Futureproof (25 page)

May

I'm at the house maybe twenty minutes, the come-down already hitting me hard, when Jonas calls. He's panicking, says that something's wrong with Karen, that she took a dope hit and passed out, just like Splinter those times when he OD'd. I tell him to bring her over and I'll try to help but he says there's no time, he's too far away and and and…

“…I think she's already dead, man. You've gotta help me. You've gotta help me! Karen!”

“Jonas, calm down. How close are you to the nearest hospital?”

“I don't know. Like five minutes.”

“Go to the hospital with her, tell them you found her like that when you came home. They'll take care of her.”

“I don't want to go to jail, man. I'm just a fucking kid, bro. Karen!”

“You won't go to jail. But if you don't take her now,
right
now, she might die, and I know you don't want that, right?”

“No,” he whimpers.

“Take her to the hospital, and after they've got her checked in and everything, come by and pick me up and I'll go back with you.”

“OK,” he says, newly determined. “I'll see you soon.”

“Do you have money?” I ask, planning for the future.

“A little.”

“OK. Good luck.”

 

An hour later Jonas bursts through the door with blood spilling from his mouth, all over his clothes and everything. I can't understand anything he's trying to say. He runs to the kitchen and turns on the water. He grabs a cup out of the cupboard and drops something in it. It looks like a piece of chewed-up gum slathered in blood. Jonas looks at me and opens his mouth.

And then I know what's in the cup. He's somehow bitten off his own tongue. I grab a bunch of paper towels and he puts them in his mouth. They are immediately soaked in blood.

“I've gotta call the ambulance, dude.”

He shakes his head vehemently.

“You're gonna fucking bleed to death. What happened?”

He points at his mouth and gestures, as in,
Duh, I can't talk, dipshit
.

I grab a pad and he writes it out in ragged letters, says that he was too afraid to take Karen into the hospital, he didn't want to go to jail. So he left her passed out in front of a parked ambulance and took off. But on the way to my house he nodded off from the massive dope hit he'd taken with Karen, the one that had leveled her. When he woke up he had smashed into a car sitting at a stoplight and his tongue was sticking to the windshield, completely detached from the rest of him.

His note is a mess of scribbling and arrows and obviously hard
to read, but that's the gist of it. He didn't know what to do so he just backed up and drove around the rear-ended vehicle, came the last mile or two to my house.

“Is Karen dead?”

He shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders, tears welling in his eyes.

“Somebody found her lying there right as I was leaving,” he scribbles. “How am I going to talk for the rest of my life?”

I hand him another wad of paper towels. He spits the blood-soaked ones into the trash.

“There's probably a good chance that they can reattach it if you go to the hospital, man. I know you don't want to, but this is your health, your fucking life. Karen's going to be fine. But you have to fucking do what
you
gotta do. Right now.”

Jonas looks out the kitchen window for a minute, then agrees.

The police are already in the driveway when we get outside. They see the blood on Jonas, ask him if he was just involved in a hit-and-run accident. He looks at me and then nods at the cops. They ask him why he ran. Jonas writes something on the pad and shows it to the cop. The cop frowns and shakes his head. I hand the cop the cup filled with ice and Jonas' tongue.

“That's the only reason he ran, Officer,” I say. “He bit his tongue off and panicked. It could happen to anybody.”

“Looks like you're gonna be doing a whole lotta writing for the rest of your life, man,” the cop says to Jonas, like the cool motherfucker he isn't. As if wearing Ray-Bans and packing a pistol makes you automatically cool.

They escort Jonas to the station first and do all their fingerprinting and check-in bullshit before they finally take him to the hospital. By the time they get him in there his tongue is no longer on ice. It's rapidly decomposing at the bottom of a cup filled with lukewarm water.

June

Andie and I are taking a break from painting my mom's front porch for some quick cash, shooting coke in the bathroom, when I find out she's pregnant again. At first I think I'm experiencing some form of the expected coke-induced hallucinations, but when I put my hand on her belly I can see that, yes, it really
is
moving.

I yank her shirt up. She always wears baggy clothes.

She is blatantly,
obviously
pregnant.

“What the fuck is this?”

It occurs to me that I haven't seen her naked in months. We haven't even tried to screw since probably Valentine's Day, when everybody ends up screwing, even smackheads.

She starts to cry, just turns it on, like she's been expecting this moment to come and now here it is and how could she not expect it to come, really, because it's not like this sort of thing just goes away.

“I didn't know what to do,” she sobs. “I didn't want to tell you when I found out because I was afraid you'd want me to get an abortion and I just couldn't go through that again, Luke. I couldn't do it, baby. I'm sorry.”

“How long have you known?” I ask, gasping. The coke is really hitting me hard. And this revelation ain't helping any.

“I didn't know how to tell you.”

“How far along are you?”

“Please don't yell at me,” she sobs.

“How the fuck am I supposed to react? You've been pregnant for months and all this time we've been shooting every drug under the fucking sun. How am I supposed to react? When this kid is born it's going to be totally fucked up. How could you do that to our
child
?”

“I thought that if I kept getting high then maybe I'd have a miscarriage. But I couldn't go through the pain of another abortion, of knowing I'd killed
two
babies because you didn't want them.”

And that's when it dawns on me.

This is the sign.

This
is God's way of personally touching us. He's finally decided to step up and personally talk to us. This is the burning bush. This baby is the Red Sea parting, the clouds opening up, and the edict being handed down.

This is the miracle.

 

The next day I take Andie to Planned Parenthood and they run an ultrasound on her, set her up with a doctor. After all of their tests and questions they determine that the baby is four or five months along.

The clinic gives us the numbers of a few detox and drug treatment centers and within days Andie starts her methadone program in earnest. The people at the clinic said that since the baby is also addicted to opiates, she will have to stay on methadone until the baby is born.

The fact that she will be taking legally sanctioned opiates is excuse enough for me to continue using the illegal kind. It's all semantics, really. And since I no longer have gainful employment—just couldn't hack it anymore—I've gone on the shoplifting warpath. Every day I hit a different Home Depot or Wal-Mart or Target or Kroger, stealing blue jeans and copper pipe fittings and CDs and ball bearings and steaks and seafood and portable electronics and cartons of cigarettes, returning them without receipts for cash. It has never been easier than now. I am invulnerable. Nothing can get in my way.

Some days, when I'm feeling balls-on, I'll walk into a store and walk back out minutes later holding the merchandise right out in the open. It's not concealed under a trench coat or shoved down the pants. I just hold the stuff in my hands as though I was sent there by higher-ups and nobody need contact the police because I'm just doing my job, people.

Then it's straight to the store I ripped off the day before, where I walk in, plain as day, and get money for the stolen merchandise, with a “thank you” from the clerk tacked on top of it. I can do no wrong.

This is my final run here, and I am bound and determined to make the most of it. I even resort to asking strangers outside Wal-Marts and Home Depots if they'll make merchandise returns for me (all the major chains have a no-receipt return limit), saying I've lost my license. Inevitably the middle-aged men and women never ask for their share of the take and I thank them profusely before heading back out on the road, looking for more.

All the while Andie is taking her iron pills, keeping her doctor appointments, drinking her methadone at the clinic every morning at 9 a.m. sharp. On Sundays the clinic gives her a take-home dose, which she uses to fill three syringes. I help her slip all three into different veins, at which point we push in the plungers at the same
time, thereby maximizing the potential of her actually feeling a rush. She says that it's a pretty fruitless process, that the rush is minimal and only lasts for a few minutes, but her need for the needle has not gone away. Needle lust is part of the romance of this thing.

There have been times, when there was no money and no way of getting to the Bluff, when Jonas and I have put needles in our arms just to have some semblance of a high and, believe it or not, even when we were only shooting water into our veins, there were moments when it felt like I was actually getting stoned. Just the suggestion of the possibility, the thought that somehow the water could transform into the narcotic—water into wine—was enough of a placebo to simulate a rush, if only for a minute. And then, in a possibly sick play on the water gun days with Corey, when we'd drive around and shoot pedestrians in the face with powerful jet streams of water before tearing off in a hail of burning rubber and cackling laughter, Jonas and I would fill syringes with our own blood and pull up to citizens waiting at crosswalks and squirt the blood on their white blouses and sport jackets, put the fear of God into them.

July

He's sold our house for firewood.

When I get home from “work,” Andie's standing in the front hall talking to her namesake, her dad, and he's telling us that he's sold our house to a fucking fire department so that they can use it to practice putting out fires.

“You pushed it to the breaking point, Andie. And now you're gonna bring a baby into this crap-hole. I need you to move on. You've caused nothing but trouble for this family. And the same goes for you, boy,” he says to me. “I've given y'all one chance after another to straighten your act up and still it isn't enough. I didn't make you pay rent on this house and you treated it like your own personal dump. I haven't even been
in
the house and just in this hallway there's holes in the walls, the carpet is actually burned over
there in the corner, there's plastic taped over the window where it's been busted out…you guys don't deserve this house. You don't really deserve anything.”

He picks up a crumpled poster off the floor and tosses it aside.

“You can't just throw us out, Daddy,” Andie says. “We're trying to clean up. For our baby.
Your
grandson. For once in our lives we're trying to do something right.”

“I'm sorry, Andie, but it can't go on any longer. I'm done. Your grandmother's done. And if anyone gave you two custody of that baby, I'd be first in line to tell them why they messed up. Because the two of you are the worst thing that could happen to that child. That baby needs a loving, stable family. You don't have that to offer. And you're sure as hell not going to live here with it. For the past three years I've watched you destroy this house and do even worse to your bodies. It ends here.”

“You've watched us, huh?” I have to interject now because this guy is about as full of shit as anyone has ever been. “That's funny,
Andrew
, because I've never seen you in this house, not one fucking time. Your office is less than two hundred feet down the road and you never came up here even once to see how your own daughter was doing. You don't invite her to your holiday family gatherings, you pretend she doesn't exist. How fucked up is that, man? She lives right in the middle of all your businesses, your homes, and all she warrants for contact on a yearly basis is an envelope filled with money every Christmas?”

He folds his arms and squints his eyes at me, moves the toothpick in his mouth from one side to the other. He's a much larger man than I am, could most likely kick my ass, but I'm done caring.

“Well, guess what?” I continue. “
It isn't enough
. People need people to tell them that they are there for them, that they are willing to hear what they have to say. I don't give a shit if you valiantly took cus
tody of Andie when her mother proved herself a psycho, a parent is more than a source of money. You put her in this house and walked away, satisfied that you had accomplished your parental duties. But all she wanted was somebody to take some fucking interest in her life. Can't you understand that?”

Both Andie and I are crying now.

The elder Andrew says, “You have until Friday afternoon,” and shuts the front door behind him.

August

The Olympics are upon us now and the city is buzzing like never before. In a last ditch effort to clean up the streets, the city council decided it would be a good idea if they implemented a plan to scrape as many of the bums off the street as possible. So they put signs up all over the place saying they'd buy a one-way bus ticket for anyone to anywhere in the lower forty-eight states.

The plan was a resounding failure.

The bums here ain't stupid. There's gonna be more fucking money in this town for the next month than there has ever been. Hell, I'll bet there are some folks on the lower end of the job spectrum who have decided it'd be a wise career move to take some time off work simply so they can take up panhandling. There is a veritable assload of money to be made here. And that's not even including yanking
cameras and handbags off the shoulders of unwary tourists.

But for junkies it's all little more than a pain in the ass. Half the Olympic venues are right in the area where we have to go to score. The traffic has been tied up every fucking day and cops are everywhere.

We are killing time until the baby comes. After Andie's dad kicked us to the curb so the fire department could burn down our house, we scrounged around for a while, lived in the T-Bird, stayed in a run-down hotel for a few nights until we ran into this kid Kevin who used to work at the car wash with Andie and who now dabbles in the big H.

None of the other junkheads have it like me and Andie. We've got
purpose
now. We know that just over the horizon we're gonna be out of this mess and in a way that makes it all easier. It makes it easier to relax, say “fuck it” about pretty much everything. You never know what you truly need in life until you're forced to fill a car with as much of your shit as you can carry. That's when the posters and crockery and knickknack collections fall by the wayside and you've got a trunk full of letters and clippings, old photographs, a few of your favorite books, whatever's left of the music collection that was unpawnable. A few pairs of jeans, a shirt or two. None of it really matters much. Only the child matters.

 

Kevin and I pick up Jonas from jail the day he's released. First thing we do is call Karen's mom for him. He doesn't like talking on the phone because nobody can understand what he's saying with only half a tongue. Karen's mother tells me that her daughter's in a treatment center in upstate New York and to tell my brother to never try to contact her again. I leave that part out when I give Jonas the rundown.

We stop by the Wal-Mart and actually pay for a couple of kites,
then spend the rest of the afternoon with Andie standing in the old Peckerbrook soccer field holding on to the wind, feeling it try to pull us away.

“Ya know,” Jonas says in his own brand of mangled dialect, “I couldn't talk for like a month after I got thrown in the can and it got me to thinking, what would it be like to be normal for days on end? I mean, 'cause I was living it in there, ya know? Those motherfuckers don't even let you smoke. Whether you like it or not, if you got a sentence, your ass is getting clean. You don't have a choice. But I thought to myself in there, if I did have a choice and stayed clean, how would that be? I just can't imagine it. Shit's fucking boring without having your mind a little fucked up.”

“No shit.”

“You can live a boring, bullshit-dull life with no bottomed-out lows,” Jonas continues, “smooth sailing all along for the most part…or you can take the jump.” He looks at me. “I can't stop taking the jump, Luke.”

We stand next to each other, our kites in the distance. “I know what you mean, man. Like fucking Sisyphus, the Greek guy who was cursed to push a rock up a hill for all eternity because he betrayed Zeus. But when you really look around, stand back and see the big picture, all life is is pushing rocks up hills. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, judges, rock stars, electricians, construction workers, plumbers, fucking garbagemen. Eventually everything sucks if you do it long enough. There has to be something else to fill in the empty places.”

“Yeah,” Jonas says. “Remember back before Mom got married to Victor, when she used to take us out to Collier's meadow and we'd fly kites all the time? That's my favorite memory.” The wind really picks up and I look across the field to where Andie stands full-bellied, her Hello Kitty kite dancing in the wind and her hair flowing, like in a shampoo commercial or something.

“Hey, don't worry, J. You're still searching for your rock, finding your path. And
then
the trick is figuring out a way to keep pushing your rock while flying the kite at the same time. You've gotta sneak off every now and then, take a piss behind a tree, flirt with a beautiful girl, feel your place in the world and be at peace with it.

“Like skipping out on work and flying a kite because it's Tuesday and tomorrow might be the end of the world.”

We stand there flying the kites for the rest of the afternoon, just shooting the shit, watching the way the plastic kites, blue and yellow, turn and dive with a simple flick of the wrist. It's like nothing else.

It's the little things. I'm no fool.