Black Hole (11 page)

But some of us won't die.

Those of us who never caught a break.

The one thing life handed us was some kind of freakish endurance. I've done twice as many drugs as other people who died from doing half as much. I've drunk enough to kill a man and snorted enough coke to kill another, and I call it Tuesday night. I've gotten away with it time after time, pushing myself as hard as I can, taking uppers when I'm down and downers when I'm up until I don't know which direction I'm facing at any moment. Hell, I don't need painkillers or speed; I need a fucking compass. I've gone into neighborhoods I shouldn't have been in, bought shit I was pretty sure was drugs from people I didn't know and smoked them with a pipe I made from garbage I found on the street, and I'm fine.

I should be dead, like a cockroach you step on and then lift up your foot and it runs off. It should be dead, and so should I.

Knew a guy named Tucson Sam—it was a play on Toucan Sam as far as I could figure, but he was actually from Phoenix or some shit. Sam had it all, or so I thought. He had a small-town handsomeness with a big-city mystery. He played guitar in a bunch of retro country bands. He had a great old truck that looked like it was out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The girls loved him, especially when he was heartbroken.

The more he got dumped, the more he got laid. One after another, they came to him, doe-eyed solutions to his problem. Now you should think at this point, why couldn't this fucker keep a woman around?

Along with everything else retro and cool about him in a rustic country way, he had a crippling problem with whiskey. He drank every day, and he only stopped to drink at night. That's
why we were good friends. We drank together. I never told him to stop. I backed his play, listened to his troubles in the small moments between women.

He eventually wrecked the truck and got a motorcycle. The motorcycle was a rumbling blue ox to his rebellious Paul Bunyan. He looked like a biker, became a biker. Bikers liked him like women liked him. It was strange. He had this undeniable charisma. But as he dressed the part, he lived the part as well. Got into the drugs.

Bikers are famous for the speed, for the meth, but what they're really making their nut on now is Oxy. Too many people are cooking meth now, and it's too difficult to get the ingredients. Oxy is all made in a lab. No cookers to deal with, no lab explosions, no tweakers. And what they're selling, they're taking.

Sam got an Oxy habit. Which, like most Oxy habits, turned into a heroin habit. You remember drug week in high school? They always had this jag about marijuana being a gateway drug: smoke a joint, you'll have a needle in your arm by the end of the semester. Bullshit. Such bullshit. I think the first time you smoke a joint and don't try to fly off the roof of a skyscraper, you think everything you've ever been told is bullshit. So eventually you say fuck it, I'll try speed, and Vicodins and ecstasy and whatever people have. So drug week is the real gateway drug, right? That's what I thought until Oxy came around. Take it every day, and you will eventually end up shooting dope, I guarantee it.

Sam's heroin habit turned into psychosis. I don't know what really happened, but he lost his damn mind, is all I know. Lost his job, lost a bunch more after that, lost his bike, and worst of all, his looks. The girls stopped coming around. He had that look
that junkies get that their face is one size too big for their skull. There's a strange gauntly gray sag they get.

The worst though is what he did to his dog. He killed his dog. Like butchered it, on the steps of the old bank that's now a social security office, on a Sunday morning in front of the brunch crowd outside of Boogaloos. They caught the whole thing on iPhones. Axed that fucker open. The cops were on him.

I hoped he'd get better. Maybe being locked up would do him some good, get him some help. But it did and it didn't help. It cleared up his mind, all right. But he couldn't live with what he'd done. He killed himself in a SRO in the Civic Center.

Poor guy. I used to think he had it made. I used to wish I were him. I wanted to be like him. That's the life of the junkie though. You don't know what it is until you're on that side.

There used to be this RV on Twenty-first Street. If you were desperate or dopesick, you could stick your hand in the hole with a ten-dollar bill, and someone on the other side would give you a tiny balloon of heroin.

On that same corner now is a food truck. If you are hungry or desperate, you can hand them a ten-dollar bill, and they'll hand you a kimchi burger. Much less of a deal, if you ask me.

I have to take the edge off. I feel like shit. My sweat's coming out in a slick film. My crotch is damp. My fingers are tingly. Loud. Everything is too loud—cell conversations, barking dogs, yelling children. Cars honking. Ring tones.

A woman in Lululemon gear ties her dog to a parking meter and heads inside the café. The dog cries, and I feel sorry for it. It has to live with her; it's codependent on her chronic
abandonment. I know her type; I've worked the cafes before: she's the kind who asks for a drink, but everything about it is special needs: the temperature, the milk, the foam, the glass it's in . . . nothing can be done for her like it's done for everyone else. She can't find one thing on the menu that she likes as is. Back in the day, we could just tell her no, to fuck off, that we weren't doing all that shit. But the new cafes ruined everyone. Which is my real beef with Starbucks. I don't care about corporate this and that. They indoctrinated the public into the coffee world. No one in America knew what a latte was until they came along. Starbucks became a place for all the fuckers with special needs to give directions and get attention. We used to ask for lattes and mochas in singles and doubles; now it's sizes. That's not how it should be done. We had a terminology that had existed for however long the espresso machine existed, and that place ruined it. I don't give a good god damn about the mythical mom-and-pop places, which are often owned by complete jerks who should be out of business. I'm against these marketing fuckers branding something that didn't need it.

Sunday mornings are hell in the Mission. It fills up with the brunch crowd that, if you don't live here, I can't really describe. Brunch is the disco of this decade. People wait in line for pastries at Tartine. Sure, it's good, I've been there on a weekday, but it's not stand-in-line-like-it's-Studio 54 good.

Mornings are hard on drug addicts. Shit is wearing off. Stuff we took two days ago is coming out of our systems, and we're coming down from stuff we took the day before. A call must be made: more of the same to keep the sickness away and the party rolling, or some assistance in the crash with something to take the edge off? A delicate balance must be maintained.

Some people see the drug life as easier, that you just get high and don't worry about shit. Not the case. The moment you buy your drugs, they start to run out. The more drugs you take, the more your tolerance grows, and therefore, you must buy more the next time. It's a tightrope act, with your emotions being the rope and drugs as the balancing pole. You fuckers on the ground do nothing, and you stay nothing. Not high, not coming down, nothing. I don't remember the last day I wasn't on something, coming off something, or recovering from something; usually it's a mix of all three in varying degrees, like three colors of light that sometimes, occasionally, when I get the mix right, burns a perfect pure white. Which makes it all worth it, and if you don't know about that, you'll never get it.

And you fuckers with your yoga mats and strollers and fair-trade toddlers crowd up my sidewalks and give me stares like I don't belong here. I'm here every day. Where are you? You're only here on the weekends. You're working down in Silicon Valley, leaving this street every day so you can afford to live here. You could take it easy and live in a van, like me. But you'll be paid off on that mortgage in another twenty-seven years when you're seventy. Maybe you'll like it here still. Maybe you'll be dead, and I'll be squatting in your house. How many purebred dogs will you go through in one lifetime? How many hybrid cars will you purchase? I hope you had a nice time with your life. I did stuff. I may end up with nothing, but we'll both be dead and it won't matter. We'll be on our deathbeds in the same room at SF General, and yeah you did CrossFit and yoga and ate gluten-free bagels, you had an IRA and a 401(k) and T-bills, whatever those are, and you dated respectable people and you married one and had two kids, one of each, and you raised them bilingual
and sent them to good schools and you named them after your favorite characters in your favorite books that you read and you didn't watch TV because TV is bullshit, and me, I went into neighborhoods I shouldn't have been in and bought what I was pretty sure were drugs from people I didn't know and I smoked them from pipes I made out of garbage, and I didn't go to the dentist for the entirety of the '90s, and I ate meat, smoked, and wore leather, and I flushed the toilet whenever I fucking felt like it, fuck the drought and fuck the bad karma . . .

Chuck, bro, are you okay?

He's shaking me, a hand on each shoulder. I'm not wearing a shirt. Scratches like I fought a cat. Pants, no shoes. Barefoot on the sidewalk. The wind is cold; I'm covered in a thick sweat.

Chuck, we have to get out of here.

I know this guy. Can't place it. He's from another time, another life.

I'm in front of Tartine. The phones are out. I'm being filmed with iPads and cell phones. Nannies are shielding kids from me. Someone's yelling. Wait, it's me. I'm not thinking. I'm yelling.

Chuck, it's me, Eric. You are fucked up.

Eric's an old roommate. He lived in the pantry of my house on Laguna Street for a hundred bucks a month. Ninety. Ninety-one. Something. What year is it?

Eric tugs at me. I follow.

I'm at Eric's house. The walls are covered in rock posters and flyers. I'm sitting on a futon in the living room that's probably his bedroom as well. He tries talking to me, but the words are coming out so slowly I can't understand him. I'm falling in a remote hole.

Time pauses and restarts. A fly stops in front of me, hovers like a helicopter. It backs up, goes forward. This isn't good.

Eric comes back. He has a briefcase with him that's a stashbox. He opens it, rifles around, comes out with a tiny squeeze bottle. He tilts my head back and drops something liquid in my eye. It's cold. Then I feel good. And my cock gets hard immediately. I need to fuck somebody. Right now.

Ha, you like that, right?

Remote . . .

Oh shit, that's what this crash is. I have some of that. Hold on.

He rifles around some more. Finds a pill. He crushes it into a fine powder and holds it under my nose. I snort it like a drowning man grabbing for a rope.

What the fuck, Chuck?

What was that first shit you gave me?

Some new shit I'm fucking with. It's a failed antidepressant. It's supposed to turn depression into happiness, but it just crosswires sadness with sexual arousal. Of course, it never got through clinical trials. But it's the best ecstasy comedown cure ever. I'm running a weekend party the last week of every month. Sunday is comedown day. We show Hallmark commercials and montages from
Old Yeller
and shit, and everyone gets naked and fucks. Even the ugly old guys like me. You should come. You're already halfway naked. Really though, what the fuck?

Blacked out. Been taking a lot of shit. Speaking of which, I need to take a shit, a literal shit.

Down the hall. And take a shower. You smell fucking horrible.

The first shit blasts like a shotgun. Then nothing. Then it wells up again and blasts. Water and chunks. Then a stream of water, like a riot hose. Then nothing. I sit for a while.

Rock hard. Stroke. Think of Liza. What she used to look like. The Catholic schoolgirl uniform she showed off to you before you fucked her way back when. The event that led to the fetish. You're not interested in Catholic schoolgirls. You've been trying to fuck Liza again for years. Fuck her again. That's your thing with the skirt. You're chasing after her memory. Scars. Burns. No. Fuck. Think of that ass peeking from underneath the hem of the skirt. The first shaved pussy you'd ever seen. Only strippers and porn actresses had those then. It was the unshaven punk era. Shaven armpits were mainstream corporate bullshit. She's standing over you wearing a skirt with no panties and asking you what you think, and you're still afraid to make a move, frozen from a childhood of abuse and rejection. You can't say anything, and she laughs.
Take it out,
she says. She can see you're hard, you still harbor fear that she's going to laugh at it, but you take it out because that's what you're told to do. Instead of laughing, she hovers closer and closer, till she slides right on top of your cock and she's grinding you. A drop of sweat runs off her face and lands in your mouth. You don't want to come right away, but you do, a flush of heat ripping through your neck, you close your eyes . . .

You open your eyes. See the scars. Living room. Liza's here. Fucking Liza on the floor. Not a fantasy anymore.

Where am I?

What? Jesus, Chuck. You're in my living room.