A Dangerous Game (14 page)

I’m musing like this because last night I did coke. It was the fourth time this month, and March isn’t even half over yet. I’ve called in sick twice, and twice I’ve gotten cash on my credit card to buy the stuff. I know it’s going to ruin me, but the coke demon always comes around, seductive and persuasive. These are the kind of thoughts I always have on the day after. It’s almost become laughable. The next-day depression and the remorse are the price I always pay, in addition to the cash.

But it always seems worth it when I’m excited, sprinkling a little mound of powder and white rocks into a crisp dollar bill, folding it so it’s sealed, and then running a pen over it to grind it up. When I open the dollar bill and the little mound of fine white powder appears on my glass coffee table, it’s like a gift, and the money, the blues I will get the next day, along with the limb-weighing, body-numbing fatigue, all seem worth it. A small price to pay for the pleasure I know is on its way. If it’s a work night, I kid myself (and I do this over and over and over… like some poor soul in Hades who never learns) and say I’ll just do six lines or ten lines, or I’ll only do it until eleven. But six lines always become twenty, and 11:00 p.m. becomes 6:00 a.m. I tell myself I’ll put it away and save the rest for the weekend. And I really mean it.

Yes, by now I know better, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking that this time I really mean it. This time I won’t keep doing a little more, a little more, promising myself “Just these two more lines and then that’s it.” But it never works. It’s as predictable as the dawn coming up to keep me company later on.

And, speaking of dawn, it just colored my apartment a little over an hour ago. I had just reached over and turned off my clock radio, the one that’s supposed to get me up for work this morning. I lay there, wide-awake, thinking “Should I go in?” I’ve done it before, when eight hours seems like eighty, when the fatigue hits (they don’t call it crashing for nothing), usually around noon or so. Trying to keep my eyes open in a meeting with the creative director. Oh yes, there’s nothing like a day at the office after a cocaine binge.

Or should I just call in sick? Will one more day really make much difference? I mean, I really do feel sick.

It doesn’t take much to convince me. My limbs feel as if they’re weighted down as I get up to grab my cell and tap my boss’s direct line on its screen. I picture her: a black woman in her thirties with three kids, a mortgage, and no sense of humor. Great for someone who’s in charge of copy for a big ad agency. After I hear her crisp, no-nonsense message, I mumble wearily into the phone, “Hi, this is Rufus. I’m not feeling well. I won’t be in today. Call me at home if you need anything.” I feel like adding, but I don’t, “I’ll be awake watching movies until about one. After one I’ll be in a restless sleep on the couch, that cat curled up in the crook of my bent knees.”

Now, freed with an entire day in front of me, I return to the living room. It’s a mess. The coffee table is littered with a can of Crisco, a black leather snappable cock ring, a straw, a dollar bill, a razor blade, a little pink Ziploc bag that looks as if it’s made for the world’s tiniest sandwich, and three candles burned crookedly halfway down. There’s also a piece of paper on which the number of a phone sex line and an access code are scrawled. (I’m old school—I never got into online hookups. Hearing a guy’s voice to me is sexier than looking at some years-old picture.)

Here’s my cell (gotta wipe the Crisco off that later) and a bottle of poppers. Two empty beer bottles lie on the floor, and an overflowing ashtray shames me on the end table. A crushed box of Marlboro Lights lies near the DVD remote control; next to it, another pack, half full. I pull out a cigarette, light it.

I pick up the pink plastic bag, open its top like a tiny mouth, and shake it over the table’s glass surface. A light sprinkling of cocaine falls to the “playing field,” the part I keep pristine to form my lines. The playing field always has vestiges of the previous binge, and I move the razor blade across this surface, sweeping up the tiny remnants. And then there’s the dollar bill. It too can be scraped for remains. Usually a little still clings to its surface. In the end there’s enough for one medium line or two small ones. I’ll make two small ones. I try to snort the first one up my left nostril, but it’s completely blocked and the fine powder just comes right back out. I wipe my reddened, sore nose with the back of my hand and take another drag off the Marlboro. I then make another attempt, this time with my right nostril. It works.

I lean back on the couch, take my limp dick in my hand, and hit the power and play buttons on the DVD player. A group scene, all men, springs into life, and I watch, wishing the magic would come back.

Wishing, really, that last night’s magic was never there. Because maybe without the coke, I might have played safer with the three guys who came over during the course of the evening.

But it just didn’t seem to matter. And I really didn’t want that last one to come inside me. But he just did. He didn’t even give me any warning. One minute I was on the bed, legs in the air with him standing between them, pounding away for all he was worth. We smiled at each other. I trusted him. And then his eyes squinched up and he moaned. I knew what was happening, but I just lay there and let it.

Afterward, in the bathroom, when I wiped my ass and the toilet paper came away with a bright crimson smear, I called myself stupid.

Que sera, sera.

The phone rings, and I flip it over to look at the display. Work. Fuck ’em. The sun’ll come out tomorrow. Right now it’s time to take the scissors to the baggy so I can lick whatever’s sticking to the plastic off, numb my tongue.

Wren set the computer down on the floor beside him. He was shocked about many things. The first was that Rufus obviously had a capacity for writing. Wren was no judge of quality, but the words he read had telegraphed pain, had showed, rather than told, the anguish of being caught up in a force beyond one’s control. Why wasn’t Rufus using this talent to make his living instead of doing what he was doing? If this memoir, if that’s what it could be called, was actually true, Rufus had had more than a dead-end job. He was white collar, a creative type, but probably making some serious cash, at least by Wren’s standards. Enough to live on comfortably enough, anyway.

Had Rufus hit bottom?

Had he burned bridges at the job he talked about blowing off? Had that failure led to others? Was that how he wound up here?

Wren felt an ache in his heart for Rufus, a keening that made him want to draw Rufus back to him so he could console him, so he could take care of him, much as he had once done with Linda.

Odd thought, that.

The second thing Wren wondered—worried—about was whether the bad news Chillingsworth had delivered had sent Rufus out into the night in search of his seductive and destructive mistress, cocaine. Wren had always been sensible enough to stay away from drugs himself, maybe because even in his short life, he had seen enough of his friends brought down by their fickle charms. Only last year he had watched his buddy Trent go from looking like a rough-and-tumble beefy football player to a hollow-eyed, missing-tooth waif in the space of only a year. Trent had been ensnared by crystal meth.

Wren knew how easy it was to find drugs at any hour of the day or night in a city the size of Chicago. He prayed Rufus wasn’t out there now getting high.

It was obvious he was clean, simply by the vitality that coursed through him and the fact that he had given up the other side of his addiction to cocaine—smoking.

Maybe, Wren told himself, none of what he had read was true. Perhaps it was the start of a novel.

He shook his head. The thing had the ring of truth.

He looked ahead. Outside the sky had changed while he was reading, going from deep night to an indescribable dark gray, a sky that heralded the coming of dawn. Rufus had been gone the entire night. An irrational part of Wren wanted to throw on some clothes and go out into the city and search for him. The rational part stopped him—such a hunt would be like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

He needed to be here should Rufus come back, anyway.

And what if he never came back? Wren prayed he had come to no harm, but what if tonight’s news had activated the flee part of the fight-or-flee response that was within all of us, especially when we were traumatized?

Wren would not even know where to begin looking if Rufus had decided to hide himself.

He glanced over at the door, expecting the sound of a key in the lock, but the silence taunted him, denying him such simple comfort. He took up the computer again, set it on his lap, and touched the mouse pad to wake it from the slumber it had fallen into while Wren thought.

He read the next entry, hoping maybe if he persevered, there might be some hope, a happy ending.

But when he thought of Rufus’s life now, especially tonight, he doubted it.

March 11

It’s amazing what sixteen and a half hours of sleep can do. Although it was a little hard to get out of bed this morning, right now I’m in the shower, feeling fine. The coffee’s brewing in the kitchen. Vivaldi’s playing on the radio, letting me know spring is just around the corner, and yesterday’s depression seems like a distant memory.

Today will be different. A new beginning. I read somewhere that coke isn’t physically addictive. (Wonder how many Internet sites I had to go through to find that one person out of a jillion who claimed that.) I just need to tough it out. Give it a few weeks and it’ll be easier.

Right?

Besides, my checkbook is a mess. Payday’s still ten days off, and I have about $53 to get me through.

But I’ll worry about that later. Today—a new beginning. I emerge from the shower, toweling my buzz cut hair, dabbing it dry. I run my fingers through the stubbly dark blond hair and look at myself in the mirror. Other than a little red around my nostrils, I look great. The deep blue in my eyes is back, the pupils down to normal size. I still look like the twenty-six-year-old gay man I am. Hell, I can still pass for twenty, maybe. I can still get away from the number I know coke can do on you.

I look down at my dick as I dry it, because the towel rubbing against it causes a little twinge to travel up my spine. “Ouch,” I whisper. I pull it to one side and notice a tiny cluster of blisters. Some of them look swollen with liquid.

“It’s just from too much Crisco and rubbing. The grease caused a few blisters.”

I take the “L” downtown. During my ride, I try to read last week’s
Entertainment Weekly
, but find myself scanning the train for cute guys and thinking about what I’ll do tonight. I know I need to keep myself busy. Maybe I’ll call Billie, my straight woman friend who lives by Lake Michigan up in the Rogers Park neighborhood. She has no idea about my cocaine binges and my promiscuity. She sees me as a nice, literate young man.

And that’s what I am, really. The binges are just something out of character.

Besides, if I call Billie and she wants to do dinner and a movie, it’ll keep me up late enough that it would be insane to entertain thoughts of calling Sam.

Before I head into the downtown Chicago off-white monolith I call home during weekdays, I run into Starbucks and grab a cup of that day’s blend, make it large. A little reinforcement for the day ahead. I know there’ll be a shitload of catalog copy to do for the Busy Beaver, the hardware chain I spend most of my time doing retail for. Busy Beaver… it’s so ripe for parody it stinks.

But enough. Today it’s the conscientious worker.

My cubicle, thank God, is against a wall. Which means I can sort of hide in it. Well, hide as best one can behind four-foot-high beige fabric-covered dividers.

I like to get in early so I can leave early. Most people here work until eight or nine o’clock, so they don’t come in until late.

But it’s funny, because Sheila, my boss, is already here. Lucky me, Sheila sits right next to me, so any personal calls I make, any Web surfing I might do, Sheila can easily keep up with. So I don’t do much besides toil away writing copy for retail flyers that will be tucked into copies of the
Chicago Tribune
to later be tossed in the trash or recycling bin by annoyed readers. With wave after wave of retail catalog copy to write, I don’t have time for such pursuits anyway.

I can call Billie later, when Sheila’s in a meeting. I try to be sociable when I arrive that morning.

“Good morning,” I chirp, yes, chirp, but Sheila isn’t in a good mood today. Obviously. She doesn’t turn her head away from her computer screen, just lifts a chubby black hand and wiggles it a little.

Great.

While I power up my computer, a shadow falls across my back. A pretty big shadow, because Sheila probably weighs in at about 250.

“Rufus.”

I swivel in my chair. Grin. I still don’t know what’s coming.

I notice Sheila’s wearing a silk skirt with a blue and gold paisley design and a bulky blue cotton sweater, gold jewelry. She looks nice. For Sheila.

“How about let’s go get some coffee.”

It’s still early enough that the break room is deserted. Sheila pours herself a cup from one of the two coffeemakers. She cocks her head toward the coffee with a questioning look.

I raise my Starbucks cup to her, and that at least garners a glimmer of a smile.

“The good stuff. Let’s sit down.”

As we cross to a table in the corner and against a wall, I begin to feel just a little nervous. My stomach begins to churn, my scalp to prickle.