Garbagehead (experimental novel in progress)
The garbage in the back room of the trailer forms a knee-high pool around the filthy mattress. Only the chest of drawers in the built in to the back wall is free of debris. Bill wades in behind me and I apologize for the garbage half-heartedly.
“Oh it’s OK, it’s been like that every time I’ve been here; it’s always like that.”
He’s right; it has in fact been like that for a long time. I hand him the little bundle of ‘caine tied off in a plastic bag that I picked up down at the projects with his money. He thanks me, and kicks me down a hit, I pull two sterile syringes from a ten pack, from a hundred-box, get a glass of water from the bathroom sink, a spoon from one of the drawers and we silently do our hits. It’s the same, it’s the taste on the tongue, the loudness, the brightness, the craving for more; it’s all routine. We toss the syringes in a large red sharps box on the counter top, he takes what remains of the product and leaves, and I beat the cottons for another taste.
It’s cold out, overcast, west wind from the foothills making the trailer rock back and forth like a boxcar. In fact the thing still has wheels on it, and even though it’s larger than some apartments I’ve lived in, it could in theory be hauled away down the road. I briefly wish I could, but it would in fact take a semi-truck tractor to do it. I don’t own one, and wouldn’t have a clue how to drive the damn thing if I did. It’s time to chill out again and wait for the next client. I feel like total shit and on some level realize that’s what I am; it’s still no big deal, I can handle it. This place however blighted in appearance is my domain. I own the damn thing, and if I could afford to have it towed to some other place I would be completely within my rights if I did. I have no intention of doing so, or selling it anytime soon. There’s really nothing wrong with this location.
Some people don’t get it but it’s a question of preference, of choice, of not actually wanting anything else, except perhaps a one-way ticket to a place where the dope is legal, or at least a lot cheaper. The traffic here can support a 100-700.00 a day habit on most days.
Sometimes I look at a growing track on my left arm, with a red, scorpion-shaped abscess forming on it and wonder how much the damn thing has cost me already, or if I should get the infection treated. I wonder what else the money might have bought, but aside from the hypothetical ticket out I can’t think of anything that I should have spent the money on. The thing is my “gold chain” I decide. I also make a mental note to see a doctor about the abscess sometime soon, or not so soon, or just “eventually.”
Typewriter
In the middle of the 80s I went to school to be a writer. It was what I wanted to be. It was what I believed I was. The year is 1991 and for some reason I decide to try to write again. Someone gives me an obsolete computer that lights up and makes noises when I plug it in. I ask the only computer expert I know; a client. He’s a well-paid worker at an IT firm and a weekend heroin user. He refers to the computer derisively as a “coal burning model” while making a noble attempt to get the operating system up and running. Eventually he gives up, and I give up on the stupid machine too. I give it to my next-door neighbor who wants to try his luck with it, and never hear anything about the damn thing again.
My fortunes improve when an IBM Selectric typewriter is discarded by the same source from which the useless computer came. There is nothing wrong with it except some minor damage to the ball, resulting in just a couple of letters being inoperative. I determine that the ball can be replaced at a cost of thirty dollars, and in spite of how high some of my daily expenses have become, I promptly purchase one. I set the typewriter up next to the front window to start.
“Let’s see, is this thing working now?Asdfghjkl;’qwertyuiop1234567890-=zxcvbnm,./ well all thekeys do seem to be working.”
The problem of not having anything to write about wasn’t something I was thinking about when I bought the ball, and there’s a brief moment of regret at not having spent the 30.00 on some dope instead. I realize that if I sit at the typewriter long enough and keep typing, something will happen.
Ellen
Something happens. There’s a knock on the front door. I look out the window and see Big J., the de facto mayor of the trailer park outside. He has a small, very young, pretty, and drunk woman with him. I let them in. The girl is crying a little and she has a bruise on her face. J. starts telling me what it’s about:
“This is Ellen, her drunk-ass boyfriend just beat her up. Can you look after her tonight?”
I look at her, and at him. He’s huge; she’s maybe about my own size if that big. She seems awfully young, but she doesn’t seem like she’ll be any trouble.
I’m trying to type again; Ellen turns on the radio to a rock station and starts to dance around in the living room. I tell J. “Feel free to come by and check on her if you like.”
“Nah, I trust you,” he says, then leaves.
“Oh well, at least she seems to be cheering up a bit” I‘m thinking, turn my attention back to the typewriter, gaining some ill-defined sense of purpose from its sporadic staccato clicking.
They said they’d have a war on drugs
Seems like the start of a poem. I look back and the teenager is still dancing around the room, but she’s removed her shirt and her bra and her spherical fist-sized breasts with erect nipples are moving with her body, showing the inimitable resilience of youth. “God, I hope she’s 18, oh well, she seems to be having a good time, what the hell, she’s not hurting anything.”
Smile and turn my attention back to the typewriter, another line appearing worm-like out of the sand of the blank paper. Looking down, watching, hit the return key and another line comes, stopping, reading what’s there:
“They said they’d have a war on drugs,
A drug war, easy to ignore,
We responded with shrugs”
Trying to come up with the next line there’s a warm beer and cigarette scent suddenly enveloping the chair, the typewriter and my brain, pale skin above the hips of tight dirty jeans, then there’s a tit in my face.
She stands there for a second. She backs off a little, smirking down at me defiantly; suddenly she knows she has power. I take a deep breath, her smell doesn’t bother me; beer and tobacco evoke the sexual experiences of my late teens, if anything it’s an aphrodisiac effect. The lame line comes out of my mouth next.
“uh….I’m really a whole lot older than you.”
“So? I’m 18. What the fuck is wrong with you anyway? Are you scared? Are you gay?”
She shows me the ID that she says is her real one. It does indeed have her age at 18. Then she shows me the fake one that says she’s 21, and points out to me that she’s been working as a stripper since the age of 16 using that one. The ethical questions that arise in my mind last only a fraction of a second, then I’m up on my feet, and we’re headed for the back room. I somehow manage to find one clean fitted sheet to cover the bare matter and we’re down on it, I’m down on her and it’s happening.
“Oh my God this is actually happening….”
The illusion that my luck has actually improved is present.
“OK, let’s fuck now,” she’s saying, and while I’m puzzling over what angle to approach that task from, she again saves me the trouble of having to think.
“Hands and knees,” she commands, and she promptly takes her position, presenting me with a posterior entry, something I’m always fond of regardless of the orifice involved in the actual act. I quickly put on a condom and enter her vaginally, briefly thankful that it’s late enough in the evening for me to be capable of sex, perhaps even reaching orgasm as the methadone level in my blood drops. Indeed this is what happens, I’m not sure how long it takes, I can’t tell if she likes it or if she’s feeling anything at all, meaning the answer is no on both counts. For my own part I’m briefly tempted to write poems, beg her to move in, “fall in love,” or some other such idiocy…but after all I’m the one who’s over 30 here and she’s barely legal. She was in control. We both fall asleep and I take some pleasure still in the proximity of her very soft and smooth body, the warmth helping me fall into the fitful sleep before the dawn trip to the methadone clinic.
In the morning she’s gone. She doesn’t give a fuck if I write poetry to her, and even though I wouldn’t beat on her I’m a bad fuck and a pathetic old man as far as she’s concerned; of this much I’m certain. The malaise and tiniest stirrings of craving, nowhere near withdrawal drive me into the dawn, eastbound on the ridiculously long round trip into the city to get my dose.
Methadone
My brain rejects the tedium of daily life. Life is defined by my only religion, the one I absolutely have to practice every day, except Sunday. My alcoholic friends have to deal with this too; the closing of the church on Sundays. . Alcoholism even sounds like a religion, like Buddhism, or Catholicism. Alcohol-ism. daily devotions, rituals, if not to a higher power at least for a higher purpose; of course there is no “ism” for my religion/disease. It does involve a daily pilgrimage to a temple, where I take the sacraments and leave, feeling my soul come back into my body, starting about ten minutes later. This shit owns me, body and soul, and if I ever had to do without it for more than a day or two, I think I would burst into flames, (well not literally) and then I’d feel obligated to hang myself.
Thirty minutes later staring south and east through a tinted window of a regional bus into a pink and gray sunrise, I’m relaxed again because I’ll be entirely well for the better part of another day. The feeling will start sometime in the next hour or two, exactly how far into the future that is depends on timing, vagaries of local Denver buses.
You really don’t get it do you? This much is obvious to me watching you from somewhere behind these generic unfiltered fumes, seven and a half minutes after the candy-bar and several dollars after the bus. The black guy next to you asks me if I’m OK and I gasp a little.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be alright.”
I need to nod back at him in confirmation; to let him know that I’m not in fact unfriendly, and in fact I know he’s speaks the truth. Yeah I’ll be alright, not all that long from now, therefore I’m more or less alright at the present moment. Another drag on the generic non-filtered, a pleasant toxicity of burning liquid down into my chest, seemingly filling the hole and backing the hunger off for a few more minutes, flashing back on young Ellen for a second and feeling an entirely pointless mixture of vertigo and crotch-area frustration, banished as quickly back to where it belongs, in the past, sex is a waste of time, and there really is only one point to all of this effort.
One bus is pulling up it’s the right one, 52 down Bannock service to the front door and it’s a good thing because I feel uncomfortably close to that next yawning and drooling stage, remembering that I shot coke the day before, really not that different than on any other day but that’s why my dose wears off faster, shit they warned me about when I started on the methadone.
I’m off the bus and headed for a squat brown 2-story building, entering, approaching one of two windows, handing over five bucks for a small paper cup with a couple of ounces of a pink liquid at the bottom, slam it like a shot of JD and rinse the cup, chase the bitter synthetic cherry syrup with the water getting every last drop in the process. It’s another ten minutes or so before it starts working.
“It’s so peaceful,” it speaks to me quieting something in the back of my brain it was there, then it was missing and now it is back where it should be, warming and spreading like the bitter colors of the summer dawn over east Denver. I consider hitching a ride back and saving my last little handful of change for something unknown, maybe another candy bar and a pack of rolling tobacco, then I decide against it.
There’s always another hustle, in fact “Uh hey, sorry to bother you but I just got back from the methadone clinic in Denver and I really haven’t had anything to eat yet today, spent the last of my change for bus fare, I really hate to ask but…” is usually effective especially when it is a statement of pure fact, then people can simply sense the truth of it. Who in their right mind would make up something like that anyway? It’s not exactly calculated to gain the sympathy of conservatives or for that matter the SUV and health food crowd, liberal fascists that they are who don’t want a methadone clinic anywhere near their town, thinking it will attract junkies; they are in total denial anyway because there’s no need to attract junkies from elsewhere. There are already plenty of them in town.
So it’s back on the 52 bus after digging an empty coffee cup still colored with traces of opaque low-grade coffee diluted with creamer our of the trash, and taking it up to the counter at the hospital McDonalds, demanding a refill, sugar packets and creamers. I always get them; the kids behind the counter are cool, they know what’s up, but what do they care about their slave-driving low-wage employer, who certainly doesn’t seem to care about them all that much; market street station 2.00 with discount and I’m westbound.
Morning nod coming on in transport there’s also the comforting drone of the engine and overall quietude and relative darkness behind the tinted windows, the arrogance insults and violence of this day or perhaps the next still at bay, at a comfortable purely conceptual level, life is getting better as the methadone gets into my system. Something dull and leaden in color and weight beneath the spreading light and warmth in my body, but that’s the actual drug’s nature too; no part of it came from a poppy or anything that grows out of God’s earth. Some fucking Nazis came up with this shit, some say to support the habit of der Fuhrer himself as Germany’s opium supply dwindled, and lines of supply were gradually cut of by enemies on all sides. But here it is and I’m behind it, under it, on it, it’s in me and I’m none the worse for it, Nazi Dope from Hell though it may be.
A song to a strummed guitar inside my head, tuneful and acoustic, some singer with a clear tenor (couldn’t be me) singing lyrics “She wanted straight inner union, she wanted clear inner union…” maybe I’ll figure it out as the nod wears off and I look up from my chest and open slow-to-respond eyelids.
Coming up the Boulder turnpike looking out at one the lower paying “factories,” Neodata where they start people shuffling little pieces of paper around and entering data found on them, all for 6.00 an hour. Wonderful, Meredith had worked there for a while, so did Zeta and most of those deadhead girls, I referred to it as “Neoplasma” when speaking with them and it stuck. The factory drifts by on the right and there’s that one low hill to climb before the City of Boulder and the lower green reaches of the foothills.
Wishing-wanting to be back in Denver with cocaine, in a clean and economical room like at the Broadway Plaza with the satellite dish on the roof, excellent quality on the nice TV Medium size flat screened and at least two hookers from East Colfax, just to party do coke and maybe some junk.
Someday perhaps, like after the big SSI check finally comes, or the one of the little welfare checks that just keep coming once a month. Vitally fantasizing with statistical distortions all around the concretes of product and price; money for me and in the willing mouth grip of a harlot I will spend my frustration and the ten dollars as well; and with nothing left to deliver back to this Egypt we live in, nothing can really be taken away from me either. Mid-Morning around 9:00 and I am actually off the bus at the main terminal, a short walk reveals an yet still-cool and clear, blessed by light gold and green motion in the sound of the unfalling leaves.
Syringe Darts
Back on the IBM in the trailer and trying to finish the stupid poem, I’m yet again taking some comfort in the clicking of the ball against ribbon and paper. There’s no real point to this but it’s something to do, and besides, now I’m a “poet” again.
“Syringe Darts”
“They said they’d have a war on drugs
A drug war, easy to ignore,
We responded with shrugs
A lot of dopers went to jail when they fucked aroun’
Still the price kept going down
They declared a government war on sin
Wrong! ‘cause all along they was the ones
Who was bringing it in
So my friend let me make this plain,
Go and get that cocaine And when you get that eight-ball
Don’t stall just bring it round my place
And we’ll play syringe darts on a poster of Nancy Reagan’s face.”
O…K…and that’s a wrap, a fucking poem what do you know, and it’s getting boring around here, not boring enough to go out and try to hustle someone into going and getting some coke down at the projects, but bad enough to wish someone would show up again with that very idea in mind. I click a couple of letters out on the IBM just to hear the noise, sigh, get up and turn on the radio, walk to the kitchen and start making some oatmeal. At least I can do that much. This one kid from New Mexico who came up here to cook meth in the storage shed couldn’t even make a pot of soup or cereal for himself.
“Uh could you make me some oatmeal?” he’d ask, during his infrequent breaks from the lab. I wanted to give him a load of crap about knowing how to cook dope but not oatmeal, but I figured there was no point to it. Besides, I don’t know how to cook meth; I could learn the recipe I doubt I would have the patience for it. I’d probably end up blowing myself up
Harley Pipes
Trying to remember what day it is, concluding that it must be Friday and that I really need to remember to get up early to go to the clinic tomorrow. It closes at 9:30 AM on Saturdays, and I need to bring one of the little brown glass bottles in with me to get my Sunday take-home dose. Friday means cash-flow and free highs, people being annoying but that’s OK as long as they’re spending.
I’m hearing Harley pipes in the parking lot, growing louder closer, tires on gravel, the engine suddenly cutting off, and the approach of boots over the gravel. I know who it is before he knocks.
I let Jake in and he asks for a clean syringe, and hands me a used one with its cap on. I dispose of it properly in the health-department issued sharps box in the back room, it’s my job, I even got paid for it for a while. The health department provides the syringes and the sharps box, and I do the exchanging with the quirky and suspicious local IV drug users. It’s in the name of public health, HIV prevention. My parents would be proud of me.
Jake has followed me into the back room and he’s right there behind me when I turn to hand him a fresh syringe. He seems a little shaky, which makes sense; he probably hasn’t had his morning hit. He asks permission to do a hit in the house, which I give him, not even demanding the usual “kick one down for the house” surcharge, as I already know that he’s just doing heroin, something I won’t even feel this early in the day with the amount of methadone I have in my system. I just get him a black-bottomed spoon and some fresh water from the bathroom sink. He seems cold, maybe from the Harley-ride down from his place in the foothills, protected only by a light leather jacket, but more likely it’s just withdrawal setting in that’s chilled him. He’s a little too tall to be in here, and even though his head comes short of the ceiling, he instinctively stoops as if he’s going to bang his head if he stands up straight.
“Fuck….holy shit, holy shit,” he keeps repeating as he cooks his little hit of tar down, draws it up, injects it. He then breathes a sigh of relief, smiles and leaves. I hear him kick-start the bike and putt off over the gravel, the tone of the engine indicating a slow and relaxed acceleration. He must be feeling better now.
You Don’t Get It
I’m pretty sure you still just don’t get it. There are only two things you need to know about me.
1. I don’t care if I die, as long as I can get a good hit in the process of doing so.
2. I care even less if you die.
I’m sure that I don’t appear to be that evil all of the time, it’s not like I wish a painful death upon you, I really don’t want you to get a case of full-blown AIDS, but why should it bother me if you OD; that’s probably painless, maybe even pleasurable for a few seconds, which is how I feel towards my own existence. Some people think I have “feelings,” which I do have as long as I need to. I can be who you need me to be, actually feeling what I need to feel to be convincing, to become that person you want near you. I can maintain the illusion until you leave again, or until the moment indifference and betrayal is called for so that I can get what I want. I even could “fall in love,” I suppose, but that requires an uncomfortable relinquishment of control and for what, further misery and sex?
Sex is an annoying and at times dangerous pursuit, and people who are really into sex are annoying, dangerous, and unreliable. Some of my cokefreak and crackhead clients are like that, and I always try to encourage them to leave and go deal with it somewhere else when a hit somehow unearths their repressed cravings for flesh. I only think about sex when I’m going into methadone withdrawal or crashing from a hit of coke, which usually seem to go together. Otherwise it’s a very low priority, and when I do a hit of coke I simply go numb to the core, grow silent and do not want to be touched or even to talk. I cannot understand people who grow amorous on that shit; it’s the ultimate anesthetic of the body and soul.
It’s more of a concept really, a fantasy, something that I still believe I’m supposed to want. The same is true of loneliness and other such nonsense, it’s almost always just some manifestation of chemical imbalance, of craving and withdrawal, and even though drugs may suffice where human contact was once needed, the presence of another person, regardless of my relationship to them will never be able to replace drugs.
Fucking Waste of Time
I can’t regard the possibilities of sex and romance as more than dangerous distractions really. The problem is that they do exist, and somewhere in the quest for a break, for the continual friction and discomfort that defines existence at its most basic and unadulterated, the opportunities and the pointless lower-chakra driven desires combined with faces, eyes, tastes and places for tongues, screaming envelopments of shimmering fields around two bodies, clinging, resisting , fighting a coldness that even soaks the bones in a night where the sun’s tyranny has not yet left the air. The stagnancy holds, the cold in the bones, longing, wanting something empty and unquiet, again located near the base of the skull to just shut up, to be filled. Hence the need for the next load of whatever comes along, injected routinely, really the most sensible and reliable act in the world, rational in its entirety as the result, the desired result is more or less guaranteed.
Why the opiate or the methadone is appropriate is defined in the phrase that drifts in with the merciful chemical “it’s so peaceful.”
I wish for nothing more than this.
The leaders of the land, the magnates of church and State alike, and finally the police and prison warders have in their books phrases and definitions that have me and mine reduced to vermin, to be captured caged, and exterminated, preferably in the slowest and most painful way possible.
While most of us stick to low level criminal activity, some seek more spectacular acts against the property rights of persons other than themselves, even acts of implied violence that bring terror to the victims. Then there are acts of actual violence, of flesh being damage by fists, blunt or sharp objects, bludgeons, broken bottles and in the most decisive equation, bullets.
Prison hovers close by at all times, and while in this year I have seen the inside of the county jail on a few occasions, I have not seen the state prison system for myself, although I have heard stories. Rape is the first thing most Americans seem to think about the fate that awaits the male prisoner in this nation’s prisons. The special fear the young man feels upon entry into a men’s prison for the first time is simply the fear that women live with every day.
In fact it is an iconic piece of our mythology, and is all too real in many places, although the frequency of forcible sodomy in men’s prisons is affected greatly by how seriously the problem is taken by the staff.
What would our prisons be without the mythology of rape? What would cops scare young drug offenders with? What new tool would replace the threat of sexual assault, so valuable a leverage in the recruitment of street snitches?
Tatoo Juan
So it’s on into Friday, waiting for the next event, knowing that no more nubile 18 years olds will place impossible to ignore tits in my face, and feeling somehow thankful for this.
Better yet Tatoo Juan knocking at the door, down from the tattoo shop a couple of doors up the block. He’s looking at me with his perpetually positive facial attitude, ready for some kind of start off or wake up. His head’s mostly bald and a scar runs down the middle of it, a steel plate implanted through the middle of his skull as some kind of and emergency repair job, for to some kind of crack-cocaine related blowout back in New York, and I guess he doesn’t do so much coke anymore, although he’ll still want a little here an there. His entire body is covered with tattoos and he wears shorts, even in the middle of winter; entirely appropriate to his trade, and the walking advertisement that is his body.
I’m not sure what point of his visit is yet, as he walks over to the shitty stereo and places the vinyl disc on and it’s Easy E with a 20 something minute rap epic. Adventure seems imminent.
The project is to procure some tar from somewhere other than the convenient but overpriced trailer-park retailers, and I set about the business of this. Jon’s patient, strangely calm, someone capable of planning ahead, running a business and not usually getting sick before being able to score again. He claims to be half Jewish and half Puerto Rican, but I’ve only met his mom, who indeed seems like a friendly and open-minded nice Jewish lady from New York. Juan doesn’t look like Juan Epstein, he just looks like a white boy with lots of tattoos.
It’s a question of driving, the phone calls aren’t turning up much, and some people down in Denver don’t even have phones, so the decision is in fact to drive to Denver and see who’s around.
After an abortive run through Five Points that only succeeds in locating an old man who regretfully announces that he has retired to methadone and dominoes at the senior center, a little more driving yields a result at someone’s home, Scotty in his barren room with a single Billie Holiday poster breaking the antique white monotone of the wall and stating the obvious, it’s that famous photo of her last recording session, the heroine of heroin whose image finds its way to the containers chosen by addicts for their lives, rented places where they listen to her. And who better indeed to listen to while finding this moment of transitory healing, wellness as a disruption to sickness. Things get worse in temperature extremes too, sometime heat being the worst.
So we get a nice chunk, about a half a gram or so with John’s money and head back.
-
Four AM Tatoo
Friday night passes normally except that at one point I’m drinking a 40-ounce, and alcohol is something I almost never touch. There had been coke earlier, and I can’t even remember where the beer came from. But I’m drinking it, it’s coming up on 4:00 AM and Juan’s still there. I guess the night must have been productive, it did seem like there were a lot of coke runs, a lot of free hits, a few speedballs and quite a few people passing through simply to pick up new syringes. And now it’s just the two of us talking. Somehow I’ve ended up in possession of a couple of little pieces of the heroin we’d picked up that afternoon. Jon wants one of them back. I think about it, and decide what I want.
“I want a tattoo.”
Juan shrugs.
“Sure, we can go do it right now, just stop drinking that beer, it makes you bleed more….”
I decide that I want a small black broken heart, with some lyrics from a Rolling Stones song inscribed underneath it. Juan insists on putting it in quotation marks, pointing out that the lyrics are in fact Mick Jagger’s and not my own, but doesn’t insist on inscribing Mick’s name beneath them.
“I Want to Tear
Your World
Apart”
We walk up the block, and Juan opens the tattoo shop. Juan is very professional in his approach, using gloves, disinfectants and single-use disposable needles and blades. He sterilizes the work table, has me sit down in something like a dentist’s chair, and goes to work on me. It hurts. The fine needles drive a stinging tickle into the nerve endings of my skin, and though each jab is bearable, the repetition amounts to a larger pain, making my arm jump around almost involuntarily. I’m surprised at how badly this hurts in spite of how loaded on supposedly pain-reducing substances I am. The outline of the heart and the fine lettering somehow get done, with an occasional “Dammit, hold still!” from Juan, which I do my best to obey.
The real pain comes when he attaches something to the tat-gun that does not qualify as a needle in any way; it is a blade. It’s wide and flat, maybe an entire eight of an inch across. He starts filling in the outline of the broken heart with black, as the blade tears into the skin, releasing much in the way of blood as Juan works. The thing hurts like hell, but somehow the pain is more solid and less ticklish than the multiple jabs of the tiny needle. It’s concrete enough to make me clench my fist and hold still, and although this phase of the operation seems to pass slowly, the whole thing is over in about twenty minutes. I’m bleeding heavily. Juan disinfects the wound and bandages it skillfully, warning me not to remove the bandage of a couple of days, and also that there will be a heart-shaped scab there for quite a while, that it won’t look nice and that I’ll want to keep it covered anyway. I am not to pick at it to speed the process along; some of the ink might be pulled off of partially healed skin with the clotted and dried blood, were I to do so. I now have, at the age of 34, my first tattoo, small, black, broken, with the words of a song that say what I feel better than I ever could.
Fucking Up
I fuck off the whole weekend by allowing myself to fall asleep near dawn. I wake up to late to make it to the methadone clinic. I’m pissed off at myself but there’s not much to be done about it, decide to sleep through as much as possible, scrape up some short lived and inadequate relief from the local outlets if anyone needs to score, small comforts. It takes a long time for the sickness to hit with methadone anyway. It’s more of a drag psychologically than anything else. I’m broke, hungry yet unable to eat, and oddly cheerful as Monday dawns again. I’m not even worried about exactly how I’m going to get to the clinic, although I don’t have two dollars for the bus.
Step out into the first traces of light in the east and stick my thumb out, I ride down through Boulder to 36, another all the way to Denver and I bum fifty cents off the driver to get the local bus. I’m in a good mood when I make it to the clinic and in a better one when I leave; there’s no hurry and I’m not even pissed off about the obligatory UA that results from missing a couple of doses. I know I used, they will know I used, what the consequences will be remains to be seen, but they will fall within a tolerable range of annoyances.
Again blessed relief and “it’s so peaceful,” I don’t know how I’m going to get back, think, decide on getting home the same way I got there, don’t feel like panhandling in Denver and now that I’m dosed I have more patience than ever. Walk down to the on ramp to 1-25 and stand there for some indeterminate amount of time, catch a ride to 36 and stand still again. It’s still somewhere in those beautiful first two hours and time has no meaning. Location has no meaning in relation to comfort or mood either, it’s just something I take notice of, and the trip back up to Boulder is a very minor problem; its time-consuming nature not frustrating, I believe in the certainty of the outcome, and that nothing other than my eventual return to the trailer will result from this.
’
65 mustang in that weird off-yellow color with a black vinyl top pulling over stopping, Texas plates long-haired dude behind the wheel and I go ahead and get in.
The question comes two or three minutes into the ride.
“Do you know where to get any coke?”
I hesitate. The answers to questions like this always have consequences.
“It’s OK man, look, I’ll show you my tracks!”
He rolls up his left sleeve, and I can just look over at his arm as he keeps his hands on the wheel. I can see long permanent scars like mine; dude’s for real so I decide to play it for what it’s worth however little.
“How much do you need?’
“Just a quarter…”
I sigh, “Well yeah but it’s all the way up in Boulder where I live.”
“Cool, I’ll give you a ride there.”
A ride all the way back to the trailer
For My Ol’Lady
Mustang pulls up in front of the trailer, and I invite him in. He gives me twenty five bucks and I walk over to the local retail outlet, there’s no point in going to the projects for something this small. As usual, the count is a little light to begin with when I pick up the quarter gram. I don’t touch it, just take it back to the dude, and then ask him if I can have just a little, maybe a nickel’s worth for a taste. He’s cool with that, and I break it down with cold water and draw it up. Before I hit it, I offer him a syringe and ask him if he wants to get high right there too.
“No, it’s for my ol’ lady,” is all he says; thanks me and leaves. I do the tiny hit, hardly worth even the extra hole in the tired vein, just a little lift, a tease really, but worth it for the ride home. I figure I’ll never see him again. What would be the point of driving all the way up from Denver for tiny little bits of dope?
Full Moon on Ketamine
Things of little import, days and their drift with the timing of the trips to the methadone clinic and little else; Just the IBM sitting there waiting for something to some into my empty head, do these days even exist? It’s not as bad as it might sound though, could be a lot worse really, could still be living in Denver with all the fucking crackheads and meth freaks down there, a shade worse than the customers out here on the edge of town at the edge of reality. This place you can stand in the wind, mountains always close, Armageddon visible in the right lighting, and people who’ve gotten into some kind of jam up, usually with themselves, kind of like me. They are here, amusing at times, annoying at other times, almost always harmless. Someone will show up wanting something, the sign on the wall has an arrow pointing at the sharps box saying “Please Deposit Used Syringes Here” and that right there keeps their dulled, barbed potentially infectious points away from skin and blood. The health department now has a new machine that melts them down into these things that look like hockey pucks.
No excuse but one 3cc syringe full of Demerol and another full of Ketamine delivered by Jake’s woman for reasons unknown free of charge probably because she has some way to get more, just samples.
Squirt smaller half-cc hits out into spoons and hit one, the Demerol just a flavor and nuance sliding over the top of methadone blocked receptors, just barely, then the Ketamine, silvery tingling and a lifting away, nullification on the gravitational grip of the body on consciousness, not enough for departure, just enough to take the accursed weight of physicality off during the short-lived PCP like trance. Alternate again to the Demerol, and then to the Ketamine yet again and walk out into an oscillating and metallic light, Luna huge and brilliant ascending over trees and plains to the east, reigning over this cooler part of hell and high lunacy.
To vertiginous effect, damp lighting filtered through leaves to silver in puddles; you may not agree; this is sacred and cannot be found by any intentional or conventional means.
To walk as dead with eyes open.
The Mexican Chick
I was wrong about the dude from Texas, whose name a Jimbo or just Bo or something like that. Bo comes back with his ol’ lady and asks me to score for them again.
Another walk over to the other dope house, it’s just a quarter again but I demand that they kick me down a decent size hit this time so we split it three ways. The shit isn’t too badly stepped on this time and we all get a really good one.
Small dark red-brown with Indian eyes and long black hair, short skirt and feet in flat sandals, clean animalistic and hyper-aware, brushing dangerous eye contact, heart blips and races harder than from the coke which I’m down from already.
The fear I don’t feel in the presence of death and the absence of vision is present, have to blink draw breath and remember I’m supposed to feel like crap right now and wish I had another hit, take comfort in the fact that another one is inevitable sometime in that same day.
Nothing like it to hold back the unknown quantity rushing in that thing to be avoided at all costs, pain or even the potential, no not that kind of pain, the physical, banal, boring and in time ignored as part of a larger gray shades landscape, but something that is sharp. Piercing, check the perimeter and it’s been violated.
Trailer Park Girls
The drift into Tuesday it’s too warm for the time of year and it’s beer with the neighbors. Back through a hole in the fence short path to Floppy John’s place where it’s out in the yard with PBR semi warm and some little bitch, white girl skinny acting and talking like a teenager but tired alcoholic face betraying thirty-something like myself, she’s talking, looking grasping pointlessly on my hair, kissing, tongue and nicotine infused alcoholic spit and I like it. She says her name is April.
“Your house?”
I silently approved the plan and we walk slowly off hand in hand, Floppy John raising his beer in a toast to us and saying “enjoy!”
Back in my living room which for some reason I can’t determine is clean, toxic kisses and then she bolts out the front door saying she’ll be right back, I shrug. She is right back, this time with another woman, who’s taller than either of us, kind of heavy around the hips, big butt, her face is that Indian looking but her skin is pale.
The two women stand in front of me, I’m looking up at them from couch. They raise their shirts in unison, baring braless breasts. The little one asks ‘Which one of us has nicer tits?’
It’s one of those questions that’s too dangerous to answer. Again I weigh my words carefully as the years have taught me too, and can come up with nothing better than an awkward neutrality “Uh, well I think they’re all… I mean you both have very nice ones,”
Actually I like April’s better, they’re small and youthful looking, although April is somehow malnourished it seems, Patty the big girl’s are large and hang maybe a little low, neither of them are beautiful women, ‘not like the Mexican chick,” I catch myself thinking.
I still think I want to fuck April, just on general principal, arousal from the initial contact is gone and it’s just an idea at this point. Pointless I guess but some stupid notion of teenage boyhood, that I should fuck. April does act like she’s still sixteen, her middle-aged alcoholic face n
notwithstanding.
End up on the Island-Mattress in the back with both of them, but it’s really just me and April and I go down on her for a while.
Morning After a Bad Fuck
I couldn’t get her off with my tongue, maybe ‘cause she was drunk, or maybe I’ve just forgotten how it’s done through an overall lack of practice and I couldn’t cum by fucking her either.
“Methadone,” as sort of an apology, she looks a little offended, but she and the big girl Patty took care of each other, they’re both gone and I’m glad. No need for any regrets here. Trailer park girls, and who the fuck am I anyway, having to demand that again of my reflection in the bathroom, pointless.
Feeling of just a little too much spit and a nausea that paradoxically resembles hunger, time to go to the clinic again and this trip is too fucking long. Now I have to do it every day because of the inevitable hot UA after fucking off the last weekend. I do have a new tattoo and the bandage reveals a field of narrow black sprouts of clotted blood growing up through the slots left by the wide blade. The black broken heart is three dimensional for now.
I go up to the shop on the way out, and Juan says that it’s healing just fine but not to pick at it, that some semi healed skin might pull off and take ink with it, leaving the coloring uneven. He re-bandages it for me, and I head for Denver.
What holds me and drags me in each day as a steel chain with a fish hook in my gut, I guess that’s why they call it hooked. So it reels me in and plays me back out over and over again, never quite caught and gutted but never released. Make all the gestures of defiance and freedom is everything hypocritical delusional denial asshole I know what owns me, no question about it fucking Nazi shit but so what?
Not complaining because really you don’t fucking get it do you, nothing else works, at all. Except the real shit and there’s problems there the near infinite potential for increasing tolerance, nobody fucking stabilizes and one hit sure as fuck won’t hold you 24 hours. Mainly it’s a reason to live because no matter how bad the night before or the morning after the next sacrament is waiting.
La India
She’s called “Flaca,” or “La India,” small dark and thin, but healthy-looking. I like her and label her ‘dangerous,’ resolve not to let any desire to fuck her influence any of my decisions, not to mention that old ‘Bo well he’s just a good dude, so each time they come up greet them by hugging them both at the same time, telling them they’re ‘my favorite customers,’ which I actually mean, I certainly am not using the line on anyone else at that time.
“How did it get to this point?” one might ask, although I rarely worry about such things these days. A random injection or a divorce? Stupid can of cat food down the leg of my jeans into my boot through a hole in my pocket so that even after I get busted for shoplifting they never find it, I get my ticket and walk out of there with it. Bring it home to the cat “You will never know the shit I went through to get this for you!”
How many times has the concept of “amounting to anything” been spat down to us by well-meaning fathers and figures, as if this world amounts to much of anything. Of all the raw hypocrisy, this is the outrage, when you speak your hate words for my religion as if it is somehow less abominable than what you’ve tolerated and somehow excused; your sign waving folksong singing generation, wallowing in the opiate of the liberal, hope is dope, feels good until you run out of it doesn’t it now?
As if I owe any of your miserable asses anything, and you want me to contribute to this thing, you “society” or whatever the fuck you call it. Fuckers this part is not my fault, the toxicity, the radiation, the genocide, it was there before I was born.
