Futureproof (22 page)

“Fine. I can get it for you by next Friday.”

“Yes, man. Yes.”

Trizden stands up to take his roll. I drag hard on a cigarette. I feel dirty.

“What happened to the poet?” he asks after throwing his fourth consecutive strike.

“He died during the war. Of consumption. Drowned in his own fluids.”

“That sucks. But—a national hero, huh? I guess that's not a bad way to go.”

 

Animal Mother loans me the rent money. Two days later Andie shows up at the apartment and says she needs to talk. She says she wants me back, that I haven't called her in weeks and she can't stand to imagine that I would be out of her life forever.

Within twenty minutes we're screwing.

Then we go down to the Bluff and a mere two hours after Andie steps back into my world we're right back where we were in the first place.

Because that's what we do.

People like Andie can't be with people like me, no matter how good the intentions. We feed off each other. We are the ragged claws scuttling across the silent sea floor, picking the microbes off each other, barely sustaining life.

But I am a creature of habit. And I have nothing but the drudgery of day-to-day labor and an empty apartment filled with the memories of a thousand deferred possibilities. And I'm fond of Andie, to whatever degree one needs to be fond of someone to cohabitate with and sleep with her on a regular basis.

We are comfortable with each other.

And when everything else looks corrupted and void of possibility, you take the road you know best, even if the end it presents is the same one it has always given before.

October

Last time, the excuse was that it was a beautiful autumn afternoon. This time it was O.J.

I got everybody to stop sawing and hammering on the latest floor install long enough to listen to the verdict being read on the radio.

Not Guilty.

I use this injustice as fuel for my fire. I go downtown with Andie and Jonas after work and get higher than I have in months. “This is for O.J.,” I say.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Jonas mumbles between nods, his eyes all red-rimmed and angry.

“It doesn't matter how much we try to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, you fucking idiots. Can't you see? We're going to be trapped down here forever because we have no marketable skills. We
can't run or jump better than anybody else. We can't afford college. We can't act or sing. We can't do long division. We're the fucking plebes. We have no hopes other than what we find at the bottom of a bag of dope, the emptying of a syringe into a collapsing vein.”

“That was inspirational,” Andie says sarcastically.

I look to Jonas for his take but he's nodded out, as usual. The kid can't stay awake on dope. His whole life is spent either trying to cop dope or nodding off because of it. And for the in-between times he has his unrelenting anger to hold him over.

And I've got mine.

“Here's to O.J.,” I say again, gasping, banging another bag of coke.

November

Andie and I recently hooked up with a new contact down in the Bluff. His name is Quill. He's different from most of the go-betweens down there in that he has us take him to different dealers' houses and then asks for rides to the grocery store to pick up milk and shit like that. He's only twenty-two, but he's married and has three kids. His wife comes along sometimes when we go to pick up the dope. Her name is Meat.

Quill and Meat are cool. They seem to genuinely empathize with the plight of the junkie. They even gave us their hotel room phone number when they left their kids with Meat's mom so they could have a night off from the incessant stress of the drug-dealing ghetto life.

Andie and I sat in the Holiday Inn parking lot all night and shot
coke until it felt like we couldn't breathe another breath and then I went over to the payphone and called Quill in room 509 and he brought me out some more cocaine as the sun came up.

On the way home, I sat at the stoplight at the entrance ramp to the freeway, the come-down bags of smack safely secured under the flat spare tire in the trunk, trying to see if I could fix my final coke shot in the time between the lights changing. As we merged onto the highway I pushed the least dull of our four works into my vein and began pushing the plunger down, could feel the rush hitting me again, but this time it was worse, like being body-slammed by a four-hundred-pound wrestler.

I don't know if it hit me harder because I was trying to pay attention to driving as well as rushing on my run, but first came the tunnel vision and then I started to die.

My chest heaved, trying to pull in another breath, my heart
thunk-thunking
so hard I could feel my pulse in my eyeballs and fingertips. I pulled the car over and leaned my head on the steering wheel long enough to try to find it in me to keep living. Andie freaked out and asked if I was OK and did I want her to drive.

By the time I regained some semblance of normalcy from the coke hit, it felt like I'd aged about twenty years.

These brushes with death have gotten more and more frequent since I started using again in earnest. That's why we're going to New York. I figure at least once in a lifetime a junkie must make the trip to Junkie Mecca. Now is our time. Now there's only One Thing.

 

We drive straight through from Atlanta to New York, just to hook up with Splinter and shoot dope. That's all. No higher reason or purpose.

Splinter gets the “bundle special” for us from a guy he knows over on Avenue C. Ten bags for the price of nine. He counts out
four twenties and a ten, and the dealer hands Splinter a square stack of wax-paper-wrapped bags tied together with a small rubber band.

I can feel the adrenaline coming. It's a rush I've come to expect and appreciate nearly as much as the high itself. Andie squeezes my hand and I look at her and smile. She doesn't take her eyes off the bundle.

We brisk-walk the long three blocks back to Splinter's. Behind his building there's a little terrace with a stone picnic table. It's as good a place to fix as any. Splinter pulls kits from his coat pocket for each of us. Every kit contains a bottle cap, cotton ball, a little plastic flask of water, and a work, still factory-sealed in plastic. “These are brand-new, straight from the needle exchange,” he says. It's a relief not to have to argue with Andie over who goes first. When there's only one work she's a total pain in the ass about it.

I pull a baggie from the bundle and toss it to Splinter. “I hooked you up
and
got you a deal, man. That should be worth at least three bags,” he says. I toss him another. It's been nearly ten hours since Andie and I used our last rationed bags in the car on the way up. I don't feel like arguing.

Then it's a race to get fixed. I've got my method down to a science. I unwrap the wax paper, which is embossed with an ink stamp that says
HITMAN
, with a cross-hairs emblem over the word.

“What the fuck is ‘hitman'?”

“A hitman,” says Splinter, prepping his hit, “also known as an ‘assassin,' is usually hired by someone to ‘rub out 'or ‘kill' another person.”

“No shit, dude. Why does it say that on a bag of dope?”

“That's just the brand name the dealer puts on his shit to differentiate from the other dealers' shit. That way you can find out what the best stuff is that week and ask for it by name.”

I pour my dope into the bottle cap and suck some water into the syringe.

“So Hitman is good?”

The dope turns a rich dark brown as it mixes with the water.

“It's so-so shit. The best stuff is Cardiac Arrest. It's so fuckin' pure. We'll hook up some of that in the morning.”

I suck the skag into the work and in moments the needle is slipping into my right arm. I got my first “tattoo” on that vein. It's just a single dot of blue where I'd once inadvertantly sucked up the ink from the date stamp on the bottom of a soda can. When I shot the dope the ink left a permanent reminder. Now I use that dot as a target mark and know I'll be bang-on every time.

I push in the plunger and before I can depress it even halfway the wave of rush rolls over me, warm and thick. I pause, wait to see how far it will go, wait to make sure this won't be too much, that my heart can handle the rush, before I push the rest of the junk into my vein.

“Oh, Jesus. This is good shit.”

I look over at Andie and she's lying on the walkway, the needle hanging from her arm. She doesn't take the same precautions I do. She always bangs the whole bag at once, no matter what. This is why I never OD. This is why Jonas, Splinter, and Andie have OD'd numerous times. Andie looks at me with half-closed eyes and smiles. I lay my head on her chest. The fourteen hours on the road, praying the car would last until we got here, have already been forgiven. New York City. Promised Land.

 

The next morning Splinter wakes me early and asks if I want to see the city. I tell him we want dope first. He says the best stuff should be on the corner by Tower Records within the hour.

“Is that the good shit? The best shit?”

“Cardiac Arrest or Murder One. The purest and least cut.”

“Andie.” I shake her awake. She groans and rolls over.

“You'll feel better soon.” I jiggle the remaining dope bags in front of her nose. “We'll hit the rest of this bundle and then score some more.”

 

We have hot vegetable soup and a hunk of French bread for breakfast, courtesy of the Catholic Church soup kitchen down the street from the apartment. It comes in a brown bag with a plastic spoon and a lidded Styrofoam bowl. We sit on a bench in the park and watch the heat rise from many a bum's soup bowl.

When we get back to Splinter's there are not one but two tickets under the T-Bird's windshield wiper.

“Sonofabitch!”

“I told you this city is a motherfucker to have a car in, man,” Splinter says.

The T-Bird sits alone on the left side of the one-way street. Every other car is double-parked on the right side. You can see where the street cleaner navigated around my car. It has made two passes, one at 7 a.m., the other at 9. This explains the double ticketing. Andie says, “Fuck it. Let's shoot this dope.”

So we do.

And after coming down a bit, we decide to walk.

We've got our hoods up and the wind is getting colder. Andie holds my hand and I realize that this is the first time she's touched me since we got to New York. We never fool around anymore, except for the kiss after we both get a good hit, when our heads are filled with clouds and our bodies are swimming in the Heroin womb. I squeeze her hand and she squeezes back and we look at each other and smile. This is our first vacation.

We wander uptown with no real destination in mind. A really
attractive girl, probably in her early twenties, runway model fashionista, nice handbag, all that, is standing under one of those roofed bus stops.

“Merry Christmas,” I say to her, pulling out a cigarette. “You got a light?”

“Christmas is neither merry nor is it a holiday I celebrate,” she snaps.

“Why, are you Jewish?”

“Not that it's any of your business, but yes, I am. Though I don't celebrate Chanukah either.” She sneers, turns away from me.

Andie pulls on my sleeve to go but I still haven't gotten my light. And I know this chick smokes because she's got that pissed-off-at-the-world look and all of us in that boat are smokers.

“So can I get a light?”

She steps back, reaches into her shiny handbag, and pulls out a pink Bic.

“I wasn't going to steal your purse,” Andie says.

She looks Andie up and down and deadpans, “Like you could.”

“You're just pissed at the world, huh?” I say, taking a drag on the cigarette.

“What is it with you? I gave you a light, OK?”

“I just wanna know what makes you so pissed.”

“What are you, fucking Freud? You don't even know me.”

“You're a real New Yorker, aren't you?”

“So you're not from here? That explains the lack of common sense and the inability to know when to take a hint.”

The Heroin is wearing off and so is my confidence. I resort to my joke. It's the only one I can ever remember.

“It's not me, it's you,” I say. “Let me explain: A man walks into his shrink's office and says, ‘Doc, I keep having these nightmares. One night I'll dream I'm a teepee, the next night I'll dream I'm a wigwam.
I'm a teepee. I'm a wigwam. I'm a teepee. I'm a wigwam.' The doc looks at him and says, ‘The problem is, you're two tents.' Get it?”

“Blow it out your ass,” she says, then disappears inside a cab.

 

We're sitting at Splinter's kitchen table taking monstrous shots of cocaine with Splinter's friend, I think his name is Damien. He has the master hookup at this bogus coffee shop that's really just a front for a major drug-dealing operation. We've already eaten the donuts that came with the stuff, the better to complete the illusion of coffee-shop legitimacy.

Andie's out on the patio puking. Everyone else is talking incessantly. Words piled on words, lost in a rush of give-me-more, I-can't-catch-my-breath.

I take my shot and I can't breathe. It's the most potent cocaine I've ever injected, like shooting a bag of ether, so light and full of air it makes you feel like it's sucking the very life out of you and replacing it with itself.

My face is numb and my guts churn but I don't want to run to the bathroom because I'm afraid I'll die in that little space, trying to get the bad stuff out.

I implore Splinter to fix me a hit of the Cardiac Arrest or 187. Every junkie worth his habit knows that cocaine is Heroin's evil twin, and when someone is lost in the shadows of the white stuff they can always turn to the H.

Splinter fixes the shot for me and I push the syringe into my arm with all the concentration and deliberation of a captain docking his ship. Splinter has saved me. The cocaine insanity leaves, the warm velvet of Heroin blanketing everything.

Damien has been unsuccessful in getting the needle to hit a vein. He's been trying for twenty minutes and his arms show it. Blood seeps from six separate entry wounds. This guy is at least 6'3" and has to
weigh close to 250, but his veins are smaller than a baby's.

I offer to get him set up right. We use his belt this time. Nobody that's been doing this for any length of time bothers tying off like you see in the movies, but this guy has special issues that require drastic measures. I push the needle in at the crook of his elbow but his vein rolls away from me.

I pull the syringe out and watch a new blood bubble appear. The wounds are running in intersecting rivulets and he's starting to look like a suicide.

I push in again, trying to keep his vein in place with two fingers, but it's so deeply inlaid beneath the skin that it's impossible. The needle misses again but I tell him I've got it anyway. I push down on the plunger. He knows immediately that I was lying and fucked it up.

“You motherfucker, you skin-popped me!”

There's nothing worse than a skin-pop, when you miss the vein and shoot the dope into the surrounding soft tissue. This activity would get a “normal” person higher than hell, but for the experienced mainliner it's money down the drain, a wasted shot that makes you want to get high
for real
that much more. A mainline vein shot goes straight to the heart and then to the brain in a matter of seconds. Anything else—smoking, snorting, skin-popping—is far, far removed. We are fucking medical about this shit.

I flip the baggie of coke to Skin-Popper so he can try again and head outside to find Andie. She's sitting on the cement picnic bench, smoking and looking crazed. Even when she's not geeking she has the biggest eyes I've ever seen. Right about now they look like fucking portholes. Cocaine makes all the muscles in your face contort and pull back. Cokeheads always appear hyper-aware, but it's a façade. Our eyeballs are just more vulnerable to dust.

I lean down to kiss her and can taste the cocaine in her saliva. It
numbs me further, if that's even possible. I realize that she's probably as high right now as she's ever been.

“Are you doing OK?”

“Yeah,” she murmurs, sitting motionless, not meeting my kiss.

“I was worried about you,” I say. “You were gone all of a sudden and I was about to die. Where were you?”

“I had to get some air before I passed out.” She's staring at her shoes, or maybe it's the cracks in the concrete.

“We've got to quit doing this shit.”

“What shit?”

“The fucking cocaine. It's so strong—it's evil. I can feel it taking me over.”

“Alright,” she says, stumbling to stand, “but let me take one more hit before you get all religious on me.”