the floor and walls then in the toilet. As he tells the story, he looked around for something with which to clean it up but could only find these fancy embroidered hand towels that had been passed down to Jennifer by her late grandmother. He wiped up as much of the vomit as he could before Jennifer’s family heirloom hand towels were saturated. Not having made much of a dent in the mess, he decided to destroy all evidence and stuff a couple of the hand towels in the top compartment of the toilet, stuff the rest of the hand towels in the toilet itself, flush it several times, and lock the bathroom door from the inside, leaving the toilet overflowing and the door locked. I know this story doesn’t properly illustrate it, but he was a really good guy who just had a penchant for random destruction that was really exacerbated by drug use.

A few minutes after the toilet incident, before the water had started seeping out from under the bathroom door, Malice hung off Jennifer’s 5th floor balcony by his feet. He had wedged his feet in between the bars, and just hung upside down. I later would find out that he would perform some permutation of this stunt almost every time he took ecstasy. One time he hung off the roof of my 14 story apartment building by his fingertips. Another time he climbed so high in an unstable tree that it started to crack and bend under his weight. It was almost like ecstasy brought out the suicidal lunatic in him.

Meanwhile, my first time taking E had started out a little scary. While Malice was running around Jennifer’s apartment causing general havoc, I had started to roll, but not knowing what to expect, and feeling a little overwhelmed by the sensation, my roll was starting on a overly intense, scary tip. For about half an hour I walked around the party telling pretty much anyone who would listen that I felt too fucked up and I was kinda of freaking out. Finally I decided that what I needed was just to relax and get my mind off it. I went into Jennifer’s mom’s room and turned on the TV, and by some stroke of luck, New Jack City was on. In fact I turned on the TV about ten minutes before the scene where Pookie totally bugs out and relapses smoking crack in that room and crying and shit. For some reason I can’t explain, when I saw that scene I started feeling great. Maybe I realized that I didn’t have it that bad after all – I mean at least I wasn’t Pookie. Just as I was starting to feel good a bunch of cute chicks from my old school came into the the room and got into bed with me. They were all asking me how I felt and when i told them how great I felt they all started taking turns giving me massages and hand rubs. Unfortunately, I was interrupted, while my ecstasy was peaking and I was in bed with these 4 girls, by Malice, Tech, and Tanya telling me that we needed to go immediately. In addition to Malice’s destruction of Jennifer’s private bathroom, he had stolen the drug box. They didn’t tell me until we had already left the party. Adding insult to injury, most of the drugs in the box had been sold to Jennifer by Tech a few days earlier. Tech had a strict honor code about stealing, and would only steal from large corporations, but in Malice’s eyes, Jennifer was asking for it by showing off her drug box. Where he came from that was like asking to get robbed. I guess they had reservations about where my loyalties lay, because instead of letting me in on the secret, they waited until we were around the corner to tell me why we had left in such a hurry. They were probably right to worry, because even though the ex girlfriend who they had ripped off had basically cheated on me and callously tossed me aside when I found out, I still wasn’t really into stealing, and wouldn’t have knowingly cut my ties with my old school friends. I was never the type to rob people. I managed to be surrounded by trife characters doing trife things without ever stepping on any toes myself, but not getting the drug box back for Jennifer was probably the closest I ever came. She certainly never talked to me again. [EDITORS NOTE: We've spoken briefly on Facebook since I first wrote this story back in 2005; the incident did not come up] I didn’t intercede on her behalf more because she represented my social past, and Malice and Tech represented my social future, rather than because of any antipathy I might have felt for her. The antipathy just made it easier to do nothing. A morally stronger person probably would have done the right thing and stopped at nothing to get Jennifer’s shit back for her, but I was a teenager; I just wanted to have fun, and ingesting all of Jennifer’s drugs was a lot of fun.

Bugging out on Jennifer's drugs. Malice in the middle.

Malice paid off his drug debts with the large amount of LSD in the box and the four of us split up the Ecstacy. He later dropped the mangled box, which he had pried open with a screwdriver as soon as he got home, into a mailbox. the very next week Jennifer booked malice to spin a party for her school. The whole time she was bitching about her missing stash, but she paid for the gig. She was a shining example of someone who deals drugs for fun and popularity rather than for necessity. I’m sure this made it easier for Malice to rob her, but I doubt it would have been too hard either way; she kind of sucked.