TWO TWENTIESThe Narrator's joke:
and we're having such a good time
what's another twenty dollars [HDaD]
clearly shows that Dwight demanded $20; but there are still questions about what exactly this means. What value did $20 represent? Was it the entire price that Dwight demanded, or is "another twenty" the remaining amount that the Narrator couldn't come up with after having already paid a part of the price? How much money --- none at all? or just not enough? --- did the Narrator have on his person?
We've got enough information to piece together an answer, so let's review what we know.
***We're given not one, but two portraits of Juanita/Katrina conducting business in the bathroom stall with a multi-tier pricing scheme. The first appears in 4Dix:
katrina got a little bit religious again
she said lord grant me twenty, lord grant me ten
because i can get by with ten if i can get a little bit from my friends
walked into the bathroom and found the 4 horsemen
wagering and arguing over which one gets to do you in [4Dix]
Here, she starts by asking her drug dealer "savior" ("lord") to pay her $20; but she quickly backs off to $10,
[*1] saying that she can get by with $10, even though it's not enough, if her friends in the gang will just be generous enough to throw in, quote, "a little bit," unquote (see
A LITTLE BIT above), to make up the difference.
The second is in TCMamG, where the first verse's list of the sexual "arts" [TCMamG] wraps up with a description of her offering her services in a slightly less desperate register:
she's perched atop the pillow in her booth
she says it's 20 if i'm supposed to tell the truth
and for 40 then i'll wipe down all your wounds with scotch and soda [TCMamG]
Here $20 is the minimum, the entry-level price for which she'll do the basic job without any flattering feedback; but for $40, she'll give you the whole works, like you're Jesus himself. This suggests that $40 is the full amount she's looking for; but $20 is still an amount she can do something with.
***The portrait of the LP "vision"/"fever dream" in Brokerdealer's If Not For Hipster Pictures includes the following sketch:
it was shady strangers comin crawlin from the wreckage
screamin i got what you need i got what you need
it was the shady shady strangers comin crawlin from the wreckage
screamin i got what you need you got forty bucks for me [INFHP]
In a vacuum, "i got what you need you got forty bucks for me" might be understood either as the cry of a dealer offering drugs, or as the cry of an addicted kid offering sex, and in fact Craig might have engineered the line to work ambiguously for both.
But the note of desperation, like Katrina's in 4Dix, indicates that it's the kids offering their services. The emphasis on "strangers," too, points to the addicts' alien souls, like alien Katrina in Juanita's body.
So that's another data point suggesting that $40 is the principal amount being aimed at.
***Here the ONDCP document comes to our aid, with the following definition (
ondcp):
Breakdown − $40 of crack cocaine that can be broken down into $20 packages
We recognize the term as one prominently appropriated by Craig:
okay i guess i'll pick it up right after the breakdown
she walks out of the crowd, her vision's kinda cloudy [TLaDiLBI]
Here both "breakdown" and "cloudy" ("cloud"=crack, see
THE FOAM and
LISTED above) are being used *both* in a conventional sense, *and* as drug slang. We'll come back to the literal events of this TLaDiLBI scene later; for now it's enough to recognize that this is Katrina, stumbling once more out of the "crowd" from whom she's just received a dose.
The fact that the ONDCP definitions date originally from the 90's gives us confidence that the quoted prices are relevant to the LP world. Like the crack packaging described in the document, the LP meth dealers sold their wares in "breakdown" packaging: $40 dollars for a full dose, $20 for a half-dose.
Compare (understanding the innuendo of "finger"=dick) the allusion to a breakdown in Hanover Camera:
The manager asked if we'd break off a little package
The singer put his finger in my mouth [HCamera]
So the kids in TCMamG and INFHP ask for $40 because that's the price of a full dose. But when they're desperate, and they're frequently desperate, they'll take $20 so they can buy a half dose.
And they'll even take $10, if there's hope that they'll still be able to make a deal for the difference.
***Juanita's willingness to provide services for $20 [TCMamG, 4Dix] is what's alluded to in "Space Humpin $19.99" (along with a reference to the Prince/1999 metaphor, but we'll get to that a little later).
***Before we come back to the implications for Party Zero, let's have a look at a completely different account: namely, the financial discussions detailed in Eureka.
She had sixty eight bucks. She said she only had ten.
Asset management. Checking all the balances.
...
He went through her purse
And he let her keep ten [Eureka]
The "asset management" that's going on here includes cash, but not only cash.
"Sixty-eight" is slang (see, with stronger than usual attestation,
urbandictionary) for a bj, the sense being 'sixty nine, but the guy owes her one'. The real asset that the girl in Eureka has in her possession, along with the $10 that isn't enough to pay for anything without the help of a little bit from her "friends," is the offer of a blowjob.
And in the end, that's what was transacted: she blew the guy, he gave her the drugs she wanted. In this case, he let her keep her $10, but that was an act of generosity, and he only did it after he verified that it was really her last $10.
***The pattern, then, is that $10 isn't enough even for half a dose; but if you have $10, you can throw another "asset" in the offer to bring it up to par.
We see this, for example, in the solo song Balcony:
I'll put your stuff out on the driveway
You can get it when you walk back through the white light
...
It costs ten dollars for a taxi. It costs a whole lot more to fall in love [Balcony]
That "walk back through the white light" recalls Jenny "creepin back to the east end/ shot through with the sunlight" [NN, ILtL];
[*2] "ten dollars for a taxi," then, alludes to an arrangement like Dwight's taxi, in which Jenny tops off the $10 on her end of a drug bargain with a backseat fuck [NN, ILtL].
***The "covenant" in Heavy Covenant refers to this same shortfall-covering bargain between the dealer and the "powerless" addict:
[*3] That's a pretty heavy covenant
To make with someone powerless
He said I'll ask about that other stuff
If you're still prepared to pay for it
...
It's a pretty heavy covenant
In the taxi to the airport
...
Then I palmed him almost forty bucks
Then I asked about the other stuff [HCovenant]
The powerless person in the first verse quoted above (as opposed to "I" later, quoted for the price detail) is a girl asking the dealer to get her drugs ("that other stuff"; for the fact that it's a girl, see the reference to the taxi ride and the comparison to Mary's "you know I'm down to pay for it" [BCrosses]). She's reduced to offering the dealer sex, because while she needs a full dose, she can't come up with $40, only "almost" $40.
***This repeated emphasis on $10 plus "a whole lot more" [Balcony] as the powerless person's half of a desperate drug bargain is the last piece we're missing for our account of the Party Zero transaction. What happens, then, is this:
After Juanita blows the gangsters in the bathroom stall, Dwight gives her her reward in the form of half a dose (one $20 half of a breakdown) of meth (see
SMASHED HER HAND above. Juanita is a first time meth user, taking it via injection to the neck; Dwight doesn't give her a full dose).
After shooting Juanita up, Dwight puts the plastic bag containing the other $20 half of the breakdown down on the sink so that he can fuck her against the mirror (see
SMASHED HER HAND above). She sees the bag, and when the sex is done, she swipes it (observed by Dwight
[*4]) and leaves the bathroom to go find the Narrator.
Note that what she brings to the Narrator is, literally, "just a little bit" [JBS]; it's just half a dose. But that other half of the dose is also the other half of the apple of Eden [CatCT].
When Dwight finds the bag on the Narrator's person, he demands $20. The Narrator makes his "what's another twenty dollars" joke, but can only produce $10.
So Dwight "took ten bucks and [his] tennis shoes" [YGD], where "tennis shoes" stands in for the "whole lot more" part of the deal ("no shoes and no pants/ And they ... called him Porky Pig" [HM]); in another telling, he "took [his] ten bucks and he went down the street" [CSummer].
[*5]And then the Narrator made up the difference.
***Unexpected confirmation of the exact measure of Juanita's "little bit" comes from the solo song Western Pier:
The girls that live inside my heart
Keep coming up the boulevard
They roll up. They pledge their love
And then they drive you halfway to a breakdown [Western Pier]
We'll discover more reflections of the Lifter Puller story in the lyrics of Western Pier later on (see SHEPARD'S MANSION and CALENDAR: THIRD PASS below). Here, the descriptions of girls who "roll up," like Juanita stumbling over to the Narrator from the bathroom (see
STUMBLING & RESURRECTION above), and "pledge their love," like Juanita giving him the Judas kiss (see
THE KISS above), prepare us to recognize "halfway to a breakdown" as a reference to the half-a-breakdown gift of "a little bit" that she brought with her.
***There are several other details that square with this account.
[*6] The reference to
new york city east side 20's [Rental]
is something that we can now parse in its entirety: "new york city" refers to The City, i.e. the brewery bar (see
THE CITY above); "east side" refers to The East, i.e. the brewery bar (see
THE EAST above); "20's" refer to the two $20 transactions at the turning point of Party Zero.
[*7]***We've already said (see
SHORT BY AN OUNCE above) that the following lines from Blackout Sam
The General made a gesture of contrition.
The law of averages says something's got to give [BSam]
point to the Narrator needing to give something to make up for what Juanita took; but now we see that there's a literal arithmetic average in play here, since the two halves of a $40 breakdown are worth an average of 40/2 = $20. This is, literally, the confrontation from which the Narrator learns that "math is money and money is math" [MiM] (see
SHORT BY AN OUNCE above).
***Finally, this analysis sheds light on both the title and the implicit narrative of 40 Bucks. (I'm not going to reproduce the whole song here, but for most of the lyrics and the Here Goes argument about Jesse attempting to make Charlemagne jealous, see:
heregoes) In short:
- Jesse's partying with gangsters (the "music scene"), and gets roofied ("whole lotta drinks and a little bit of sleight of hand"; "while she slept"; see A LITTLE BIT above).
- When she says "guys, let me cover this," what it means is *not* that she'll shell out dollars with which to pay for their drugs; what it means is that she'll *blow* someone to get the money to pay for their drugs.
- An act of anonymous sex is again indicated with "last night's conquest wasn't all that famous yet" (compare "I only bow down to the jet set/ Fame was so quick, we haven't met yet" [ABlues], and see ORIGINS OF SIGNATURES, DANCING, and THS REVISITED above).
- Charlemagne arrives in time to see her get $40 for blowing one of the gangsters. She uses the $40 to buy a breakdown from Charlemagne, and then gives it to the gangsters with whom she's partying, who are in fact the same suppliers from whom Charlemagne bought his merch in the first place.
- In other words, Jesse is imitating Holly, turning tricks and turning over the cash to Charlemagne, only she's not doing it in expectation of drugs (she's been off the speed since Charlemagne got her cleaned up: see "used to be a speed shooter" [SM] and heregoes), but to put on a show for Charlemagne, to make him fearful that she's *going* to start shooting speed again if he doesn't commit to her and take her away from the Scene.
- So the anonymous gangster who hit her with roofies and got the $40 blowjob, got his money back in the form of $40 worth of drugs --- "and then he left," just like the dealer who "took my ten bucks and he went down the street" [CSummer].
- The expression "two twenties from her dresser" both recalls the 20s of Party Zero, and suggests that her "dress" is where the money came from (compare "she was liftin her skirt just like a three dollar dancer" [Viceburgh]).
[*1] She's willing to bargain because, as Katrina, she's already high, and is "terrified of coming down" [ABlues].
[*2] Balcony takes place at "a party at that high-rise up on Harmon"; several details of the song, including the "high-rise" itself (compare Hamm's stockhouse #4) are reminiscent of Party Zero in the brewery bar. In particular, the lines
I looked up to see the moon and I saw you and him out on the balcony
It was the same thing that you did to me [Balcony]
suggest that the narrator of the song sees his girl blowing the guy out on the balcony, in a way that recalls Juanita blowing the LP Narrator out on the rooftop outside the brewery bar (see
SUCKING OFF EACH OTHER above).
Offline,
muzzleofbees pointed out to me that "Harmon" is the first name of Harmon Killebrew, who is referenced in Bloomington in connection with the "megamall" (on the site of the former Metropolitan Stadium where his record 520-ft home run is memorialized;
wikipedia). This is an excellent catch, and the mall/stadium connection which it introduces (see
NIGHTCLUBS above), adds weight to the shadow of the Nice Nice in the background.
[*3] Note that "powerless" is the epithet of the jonesing addict not only in the literal sense of "helpless," but in the metaphorical sense of "lacking power," i.e. needing speed; compare "Lord grant me the power to stop these hands from shaking" [FFarm], "We were all powered up on some new upper drug" [MN], "power to the people makin money with their mouths" [Manpark], etc.
[*4] The use of the verb "break off" in reference to breakdown drug packaging in Hanover Camera:
The manager asked if we'd break off a little package
The singer put his finger in my mouth [HCamera]
strongly suggests that "someone saw her breaking off" at the end of The Last Time That She Talked To Me:
In the kitchen there were signs that she was slipping
Someone saw her breaking off the tape machine [TLTtSTtM]
refers to Dwight's observation of her theft. The blowjob context isn't hard to see (for "kitchen" see
THE KITCHEN, for "slipping" see
SLIP AND TRIP above); it must be that "tape machine," like "smoke machine" [SdS], "fog machine" [SdS], "cig machine" [MTape], "candy machine" [TCMaMG], "washing machine" [SK], "bank machine" [TLTtSTtM], and "cash machine" [SdS] (see
CASH MACHINE above), is here being substituted for the dealer whose merch she stole.
[*5] We know the Narrator has less than $20 on his person at Party Zero; we have the evidence of YGD and CSummer to suggest that the amount in question is specifically $10. There is one other reference to the money in his pocket when he left home to join the Scene for the first time:
i left with five bucks and i lived for five months like a queen [JBS]
but "five bucks" here is evidently set up in parallel to "five months"; the amount is accurate only insofar as it falls short of $20 (compare Gideon in the parallel THS situation, heading down to the brewery bar for the first time: "went down with like fourteen bucks" [HM]).
Note that we're meant to be (mis)led by "she said i just got back" [JBS] and the other references to Juanita as a "queen" on the same album [DStraps, LE] into imagining that this line is spoken by Juanita, but it's not; it's spoken by the Narrator, whose experience of Party Zero is followed by months of sexual exploitation at the Return Parties ("queen"=male homosexual:
gdict). More on the "five months" later (see CALENDAR: FIRST PASS below).
[*6] There's also one exception that *doesn't* square with it, namely
gave him fifty and he kissed me, spit a little treat between my teeth
i think we're starting to peak [SSC]
Clearly this is an exception, but apart from that there are a couple of possible explanations for it.
The simplest explanation is that "fifty" is used to leverage the force of rhyme within the already tight constraints of an extremely complicated image. (In the same way, despite much clearer evidence than this indicating that Dwight fucked Juanita from behind against the mirror, see
SMASHED HER HAND above, the image here is built to leverage the force of the ATM-as-drug-"dispenser" [TSTux] idea instead; see
CASH MACHINE above.)
Alternatively, Green's Dictionary of Slang records the 1990's-era use of "fifty" to mean the services rendered by a prostitute (
gdict), by way of reference to the price of the sex act itself. This reading could be bolstered by Charlemagne's statement that Holly "left me fifty bucks" [MINTS] when she left turning tricks for him to run off with the "kid from california" [MINTS].
[*7] Compare also "Upper twenties, Seventh Avenue/ Just south of the Garden" [SPUD]: 7th Street [LGI, BBreathing] runs just south of Swede Hollow park in East St. Paul, next to the brewery; "Garden" recalls the framing of the shared 2x$20 breakdown as the apple of the Garden of Eden.