Futureproof (20 page)

July

Rick—my old man—the
real
one—calls when I get home from work. He says that he's been seeing a shrink (he calls the shrink his “analyst”) and the shrink has told him that the reason he hates going to the dentist so much is because he was probably sexually abused as a child.

“How does the analyst know that?” I ask.

“We've been doing regression therapy, where he hypnotizes me and all these memories that have been buried for years come to the surface.”

“And you remember being molested?”

“No, not when I'm awake. Like right now I couldn't tell you that I remember being molested. But my analyst says that when I'm in a trance I say some pretty strange shit.”

“Like what?”

“Like that…look, I don't want to get into all the gory details. But the reason I called is that I've been doing a lot of praying lately and God has really put it on my heart to call you. I just needed to tell you that I love you. I want you to be OK, Luke. I want you to know that your life is just beginning, really, and that you have the power to make it as fulfilling as you can imagine it.”

“Rick?”

“What?”

“You're acting really fucking weird. I'm not used to pep talks from the King of Gloom.”

“King of Gloom? Whaddaya mean? We're always joking around about stuff. Are you saying our relationship is dark?”

This from a man who abandoned his wife and kids.

“I don't know, man. You call me up, tell me you've discovered that you were molested, then you say that God has told you to tell me that everything is just peachy. Seriously, your analyst said that's why you fear the dentist? Who the fuck ever heard of anything like that?”

“Use your imagination, Luke.”

“I don't want to use my imagination.”

“Yeah, well, I don't want you to use it, either. I just want you to be OK.”

“I'm fine.”

“OK. Good.”

“If you'd call more often you might actually catch me at a bad time,” I say. “I just had one a couple weeks ago. Several of them, in fact.”

“Well, I told you months ago that I had an 800 number set up for the express purpose of you and Jonas being able to call me for free but I have yet to receive one call from either of you.”

“That's great, Rick. You've got a free number set up for us so now
all sense of responsibility is in our court. I get it. You've done your duty and now all is forgiven.”

“I don't know what else to do for you, Luke. What else can I do?”

“I don't know. What else
can
you do? Why don't you go back to that shrink and ask him to hypnotize you and figure out why you'd ditch your kids for a slut.”

“Hey, don't talk about Janice like that. She has been nothing but nice to you.”

“When? When I was three and you kidnapped me and she sat me in front of
Sesame Street
? Do you even
know
who you're married to?”

This is the conversation I imagine having with him. It's the one I always imagine. In reality our conversation ends with me saying that that's some good advice, Rick. We never get beyond the surface shit, the hypno-revelations, the comedic anecdotes. I actually get off the phone with him on this occasion before he's even finished describing the hypnosis and its fruits. Because there's a knock on the door and it's Animal Mother and he's crying. He says that Michelle, as in Skinhead Michelle—Sinead from Dragon*Con—is dead.

 

She hung herself from a tree during a party. She excused herself to smoke a cigarette and then, after she'd been gone for a while, people started looking for her and found her hanging in the backyard with a chain from the tire swing wrapped around her neck. Animal Mother says that Michelle's eyes were still open and bulging out of her head and her face was purple and she looked like a monster. The funeral will be closed-casket.

Everybody Skinhead Michelle knew from high school shows up for the services, mainly suburban druggie kids wearing khaki slacks with button-down shirts and ties, the very kids Michelle's parents
blame for her death. They haven't said as much but it's pretty obvious to all of us who are sober that they do. Which isn't many. Though I can say for myself, at least, that I declined to shoot up before this goddam funeral because Michelle deserves that much at least, to have her so-called friends clear-eyed as they remember her and send her officially from this world to the next.

After the preacher drones on for twenty minutes about her being in a better place, that her soul can finally be at peace, we drop flowers on her casket and then about twenty of us go to Waffle House to eat and remember the girl none of us really knew. Everybody claims to be completely taken by surprise, as though there were no warning signs. She seemed so happy and carefree, they all say.

Jonas says that her hands always looked incredibly
old
.

“Maybe she was old in spirit, you know, bro?” Jonas says. “Maybe she was ready to die.”

“Whaddaya mean, her hands looked old?” I say.

“I mean, she had these hands that looked like an old woman's hands, like they were wrinkled before she was even old. Maybe she was old in
spirit
and her hands were the only manifestations of that oldness. Well, that and this early death.”

“That makes no fucking sense. Is ‘oldness' even a word? Are you high, Jonas?”

“Yeah. Wake up, Luke. Everybody here is high. It's like pouring a beer out for a dead homie, get it?”

“I think it's fucking pathetic. And I feel like it's my fault that your life consists solely of shooting dope, even when one of our friends has died.”

“Hey, leave off him, Luke,” Karen says. “Where do you come off acting like Mr. Holier-Than-Thou? Like you don't do the same shit we do.”

“Fuck you, Karen.”

“Don't tell my girlfriend ‘fuck,'” Jonas says, Heroin anger rising in his voice.

“You're all pathetic,” I say, attempting with some difficulty to keep my voice down. “Do you even remember what it feels like to have emotion, to feel like a human being? Because this is the first time I have in a long goddam time and that scares the shit out of me.” I stand up and turn to leave, loosening my tie. Jonas stumbles outside after me.

“Do you really believe that, what you were saying in there?”

“Fuckin A.”

“I feel like that sometimes, too,” he says. “But the dope helps me, Luke. You know?”

“Yeah, I know, man. And I don't know what the answer is for that. I just know that I can't do this anymore.”

“Me either,” Jonas says. “I just know that I can't
not
do it, either.”

I look at my brother. The skinny part of his tie is sticking out four inches below the fat part.

August

The fucking car dies right after we get the dope. I turn the key but there is no response. It's mid-August in Atlanta and we're sitting bang in the middle of the Bluff. Sweat is rolling. The car's at the top of a hill, though, so at least there's that.

I decide to put it in neutral and let it roll, hoping that if it is in the act of doing what it does best, that it'll just start, you know, out of habit. But the T-Bird has an automatic transmission, so this plan of action is ultimately pointless, fruitless, hopeless, and in all other ways fucked. I hit the brakes at the bottom of the hill in front of the stop sign. And that's when the dealers, crackheads, and junkies—the locals—start coming out of the crevices. And that's when Alice starts freaking out.

I'm standing out there with the hood up, banging on anything
that looks out of place with this ten-inch screwdriver that I keep in the trunk. It's the only tool I own, used mainly in flooring but coming in handy in other more desperate situations. I ask the crackheads if they know anything about cars. I hear a few “motherfuckers” uttered, maybe a racial epithet or two. The police are a threat, too. At any minute a cruiser could drive past and we'd be fucked. White people have no reasonable explanation for being down here unless they're copping dope. The cops know this.

There was a time a while back when I was down here with Andie and we came a pubic hair's width away from getting busted. It was around 10:30 at night. I pulled up to the corner, where a guy I didn't know was leaning on a light pole. It was during one of the seasonal sweeps the cops made of the area, when all the streets are empty, so he was the only runner out at the time.

“Can you get me some boy?” I asked him with the window down. He didn't acknowledge me.

“Hey, man,” I repeated. “Can you hook me up?”

He raised his chin until his eyes met mine from beneath his brimmed dreadcap. He was chewing a toothpick. Very slowly he cocked his head in the direction of a car parked down the block on the wrong side of the street.

“Are you fuckin' stupid, nigga?” he said, finally.

I peered hard at the dark car. And then it hit me. It was a cop.

I hit the gas and turned left down the intersecting street. Twenty seconds later the cop was behind me with his lights on. Now, there's a punk club about half a mile from the Bluff called the Lizard Lounge, so I told the cop that we were lost and trying to figure out how to get back to the club.

“That's the only reason I was talking to that guy, Officer,” I said.

“Where's the fucking drugs?” he demanded.

“I don't do drugs, sir.”

“Let me tell you something,” he said, temporarily interrupting his search of my pockets. “If I find one fucking syringe cap, one fucking baggie top, anything, I'ma kick the living shit outta you, punk. Got it? And if that nasty hair of yours touches me one more time I'm gonna knock your fucking teeth out.” He was very self-assured.

But what he didn't know is that I never hold works in the car anymore. It's too risky. We keep them in a little box under a dumpster behind the Lizard Lounge.

“We're just lost, sir,” I reiterated. He didn't have shit on us. He nabbed us before we copped any dope. And after he grudgingly let us go we went to a different street and copped our dope anyway. Another junkie moment of triumph.

But this time is different. This time we have the dope on us. This time we can't just drive away. We're at everybody's mercy, the cops
and
the dealers.

“I can get this nigga over here to give you a jump for ten bucks,” some asshole says to me, motioning to a house across the street. There's a partially dismantled '73 Cadillac in the front yard.

“I don't have ten bucks,” I lie. “Why don't you see if he'll do it for five?”

“Nigga, you don't have ten bucks, you sit here all day. And you sure as shit don't wanna be down in this mothafucka after it get dark.”

I lean in the window and tell Alice to give me a ten. She hands me the money. Her fingers leave sweat stains on the bill. He runs over and gets his uncle or cousin or whatever the fuck to drive his piece-of-shit Chrysler coupe over for the jumping process. The uncle charges two more dollars for the use of his jumper cables.

“Look at it like this,” the uncle/cousin says as he pockets the two dollars. “It's that much less that you'll be putting up your arm, little brotha, and that's a good thing.”

After five minutes he tells me to try to start the car. I turn the key. Nothing. He says he can't be doing this shit all day, that he'll let me try once more in five minutes and then he “got to be going.”

“I gave you ten bucks, man.”

“Ten bucks cover two charges,” he says. These motherfuckers. Always trying to take you for everything. I try to start the car again and again nothing happens. The uncle packs up his cables and pulls back onto his front lawn, lets the screen door slam on his way back into his house. They have the TV turned up so loud in there that we can here the sound of canned laughter from across the street.

The crackheads and other menacing ghetto denizens come back and ask for everything ranging from “a dolla” to “a piece of that fine whitegirl ass.” It's been over an hour and I'm seriously considering
snorting
the dope if it'll help relieve the stress of the situation. But that's sacrilege. A junkie—a true junkie—would never, ever snort, eat, or in any other way ingest Heroin other than mainline injecting. You might as well flush the bag down the toilet. I don't care if you have to somehow MacGyver a straw and a toilet plunger, you find a way to get the Heroin from the baggie straight into your vein.

I get back in the car with Alice. “Just imagine how good these bags are going to be when we get outta here,” I tell her, as though that is going to make any difference to her. As far as she can see, we're never going to get out of here, and it's starting to look that way to me, too. It's already five o'clock. There're only a few more hours of light left.

We're sitting in the car trying to figure out our next move when, for no apparent reason, some nigger smashes out my car's right passenger-side window with a hammer. He runs off without even yelling anything antiwhite or antijunkie or anything remotely political. No motives are given. It is an act of unadulterated terrorism, pure and simple. And it works. Alice has glass in her hair and
screams, terrified, for a good five minutes. That's right about when we meet this guy Paul.

He's very soft-spoken. He asks me if I can spare a few bucks.

I tell him I'll stick him with the screwdriver if he doesn't leave us alone.

“I don't mean no harm,” he says. “Hey, I can get these guys over at this garage a couple blocks down to tow you out of here,” he says, pointing down the street

“Why would you do that? I already gave my last ten bucks to this guy over here for a jump that didn't pan out.”

“'Cause you seem like a nice guy and also 'cause I see your car down here all the time so I know that you'll do
me
a favor another day.”

“You a dealer?”

“No, man. I'm a junkie. Like you.” He holds out his arms so we can see the track marks. His tracks put our habits to shame. True junkie track marks. Years of injection mapped in scar tissue on the crooks of his arms like a river's tributaries. His eyes are true, full of sadness. I look at him and promise I will pay him back if he gets us out of here.

Twenty minutes later the tow truck pulls up.

“Don't take any wooden nickels,” Paul says to me, rounding the corner out of sight.

The tow truck guy is a real dick. He says we owe him “big time.” He drives us the two miles to the Lizard Lounge and drops the T-Bird in the parking lot. I promise to mail him a check for $25 as soon as I get home, which is total bullshit.

But that doesn't mean I'm not keeping my word with Junkie Paul. He's in the zone with us, part of the circle. He did me a solid and I will do him one in return. He will get at least two bags off me for his act of selflessness. It was an honorable thing he did, and honor is some
thing found in the smallest of quantities when you're in this game. Everyone is out for himself. Everybody, from junkies to runners to dealers, is trying to somehow come out ahead. Paul's contribution doesn't slip by lightly. Paul is a goddam angel sent from above.

I run over to the dumpster and pull the box out from under it. The works are still inside, untouched. I fix my hit, then Alice's. We lean on each other in the front seat of the T-Bird, smoke a cigarette, feel the stress slip away. It doesn't matter that we don't have a way home. We made it through a blistering hot afternoon in the Bluff. We
must
be invincible.

Before walking to the Shell station to call a ride, I try the car one last time. It starts on the first key turn.