Futureproof (18 page)

February

We don't wait to get back to the house anymore before shooting up. We cop our dope and stop at the closest restroom on the way to the interstate.

The Crown station on the corner next to Burger King presented a unique problem. Some asshole was waiting to get in there and I couldn't open the baggie quick enough as he started banging on the door. I told him I had the shits, come back later, but he wouldn't stop banging. So I threw the door open, snarled at him, and walked out with a syringe full of dope in my jacket pocket. Then I made Andie drive so I could fix on the highway.

And that's how I got the bright idea to just start getting high right on the side of the road.

We drove up the 75 North on-ramp, where Andie pulled over. I
slid the work in my vein and was flying moments later. Andie was taking all day to finish hers. Since I'm the most paranoid bastard ever I stumbled out of the car and opened the hood just in case a cop came by. Cops never fucking bother themselves with actual citizens in distress.

Andie's still got the dope in the spoon when the cop pulls up behind us.

“Put the spoon under the seat,” I whisper.

“My dope'll spill.”

“I don't give a fuck! There's a cop right behind us.”

I get out of the car to try to intercept the cop before he sees what we're doing.

“Hi, Officer.”

“Do you need any help?” she asks. A female cop. She suspects nothing, I can tell right away.

“My car does this sometimes when it gets too hot. We just have to sit around for twenty or thirty minutes and then it'll start again.”

“Are you sure?” This is surely the best cop I've ever met. Not just angling to make a bust.

“Yeah. But I appreciate your stopping. I can't tell you how many times I've needed help and there was none to be found. You're a credit to your department.” I laugh and the cop actually laughs a little, too. She climbs back in her cruiser and I wave as she drives off.

Andie's high by the time I get back in the car.

 

On my birthday, we put a floor down in a house on top of a mountain. But even with the view taken into consideration, I'm hating everything. My body is wracked with pain. I haven't had a bag of dope since the night before and I'm feeling shittier than usual because it's my birthday. This is the one day that everything is supposed to be perfect.

It wouldn't be that bad if I wasn't around Jonas and Lou. They both got high right in front of me this morning in the truck while I watched and salivated. So I'm dope-sick and neither of them will front me a bag. I already owe Lou more than two hundred bucks just for the smack he's fronted me this week. Jonas is my brother and all, but when he's got a habit going he is the most selfish prick on earth. I mean, it's my
birthday
, for God's sake, and both of them have an extra bag that I could be shooting right now, but neither of them will budge on it. Lou is probably justified in his refusal, seeing that I already owe him all this money, but Jonas is another story. We're brothers, for Christ's sake. Womb to tomb.

“See, dude,” Chris says to me. “This is why it's always better to be an alcoholic. Cheaper that way. I can stay drunk for two weeks straight on the money you spend in two days on that shit.”

“Chris, loan me twenty bucks, dude,” I plead.

“I'll loan you twenty but I don't see what good it's going to do you up here,” Chris says, pulling out his wallet.

I immediately turn to Lou. “Take me downtown. It's my fucking birthday, man. I need to get fixed.”

“There's no way we're coming off this mountain until the job is finished. No way.” It's easy to have resolve when it's not
your
birthday.

“Lou, I'm in pain over here and then I've gotta watch you two shoot up right the fuck in front of me? That's some bullshit.”

“Maybe during lunch,” Lou says.

“Jonas, give me a bag. I'll give you this twenty bucks right now for that one bag.”

“I need the bag,” Jonas says.

“After work you can get two fucking bags for twenty. Come on!”

They ignore me, turn away, and walk back into the house. I grab scraps of wood out of the trash can and hurl them as far as I can down the mountainside.

At lunch I watch Lou shoot up again after he finishes his goddam baloney sandwich. Then Jonas fixes his bag, and as he's getting his arm ready I beg him to give just half of it to me.

“You're not getting my fucking bag, Luke,” he says, leisurely chewing the last bites of his lunch.

“You're both pieces of shit. I can't believe the selfishness of this fucking crew. You guys would sell out your own mothers if there was enough dope to be gained. Fuck you.”

I head back inside and start working again despite the fact that it's only fifteen minutes into the lunch break. I have to do something or I'm going to strangle Jonas.

I grab a five-foot board and take a measurement on the wall for the last piece, the rip, to be dropped into place in the dining room. It's a typical table-saw cut. You set the fence at the correct inch mark, making sure you have deducted 5/8" to allow room for the wood to expand without buckling against the wall. I do the math in my head.

When I get outside to use the table saw, the three amigos are laughing. I ignore them and go directly to the saw.

The table saw is the loudest of our saws because its only use is for ripping boards, which basically means that you're cutting straight through the grain of the wood. It's one of the harshest screams in the world. You never get used to the sound. It's painful every time.

I decide not to use the fence because I'm feeling reckless. I take my pencil and, using my thumb and forefinger as a guide, move my hand down the side of the board, thereby creating a semi-straight line covering the length of it. No fence needed to keep the cut straight. And this way is faster, so I can cut more angrily.

I slam the board down on the saw and shove it into the screaming blade. It suddenly yanks me forward.

The tip of my right middle finger comes back ragged and bloody. Blood squirts everywhere. I call for Jonas and he comes. I still want
that last bag of dope he's holding and now I have the pretext for it. I am missing a part of my body and it happened in a violent way, in the course of my vocational duties.

Jonas pulls the bag from his pocket and fixes the work for me. He offers to stick my vein with it but I tell him I'll do it. It is only now that I truly
deserve
to get high. Fuck birthdays. Being born doesn't mean shit. Being born, getting fucked up, and surviving, now that's worth something.

Laying floor for the rest of the day, I forget at times that my fingertip is gone. I just don't feel it. It is not there. None of me is here. My body is a little video-game simulation of myself and I am sitting somewhere comfortably controlling its movements. I am working harder than ever, trying to prove to them that I deserved that bag, that I was worth it.

 

I get home and it's the usual shit from Andie. She doesn't feel good. She needs to fix. I'm like, “Look, bitch, I don't feel good either. I cut myself on a fucking saw, OK? If anybody's getting high, it's me.” The dope has worn off, leaving me irritable, the pain in my hand and arm no longer deferred.

Andie feigns interest in my injury, tells me her legs hurt so bad she can barely walk and standing up for six hours at the car wash didn't help either.

“You should try being bent over and on your knees all day,” I tell her.

“So you don't have any money?”

I contemplate lying to her about the $20 Chris loaned me, but there's no way I could leave for an hour, go to the ghetto, get high, and then play it off in front of her. She's a bigger junkie than I am and it would never wash. Besides, she'd ruin my high with her constant complaining.

But then again…if I give her one of the bags then I won't get high myself. Neither of us will. We'll stay merely
unsick
, which is good enough if you've ever gone through a night of dope-sickness, but I want to be
high
, not merely normal.

She says, “You can pawn that ounce of silver your mom gave you.” This pisses me off even more. But I have to offer her something. So I tell her that I'm going to hook up with Trizden, which is obviously total bullshit because I haven't seen him in months. But I figure she can't say a fucking word about it because she never talks to him.

“Ask Trizden if you can borrow twenty bucks,” she says as I pour gasoline out of the can into the T-Bird's carburetor.

“I will.”

 

I shoot the bags in the car at a stoplight. That's how fast I can fix. Two minutes. I contemplated waiting to fix until I got home and Andie went to sleep but decided to do it now because she'd be up half the night complaining about her body aches. The bags would call to me incessantly. There's no way I could wait until 1 or 2 a.m.

My finger throbs. I haven't yet taken off the duct-tape-and-toilet-paper bandage I made for it at work. But then, sitting at the light on the corner of North Avenue and Northside Drive, the pain is completely washed away. I hold my hand up and look at it as I push the plunger down on the syringe. I watch the pain disappear.

Every day is a good day that ends like that.

Of course, as soon as I get home Andie is on my ass. She asks for her bag and I tell her I didn't get any money from Trizden and then she starts throwing shit and saying that I don't care about her, that I never did, and that I used her for
sex
, of all things.

“Please leave me the fuck alone,” I implore. “It's my fucking
birthday
, Andie. Can you please just give me one fucking minute
of peace? Is it not enough that I pay for the majority of your habit? Huh? Is it? Isn't it?”

“Fuck you, asshole! I don't need you or your fucking money. I can get a ride with any guy I want.”

I pick up a framed picture of us taken the day we went to the lake with that one slut friend of hers and wing it across the room so that it smashes into the wall and splinters in a thousand shards of glass and wood.

“I'm outta here!” I scream, emboldened by the double-bag of dope running through my veins, pumping rage through my every cell. As I walk to the door, Andie runs up behind me and throws her arms around my shoulders and
bites
me hard on the neck. I grab her hair and yank her to the floor.

“Leave me the fuck alone! Just let me leave.”

I continue trudging toward the door, Andie wrapped around my legs and then, in a last desperate attempt at stalling me, she holds on to my wallet chain with all her weight and all I can hear then is the sound of our labored breathing and the tearing of my pocket as it gives way to her weight. I grab the wallet and yank hard and Andie yelps as the chain tears at her skin. She doesn't attempt to stop me again as I stand out at the car with the hood up, pouring gas into the carburetor.

Then I'm gone and staying with Splinter back at his transsexual aunt's house. We stay up until 2 a.m., planning our escape from all these overbearing women and their bullshit.

The next day we go to WoodCrest Apartments and apply for a two-bedroom. They say Splinter has to be gainfully employed so I ask Lou if he can put him on the crew. Lou sends Splinter to a friend who installs carpet and vinyl, a profession respectable in its own right but not nearly as prestigious as hardwood installation. We in the hardwood business like to think we do everything better, unlike
the shoddy brick masons and flabby fucking drywallers and trim carpenters. And don't even get me started on plumbers and roofers. There is none of the attention to craft like that demonstrated by hardwood installers.

Within a day Splinter is employed doing carpet and vinyl and we have us our very own apartment. The bills in my name and everything.

April

Splinter and I have concluded that we have the ultimate apartment, I mean, this place is pimp. Not pimp in the bitch-slapping, fur-coat-wearing, '72 Cadillac–driving sense, but pimp in that it is just so fly, the perfect, consummate bachelor pad. Girls are in and out all the time.

And there's no problem with hookups. Anything—
anything
—we want in the way of drugs is available within a matter of minutes and a short car ride. And it's not like we live that much closer to the Bluff than when I was staying with Andie, but now that I'm out from under her everything seems so much easier. I am a singular unit, alone. I don't have to worry about anyone else. Oddly enough, this makes me all the more eager to be good to Andie. I actually go out of my way to call her every night after work, usually right after I've fixed.

That's not to say that I don't have other interests, though. Because now the entire world has opened up to me. But as a general rule, it's never as much fun scoring, in any sense of the word, if you're doing it stag. And the girls we scam on are the same fucking way. It's crazy. You'll be pouring on the compliments and thinking everything is all going
soooo
how you planned it, and then you turn around and the girls are walking, high for free, bong smoke following them out the door. We don't care, though. At least
I
don't. Any time with a girl, no matter how ultimately humiliating, is looked upon as beneficial to one's overall physical and mental well-being.

Splinter is my partner in all of this shit. Whether it's going downtown to some secretive rave location or scoring some crystallized skunk bud or dope in the Bluff, we are always together, always scamming. Then, last Saturday, the objects of our sincerest affections moved in right above us.

They are what we refer to as “Gap college girls,” as in, they're in college and only shop at the Gap. Except for the occasional weed toke, they don't do drugs, and they date these stereotypical alpha males with Jeeps and crewcuts who wear t-shirts proclaiming row team insignias and mid-range designer brand names. But despite their crappy taste in men, these girls are what we consider the ultimate in untouchable, the
unapproachable
. They are these really spectacular
women
who are beautiful, out of our league, and—most important—know that they are.

Imagine our surprise then when a knock comes on our front door and there
both
the upstairs women stand, as intangible and gorgeous as ever. What's more, one is holding a bottle of white wine, glistening with condensation (the bottle, that is), with smiles on both of their impeccable faces.

Splinter and I can't believe what is about to happen. This is like a beer commercial come true. And it is about to happen to
us
.

“Hi. We just moved in above you guys last week? I'm Kristie and this is Jeannie.”

“Oh my God,” I think to myself. They have come with alcohol
and
their names end with that syrupy sweet
ee
sound. Our fool heads are moving up and down, surpassed in idiocy only by our stupid grins.

“So…” Jeannie continues after a moment of terrifying silence (our fool heads nodding and grinning), “we were just wondering if you guys might have a corkscrew.”

We don't own a corkscrew.

Everything is about to go up in hellish, teeth-gnashing flames—unless…

It's amazing how well a pair of pliers and a screw can double for an actual corkscrew. I can't even remember how many times I've opened bottles of wine with my little Cro-Magnon man contraption.

“Wait right here,” I say, taking the bottle from Kristie. She seems hesitant to let me disappear into the back bedroom with her wine (after all, nobody but those oil-massaging, mustache-having, bathrobe-wearing guys keeps a corkscrew in his bedroom), but she doesn't hold out for more than a second before I manage to wrest the alcohol from her hands.

The bottle secured on the bathroom counter, I slowly begin turning the screw. It's easy at first but gets progressively more difficult the deeper it is buried in the cork. I don't want to take any chances on prematurely attempting to pull out the screw. If it isn't deep enough the cork won't budge and all that will come out is the screw and a few splintered bits of cork. The process will have to start all over.

Finally, I have the screw buried nearly to the hilt. All that is needed now is a little brute force and the thing will come out like a shot. I pull hard. The cork doesn't budge. I pull again; still nothing. I put the bottle between my knees and give it all I have. The pliers suddenly shoot up, and in a flash I have punched myself in the mouth.

Blood is pouring from my two split lips. And what's even worse, the screw has prematurely ejected itself from the cork, which remains embedded as deeply as ever in the long neck of the emerald bottle.

Splinter pops his head in the door as I am spitting blood in the sink.

“What the fuck are you doing, dude?”

In my eagerness, I haven't noticed that I've already been holed away with the bottle for a full five minutes.

“The fucking screw-and-pliers trick didn't work!”

He stands there for a moment, looking at me. Incredulous.

“And the fact that you're spitting blood? Care to elaborate on that turn of events?”

“Stall 'em for two more minutes. I have to try again.”

Splinter looks at me for a moment, sighs, heads back to his duty as I return to mine. Again I start screwing and again I pull and again I whack myself in the mouth. I look in the mirror and my lips are already swollen, the blood quickly congealing. The cork is a particled mess. It's all a big, disgraceful debacle, and now I have to go out there with those women standing in our Ultimate Bachelor Living Room with their blonde-streaked ponytails and suede miniskirts and tell them that I couldn't get their fucking bottle open.

“I thought I had a corkscrew but I couldn't find it,” I mumble through one hand as the other flaccidly extends to return the wine.

Jeannie or Kristie, I don't know which one, accepts the shapely green glass bottle and stares mutely at what is left of the once-pristine cork. Mutilated.

Splinter looks at me like a crucified beggar and I wonder what he's been doing all this time to occupy the two beauties who will never again come a-calling. I am suddenly happier with the bloody mouth and egg-covered face. At least I haven't been trying to make
small talk with supermodels all this time.

“Well…” Jeannie/Kristie stammers. “Thanks. Thanks, anyway.”

They are so tall and inconceivable. Nothing can change that. Splinter and I stand there looking at the door, dumbfounded at our rapid turn of fortune. He looks at me as I pull a piece of crusted brown toilet paper from my upper lip. Then we laugh for a good long time. But it doesn't truly feel OK again until after I've taken a few tokes and a shot of bourbon. In the grand scheme of things, nothing ever feels right unless you're stupid, especially when confronted with the normal people on the doorstep, and almost in your life.

 

I nearly trip over Splinter when I walk in the door from work on Wednesday afternoon. He's smoking a cigarette, sprawled out on his back in front of the TV. We have two couches (Goodwill had a sale) and he never uses either of them. There is a forty-ounce bottle of beer and a saucer serving as a makeshift ashtray beside him.

“There's a fucking ashtray right there on the coffee table,” I say, annoyed and pointing at the ashtray on the coffee table.

“Yeah, but I didn't feel like getting up and this plate was behind the faux plant in the corner,” Splinter says.

“It's a
saucer
.”

“Whatever.”

I bring my trademark Gaze of Disdain from Splinter to the TV, and there on the news is a building with a hole in the side of it the size of fucking Utah.

“Holy shit,” I say.

“Yeah, man, can you believe it? Somebody was pissed.”

“Jesus.”

“They're saying that they think this is some kind of retaliation.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

We watch the screen silently for a few minutes. People shrieking and running around with blood all over them and little kids crying and grown-ups crying and describing how they barely escaped with their lives and all that. The building is still smoldering and they're saying that there are probably hundreds of people still trapped inside. Then Brokaw relates that there was a day-care center inside the building and none of the children have been recovered.

“You up for going downtown?” I ask.

“Hell, yes, dude. I'm fucking jonesing.”