Futureproof (19 page)

May

I wake up and Alice is gone. She's one of those girls that sniff glue and huff Freon to get off. The kind of girls engaged (they never just have boyfriends, they're always engaged) to guys named Rusty or Smoky. The kind of girls named Dusty or Dakota or Daytona. The kind who wear way too much blue eye shadow because their moms always do and who have two or three kids by the time they're twenty-five and a mouth full of rotting teeth from years of drinking straight vodka and snorting speed with guys named Rusty and Smoky.

None of these facts mattered, though. I fucked all four of them. Like clockwork. Alice was the last of the four. They'd come to my bedroom one after the other for three nights in a row. The first night I had sex with one and then after we had fallen asleep her friend came in the room and woke me up climbing into bed with us. She was
naked. It feels cheap just talking about it but it's not like I seduced any of them. They had to have told each other what was going on. Girls are always talking about shit like that with each other.

And yet, they kept coming. Like it was their turn or something. I buried my head in the pillow and threw my hips forward and pulled back again, then felt the burst, saw the flash of light, and she moved from under me and the one girl, Alice, she took my head in her lap and caressed me until I stopped shaking and then leaned down and kissed my mouth and forehead. That was pretty nice.

They all wanted to save me.

I asked Alice if she was seeing anybody.

She nodded.

“I'm actually engaged,” she said.

 

The problem with doing anything you know you shouldn't be doing is that word gets around. I still don't know who told Andie about all the girls, but she sure as shit found out.

She comes barging in the door without even knocking and slaps the shit outta me. I grab her by the arm and throw her out the front door. I watch her stumble backward before the door swings shut again. I can hear her yelling at the top of her lungs that she hates me and then I go to the freezer, drink some more, move to my bedroom, turn up the stereo, walk in the bathroom, look at my red face and neck in the mirror.

When I get back outside, Andie's gone. I sit down on the cement by Splinter's feet. He swigs on his Crazy Horse.

I don't talk to Andie again until two days later. She tells me that she doesn't believe in Us anymore, that this was the last straw. I say that I understand, that she has every right to feel that way. I am indefensible. But she continues calling me every day, as soon as I get in from work. She cries and tells me she hates me for doing this to her,
that I have crushed her and she can't see how to live anymore. I tell her that I've been using more dope than ever and she says that she has been doing the same. She tells me that she can find no consolation in anything but the dope.

This type of exchange becomes our primary means of communication and I come to rely on it. I rush down to the ghetto with Splinter after work and score my bags and then wait by the phone for Andie to call. I can't bring myself to call her because she deserves better than me calling her. She deserves to be rid of me. That's what I tell her when she asks why I never call her. I tell her I want her to regroup and move beyond me. I say these things because I feel like it is my duty to say these things.

And then, a week after the night we broke up for the last time, she doesn't call. Corey drops by to tell me that she has started seeing Hank. He says that she started hanging out with him when he mowed her lawn shortly after I moved out. And now he's living with her. He's moved in with her and Corey's pretty sure that they're fucking and I cannot
stand
this betrayal by either of them. You don't steal from your friends and you sure as shit don't fuck their exes.

I get on the phone and call Andie's house for the first time since she smacked me and I threw her out of my apartment. The voicemail picks up and she says on the message, “We aren't here right now. Leave a message and blah blah blah.”

That's what she actually says: “Leave a message and blah blah blah.”

I miss her so much.

I hang up and call back.

Again with the voicemail.

And then I'm struck by how she says, “We aren't here right now.”

We
.

We've been broken up a miserable goddam—month?—and
already she is including someone else in her fucking life. On
our
goddam answering machine. I call the message service to check her voicemail. She hasn't changed the password yet. I am privy to all her saved messages. There are three from Hank with his goddam whispery goddam voice telling her that he'll be home from work at so and so time. And saying shit like he can't wait to see her.

I have to get Sativa back.

I jump in the T-Bird, head to Andie's house wondering if I'll actually have the balls to do something heinous.

All I want is the cat, though. So fuck it. She can do whatever the fuck she wants with that traitorous piece of hillbilly shit. But I'll take the cat, thanks. The cat is mine.

Andie is just pulling up to the house in Hank's car as I get out of mine.

“You let Hank move in with you?”

“Yeah, I did,” she says, turning her back to me to unlock the door.

“Why would you let one of my friends move in with you? Why? Can't you see how that is killing me?”

She turns around in the doorway and looks me up and down.

“Why should I care?”

I am momentarily dumbstruck.

“You look like shit,” she says.

“So it's true that you don't love me anymore? You don't love me?”

“No, I don't.” She sounds more sure of herself than she ever has. I am secretly proud of her for that. But it's this self-confidence, this self-assuredness that says she could pretty easily do without me in her life that is the most wounding of all. I feel like crying but I won't give her that.

“I came by to get Sativa,” I say as stonily as possible.

“You can't have her.”

“The fuck I can't. She's my cat.”

Andie stares at me for a moment and then relents. It's easier to just give me the stupid cat and get me out of there before Hank comes outside.

“Wait here and I'll get her.”

She walks down the hall and disappears around the corner. I try to see what the living room looks like now, if there is any evidence of Hank. Everything appears to be the same. One of my drawings is still tacked to the wall. I take comfort in that.

Andie reappears with an open-topped wicker basket. Sativa is lying inside with three kittens. She hands the basket to me.

“It's a package deal, you know.”

“Shit. I forgot she was pregnant. When did she have them?”

“A few days ago.”

“They're really cute.” I smile at them and when I look at Andie she is smiling too.

“Thanks for this,” I say, motioning with the basket of cats. Sativa is purring and looking at me with half-closed eyes while her kittens nurse. I needed this. Sativa will fix everything.

“You'd better go,” Andie says.

“Tell Hank he's an ignorant, worthless dick.”

“Tell yourself that you're a dick,” Andie says.

“I already do.” I head back to the car. “But at least that redneck fucktard'll be dead soon. Cancer-ridden fuck.”

I place the basket with Sativa and her babies on the back seat.

Back at the apartment I shoot a bag of dope while sitting on the bed with the kittens mewing next to me. Splinter knocks on the door to ask if I'll take him downtown to get him one. I ignore him, pick up the phone and dial Andie. She answers.

“Please, Andie, please don't do this. Hank was my friend, for Christ's sake.”

She says nothing. I hear the line click. I throw the phone across the room and it tears out the line connecting it to the wall and clatters to the floor behind the bed.

I grab my last bag of dope, fix and shoot it. I feel the warm envelope enclose me but that still isn't enough to quell this noise in my head. I am dying inside. The dope doesn't even work now.

I crack open a razor and tear off my shirt. I move over to the stereo, drop in some Mozart. Then I start cutting, hard. I can't feel anything at all. Like cutting paper.

I look in the mirror at the blood all over me. It flows freely and from many places. I run my hands around in it, smear it and watch it continue seeping from my chest. Sativa walks in and rubs against my legs. She stares up at me and meows while purring. It's a burbling meow, bubbly like a fountain.

Sativa's tongue prickles on my chest. She is cleaning me,
cleansing
me. I appreciate her for doing that. She cares. I collapse on the bed and lie there for a long time. I reach down and pick her up.

June

Alex thought the cops were on to him so he packed all of his baggies full to the rim with smack and sold them at the regular ten-dollar price. That's like getting four for the price of one. Jonas copped seven of them and sold one each to me, Lou, and Splinter.

When Lou and I got back from the bank with the money to reimburse Jonas for his generous offering of overstuffed bags of dope, Splinter was lying on the couch with his eyes rolled back in his head, stiff as a board, a line of white fluid seeping from his mouth. The motherfucker. I'd even specified to him before I went out the door, I fucking specified, “Don't shoot that whole bag, Splinter.”

“I won't, man,” he'd said.

“I mean it, dude,” I said. “Don't shoot that whole bag. You'll fucking die.”

“I won't, Dad.”

“I mean it,” I said as we walked out the door.

“Splinter shot that whole bag,” Jonas mumbled without looking up. He and Karen were sitting directly across from Splinter, staring at him.

Lou motioned for me to help him. Splinter's arms were stiff, locked and folded on his chest. He looked dead. He looked so fucking dead. Lou said we'd have to get his blood circulating or he
would
die, so I had to stop freaking out for a minute and help him drag Splinter around the room.

Splinter's body stayed rigid. He was still not moving. We tried everything. We smacked him hard in the face. We ran cold water over his head in the bathtub. Then there was no other choice but to call the ambulance. And they don't come out for social calls. They are there solely for clean up. Somebody was either going to jail or the hospital.

The paramedics showed up right after Lou left. He didn't want to have anything to do with an OD'd kid, he'd said. He has his business to think about.

Jonas and Karen told the paramedics that they came home and found him like that. They weren't even asked, they just offered up the information like that, the stupid fucks. I gave them both the evil eye because it was so obvious to everyone that they were stoned off their pathetic asses. The female paramedic asked if we could take a guess as to what happened.

“I have an idea,” I said, cryptically.

Then her male counterpart said, real fucking private eye, “I think we've found the culprit.” He was standing over the dining room table, holding up a syringe. It was one of the syringes Splinter ganked from the hospital the other day when he was in there for chest pains. He frequently goes to emergency rooms around the
area complaining of phantom pains so as to possibly get painkillers prescribed. Junkies can never get enough syringes. They get dull after about five uses, and there's always someone coming over that wants to shoot but doesn't have a work and then you've got yet another person's blood in your shit. But the syringes Splinter got are made for elephants or something. We usually get 30-gauge, 1cc insulin syringes, which have a really fine point. When they're new they slide in like butter. The ones Splinter procured have to be at least 8-gauge. Even brand-new they feel like stabbing yourself with a fork tine.

The woman paramedic asked me if I knew what kind of drugs he was doing. I shook my head, tried to play dumb. Karen offered that he was probably using Heroin. The guy asked what the effects of Heroin are. Jonas and Karen fired off five or six different aspects of the high and I wanted to kick the living shit out of both of them.

“Alright,” the woman said, standing up. “Jim, do you want to go out to the truck and get the bags?” Immediately I took this statement in the Vietnam sense, as in “body bags,” and I started screaming at them to save him.

“You have to save him,” I said. “That's what you people do, isn't it?” “It's OK, it's OK,” she assured me calmly. “‘Bags' just means the oxygen bags we use to pump oxygen into an unconscious person's lungs. We're going to do everything we can to help your friend.”

Jim the Paramedic had a cop with him when he came back with “the bags.” The cop didn't say anything at first. He stood in the doorway and looked at Splinter with a disgusted look on his face.

And then, right when they were about to put the oxygen mask on him, Splinter sat up.

Just like that.

He sat up and looked around, still in a stupor from the massive dope hit. He pushed the mask away from his face and the cop asked
him point-blank if he wanted to go to jail or the hospital. Splinter replied that he wanted to go to neither.

“You've got to go to one or the other,” the cop said. “Once a call is made on an illegal substance problem, you have to go to the hospital or to jail.”

Splinter looked at me with anger in his eyes, but I was so happy that he wasn't dead that I didn't care if he was angry or not.

He ended up in jail. It turns out that he had a quarter ounce of weed in his jeans pocket, so they pinned that on him, too.

When he called me collect from the county lockup he was livid and didn't care what my rationale was for calling 911.

“If
you'd
seen you…” I said.

He stayed in the can for a week before I could get together the $250 for bail. Now he says he's moving as soon as he can save the money because he has to get away from dope and he knows some hippies that are going up to NYC for a while to see if there's anything to protest up there.

“How smart is it to go to New York if you're trying to get away from dope?” I asked him.

“You're always such a pessimist, Luke,” he said.

 

I walk to the bathroom to piss around 1 a.m. and something crunches under my foot. It's one of Sativa's kittens, the little gray male. Somehow he crawled out of the closet and now he's writhing on the floor and blood is coming out of his tiny mouth.

I know he's finished before I even pick him up, before Sativa begins her low cry of mourning. She looks up at me and I can see the despair in her cat eyes and I know that I have ruined yet another precious thing.

There's going to be bad luck following this one. You can't kill a cat without serious repercussions. They are God's chosen animals,
is what my grandmother says. God gave us cats because they are the easiest to disregard. They are easy to take for granted, she says. He wanted us to have to approach Him, make a concerted effort, all that. And cats are just the same. They never come when they're called. They lie around and look at you and then, just when you are cursing them under your breath, you feel that swish along your leg and they are looking up at you and smiling. But this is only for your sake. Cats don't need you and neither does God. Both are self-sufficient. The good ones are at least willing to look in on us at times, clean the wounds and help them heal. Now vengeance is about to set in. I can feel the gray pallor settling down already, can see the signs as Sativa growls at me when I come to the closet to replenish her food.

Splinter helps me bury the kitten in the rocky dirt behind our back porch overlooking the woods and, farther down the embankment, the highway. The kitten is small enough that it only takes two, maybe three shovelfuls of dirt before the hole is deep enough for him to fit snugly. He looks comfortable there.

Splinter says a prayer, which is ridiculous, but he was always the more spiritual of the two of us. And maybe cats need the last rites as much as we do, though I highly doubt it because I can't imagine any other animal doing as much messed-up shit to themselves and everyone else around them as people do. We fuck ourselves and each other. That's us at our best, our most natural.

 

Alice comes back the next day. She looks hotter than ever, wearing a tight white t-shirt knotted at the stomach, torn fishnets, a black mini, and a pair of combat boots with the steel shining dully from behind the torn leather at the toe. She's brought a bottle of whiskey and is holding it up like a
Price Is Right
model, smiling. She asks if I have change for the taxi, because the fare alone was sixty bucks and she doesn't have anything for the tip. I give her a five and then we do
shots. It's good that she brings whiskey because I've sworn off smack once again, this time determined to believe that Splinter's episode is the omen that means, finally, that the time has come to stop once and for all.

We get drunk that night, fuck, and the next morning she says she wants to shoot up.

“I don't do that anymore,” I say.

“Not even with me?”

“I just don't…” She looks so sweet and sexy sitting there, looking at me like that. “Can you get some money?”

She reaches into her jeans pocket and pulls out an ATM card. We're high within the hour.

She pukes her guts out the whole night, and the next morning she's ready to go again.

“But you threw up all day yesterday.”

“I like how you hold me when we do it.”

“When we shoot up?”

“Yeah. And you're all peaceful and less worried about stuff.”

“You're a precious girl, you know that?”

She whispers in my ear and plays with my dreads. We go back down to the Bluff.

We lie in bed most of the night, staring at the ceiling in the dark, lost in our stupors, a Portishead CD or something like it thumping quietly in the black of the room.

At some point between consciousnesses, the ceiling quakes and I am momentarily jerked from my half-sleep. I look at Alice and she is awake, too.

“What was that?” she whispers.

The ceiling rumbles again and we listen hard. A girl is yelling, followed by a deeper male voice. The ceiling moves again and then we hear crying.

“It's the Gap college girls. Somebody's kicking the shit out of one of them,” I say.

We lie there in silence and listen to one of those all-American girls get her ass kicked by one of her all-American boyfriends. We are helpless to help, too fucked up to even comprehend talking to some cop on the other end of 911. I turn up the stereo and pull the covers over our heads. Alice lies in the crook of my arm and falls asleep. Andie and Hank can go rot for all I care.