Something’s awry on Mission Street; there’s something going on. The hipsters are moving toward Valencia, and the junkies are moving toward Sixteenth. The crazy guy who plays Hacky Sack with old beer cans scampers off and disappears down Clarion Alley. The old white guy who wears basketball jerseys and screams random shit about being in the penitentiary disappears behind a door. Motherfuckers are running.
I should run, too, but I’m too high. My inertia keeps me going down to the corner of Nineteenth. I keep looking down there—is it a fire, a wreck, a drive-by? In the late ’80s and early ’90s, shit went down around here as the Norteños and Sureños got in an all-out war over the control of Twentieth Street. Nobody won. Honda Civics poked out Uzi snouts and sprayed at pay phones where vatos stood ground with pagers. Twenty years later, it’s still neutral ground.
The adrenaline’s flowing, but my blood feels thick, like hot fudge going through my veins. I’m floating down Mission. As the chaos increases, everything seems to calm for me. I see people screaming but I can’t hear them. All I hear is the Five Stairsteps singing Oooh child things are going to get easier, ooh child things’ll get brighter . . . A Latino mom runs by, carrying her child like a football, his mouth open in a scream I can’t hear. A pudgy hipster in cutoff skinny jeans has lost his sense of irony; he jumps and scatters his way through the street between cars . . . It’s a social clusterfuck down here, and I couldn’t be more at home.
NSA Andy runs up the street in a hospital gown, torn and hanging on like the flag of a defeated army, somehow. His head is freshly shaved, and his eyes are big as Skoal cans. Where each arm used to be is a stump with crossed X’s of stitching. He’s screaming the Gilligan’s Island song at full screech, no, Petticoat Junction. Wait, both.
Andy’s lost it, for real. I don’t think he knows where he is. Maybe he’s stuck in a bad dream, running down Mission street in an unending night terror, running from NSA agents, CIA spooks, FBI assassins, Greenpeace hit men, white-power survivalists, black panthers, tenderloin crack dealers, old bosses, the babysitter who molested him, all of his demons real and imagined, those from his past and those who never existed.
His eyes lock with mine, and the world tunnels into his face. He recognizes me, a friendly face in the crowd of chaos and mayhem. He smiles a desperate smile, distorted by his freakishly bulging cheeks. The distance between us closes until we are inches apart. The song stops.
Fix me, he says, opening his mouth.
I think he’s talking about his arms. A speech coils in my brain; I want to think of what to say, how to explain his arms to him, but then the junkie in me registers what’s going on.
Tiny balloons are held chipmunk-style in his cheeks. Someone gave this man a mouth full of dope. Some heroin dealer took mercy on him, out of kindness or abject fear, and gave Andy a week’s worth of dope. Problem is, how the hell is he going to shoot up? A monkey could fix with his feet, and a junkie could find a vein in a bowling ball, but this poor drug fiend is fucked as fucked can be. All this dope and no way to shoot it.
Aw, brother, I say, I ain’t got no works on me. Just a pipe.
They took my arms.
I know.
They were going to take my legs next.
Now, I don’t think . . .
They were going to cut me away until I was a brain in a jar, forever trapped in a dream, stuck in my own thoughts and never waking, on the shelf of an NSA freak like a trophy.
Sirens that sound off a Frankie Goes to Hollywood song. Relax. Don’t do it . . .
They’re coming for you Andy. You need to get out of here.
Andy looks around.
Capp Street, I tell him. Go down Capp Street. If there’s one place in the world you may not stick out, it’s there.
Andy runs. It’s a panicked fear that fuels him in a PCP-like fury. Cars screech and stop. The frightened villagers spread out, running from this monster that’s come down off Potrero Hill in seek of . . . well, this monster just wants to get high. He just needs a friendly hand and a rig.
BACK AT LIZA’S
FUCK, SHE SAYS, you smell. Like bad, like fuck it.
Good to see you, too.
Come in. Get out of those clothes and in the shower.
I walk down the hallway, dropping clothes as I go. I can smell myself. It must be really bad. It’s like an old lunch in the fridge that you can’t smell until you open it. Both metaphorically and literally. I smell like an old lunch, a half-eaten sandwich with some kind of oil or dressing that turned.
I line up my drugs on the bathroom counter. Coke, remote, a marble, and a pipe. I turn on the water, let the hot water steam up the room a bit. I take a bit of each. A small bump of coke for each nostril. Just enough remote to keep things normal. A long, healthy marble hit.
The water takes off a layer of funk. It’s right about to scald but just a tiny bit tolerable. I slow everything down and let it sink in.
In what feels like hours, Liza walks in, naked.
Drugs! she squeals. They’re my FAVORITE. However did you know?
Liza hoovers the coke. Christ, she can disappear that shit up her face hole. She takes a full dose of remote, but when she sets it down, she knocks it over.
FUCK. Liza!
Jeez, I’m sorry. I’ll get you more.
Fuck. I was all set. That was my personal stash.
Did you fuck around and get a habit?
What the fuck do you think? I’ve been hooked on that shit for months.
Well, let’s get you cleaned up and get you some more. I know a guy.
She takes a giant marble hit. That, she’s welcome to. She can smoke all of that shit she wants.
My guy will probably want some of these, too. He has money. Cash. Lots of money.
That’s my girl. Now put the pipe down and get in here.
Like every good drug addict would, she takes one more hit. She sets down the pipe and gets in the shower.
Faded tattoos, some well done and some fucked from the get-go, cover her body like stickers on a guitar case. She has scars she can’t remember the start of, piercings so old she’s forgotten about them. She’s missing an ear, an eye, and a lot of her scalp, but still, she’s a beautiful lady, more than what I deserve.
THE GUY
WE’RE IN FRONT of a warehouse somewhere off Third Street. I never figured this neighborhood out. It’s an industrial area, one of the few areas of town that hasn’t been made into a cute or up-and-coming area. It’s still warehouses and cab companies and the occasional rave.
The warehouse used to be a bottling company; you can still make out the lettering on the side of the building. But the colored lights coming out of the top row of windows are a dead giveaway, as are the beats quietly thumping bass notes. What used to be a blue-collar warehouse is now a drug and party palace.
I stay close behind Liza. She’s decked out like a sad doll. Sort of goth, but she looks more like a toy, like a Raggedy Ann, but sad. A permanent frown done with makeup to look like it’s sewn on.
This is the place Eric was talking about. I can tell when we walk in. It looks like the receiving room of a funeral home, but with house music. There are the steampunks and the goths, the hipsters and the cool, and voyeurs scattered about who don’t quite know what’s going on. People are crying and feeling each other up, slight groping, like a family funeral with hugs that linger a bit to long and have maybe more hip grindage than you would want from your aunt.
We cut through the room to a hallway. It’s lined with movie posters. They’re going to be showing Bicycle Thieves, Where The Red Fern Grows, and Old Yeller. The Champ remake with Ricky Schroder. The Outsiders. Never Let Me Go. Grave of the Fireflies. Then there’s the remixes, the three suicide scenes from the three A Star Is Born movies, the death scenes from the Rocky movies, and one that seems to be really popular, the Disney Death Film, a montage of all the cartoon characters from Bambi’s mom to Simba’s dad that die in the various animation features, plus a sequence of Wile E. Coyo
te dying over and over.
There’s a line of furverts waiting to get into that one. Plushies. They’re dressed in anthropomorphic animal costumes. They will pile up in there and furry fuck each other, some rubbing off on the other costumes, the others with action flaps that lift up and allow for actual fucking. It’s a super sweaty mess of fat-people BO and jizz in there in no time; those costumes are hot inside. Hell, I can’t fuck with a shirt on without feeling constricted and dangerously heated. I have no idea how they get it on dressed like a giant bunny.
There’s a sample in the house music, Erik Satie mashups. Then comes Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Albinoni’s Adagio in G. Old music with sad new beats. “Eleanor Rigby” chunks played in loops. Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Music that makes you sad on a great day.
We walk up the stairs and through a floor that has a Giving Tree theme. That sad fucking book about codependency and enabling. It’s a horribly sad book, and I don’t know why it’s ever given to a child. Fucking greedy bastard in the book takes everything from the tree until it’s a stump and then sits on what’s left. What kind of message is that? The tree should’ve eaten that fucker.
There’s a poetry reading happening, and we move our way through that as fast as we can. All poems about dead mothers and cancer and lost loves and needless suicide. There’s a group called the Sylvia Plath Hallelujah Chorus that’s going to perform later, and I definitely don’t want to be around for it. There’s a giant oven set piece that they all walk into in the end.
We make our way to a third-floor room, through a series of soundproofed doors. Finally, we’re about to meet the guy. The guy. Her guy. It’s always the guy. Like a drug version of a Paul Reiser joke. He was joking about getting the TV fixed or some shit, but it works with the drug world as well. There’s always A GUY.
By the last door is a hulk of a man, a cartoony figure in his bulk. I recognize him from the gym where Big Mike and I sold the horsemeat. Away from the other monstrous men, he looks somehow bigger. Standing by a normal door, he looks like a joke. His pupils are pinned. He’s high as hell on something, and I’d rather not find out what.
We walk up to him. He stares at us like he can’t see us. Like a blind man’s dead-eyed stare.
Cecil? Liza says.
The hulk stares. Doesn’t move. I’m high, the lighting’s weird, but now I’m doubting whether or not he’s alive. He’s dead or some kind of statue. I look around. There’s a camera above him.
The door clicks open. Hulk man stands aside enough for us to enter.
The inside of the room looks like the model for a condo. It’s a studio apartment, decked out with new furniture.
Cecil, aka THE GUY, sits on a couch in front of a coffee table. He’s watching TVs. Not TV. There’s a wall of them with the sound down and the closed-captioning on. His eyes dart from one screen to another. He waves us in and asks us to sit. He gives us the one-minute finger.
There’s a basket of identical remotes in front of him. He picks up one with a number 19 written on it and clicks one TV off. Then he looks at us, adding us into a rotation of the twenty TVs he has in the room.
I have some great stuff, he says. I can split my attention to multiple sources and never get distracted. The more I take, the more things I can watch. I watched all of Martin Scorsese’s movies at the same time. What a rush. What can I do for you, Liza?
We need some remote. I wanted to get it from you so we can be sure of the quality.
I have dozens of dealers in here I can hook you up with.
There’s something else.
What?
My boyfriend Chuck has some new shit that he needs an outlet for.
Well, is that so, Boyfriend Chuck? I see new shit in here every week. I have new shit like some clubs have new bands. I don’t care about shit because it’s new. I care about it because it’s great. Not good, great. Is your new shit great, Boyfriend Chuck?
Yes, I say. It’s great stuff.
I take the marbles out and put them on the table. He squints at them, then looks at me. His mouth tightens.
I’ve seen this shit before, he says, anger rising in his voice. Get it the fuck out of my sight.
No, it’s new, it’s good, I swear.
Do you know what it is?
Yes. Well, no, but it’s great stuff.
You’re not using it, are you?
Yeah.
You’ve done it more than a couple of times?
Yeah. It’s good. I swear. The high is clean, the crash self-manages.
I don’t know how to tell you this.
What?
We call it black hole. You need to stop doing this shit now. Right now. We call it black hole because it sucks you into itself and there’s no way out. And it’s black and round, but that’s a nice coincidence. Get rid of it. I don’t care how. Throw it in the ocean, bury it, drop it in acid. Whatever it takes. But stop taking this. Take anything else. Pick up a heroin habit, for fuck’s sake. You god damn kids. Stick with the classics: heroin, cocaine, Oxy, sure, you’ll get strung out but it won’t completely fuck up your sense of reality.
I turn to get Liza’s opinion.
She’s gone.
Chuck? Cecil asks, snapping his fingers. You with me, buddy?
Liza, I say. I was looking for Liza.
Cecil looks at me quizzically. He rummages through his desk drawer and comes out with a wristband. He holds it up. I put out my wrist.
Suit yourself, he says. He fastens it on. I can’t see how it will help, but it can’t hurt, I guess. He looks to the hulk. Ismail, take him down to the Liza room.
The hulk comes over to lead me away. Liza has her own room here? I’m not sure what’s happening. I just go with the flow. I follow the hulk to an elevator. We get in. There are buttons with no numbers on them. It shakes, jumps—it’s an old freight elevator with blinking Christmas lights all over it. I can’t tell if we’re going up or down. It is as bumpy as a stagecoach ride.
When we stop, he pulls the door open. I see a hallway.
Which way?
He pushes me out of the elevator and shuts the door. There are anonymous doors, locked, with aging knobs, losing their color. Until I come to a door that’s marked: “Living Inquiry, Zygotic Android” Project. LIZA. Fuck. This isn’t what I meant.
I go back to the elevator. Push the button. Nothing. I push it more. Nothing. It’s not responding. This hallway is all locked doors and the LIZA room. Maybe that’s the way out. Someone must be there.
The LIZA door is locked as well, but the knob is new. I jiggle the knob and hear a beeping sound followed by the door unlocking. There’s a reader on the door somewhere activated by the wristband.
The door opens into a locker room. It’s all white tiles and lockers with black locks on them. There’s a laundry basket holding a solitary container with a screw-on cap in the middle of the floor.
Chuck? a voice says over the system. I look around. I don’t see anyone. I do spot a speaker in the ceiling. Chuck, please disrobe and put your personal belongings in the basket. Leave a urine sample. Then continue through the showers. Bathe thoroughly. Even if you don’t think you need it.
I take off everything. I can smell myself, a particularly bad BO. I had no idea. This place smells so neutral that my smell is louder than a laugh in a library. I put everything in the basket, pee in the sample jar, and walk through the showers.
There are no fixtures, only a digital display. It blinks on and flashes STEAM repeatedly.
Steam starts from jets along my entire height. It’s right at the temperature that borders on feeling great and scalding. Right as I’m getting lightheaded, it stops. The display blinks SOAP. CLOSE EYES.
I close my eyes and get a steady stream of soap sprayed on me. This is a human fucking car wash.
The soap is followed by a rinse cycle. The stream is just a little less solid than a fire hose.
The shower stops. Proceed to the next room, the voice says.
The door at the end of the shower room has no knob. It has a small hole with a graphic of a hand with the index finger extended. I slip my index finger inside it. Sharp pain, and I withdraw.
There’s a tiny hole. These fuckers took a blood sample. The door clicks open.
There’s a room with a white floor, ceiling, and walls, and nine silver pods. One is open, and the hulk is there, looking impatient. He motions to me, and as I walk closer, I see he wants me to get in.
Deprivation tanks. This isn’t my thing. I like the drug highs, not organic highs. This is for people using orgone accumulators, dream machines, and the like. The “you don’t need drugs to get high” assholes. Fuck that.
Hey, Ismail, that’s your name, right? These tanks, not my thing. There’s been a misunderstanding. I was looking for a lady named Liza, not a whatever this is.
Ismail still isn’t in the mood to talk. He motions for me to enter the tank.
If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just take my clothes back and get the fuck out of here, better for having a shower.
Ismail does nothing. I do nothing. His expression worsens. I do nothing. He contorts my wrist in a way that hurts down to my feet. I try to squirm away, but I end up in the tank.
It’s filled not with water, like I expect, but a warm gel, a little less thick than Jell-O. There’s some kind of minty tingling that’s really nice. I sink in until I’m suspended completely, with only my face above the gel.
Black Hole Page 10