Black Hole (6 page)

I have a client coming in later. I need something special for the party.

Ah, hell. This is why I don't get fired. If you come into work drunk, you can get fired, but if you're a great drug connection, you'll never get fired. Your only worry is that some other degenerate fuck with a better phone full of contacts doesn't get hired.

What are you looking for? Psychedelics? Amphetamines? Designer stuff?

No. Something special. Something not on the market yet.

How am I supposed to get something that's not on the market?

I don't know, figure it out. Should I ask where you're going in the company trucks in the mornings? Should I ask why you sometimes stand in front of the tank and do nothing but stare for an hour? Should I ask why someone drank your Vitamin Water by accident from the fridge and didn't come down for two days?

That shit was clearly labeled as mine.

Not the point. I know what's going on with you. Frankly, I don't give a fuck. But you need to do this for me.

OSO

I CAN SMELL
Oso from outside his building. He's up a few floors, but he leaves a trail of his funk behind. It's not bad out here, but it's rough up close. It's a sour smell, like something went bad. It's a quick-hitting smell, like when you open a container and sniff, and everything's fine until you're about to pass out. Some people say that it's a fat-guy smell, that he can't wash himself. But I think it's worse than that. I know someone who did time with him, said he would take a full shower and would come out still stinking, said a celly hanged himself because they wouldn't transfer him out, said he got shanked one time, and the fat closed over both the sharpened spoon and the guy's hand, and Oso beat him to death while he was stuck there like that, because he was that weird fat-guy strong, slow, but hit like a mule kick. I've walked into clubs and known he was in there because of the smell.

Oso is easily five hundred pounds. Maybe he's six. I don't know. I don't have a reference for anyone being that huge. Three hundred, I've seen, and he's well past that. When he sits, parts of him hang over other parts of him. When he stands, parts of him don't get up when other parts get up. He's not shaped like a human anymore.

He doesn't leave his Tenderloin apartment often, but when he does, everyone gets out of the way. He wears a black outfit and floats through the sidewalks. His street name is The Death Star, but no one says that to his face. He has his groceries and drugs delivered, so when he leaves the apartment, he's only
leaving to kick some ass. No one knows who it will be, but they know to run.

Pity the poor fuck who doesn't see him coming. His rage matches his appetite. I've seen him pin a junkie against a car with his belly, like a fat fleshy airbag, in a suffocating gesture. Your body immediately exhales then can't inhale. There's no more panic than the lack of air.

What you fools looking for?
Oso slurs.

He's eating a pie with a fork. Not a slice of pie, but a pie with a fork. He stops intermittently to spray more whipped cream into it.

Something special,
I say
. Something not on the market yet. Something new.

How much you fools looking to spend?

Not a dime over five large.

In his apartment with Big Mike, I'm the smallest man in the world. I'm trying to picture dropping three hundred pounds of fat on Big Mike, what would happen to his prison tats, but I can't formulate it in my head. Both of these guys started out at around nine pounds as babies and now they're enormous.

We cleared five grand in the horsemeat deal. Had to pay off the racetrack guy, and the gym was buying the meat wholesale. So we're trying to buy something from Oso.

I think I got the thing for you fools,
he says with a snicker. He puts the pie down and reaches behind his chair, retrieving a lidded jar that's full of black marbles.

Bro, what is that?
Big Mike asks.

Shit is too new for a name.

That's what we're looking for,
I say.
What's it do?

It's a synthetic smokeable speedball. Comes on speedy, then, where the crash would be, a nice Oxy-style comedown.

Great,
I tell him.
How much for the jar?

Fuck, you fools ain't buying the jar. These retail at a thousand bucks apiece.

No way,
Big Mike says, standing up.
We're out. You're fucking with us.

Wait, wait, I haven't told you the best part yet . . . this shit doesn't run out.

Now I'm interested,
Big Mike says.

I've been hitting my own every day for a month; it's still the same size. I'll give you fools eight for five.

Too much,
Big Mike says,
I don't know anyone who can afford it.

I do,
I blurt out. This is exactly what I need.

DRUGSITTER

NOT ONLY DO
I have to find these rich fucks drugs, but apparently I have to babysit them as well—Eirean and four of his friends, with names like Colin and Taylor and Colby or whatever. They're all vaping; it smells like they're freebasing Jolly Ranchers.

Eirean's friends are exactly what I thought they would be: a bunch of nerds under thirty with more money than most suckers will ever see in a lifetime. What do they spend it on? New Balance jogging shoes, tight pants, plaid shirts, Tesla Roadsters, air hockey tables, and studio apartments that rent for as much as homes sell for in the Midwest. And occasionally, they spend a thousand bucks getting high.

We're on one of those bullshit bachelor-party-bus buses, the ones that look like a commuter shuttle got gutted and decorated like a casino, with LED lights everywhere and a stripper pole. It's the absolute opposite of cool.

Fuck it. I don't care. I sold five marbles, got our money back, and still have three left over. One for me and two more to sell. If I had a drug that wouldn't run out, I would definitely share it. But each of these rich fucks wants his own.

We're hitting this shit and watching
FernGully: The Last Rainforest
on DVD. The guys are pointing out how
Avatar
totally ripped it off. I've never seen this shit before. I was a full-grown man getting high and fucking women when this shit came out.

This whole hipster generation is stuck in their childhoods. I guess they had nice childhoods. They were told they were special
and given lots of shit, they felt free to take out enormous student loans, and they do not give a fuck about what came before them. They had bike helmets and car seats and no one ever smacked them in the face for talking back.

They stop for cupcakes. I stay in the bus. I can't get out. I can't bear this bullshit. There's this huge line down the block, but they use a linecutter app and swap places with people near the front of the line for a fee.

They come back in the bus with bacon–German chocolate cupcakes. They take bites but don't finish them. They're too high to eat.

The marbles are much better than Oso let on. Whatever this shit is, it's clean. The world goes from standard definition to HDTV.

We stop at a club. Now it's on, I think, party time, but I'm wrong. As we're ushered into a private room, I'm still excited. But instead of strippers, it's videogames. Japanese shit that's not out here yet. They came to a club to get high and play videogames. For the love of fucking god.

GOOD MORNING

I WAKE UP
with a sticky note on the floor next to my head. It says,
Who are you?
It looks like a girl's handwriting. I'm not sure whose floor this is. It's daytime. I check for my drugs, wallet, keys, and phone. All there. I'm wearing clothes and shoes. Time to go.

I go out the front door and enter a hallway. I'm either in a new apartment building or a really swank hotel. I find an elevator and get in.

In the reflection of the elevator wall, I see there's something spattered on my face. Little dots of something. I can't tell exactly what.

I check my phone's map. The pin drops at First and Harrison. Not bad. I know how to get home from here.

On First Street, a homeless man approaches me with a blind rap about needing food and a place to stay. It's eight
AM
. There are a lot of places to eat in San Francisco at this moment. Also, never bullshit a drug addict about drugs. We're all liars, and it takes one to know one. But when he gets close, his eyes widen, and he apologizes and runs. Whatever.

FRANK'S COFFEE

FRANK'S COFFEE IS
the last of the '90s-style coffeehouses in San Francisco. It's a vestige of the past. All the new places are one-cup-at-a-time types. Frank's used to be a central meeting place of all of SF subculture. Now it serves the twenty or thirty badly aging hipsters left from then.

Faded tribal tats with fallout done at Erno's by Greg Kulz. Ripped-open flesh tats with biomechanics underneath. White-boy dreadlocks turned whiteman dreadlocks recede on skulls. Nose rings older than the average barista hang from septums. Old men who used to be young men who dressed like old men are now unironically dressed like old men. Giant cell phones sit on tables. People are reading books instead of Kindles. Bukowski. Bulgakov. Henry Miller. Hubert Selby. The same bullshit they tried to impress people with all those years ago.

Trashy paperbacks fill the shelves. Framed Frank Kozik posters from the Kilowatt and the Kennel Club decorate the walls. A big
NO CELL PHONES AT THE COUNTER
sign hangs below the cash register. Some kind of leafy plant that is somehow still alive hangs from the ceiling like it always has. Twenty-five-year-old staples from flyers are still in the wall. Jane's Addiction,
Ritual de lo Habitual
, on a cassette taped off a CD, hangs in the air like a bad smell.

More consistent than anything else is the manager, Joel. Joel's first job in San Francisco was bussing tables and cleaning up here while he was living at the hostel that used to be across the
street, which, of course, is now a condo complex. Hundreds of employees have come and gone, but he's still here.

Joel pours me an iced coffee when he sees me walk in. He knows what I like. I've ordered more than a thousand of these from him, never changed the order.

I give him three bucks.

You have blood on your face,
he says in a monotone.

What?

It's not a lot. But you should clean it off. It's creepy.

I'm not sure what it is . . .

I am,
he says, handing me the keys to the bathroom.
I'll watch your coffee.

Freshly cleaned face and a coffee later, I'm strolling back through the Mission. There's something heavy in my pocket. I pat it down. The marble. I could use a hit. No pipe.

I know a store that sells squares of tinfoil. They also sell Brillo chunks and glass stems. At night, they sell Styrofoam cups of Royal Gate Vodka for a dollar to the local drunks.

When I get to the corner where it is, I'm looking at a fucking baby store that specializes in its own locally sourced organic baby food. For the love of fuck. I'll have to wait till I get home.

At home. In my room with the door shut. Noise-cancelling headphones. Black Sabbath's
Master of Reality
. Fill the pipe, hit the marble. Eyes closed. Perfect. I dig around for my remote. Shit, it's almost out. But I'll worry about getting more later. I drop a little in the eye, speed up the iPod, and listen to what sounds like normal speed to me.

Life is good when the drugs are good.

I wake up. I feel refreshed. This may be normal for some people, but not for me. I usually wake up needing something or recovering from something, but never feeling better than I did the day before. I feel . . . healthy. Which isn't right. Maybe I woke up still high? Am I high or not?

I take a hit of the coffee. It's rancid. Gone bad. I pop the top, and there's moldy skin underneath. How long was I out? I thought I just took a nap. I was dead to the world, long enough for a layer of scum to form across the top of the coffee.