Futureproof (16 page)

The hoods are put over their faces and the nooses around their necks.

There is a long silence when I can feel everyone's breath holding expectantly in their chests, can hear all of their hearts beating. We are anticipating the pulling of the lever, the dropping of the bodies. The six men all stand silently as well, even Larry. Their hands are tied behind their backs. Their boots are black and shiny.

Then the lever is pulled and the noise it makes is like a gunshot and it all happens in slow motion after that.

The two-foot-wide plank drops from beneath them and they fall a short distance, maybe a foot, before they are jerked into place at the same time by the neck. The bodies move and turn, the legs kick. The big man with the tooth missing takes the longest time to die. He fights it the whole way.

Then they are all lifeless and twisting slowly, their heads slumped over and pulled up at the neck. Nobody yells cut for at least a minute after the initial drop.

It is completely silent. We are all wondering if they're really dead. Perhaps the cables didn't work, the breakaway nooses caught in place.

“That was creepy,” Jonas whispers.

“That was totally cool,” Splinter rasps.

We look up at the scaffold and all of the actors have taken off their hoods and are smiling and laughing, some lighting cigarettes as they hang there, nooses still around their necks, breakaway-rope handcuffs on the ground beneath their feet.

 

As filming winds down, a sense of desperation wends its way through me. Once this movie is over it's back to Andie and mind-numbing drudgery, back to Johnny and backbreaking hardwood floor installation. No more lazing about the Andersonville compound and meeting the new people who filter in every day and are brought up to speed by all of us “pros” on the mechanics of what it means to be a full-time movie extra. No more sunrises over cow pastures or hot coffee sipped out of Styrofoam cups. No more hanging out with Splinter or Jonas or Corey on a day-to-day basis. The boring routine of everyday normal life is fast approaching.

But Andie can't comprehend the situation. She's been working at a car wash, accepting loose change for tips, while we have been a functioning part of the Hollywood mystique. It has been our job to appear bedraggled while our spirits soared, heady with the rarity, the magic of it all.

And now it's over.

September

Andersonville ends in rain. Jonas and that girl of his, Karen, are totally up each other's asses all the time. All they ever do is shoot dope now. He came down to the set with Karen a few times and they hid out all day, picked up their checks, and headed straight for the ghetto.

Andie is always pushing me to “just pick up a couple bags,” and when I won't do it she says that she
needs
a bag, that she can feel her insides peeling away when she doesn't have just a little bit to mellow out with. I usually cave at that point and we jump in the car and speed down there, our works hidden under the carpet beneath the front seat.

We'll have two works and two spoons and we'll inject each other at the same time and then kiss and let the wave wash over us, let the dope take it all. It never fails us. It works every time.

 

I rotate back to the post-Andersonville world with some difficulty. Johnny is still a dick but he's happy for my return to the hardwood crew. Hank now sports a giant incision scar across his throat, Colombian necktie shit. He said they had to remove his thyroid. He's proud of the scar. It gives him evidence. Nobody can think he's been faking it all this time.

“They took a tumor out of my neck as big as my fist,” he whispers enthusiastically. His voice is completely gone. They tell him he'll probably never be able to talk again. There is no nerve activity in his vocal cords, they say. They are paralyzed. So he whispers. We now laughingly refer to him as “The Floor Whisperer.”

“Why didn't you call me when you got that surgery?” I ask him.

“I didn't have a fucking voice to call you,” he whispers.

“You couldn't call me before you went in for it?”

“You stopped working for Johnny. I hardly ever saw you. You were dead to me.”

“I was
dead
to you? Dude, I live twenty minutes away from you.”

He shrugs. I can't say I've done much to keep our connection up-to-date, either. I never really do with anybody. It's all random reconnections if there's ever one in the first place.

“So does that mean that your parents up in West Virginia are dead to you, too?”

“No,” he whispers. “You can't just stop talking to family. But other people come in and out of a dude's life all the time.”

“I just thought we were closer than that.” I finish my sentence yelling over the racket of his nailing. He's gone back to stapling the fucking floor down mid-conversation. I bend over, grab my mallet, my stapler, start banging away.

I'll never get used to this shit. I'll never be satisfied doing this
work. I can still nail faster than Hank, I can pull up a wall almost as efficiently. But I can't imagine being thirty, forty years old, and still on my knees, sweating, back aching, one forearm bigger than the other because the right arm is constantly swinging a mallet, right calf muscle gigantic because that leg is used for kicking the boards into place just right so that we can fly through another upper-middle-class home before heading directly to the next one. I'm making only slightly more money doing this shit than I was pulling in at Andersonville, and every time I think about that it burns me to the core and I want to grab my mallet and hurl it through every fucking window in every fucking house in every artificially contrived “community.”

But I stay bent over, break that monotony with kneeling. Always some form of supplication, some form of prayer whose answers come in little baggies of dope bought in the Bluff with ever-increasing regularity. Those little baggies make all this workable, they make this life of blue-collar slavery with no chance of advancement livable, excusable.

 

I get out of the shower with my back aching. Andie hasn't returned yet with the dope. Round trip, it takes about forty-five minutes to get down there and back.

We've got it down to a science. I call her after work, and she gets a twenty out of the coffee can, then drives the T-Bird to make the pickup. Using this method, I feel like hell for maybe an hour and a half, tops, after the workday is over.

I'm pulling on sweats in the bedroom, my dreads still dripping, when I hear Andie open the door, back from the latest mission. By the time I make it from the bedroom to the living room, Andie's already bent over the coffee table, spoon out and everything.

I've got the work filled half full of brown dope and my breathing is
shallow and rapid. This is my favorite part. The anticipation, when your mouth is watering, when you can almost
feel
what you're about to feel.

I've got the syringe between my teeth so that I can use my free hand to smack the vein in the crook of my right arm to prominence. I look over at Andie, who is now slumped deep into the couch, bliss pasted to her face, expressionless and barely there. I'm sliding the needle in and pulling the plunger back to watch the blood register. I push in slowly and in moments everything sounds like a 45 record spinning at 16 rpm. I can see lips moving at the same speed as before but the words come out like sludge. It's all slowed down and bearable now. Andie pushes herself up and stumbles toward the bathroom to puke. She pukes every time.

 

It feels like the final curtain every time I walk into these houses and see the same gray Sheetrock, the same towering piles of hardwood in corded bundles, the same insurmountable summit to climb just to make a buck, only to have to do it all over again the next day.

So I decided a few weeks ago that I can't come to this job anymore without a little assistance. Nowadays, after unloading the tools, tromping through mud, whatever is needed to get the preliminary shit out of the way, I head to the basement with my little junkie kit. Every day I bring a prefilled syringe with me, carefully prepared each morning at the house before Hank picks me up.

Today we will be finishing a floor that we began yesterday. It's a twelve-hundred-footer. The wood is all racked out for the most part, set in its design. All we'll have to do is run the air hoses to the compressor and nail like bastards all day long, swinging our godforsaken mallets. While Hank is on the phone confirming with Johnny that, yes, we will get it done today, don't worry, we won't let you down, I slip out the back of the house. This one doesn't have a basement, though, so I have to shimmy into the crawl space to fix myself. It's
a pain in the ass, and it goes against my every survival instinct to put myself in such a confined space, where any number of rats or insects are making their homes, but it's just too risky to try fixing inside. If Hank ever found out I was doing this shit on the job I'd be fucked. He smokes a couple of bowls every day, but weed is a far cry from injecting opiates.

I pull the work out of my lunchbox from its hiding place beneath the two ham sandwiches slathered in mustard. An enormous racket begins inches above my head. It sounds like the house is collapsing around me, the noise overwhelming. Then comes the unmistakable sound of rhythmic nailing. I look up, still gripping the syringe between two fingers, and can see the staples appearing one after another through the plywood subfloor. They are poison darts, aiming for the kill.

I push the needle into my arm and try to ignore the sound of impending doom. It is loud. It is chaotic. It is destroying me. This whole fucking job is death. This is what killed Hank.
This
is how he got cancer. He was minding his own fucking business, trying to make a life, and now look at him.

I push the plunger down, feel the sounds, the chaos, feel the distress dissipate from the air around me and fade into the background. I suck them all in, all the slamming, the pounding mallets, the din of wood locked into place with methodical exactitude—and turn them into fuel. That is how to win. That is how to stop feeling victimized. Take the adversity and make it your bitch. Struggle harder, take leaps of faith, walk away.

Walk away.

I snap the tip off the syringe and toss it into the dirt far beneath the house, then come up for air.

“Hank,” I yell. He looks up at me from his bent-over stapling position.

“Hank, I'm leaving!”

He stops nailing, stands up straight.

“Why are you bleeding?” he rasps, pointing his mallet at me. I look. There is a line of blood creeping down my forearm. I try to wipe it away but it just smears and more appears in its place.

“I'm outta here,” I say, ignoring his question.

“You're leaving?”

“I can't take this shit anymore.”

“How are you gonna get home?”

“I don't give a fuck. I just can't do this anymore. I can't stand waking up in the morning.”

“I'd give you a ride but Johnny'd kill me if I left the job.”

“I know, dude. I'm not asking you to give me a ride. And it's no hard feelings or anything like that. I just have to get my life straightened out to the point where it's at least semi-bearable.”

We do the handshake/embrace thing and then I walk out into the sunlight. I turn around and go back. Hank's already nailing again. I tap him on the shoulder.

“Do you have a cigarette, man?”

“I smoke cigars.”

Fuck. I have to have a cigarette right after fixing. And I'm miles from any gas station.

“I guess I'll take one of those.”

He hands me the cigar, a Swisher Sweet with the plastic tip. These are the same I used to smoke during high school, in my room with a stolen cup of my mother's fruity wine.

“I hope we stay in touch, man,” I say to Hank. He nods his head. We won't stay in touch. We both know it.

“Keep fighting that fucking cancer, man.”

“I sit in fire,” Hank says.

October

Andie and I actually had to detox for a few days there, locked in our room. This was the point when we realized that we had one hell of an addiction going on. Andie bitched nonstop, wanted to pawn the VCR and anything else not nailed down.

Everything opens up when you hit a real desperate withdrawal, when the body's been without the fix for more than a day or so: assholes, sinuses, tear ducts, Andie and I both running back and forth to the toilet for two or three days straight. Like having the flu except about ten times worse, because no medication can take the edge off the symptoms. We just chew on ten or twenty aspirin a day and then, on the fourth day without a hit, the symptoms finally begin to subside. But not enough. I call my mother.

“Luke! You have to come down and see the house. It is so beautiful! We can drink some tea.”

“That's exactly why I was calling you, Ma. Give me directions.”

Not five minutes after arriving at my mother's giant new house, I hit her with it. I need to borrow money.

Her face falls.

“Victor left. He took all the money with him. All I have now is this house and that fricking BMW,” my mother says.

“He left? When?”

“Last week. We got into an argument about the way he was spending the money and he just got into his car and left. He didn't even take any clothes with him.”

“That son of a bitch. God, why did you ever marry that motherfucker?”

“Hey, don't say that around your brothers. If it wasn't for him they wouldn't be here.”

“Yeah, well, if you never married him you wouldn't know that they
could've
been here.”

“The same can be said of your father,” she says. She always does that, throws Richard in my face like he's my fault.

We move inside for the tea, and while she's fixing it Andie and I step into Aaron's room so he can show us his new comic books. I got him started collecting a couple years back. Adam's more into basketball and non-nerdy shit like that. I tell him that I'll look at whatever he collects, too, though.

I'm flipping through one of Aaron's books when I notice the fifty-dollar bill lying on his dresser, probably what remains of that crisp $100 he had that night at the restaurant.

I have to take it.

It'll just be a loan. I'll pay him back. He'll understand. And if not I'll just deny ever snagging it. Deny everything.

 

Victor pulls into the driveway just as I'm slipping my brother's cash into Andie's purse. My mother runs out on the porch and waves to him like he hasn't abandoned anyone, but has only just returned from a ten-minute trip to the grocery store.

He slides out of the sports car wearing an expensive-looking suit. He laughs at something Adam says to him, and I'm reminded of how much he looks like Saddam Hussein. During the war my friends always used to comment on how my stepdad was creepy, how he was always laughing like he was jolly and shit but it seemed that he was really plotting all of our deaths. My mother says that he has this way of talking to people that makes them put their guards down so that he can get in their good graces. She says that was why she married him after only knowing him for three weeks. But I don't see the appeal. I'll humor him on occasion, though, pretend to find his anecdotes amusing. Like now.

He jokes about us trading cars for a day, I tell him my T-Bird will smoke his little German piece of crap. Jokingly though. And then he wheels around, looks in the driver-side window and starts flipping out.

“Where's your mother?” he asks.

“I don't know,” Aaron says.

“There she is.” Adam points down the street.

My mother is walking away from us quickly, cradling something in her arms.

“You better get her back here with my briefcase, Luke, or I swear to God I'll shoot her,” Victor says, his hand on his hip, indicating that he has his legally concealed weapon at the ready.

“Andie, come with me,” I yell over my shoulder. Mom looks back and when she sees me coming she starts into a jog. I look back at Victor and he has his gun pointing at us, brazen as fuck. What a total dick.

This is just like the time he kicked the shit out of my mother when she was still pregnant with Adam. When the ambulance and the cops got there he told them that she'd had a psychotic breakdown and they carted her away still crying and snot-covered while the neighbors watched. She didn't come home for a week, and even after that she stayed married to him. He always finds a way to come off looking like the good guy.

“Mom, what are you doing?”

“He's not leaving me with nothing, Luke. I have to take care of these kids and I'll be goddamned if he's going to just pop up with his fancy suits and his flashy car and then leave again with all the money. There's no way.”

“Ma, he's got a gun. You have to bring the money back.”

“I don't give a fuck,” she yells, crying.

“Barbara,” Andie says, “you have to think about Aaron and Adam and what their lives would be like if they didn't have either of their parents. If he shoots you you'll be dead and he'll go to jail.”

Then Andie hugs my mom and my mom actually hugs her back, drops the silver briefcase to the ground at her feet. I scoop it up, leave my mother and my girlfriend to their emotional woman thing. Victor reholsters his gun as I walk back toward the driveway holding the case.

“Your mother's crazy,” Victor says.

“Why do you even come around? Why do you keep showing up if you're only going to leave again? You throw this shit in her face and then expect her to take you back whenever you're ready. It makes no sense.
You
make no sense.”

Victor tosses the briefcase into his car and gets in next to it.

“
You
try living with her, Luke.”

He pulls out of the driveway and in a pathetic/hilarious attempt at being cool, he throws the car back into first gear so as to facilitate
a high-speed, tire-squealing exit, but instead it just stalls at the stop sign.

 

Jonas runs up to the T-Bird as soon as we pull up to the car wash. Jonas says that he found us a job laying floor with some guy named Lou. I've had a pretty hard time getting another job. There's nothing out there that pays as well as hardwood, unless you consider these bullshit sales jobs where they lure you in on empty promises of commissions you never reach. Fuck all that. As much as I hate the backbreaking tedium of floor installation, at least I know that if I put the work in, the money will be there. And Jonas says that this guy Lou wants us to start on Monday.

The mood in the car is festive. We have plenty of money and we're about to get high.

“Where's Karen?”

“She's waiting for me to pick her up. I figure I'll surprise her with a couple bags of dope. That always gets her going.”

“Me, too,” Andie says.

“Throw in that
Cuban Linx
shit.”

We always listen to either Mobb Deep or Raekwon or maybe Nas's
Illmatic
when we go downtown to score. It gets us in the mindset, tales of urban gunslinging and dope dealing. It's a mental mindfuck, an inverting of our heads so that we are on the dealers' level. Because these dealers and their runners will eat you alive if you let 'em. The music doesn't take away from the stress of it, though. Just the thought of heading into the ghetto gets me wired. Half the time I have to stop and take a shit at the Burger King before we turn left into the Bluff on Proctor Street, or else I'll ruin my pants.

“Turn down Griffin Street,” Jonas says.

“Griffin? Who's down there?”

“I've got a badass connection. He always has fat bags and can
get girls
and
boys.” “Girl” is street slang for cocaine, “boy” for Heroin.

We pull up to the corner and immediately three niggers circle the car. Jonas lowers his window about six inches.

“Where's Alex?”

“I got Alex's hookup,” one of them says.

“Fuck that, man. Where's Alex?” Jonas says. I'm impressed. I've never seen him so aggressive.

Another guy strolls up, light-skinned and clean-cut, not wearing a do-rag or all scarred up. Most of the runners are dope fiends themselves, so they're always skimming off the top. But this Alex guy looks like a businessman. He tells us to drive around the block.

By the time we circle back three minutes later he has all of it: eight boy, six girl.

It is a damn good day. You can
taste
the goodness. We have a full dope-load and a few bags of girl to go along with it, to make us that much hungrier for the smack.

 

By the time we get back to the house my hands are sweating nonstop. It's been five days since I've gotten high—forever. Before we make it inside, Corey and Splinter pull into the driveway. We set up on the kitchen table.

“Where've you guys been?” Splinter asks.

“Hooking up,” Andie says, stupidly.

“You've gotta hook me up, then,” Splinter says.

“You got any money?” I ask.

“Hell, yeah, dude. But even if I didn't you'd still be hooking me up.”

“Yeah, my ass.”

“How much do you have?” Splinter asks.

“I guess we can give you a bag,” I say.

Andie has already gotten all of our shit out by that point, the spoons, cotton, water, everything.

“Give me my bags,” Jonas says.

He mixes a bag of coke with a bag of Heroin. Speedballing.

“Be careful. I don't want to have to take you to the hospital. When did you start doing that shit, anyway?”

“Don't doubt it till you try it,” Jonas says.

“Do you wanna try it that way, Andie?”

“Sure. I'm up for anything.”

We mix ourselves some speedball and then shoot. I immediately feel the difference from straight smack shooting. My body wants to go up and down at the same time. And then it begins to alternate between the up feel of coke and the down of Heroin and I'm on a splendid roller coaster where every high and every low is just as perfect as the feeling that came before.

“Who the fuck discovered
this
shit?” I say.

“It feels so
fucking
good,” Andie says.

I decide I have to puke and head to the bathroom, feel better as soon as I finish the Technicolor Yawn.

My arm is leaking blood beneath the sleeve. I can feel it dribbling down my elbow. All bets are off. Nothing stands for anything. We are lost in the moments that slide by, grabbing whatever we can on the way down.

I wash my mouth out and when I come out of the bathroom Andie is standing there and I kiss her deep. Her mouth is warm. Her breasts heave against my chest. Then we separate and she looks at me with her head down slightly and I wipe my mouth with my sleeve.

I want to take her right there and pound her until she can't see straight. So I do. She writhes and curses and begs for more. She's like some kind of porn star now, nothing like the melancholy bitch
she used to be. She has given up on love, I decide. She has given up on attempting anything meaningful or heartbreaking.

But the body shuts down the sex parts when you're high, and coasts on endorphins for a good while. I realize these things after trying (to no avail) to fuck Andie.

She pulls my face to her chest and slips one breast and then the other out of its prison of lace and grants my mouth her pink nipples, one then the other. I push her down on the bed and she pulls her nightie past her hips and I try to enter her from behind but I can't stay focused. And then I'm pushing on her with only limpness and pathetic will.

I go to the bathroom to piss, ashamed. Can impotency set in this early?

I stand over the toilet with my limp dick in hand, the urine hiding in the recesses of my bladder. Nothing comes out. I have to pee so bad but nothing will come. It's right there on the spouting and it won't make that final leap to the toilet. Because who does this shit, anyway? You can't pretend you lead a normal life, get up at 6:30, go to work, bust ass, come home, and shoot bags of cocaine and Heroin. People just don't do that. It ain't natural. None of this shit is normal. None of it. It's all a fucking pipe dream without a single hint of nobility to it.

I turn on the sink faucet and wait until the tap is warm, run the water over my prick for a good ten minutes until, finally, the piss is coaxed out and down the drain. It turns the water yellow. The vitamins I take every day to supplement and replace lost nutrients make my piss bright orange. I shoot Heroin and take vitamins. The water going down the drain is rust-colored. Nobody fucking does that. This is not maintainable. None of this is going to pan out.