by Nico Walker
“What are you telling me about work for? You’ve never even had a job.”
“THAT’S NOT TRUE.”
“Babysitting doesn’t count.”
“SHUT UP.”
“Well it fucking doesn’t.”
“Why are you always so mean to me?”
“I’m not mean to you. Now please get the fuck out of here.”
“I love you.”
“You know that’s bullshit.”
She kicked me again.
I said, “Shit! How the fuck is this cool?”
“I’m sorry.”
She helped me up off the floor.
She took me to bed.
Try as I might, I couldn’t fuck.
I said, “Hey, Libby.”
“What?”
“I think the reason I’m so fucking miserable is I’m in the wrong place by mistake. Probably the wrong time too. I don’t know. It’s like I have nothing in common with this shit. A hundred years ago you could just buy some heroin at the fucking store and people’d leave you the fuck alone. But it doesn’t work like that anymore. They want you to agree with them now.”
“Why do you whine so much all the time?”
“I wish I could act like normal motherfuckers, you know? But when I try and fake it they can tell and they fucking judge me. How do they always know I’m against them? Shit. Fuck em but it’s discouraging.”
“This is boring.”
“I want you to kill me.”
“BORING.”
“I’m serious.”
“You’re being stupid.”
“No fucking shit I’m being stupid but I’m serious.”
“I’m not going to kill you.”
“Goddamnit, Libby. I’m asking you to do something for me. Can you please just shut the fuck up and do it.”
“This is retarded.”
“C’mon.”
“No.”
“…Please.”
“NO.”
“You say you love me, don’t you? If you really mean that then you’ll do it.”
“No.”
“C’mon. Please.”
“…Right now?”
“Yeah. Right now. Why not?”
“…Okay.”
She straddled my stomach. Her crotch was cool and wet. She put her hands on my throat and leaned into it. She was trying to crush my trachea, I guess. It would have been better had she put the pressure on my carotid arteries. Then I’d have been out in a few seconds and she could have done what needed to be done. But the trachea hurt too much, especially slow like she was doing it. And there was the question of whether or not she could get it crushed all the way. I was surprised that she was really doing it. But I had no choice but to go along with it because it’d been my idea. So I just lay there. Her lip was shaky. We stared into one another’s eyes. I couldn’t breathe. Maybe she did love me. Maybe she was the best thing that ever happened to me. But I had to breathe. I grabbed her hips and threw her over my head. It took her farther than I’d have thought and she went headfirst into the radiator. I got up and she was laid out on the floor. A look of surprise.
She said, “What did you do that for? You told me to kill you.”
I said, “It was a test. And you failed.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
The rest of winter was graceless.
I dated Megan: she didn’t pay for a bag of coke I’d got her so it turned into a date and suddenly we were dating and I’d met her sister and her mother.
Megan’s mother looked like a bowler.
Megan’s sister said she’d kill me if I ever hurt Megan.
I knew I had to get out. I got to panicking.
I tried about everything I could think of to get Megan to be the one to break up with me so as to spare her feelings. I acted batshit crazy; she liked it. I ignored her phone calls for days; she kept calling. I stopped paying for things; she paid for everything. I stuffed her socks in her mouth; she had an orgasm. Nothing worked.
So I had to tell Megan it was a mistake. This happened at her place. I had come over and gone right into it, hoping it’d be quick and painless. But Megan started crying. Her Chihuahua Tony was there. He saw everything. He was wearing his little Dracula cape, and Megan was on the sofa. You’d have thought somebody had died. She wanted me to feel shitty about not liking her more. I thought it was selfish. I said she was really overdoing it because my heart had already been murdered and so had everybody else’s that I knew of so what was her excuse? We hadn’t been seeing each other a month yet. This wasn’t a big deal. But Megan wouldn’t stop with her bullshit. She was doing a fuckload of crying, and Tony climbed up onto her shoulders and tried to lap up her tears and Megan said, “TONY, GO AWAY,” and she threw Tony on the rug and Tony climbed back up and tried lapping up her tears again.
“TONY, I’M SERIOUS.”
She threw Tony on the rug again.
I said I was sure she was a fake because it was impossible that she could be so upset about this. I said girls did cold-blooded shit to me all the time and no one ever gave a fuck about that. Why wasn’t it a big deal when a guy got shit on? I’d been shit on a thousand times and it was the twenty-first century and she was being rude.
Megan’s sister didn’t kill me.
No one has yet.
* * *
—
I HAD to take some kind of opiate or I couldn’t go to school. I’d get panic attacks. It was all the people that did it to me. Either people terrified me or they made me feel like I was a fucking bastard in comparison. There was no in between.
When I had no choice I’d try and go to school without dope and I might lose my nerve in the parking lot and stay there in the car and smoke cigarettes and listen to the radio, maybe fall asleep. Then I’d go home. But this was stupid.
* * *
—
I MANAGED to piss Joe off.
He’d dropped in to see me on St. Patrick’s Day. He wanted to maybe go and drink something and he caught me with my eyes cracked out of my head. So he got to making an intervention of it.
He said, “Maybe you should chill out on this stuff.”
I said drug use was the only thing I didn’t have a problem with.
He said, “I wish you could hear how fucking crazy you sound when you talk.”
“Why are you bothering me with this?”
“You’re my friend, man. I have to tell you if you’re fucking up your life.”
“I’ve kind of had it with friends.”
“Alright. Good luck then.”
“Yeah you too.”
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT I broke into the coke safe and shot about 8 grams all told probably. The night stilled. I began to hallucinate. A car was parked somewhere beyond the light. It was watching me and my eye trembled. I heard a radio. Men were on the stairs. There was a shadow in the hall. Somebody was kicking my door in. I flushed an ounce of coke down the toilet. I threw a shoe box full of used syringes out the kitchen window. The shoe box landed on the roof of the convenience store next door and the syringes scattered all over the roof. I surrendered to a phantom SWAT team.
I said, “Let’s do this nice and peaceful.”
I opened the door.
No one was there.
The sun was rising and the cars were coming out when I climbed up to the roof of the convenience store with a broom and gathered up the syringes. I was dressed up like I worked. I tried to act like I belonged up there.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I picked Emily up at the Greyhound station. She was on her way to Elba. She had been living with her dad down in Florida and she’d started shooting dope there.
I’d had no idea.
It was a three-hour layover.
&
nbsp; Emily said she wanted to get high.
I took her with me to meet up with Three-Hundred and she paid for the heroin.
We went to Walgreens for rigs.
I said to her, “Can you go in and get the rigs? You look more respectable than I do. And I’ve kind of burned this place up.”
She said okay.
She went in and came out with rigs for us.
She was an angel.
We didn’t shoot up till we were back in my apartment. I cleaned some spoons off real good. We had saline wound wash from the Walgreens. I’d given her extra money for it. It was a special day.
She shot up like she knew what she was doing.
When it hit her she said, “Fuck.”
And it hit me and I was right as rain. If you know, then you know what I mean. If you don’t, then don’t ever find out.
I kissed Emily.
She kissed me back.
I said, “I’ve been a real fucking bastard since you left. I’m no good.”
She said, “I’ve missed you too.”
She’d been fucking with some guy down in Florida. She shot dope with him. She was working at her dad’s dental practice. She was the receptionist. She said she’d been bored as shit. But she met this guy and he was alright and he got her shooting dope. And there was a time she’d shot too much heroin. Not all at once, but over the course of an hour or two. Lover was there. This was at his place. She couldn’t breathe too good. She’d been worried she was going to die. She rode it out though. Lover had kept an eye on her.
“He said I’d turned blue,” she said.
“Goddamn that’s terrible. That scares the shit out of me.”
And I’d get tore up thinking about it before long, after I’d dropped her off at the station. I’d be thinking about this guy and him watching her turn all blue and what else, watching her gasp for air. I pictured her lying on the floor in some piece-of-shit tract house down in Florida. Wall-to-wall carpet and all that godlessness.
I still loved her.
She wouldn’t fuck me though.
She said I had to get an HIV test before she came back.
And I said alright. And she said she’d be back.
* * *
—
THE FREE clinic did the HIV test with fake names. The name I got was Deon Valentine.
“Deon Valentine…”
“Deon Valentine…”
“Deon Valentine…”
The lady asked how many partners I’d had since the last time I was tested.
“Does it count if I tried but I couldn’t…?”
“Was there genital-to-genital contact?…Then yes.”
“Is that a lot?”
“No. Not really. Have you used intravenous drugs?…Have you had sex with any intravenous drug users?…Have you shared needles with anyone?”
PART FIVE
THE GREAT DOPE FIEND ROMANCE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
There was nothing better than to be young and on heroin. Emily and I were living together. The days were bright. You didn’t worry about jobs because there weren’t any. But you could go to school so you could get FAFSA, you could get student loans and Pell Grants. And if you were getting G.I. Bill, that’d cover your tuition; then you didn’t need your FAFSA for school and you could go and buy dope with it instead. Which was all you really wanted. You could kill yourself real slow and feel like a million dollars. You could grow high-class weed in your basement and pay the rent like that. Of course the future looked bad—you went into debt, you got sick all the time, you couldn’t shit, everyone you met was a fucker, your new friends would eat the eyes out of your head for a spoon or twenty dollars, your old friends stayed away—but you could do more heroin and that would usually serve to settle you down, when you were going on 25, back when you could still fake it, and there was nothing better than to be young and on heroin.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Around ten at night Ari had called back. This was where Ari had said to go. I got off the freeway at Fleet Avenue and made a few turns and parked in the street. The house smelled like cat piss. Ari looked like Justin Bieber. He said Gary was on his way. This wasn’t Ari’s house; this was Gary’s house. I didn’t know Gary; I knew Ari. Ari was from Shaker. Really I didn’t know Ari either. He used to go to ’80s night. I was just hoping he could get me some heroin. I was in need of a dope boy. I was getting Oxys pretty cheap—about 50ȼ/mg—and those were fine, but what I wanted was the real thing. And this was where I was.
Ari and I were waiting in the living room. A retarded woman was watching TV. The living room carpet was red. The retarded woman had a blond mullet that went halfway down her back. Ari called her Shelley. Shelley was watching CSI. She didn’t want to change the channel. She had a husky voice and her consonants were kind of fucked but you could understand what she said and you could hear the desperation in it. Shelley was desperately retarded.
Gary showed up with the heroin. I was surprised because Gary had achondroplasia. Ari hadn’t told me Gary had achondroplasia. Ari hated me. Gary took the heroin out of a little metal box with a magnet on it. He said, “Check this out.”
There wasn’t a lot of heroin. Just two grams. Gary said, “This shit’s supposed to be fire. That’s what my dude told me.”
I gave Gary $140 for a gram. The price was real shitty. I only wanted to pay $100. But Gary had said what he said and I’d allow for quality. We shot up around the kitchen sink: Gary, Ari, and I. The kitchen was trashed. Shelley watched us shoot up.
“You ted I can have tum, Gary.”
“I’ll get you in a second,” he said.
“You ted I can have tum.”
“Would you shut up, you retarded fucking bitch?”
The heroin was alright. Not worth the money. But we all felt it. I had 0.7 grams left. I’d take that home. Gary said, “You like Dilaudid?’
I said I’d take all the Dilaudid I could get.
He said cool.
“You ted I can have tum, Gary.”
“Go watch TV.”
Gary sold me ten 4mg Dilaudids at $7 each and I was glad and I got the fuck out of there. The night was very cold and the cold was good. The cold was familiar. I called Emily and I drove home.
Emily was in the kitchen. She said, “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
I wouldn’t ever get tired of coming home to her. We shot dope and watched late-night TV. Maybe we should have fucked on account of it was Valentine’s Day and all, but we didn’t give a fuck about Valentine’s Day. We only gave a fuck about one thing. So that’s how we were together.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
When Ari’s folks kicked him out he came to live down Gary’s way and Gary put him up in an abandoned house. And it was fucking freezing. But Gary had cracked the gas line so the stove would run. A sofa was next to the stove. All four burners on the stove were going. From the waist up the kitchen was an inferno, but if you sat down too long you could have frozen to death. We were waiting on Gary. I gave Ari cigarettes. Ari was getting sick. He was feeling bad. This was Ari in poverty. Ari’s poverty was based on his belief that he shouldn’t ever have to pay for anything or do anything to make himself useful to anyone. Now he was getting sick and he was wearing his sleeping bag like a cape and things weren’t going especially well for him.
I wasn’t doing much better. Emily and I had each shot a 20mg of Oxy earlier in the morning, but that’d only keep us well for a few hours. A 20 could take you there if you had no real habit but it counted for next to nothing when you were as accustomed to things as Emily and I were. That was how dope had worked on us. It had got so we were wasting our time if we weren’t putting at least $45 in our veins, and even then it was just a little moment till we were sick all over again.
So yeah. Emily was over at school and soon she’d be fucked an
d she was counting on me to come through for her. I wasn’t having any luck yet, but I had a couple irons in the fire: this shit with Gary, plus I was waiting to hear back from Big about some Oxys. I’d skipped class. I always skipped class to go look for dope. It was more important that Emily go to class since she was the smart one. She was a grad assistant, and it would have looked worse if she missed. People would have said, Where’s the grad assistant?
* * *
—
GARY SHOWED up. He didn’t have any dope. He’d said he did but he didn’t. He had lied. Gary was a real full-of-shit motherfucker and I’d already known that.
Gary had a $20 crack rock.
Ari said, “What about the dope?”
Gary said, “I’m still waiting on Old Boy to call me back.”
Ari’s nose was runny. He was making sad faces.
I lit a cigarette.
Gary said, “You got any glass?”
I had a bowl in the car but that wasn’t what he meant.
“Fuck!” he said. “If I could just get a Brillo pad we’d be alright.”
I said I’d take him to the store. We had some time to kill and we’d do just as well to smoke some crack while we waited. So we drove to the store. Gary said if I spotted him the money for the Brillo pad he’d let me and Ari smoke the crack rock with him. I spotted him the money. Gary got out and went into the store. He took forever. He came back. He had bought a box of Brillo pads and a tall boy of Mickey’s. I said nothing about the Mickey’s. Gary tore off a piece of Brillo pad and put it in the bowl and he had the crack rock in there too. He took a big rip of crack smoke. Then he exploded. Spit went everywhere. Gary opened the door and puked so bad he fell out of the car. He had got some puke on his clothes. The puke smelled like Big Mac sauce. It was my turn to smoke some crack but there was no more crack left to smoke. Gary had got the whole rock, one hit.