Harv and I, it was just an ordinary
Sunday, you know the kind, ordinary decent Sunday, sleepy and long, though the
guts of it a little twisted, some knowledge in the back of your mind you just
can’t quite tickle. Not to stop certain people from trying, of course, but
people’ll do anything for a high, right? Anyway, Harv and I, ordinary Sunday.
Or was it Danielle? Doesn’t matter probably. Well, either way, we were walking
along by the edge of the river, watching the trash churn over and over itself,
pulled in little gravitational whorls by the water as it wanders over the
carcasses of bicycles and dogs just below the surface, when Jonathon walked up
to us. We asked him if he got it, and he said nah, sorry guys, the market’s,
like, all dried up this month, some guy down state got hit hard. Like, guns
drawn, riot shields, tear gas grenades, bullet to the head (his own, on the floor
of his bathroom, it turned out, when he heard knocking at his door. Turned
out to be a couple mormons, proselytizing. Nevermore?) hit hard.
But then he says he has something
new, never even heard of it before. We ask him what it is, and he shrugs, pulls
his jacket up his shoulders a little bit. Pretty sure he’s trying to kick
something or another. Oxycontin? Hydrocodone? Just straight up heroin? Probably
doesn’t matter. With Jonathon it’s always an opiate. Razor edges.
And then he says it ain’t got a name
yet, you know how this shit is. And Harv/Danielle looks at me, wary, eyebrows
arched slightly, eyes a little wider than normal, mouth all twisted up. And
then I turn back to Jonathon and ask him what it does, and he says it’s, like,
a psychedelic. Probably. He thinks.
And you know, we probably should
have walked away there. We aren’t junkies. LSD isn’t addictive, no psychedelic
is. I mean, you can get addicted to the experience, sure. I know people who
are. But we aren’t. I know all this. But I still ask Jonathon how much, and he
says a hundred fifty, and I think, that’s not bad for something new, I’ve spent
a lot more for “something new”. So I say sure, and Harv/Danielle looks at me
again.
The sky looks like motor oil. Can
taste the smog. Can’t really see across the river. That might just have been
fog though. Or maybe we were by the ocean. Memory is all messed up in my head.
But I know the sky looks like motor oil, and the clouds flow like satin,
creeping down bare flesh, and the sun casts a weird ghostly pallor that makes
the light flatten out real long and harsh, and reminds me of the look that
daytime soaps get. Jonathon turns away from us to get something out of his bag,
and when he does I get a glimpse of his face and I can’t tell if he’s smiling
or frowning.
He hands it to us, and it’s just two
blank squares of paper in a dirty plastic bag. I look up at him as I hand him
the money. He looks away. I see something get turned up in amongst the froth,
and it looks like it had meant a lot to someone once. Somewhere nearby a train
trundles down its track, and the sound of its horn pierces the muggy calm.
So then Jonathon goes on his way,
and so do we. Walking through the streets, everyone studies their shoes, and a
taxi drives by too fast, hitting a puddle and splashing the gutter refuse,
thick and inky, all over my torn jeans. Harv/Danielle looks at the jeans, then
up at me, then back down at their shoes.
We walk past a homeless woman, and
she looks up at us, and she has the same eyes that a lamb gets when it’s about
to get slaughtered. Her hair is thick like weeds by the edge of the river, and
her skin is thick with ashen dirt, looks like the sky. She cradles something in
her arms the shape of a child, but I can’t see its face, just a bundle of
tattered rags.
From somewhere a group of kids come
running. Don’t know where they ever come from. More every day. Packs. Ferrel.
Wild eyed. Never seem to see the rest of us, just push their way through like
they’re the only beasts left on a dying earth. Anyway, the kids reach us, and
one of them pushes in between me and the homeless woman and knocks over the
battered old can where she’s trying to collect enough for dinner. The coins all
start running and the woman runs after them. A few land with a plop the wrong
tone in the gutter’s ooze, and she doesn’t even pause as she plunges her hand
into them nether regions between street and sidewalk, and she puts her arm deeper
and deeper and I briefly wonder about what happened to that infrastructure
revitalization. She fishes around down there, and her hand comes back up the
color of shit, and she looks like she’s going to break in half, so I give her a
few bucks out of my wallet. Don’t like watching strangers cry.
On the way back to my place, we stop
in a little old diner, the sign half smothered, even as the walls are still
chrome and the lights inside seem warm and friendly, calling to me out of some
place in my past I feel very deeply but, for some reason, can’t quite lay my
eyes on. Our waitress recognizes us and smiles (it must have been Danielle - I
don’t think I ever went to the diner with Harv) and we both order our usual.
It’s quiet. A guy in an expensive suit sits at the counter eating a hamburger
and sipping a coke. A homeless man sits in a booth in the corner with his dog
under the table. Illegal, of course, but the owner doesn’t really care. Decent
enough sort of guy.
Outside it begins to rain, hard, and the dirt and smog choking the city
begin to run in long streaks. Headlights flash past, searching, and
occasionally the harsh yellow of a taxi is caught up in a splash of water and a
weird miasma of street light and fog, pulling shadows like teeth. Down the block
a neon advertisement warns of coming judgment and promises God in the colors of
a strip club or bowling alley.
I believed in God for a full five
minutes once. But then my roommate interrupted me and I never believed in God
again. Maybe I should go see what the sign is talking about. Maybe my God is
neon.
A woman walks by outside the window
in a long red dress, stuck to her legs by the rain, her protracted auburn hair
twisted like a rat’s tail about her face, her eyes scarlet. The chef sees this
from behind the counter and she runs out with an umbrella. The woman turns to
her and they exchange the briefest bursts of smiles, like flashbulbs on a
bloody street, and this smallest gesture gives me this unbearable feeling of
warmth somewhere deep inside me. Then the chef runs back in, and now her short
blonde hair is stuck to her too, but she’s smiling a little bit. Our waitress
smiles at her. I smile at Danielle. Danielle is looking at her food and didn’t
see any of it.
One afternoon in December I remember
walking along the river, in a light like the whole world had collectively just
dropped, air the sound of standing under a power line, light the smell of a
dingy place thrown away in a back pocket of the world. And I remember watching
them pull a body out of the water, and I remember looking at her face,
crystalline and porous at once, socked in tight by months disappeared in
amongst mud and reeds and old bicycles and human waste, a pallor of fresh
fallen snow, her hands shriveled up like an old woman, balled into collapsing
fists, and spiderwebs of something grown up her arms like frost on a window in
the midst of a dead winter. She was beautiful once. Scared once. Alone once. In
love once. High once, more than once. Always high more than once, if they pull
them out of the river.
Why is it always raining in this city? And in the rain why do the
streets expel big deep breaths of noxious steam that makes every woman look
beautiful and every man look dangerous?
I held her, our bodies naked against each other like we were some
trickling of stars out amongst the darkest edges of our universe, far enough
out that time itself begins to dilate, and we were turning into one grand
consciousness, and in some deeply weird and Cronenbergian way our flesh was
fusing into one, the little patch of warmth and light on a dark night, and I
didn’t feel alone. Then she left and I never saw her again.
But hey, so it goes, right?
As we walk out of the diner, Danielle turns her eyes up to me and I
notice a little fleck of something gold in them, a raft lost at sea, storm
clouds mounting on the horizon, sleepless. She tells me she doesn’t think she
really wants to get high today, not with whatever we scored. I tell her sure
and she says she has to go and I say okay. I watch her walk away down the
street, men and women with heavy coats tied up about their shoulders and cheeks
and walking in these little zagging running steps. The rain is coming down
harder. I brush a drop out of my eye, as, all around me, the rain turns to
tears.
But hey, so it goes, right?
In the windows of a skyscraper, I see streetlights reflect like memories
out of time, pieces of a broken mirror, old cocaine, flesh occasionally casting
up like spotlights, and her saying... but the windows of skyscrapers and the
rain and the streetlights and an old man totters down the road, swaying like a
kid coming out of a cheap nightclub (at the thought I feel something ancient
welling up in me), a space forming around him, an airbag against his scent. I
catch a glance of it and I stand transported, reminded of someone I once knew.
The old man smiles at me toothless and upside down.
I remember playing in the surf at night, running just for the sake of
it, the stars drowning in the sea, the E just kicking in, Harv taking off all
his clothes and throwing them into the water, and us just looking at him and
laughing. Later we will make a campfire and sit around it, Harv’s clothes long
gone, the rest of us trying to dry off, huddled close, me holding her, him
holding him, us all forging together, drifting into one great organism,
cleaving a path into time, rushing for the future. Three of us OD’d in the next
year. Then I left her on some great stretch of brilliance learned into me on
shrooms. Harv’s still around, somewhere, at least until he’s the next body
dredged up face crystalline.
Eventually I make it back to my apartment building, push open the front
door, look down a stretched corridor, half the bulbs burned out, looking down
dead over spattered concrete, freckled walls, doors of wood scarred like my
first lover’s wrists. I remember kissing her scars like roses.
I wander in a daze up the stairs, pushing aside used needles with my
feet, don’t like the sound they make when you step on them, blocking my nose
against the smell of decay, as though the meat of the walls is coming apart
slowly, some alien disease blowing out the cells all cancer like.
When I reach my door I unlock it
quickly and open it slowly, looking around for someone I forgot was crashing
who is now sketching out. It’s happened far more often than I care to admit.
This time rather than a half naked junkie running through the just-open door,
out slips a cat like steam.. I briefly consider where it came from, but decide
I don’t care. I step inside, still bracing slightly for someone left behind.
A few years ago a friend whose name
I’ve forgotten OD’d on my couch when I was out. When I got back and found him
there, I dragged him out into the hallway for a neighbor to find. Ms. Bradise,
I’m still very sorry you had to find Jimmy dead, nude, and rat eaten on the
landing at 1am. I still also have no idea how he possibly could have gotten
there.
His veins looked like balloons three
days after a party.
His eyes claimed a rightful place on
the mantlepiece of my soul, next to dead lovers and lovers best to think of as
dead, my father burning alive in a car crash as all I could do was scream, and
my sitting on a frozen lakeside in snow four inches thick, more coming down, my
breaths showing like pubic hair, pondering the potentiality of my return to
that party with the coke coming out and the girl I thought I loved about to
leave with another guy and I think somehow that was my turning point in life,
the last time I could have maybe been okay, if I’d just made my decisions
differently, if I’d just followed the edge of the lake to the road, even as the
snow grew thicker, and the road south, away from the city, find the little
hamlet I remember spending Christmas in before my dad died, and maybe opening a
little bookshop there with what was left of my inheritance, and going sober
(just booze then, but, you know, that’s how it starts) and maybe just living.
But instead I went back into the party and she indeed left with the guy and I
took some E, then I snorted some coke for the first time and not long after I’d
drop acid for the first time and the rest, is, as they say, history.
My apartment is the city in
synecdoche, a pastiche of the ugly and the beautiful, scar tissue worn on the
face of an angel of marble. As soon as I’m through the door, I step on a used
needle and swear. House guests, god knows whent. I wander about my apartment
kind of floating, peering about for further signs of half life, smelling hard
for urine (best way to get kicked out of my apartment - pee on my furniture). I
step into the bathroom and turn on the light, which glows a dull hospital
green. In the mirror I see my face. In my face I don’t see me.
Once I’m certain that the only forgotten house guest was feline, I
collapse onto my couch, the stuffing oozing out like blood, mottled stains
actually blood, and I feel a lump under the cushions, reach down to extricate
it, and come back with a pair of clean, white, mens underwear. I throw them
across the room vaguely in the direction of the trash. Then I take the plastic
bag from my pocket. Then I look at the two tabs and consider the infinite
potentiality of the unknown. Then I remember how scared I was the first time I
took LSD. Then I briefly consider dosage, decide I don’t care, and put both
tabs on my tongue at once. This is, as an English junkie once told me, entirely
not cricket.
And then I wait. And nothing
happens. You never really know how these things are going to come on -
sometimes the walls start crying thirty minutes after the tab hits your tongue.
Sometimes two hours later you find yourself thinking it’s a bust, and you find
yourself all two dimensional and you forget which way is up, or, for that
matter, the entire concept of gravity. Really can’t know.
After four hours though, with no
effects, it occurs to me I might be out $150.
And that’s when this sensation
rushes through my head, tidal and bodily and just a bit squishy. Not from the
drug, that’s not what I mean. Something deeper, stranger, realer, if you think
that way. A desire, a burning passionate desire to escape this couch, this
apartment, this city. And then the counter reaction just as strong that this
place will be my tomb. So I sit here like that for a stretch, my mind in this
helical spiral. I really wish I could’ve gotten acid. None of the rest of this
would have happened.
And that’s when it occurs to me, the
natural point my last half decade has been building up to, that the city has me
decaying down to. And that’s when I text my guy. And I am reminded of a phrase
that has stuck with me for years, something out of an old TV show - “liquor
before beer, don’t do heroin.” I always loved its causal efficiency. And my guy
gets back to me faster than any dealer ever should and we agree on our usual
spot out on a bridge near the edge of an industrial estate.
And then I walk out my door, locking
it behind me. And then I cross the stretched corridor. And then I drift out
into the street.
It has begun to snow, and the city
has gone dead, shop windows shuttered, pedestrians seemingly invisible, what
few left clutching to themselves like lovers, long jackets brimming up in the
wind, snow drawn about in plumeing whorls. I watch a bus run a red (it turned
pink with snow built up - how long was I inside?), and I watch the travellers,
eyes tired and bloodshot, like ghosts, the city forgetting itself, time running
through a sieve, a man in an expensive suit slipping on a patch of ice and
ending up sliding on one foot, his arms up above him, a ballerina going in for
a pirouette, his attache case flying open and spewing papers about the street,
they lost immediately to the snows. Then the businessman reaches the edge of
the sidewalk and slides off into a snow bank, where he falls and lands with a
shower of sparks the colour of ivory. After a moment he stands, laughing,
covered in snow.
I get into a cab - too far to walk,
and I fall asleep for a bit.
And then on that bridge, it
cushioned from the world in the snow, the river itself now frozen too, we
exchange what needs to be exchanged, and my guy asks me if I’m sure, and I say,
yeah, I am.
And then the rest doesn’t really matter
much. Heroin is heroin, a junkie is a junkie, we’ve all seen the movies. And
then a few years down, a friend casts me out naked on his stairwell. And some
old lady finds my corpse. And the cop looks at my broken body without pity,
just a dull pang for someone he lost once. And the coroner says it was a shame.
And that’s it.
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