Futureproof (17 page)

November

Working with Jonas has proved rejuvenating. We haven't spent this much time together since we were kids and having him around has made it easier to adjust to working with two total strangers. Andie always says that she doesn't know how I ever meet anyone. I can't talk to women until after they approach me, and even then it's like one-track-mind shit. Not just sex, though. More like—cutting to the chase. Because I can't stand the mealy mouthed bullshit that passes for small talk. It bores me and I'm terrible at the sport.

This guy Chris that we work with and Lou, the guy who runs the crew, all they do is cut to the chase. Lou's a lot older, in his forties. He has a mustache like I guess every guy that age does. I call him Mr. Mustache sometimes, in reference to the Nirvana song, and he seems to be cool with that. And Chris, with his unabashed love for porn, isn't too bad either.

Lou, who moved to Atlanta from Detroit twelve years ago, used to be a junkie. He moved here to get away from the shit. If that isn't a sign then I don't know what is. I talked it over with Jonas over lunch our third day on the job and we decided it would be alright if we told Lou that we are non-habit-forming, occasional smack users. Except we didn't actually tell him. We just stopped wearing long-sleeve shirts. The inner-elbow bruising and scabs proved fast billboards for our favorite pastime. Not an hour into the afternoon Lou lit a cigarette and said, pointing with the lit butt between two stubby, calloused fingers, “Where'd you get those marks on your arms?”

Jonas looked at me and I lit a cigarette of my own. All of us standing around smoking. Within minutes we had the tools packed and were headed to the ghetto. Lou said it was just this once, for old time's sake. A junkie for ten years and clean for twelve, and still thinks he can walk away after a single shot? Who does he think he's fooling? Nobody who's ever had a habit can come back to this shit for a weekend visit. It doesn't work like that. I know this already because I can't keep my mind off it even now…and it's only been…how long has it been? Regardless, it's harder than fighting a straightjacket to get back out.

 

We go to the Bluff and head straight to Alex, then circle the block at his command.

“This is like a fast-food drive-through,” Chris says, amazed.

“Yeah, but the service is a lot better,” Jonas says.

“And I'd take this any day over a Big Mac,” Lou says, with complete sincerity.

“What about a Whopper?” Chris says.

“What are you, fucking
Pulp Fiction
?”

“Royale with cheese,” Chris says.

After the shoot-up in the Krystal parking lot, we drive back to
the job and for the first time in a long time, I am into the work. The dope makes it bearable. I am efficient. I am a machine. It is not a test of will every time I lift the mallet or drop to my knees. The smack has alleviated all need for conscious thought. I function purely on intuition. I forge the straightest line between two points. I move from the front of the rack to the back, effortlessly. I am a machine. The dope heightens my perception. The world slows down around me. People have this misconception that a junkie becomes slower, more languid in his environment, but really it's the opposite that's true. We slow the world down
around
us. Like Spider-Man, observing everything in slow motion, then executing decisions with complete, machine-like efficiency, the mind telling the body what to do before it even knows it's doing it.

And when I pause to light a cigarette and catch my breath, I look at the others and they are all machines, too. We are all silently working, not saying a word, bringing everything together in perfect time.

Well, Jonas and Lou and I are. Chris doesn't shoot dope. He only drinks prolifically. But he did say that next time he wanted to get a couple bags of coke—a couple girls.

“You know, for snorting,” he clarifies.

December

I have this enormous, gelatinously mushy soft spot for all things Yuletide. I still wear the sleigh bell that Animal Mother gave me back in the day, when we first met at
Rocky
.

He, Splinter, and I started this tradition where we'd wear a sleigh bell around our necks starting the day after Thanksgiving straight through to Christmas Day. People said it was a retarded thing to do but we didn't care. It was a tradition that
we
started. It's
our
thing.

I still do the whole
It's a Wonderful Life
bit and everything, too. I love
The Grinch
and I fucking love
Christmas Vacation
with Chevy Chase. I love all the goodwill that is automatically activated when this time of year rolls around. I love plastic snowmen on lawns that'll never feel the cold dust of real snow, and I love lights slathered across the roofs of suburban houses in the gaudiest possible array.

This is Christmas and I love every second of it. It's the one time of year when I can find a nondrug avenue to release my anxiety. On Christmas I can see proof that the world is not as horrible as it normally seems. And this year is no different. I'm using the holiday to try once more to stay the hell off of dope for a while, because it's getting to that point again where I can't function without it.

Mom has cordially invited me to attend Christmas at Victor's parents' house in Arkansas. There's no way in hell, I told her. So she said I could stay at their antebellum mansion with my girlfriend for the holidays. Mom's given up on protesting my relationship with Andie, much like when Vietnam went on for another five or six years after all those hippie protests petered out. They finally realized their smelly asses weren't accomplishing shit. The Man in charge only backs down on
his
time frame.

So we're getting ready for Christmas, for the trip to Mom's house, and Jonas and Karen are both high and kind of out of it. They sit in the corner nuzzling each other and making general annoyances of themselves with their self-absorption and their nodding off in the middle of sentences. It reminds me of Kurt Cobain, how he used to tell interviewers that he had narcolepsy in case he nodded off mid-sentence. And everybody believed him.

It wasn't until I started shooting dope that I realized what a perfect cover story he was fronting. Nobody ever noticed the pinned pupils. Nobody questioned why his face was covered in acne or why he was always scratching his nose. But now, when I look at tapes of his old interviews, or they're having yet another retrospective on MTV, it's just so goddam obvious. All the junkies can spot it from a crooked mile away. We all know why he fucking offed himself. We all know that we're only a personal tragedy away from doing it ourselves.

 

On Christmas Eve Andie and I head down to my mom's house. We stop on the way at a Christmas tree stand. A light covering of snow blankets everything, which makes the driving treacherous. This is the Deep South and there are no salt trucks, so everybody freaks and rushes the convenience stores and supermarkets on those rare occasions when the forecast calls for snow. But the trees look beautiful. There are naked lightbulbs strung across the length of the lot leading to a small wooden shack.

We call for the attendant but he is nowhere to be found. Andie says we should just take a tree but I don't want to do that. Stealing during Christmas is surely the highest possible form of sacrilege. So after twenty minutes standing with our chosen tree in the cold, I decide that we'll just leave him a sawbuck on the seat in the shack and call it even. The trees are marked at $20 but it's Christmas Eve and everybody else already has a tree so the absentee attendant's lucky he's even getting the $10.

Andie and I decorate while drinking a healthy portion of my mother's never-dwindled supply of red wine. We play Christmas songs on the massive surround-sound stereo—additional booty from Victor's settlement.

“You having a good time?” Andie asks as we dance like rich people in a ballroom.

“Yeah. I was just thinking about that—about how I haven't been this into Christmas since before my mom got remarried. There was like a five-year period after they hooked up when they didn't have money for presents until after the New Year. And when they did happen to have the money on time they'd always return the presents soon after Christmas was over, promising they would be bought back after the first of the year.” They were never bought back, of course. We owned a TV, a stereo, a typewriter, and two different video-game consoles for approximately five days apiece thanks to this practice.

We continue dancing, pretending we know what we're doing. Burl Ives has a damn good Christmas voice.

“My dad always read us
The Night Before Christmas
every Christmas Eve,” Andie says. “That was before he married Doris. She thought it was too cliché.”

“Yeah, my mother would read us that one story,
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
. That was always Jonas' favorite. I liked it, too. I loved that those little bastard kids thought the story said Jesus was wrapped in ‘wadded up clothes.'”

Andie and I drink some wine, smoke a joint, and get the two dogs stoned by blowing smoke in their ears, as tradition dictates.

And then, even though it's only Christmas
Eve
, I give Andie her presents and she gives me mine because we aren't little kids anymore and we can open our presents any time we damn well please.

Andie opens her first gift and it's a couple of hair combs or some shit they had in a window at the mall. I thought it would be pretty funny because I read a story a few months ago about this couple that gives each other accessories to go with their most prized possessions. The catch is that neither can use the accessories because the guy sold his prized watch to buy his wife hair combs and she sold her ass-length hair to pay for a watch chain to present to her beloved husband.

At the revelation of this surprise ending, I thought how sweet it was that both of them had sacrificed their prized possessions for the benefit of the other…but then I started thinking about the fact that they'd probably never last more than a few years together on the long end of things. And even if they did last longer than that it would be a life together where both of them harbored secret resentments against each other. I mean, he sold this watch that he'd had for years and she did the same with her perfect hair and then they were both sitting there on Christmas morning holding useless objects, a watch chain and a couple of hair combs.

I realized it wasn't a sweet story at all. It was bullshit, a cosmic joke.

So my thinking, when I bought the hair combs for Andie, was that she'd see that it's possible to get hair combs without having to sell yourself to do it. Hair combs being a metaphor for everything you ever see that you ever want and don't know how to go about getting.

But Andie thinks the hair combs are just swell, really she does, though she has no recollection of that story even though I read it to her when we were both stone-cold sober and recovering from one binge or another. It's these little synapse lapses and general passings-in-the-night of this relationship that drive me batshit. Any time there is a seriously meaningful thing happening, she doesn't notice. And it goes the other way for me, as well. Half the time she's pissed at me for fucking around on her and the other half she's agitated by the fact that I don't remember the dates of significant times in our lives. She says that I pay no attention to the “moments.” But it doesn't matter at this point because she likes the combs and she hasn't chopped all of her hair off to get me a goddam watch chain.

I open my present and it's a pair of Doc Martens boots, ten-hole, green. I've wanted a green pair of these forever and will now be the envy of every kid on my block. Docs are the shiny red Schwinn of my generation. Now my friends will have no choice but to love me or, falling short of that, look at me with quiet awe.

Andie opens her next present, a red velvet dress I bought for her at Victoria's Secret. Her eyes get wide with surprise as she unfolds the tissue paper and lets the dress unravel onto her lap. She had seen it back in the summer and tried it on and loved it so I even skipped on a couple bags of dope to make sure I could afford the three-figure price tag.

“Luke,” she says, “this is the best present anyone ever gave me.”

She looks more ravishing in that dress than I've ever seen her. She appears somehow more confident when she's wearing it, like she
could have anyone she wanted. She pulls the dress up and we do it right there on my mother's eight-hundred-dollar Italian-upholstered chair and ottoman. Then we do it on the couch, the floor-length Persian rug, and on the kitchen counter. We sleep in Aaron's bed, and when we wake up at 9:30 Christmas day (I
still
can't sleep in on Christmas), it's only slightly disappointing that Santa has skipped me for the thirteenth consecutive year.

We bundle ourselves and trudge three miles through the cold and ice to the Waffle House for steak and eggs. I tip the waitress heavily and we hold hands on the way home.

The exterior of my mother's house looks truly magnificent on this winter morning. Maybe I've been wrong all this time about it being a bad move for Mom to obtain such a sprawling homestead. Maybe this is the real turning point for our family. Maybe this is where everything is going to change direction and we're all going to finally climb out of this hole, turn our backs on whatever curse that has hovered over our heads for as long as I can remember.

The sun has come out from behind December clouds and the front porch of the house is bathed in light. God is happy with us. God is smiling down.