A Story About Drugs
Across the street in the phone booth surrounded by a vibrant smell of piss I punch the numbers, "uno medio," I tell him in pidgin Spanish and he sends out the runner, brown kid no more than nine with eyes like a rabbit, I eyeball the block and cop the half and get back on the bus sweating but it's all clear, it's another day of freedom.
City city. All of downtown rising surreal around me, the city is my box of chocolate, squares of chocolate sprinkled with windows, dribbled with columns, long caramels down by the water, I want to open my mouth over the city and swallow it whole but it's already inside of me - at night all night I feel it like constellations in my bones. The bus lurches down Haight Street through the Filmore, the street signs a song of names as familiar as my fingers, Filmore, Steiner, Pierce, Scott and in a grey mist with whispers of sun, black children chase cats, orange workmen stand by vats of evil smelling tar, paint peels everywhere, Do not park in driveway sign, an incredible tattered woman in an army blanket, three punks skateboarding through traffic like crumpled Christmas wrappers blowing.
Sergio and I nodding out in Buena Vista Park can see over the web of bus cables over the houses the drift of fog rolling and breathing, Eugene a street nut passes down the clover hill giving us a snot symphony all the sounds that can be made with mucus, and the turning earth lies under me like a lover, mysterious and infinite and precious, waiting for me.
And we bop down to the head shop where Alain behind the counter with his crooked teeth and French nose donates a pack of cloves to the cause, friend of Sergio's, Sergio knows everybody. In front of the produce market on the sidewalk are bins of oranges, waxy apples, furry peaches colored like globes of sunrise, bubbles of grapes, rows of fruit like an altar under the awning and I bow down, smell the grapefruit my nost to the cool roughness of skin. Sergio and I are reflected in the gleaming apples, our faces warped backward as through a fish eye lens, over and over and red. I palm a speckled nectarine, he palms a pear, stand at the corner with juice running down our fingers.
"I steal everything I ever own," Sergio tells me, grinning fearless into the future, tall and bony in black jeans, black shirt, cracked leather boots, rabbit's foot hanging from one ear, black hair cropped close except for a long wisp in the back, a clump of horsehair braided into it. "You like thees sunglasses? I steal them." "Yeah they're great." "Oh you can't hav them," he says drawing away, drawing backwards, dropping his lower jaw goofing, "they're MYYY sunglass." And I slap my knee doubled over laughting, "oooh they're YOUR sunglasses!"
We catch a bus to the beach, as I get on I say "don't talk to me, don't talk to me," trying to pass for 16 looking young and innocent to save 50 cents with the youth fare, Sergio disappears, I look to see him sneaking in the back door, wiser than me, says "why deed you say don talk to you" and I say never mind. Watching with half an eye a quintessential business man, suit briefcase mustache, checking the time on his wrist, he pulls the bus cable, bing.
"So Michael got busted," Sergio says, "trespassing." Michael is Sergio's sometimes-lover, talks nonstop and con-artist to the bone. "That place we all were crashing at, the warehouss, the cops came and took everybody. They were so funny, they walk in like," he shudders screwing up his face and I understand, the place was trashed, all bugs and mouldy bread and burned bed rolls, I'd sleep at the shelter with the winos vomiting all night before I'd stay there, I say "gas masks and those toxic waste cleanup suits," and he laughs, says "I was under some blankets and they don find me, they don want to touch anytheeng."
I say, "Sergio did Michael go for the test?" "The test? Yeah and he's safe." "Ah, I'm so glad," I say, "so that makes three of us. Man I didn't know how scared I was until I found out I didn't need to be. But that nurse there, she gave me shit. I yelled at her." He grins, his teeth white in his brown skin like the meat of a coconut under the shell, "good," he says.
The nurse, tired eyes behind tortoise shell frames took me into a room with a Love Is poster on the wall and a Boston fern hanging in aggressive macrame, told me to have a seat. The sheet of paper on the table crinkled under me. "Just going to take a little blood," she said, I rolled up my sleeve, she ran a finger, pearl-pink nails along the inside of my arm astonished, "are these ... tracks?" "No they're mosquito bites." Standing in her crisp white, from a faraway world where opium is a brand of perfume she said "how old are you honey?" And I told her to lay off, she wouldn't understand, and she started in with how could I do this to myself, my whole life ahead of me and I warned her to quit it, my life is here and I'm living it, and she gave me maybe I could try to get some kind of help and I slammed my fist on the white metal supply table making the jar of bandaids shake, making the glass of thermometers soaking in alcohol rattle like loose pennies in a dryer and she stepped a step backward astonished. "Christ," I said, "look at what I open my eyes to every time I open my eyes, a world so beautiful and there's a hole in the ozone over Antarctica and the fruit is sprayed with poison and I can't drink the water from the faucet and there's fiberglass in the air and acid in the rain. So just say no to drugs and then they can drop the bomb and flatten us all into creeping screaming lizards wiht the skin hanging off our ribs and all the sweet creatures blind without even a sagebrush to stand under and all the green earth barren as a brick and all the blue sky grey full of ash like radioactive snow -" I shook my head hard, shook the crying out, " don't you give me that whole life ahead of me crap, what the fuck do you know."
And here we are. We're on the beach, where the ocean draws back whispering to itself, curling in, shimmering off across the sand as if it could be so bare and pure and lyrical forever, then hisses foreward in clusters of white foam, announcing its soul, sssss, an understatement of egoless love, and I go down to the edge of the water somehow suddenly barefoot and possessed, wobbling at the knees, kneeling to kiss it, saying sssss back, dancing in a loose-boned shuffle in the heavy sloshy sand. Ocean sweeping up a piece of wood and turning it over and over in wet green darkeness until it becomes blunt soft and bleached like the bone of a creature foreign to this earth, starfish, seahorses, arcing dolphins, tentacles of kep rising up on the waves, ocean washing out a piece of glass, rolling, licking cold across the sharpness until it becomes a rounded translucent tongue, lifting up an abalone shell and dropping it down, basing it against the shoreline, rattling it along coral reefs until it splinters into grains of iridescent sand ... "ssss" I tell the ocean. And then meekly collect my shoes, go back to the shore where Sergio sits smoking a clove. We roll the tobacco from the clove end with some dope and smoke it. "Mmmm," Sergio says and I say "ya."
City city. All of downtown rising surreal around me, the city is my box of chocolate, squares of chocolate sprinkled with windows, dribbled with columns, long caramels down by the water, I want to open my mouth over the city and swallow it whole but it's already inside of me - at night all night I feel it like constellations in my bones. The bus lurches down Haight Street through the Filmore, the street signs a song of names as familiar as my fingers, Filmore, Steiner, Pierce, Scott and in a grey mist with whispers of sun, black children chase cats, orange workmen stand by vats of evil smelling tar, paint peels everywhere, Do not park in driveway sign, an incredible tattered woman in an army blanket, three punks skateboarding through traffic like crumpled Christmas wrappers blowing.
Sergio and I nodding out in Buena Vista Park can see over the web of bus cables over the houses the drift of fog rolling and breathing, Eugene a street nut passes down the clover hill giving us a snot symphony all the sounds that can be made with mucus, and the turning earth lies under me like a lover, mysterious and infinite and precious, waiting for me.
And we bop down to the head shop where Alain behind the counter with his crooked teeth and French nose donates a pack of cloves to the cause, friend of Sergio's, Sergio knows everybody. In front of the produce market on the sidewalk are bins of oranges, waxy apples, furry peaches colored like globes of sunrise, bubbles of grapes, rows of fruit like an altar under the awning and I bow down, smell the grapefruit my nost to the cool roughness of skin. Sergio and I are reflected in the gleaming apples, our faces warped backward as through a fish eye lens, over and over and red. I palm a speckled nectarine, he palms a pear, stand at the corner with juice running down our fingers.
"I steal everything I ever own," Sergio tells me, grinning fearless into the future, tall and bony in black jeans, black shirt, cracked leather boots, rabbit's foot hanging from one ear, black hair cropped close except for a long wisp in the back, a clump of horsehair braided into it. "You like thees sunglasses? I steal them." "Yeah they're great." "Oh you can't hav them," he says drawing away, drawing backwards, dropping his lower jaw goofing, "they're MYYY sunglass." And I slap my knee doubled over laughting, "oooh they're YOUR sunglasses!"
We catch a bus to the beach, as I get on I say "don't talk to me, don't talk to me," trying to pass for 16 looking young and innocent to save 50 cents with the youth fare, Sergio disappears, I look to see him sneaking in the back door, wiser than me, says "why deed you say don talk to you" and I say never mind. Watching with half an eye a quintessential business man, suit briefcase mustache, checking the time on his wrist, he pulls the bus cable, bing.
"So Michael got busted," Sergio says, "trespassing." Michael is Sergio's sometimes-lover, talks nonstop and con-artist to the bone. "That place we all were crashing at, the warehouss, the cops came and took everybody. They were so funny, they walk in like," he shudders screwing up his face and I understand, the place was trashed, all bugs and mouldy bread and burned bed rolls, I'd sleep at the shelter with the winos vomiting all night before I'd stay there, I say "gas masks and those toxic waste cleanup suits," and he laughs, says "I was under some blankets and they don find me, they don want to touch anytheeng."
I say, "Sergio did Michael go for the test?" "The test? Yeah and he's safe." "Ah, I'm so glad," I say, "so that makes three of us. Man I didn't know how scared I was until I found out I didn't need to be. But that nurse there, she gave me shit. I yelled at her." He grins, his teeth white in his brown skin like the meat of a coconut under the shell, "good," he says.
The nurse, tired eyes behind tortoise shell frames took me into a room with a Love Is poster on the wall and a Boston fern hanging in aggressive macrame, told me to have a seat. The sheet of paper on the table crinkled under me. "Just going to take a little blood," she said, I rolled up my sleeve, she ran a finger, pearl-pink nails along the inside of my arm astonished, "are these ... tracks?" "No they're mosquito bites." Standing in her crisp white, from a faraway world where opium is a brand of perfume she said "how old are you honey?" And I told her to lay off, she wouldn't understand, and she started in with how could I do this to myself, my whole life ahead of me and I warned her to quit it, my life is here and I'm living it, and she gave me maybe I could try to get some kind of help and I slammed my fist on the white metal supply table making the jar of bandaids shake, making the glass of thermometers soaking in alcohol rattle like loose pennies in a dryer and she stepped a step backward astonished. "Christ," I said, "look at what I open my eyes to every time I open my eyes, a world so beautiful and there's a hole in the ozone over Antarctica and the fruit is sprayed with poison and I can't drink the water from the faucet and there's fiberglass in the air and acid in the rain. So just say no to drugs and then they can drop the bomb and flatten us all into creeping screaming lizards wiht the skin hanging off our ribs and all the sweet creatures blind without even a sagebrush to stand under and all the green earth barren as a brick and all the blue sky grey full of ash like radioactive snow -" I shook my head hard, shook the crying out, " don't you give me that whole life ahead of me crap, what the fuck do you know."
And here we are. We're on the beach, where the ocean draws back whispering to itself, curling in, shimmering off across the sand as if it could be so bare and pure and lyrical forever, then hisses foreward in clusters of white foam, announcing its soul, sssss, an understatement of egoless love, and I go down to the edge of the water somehow suddenly barefoot and possessed, wobbling at the knees, kneeling to kiss it, saying sssss back, dancing in a loose-boned shuffle in the heavy sloshy sand. Ocean sweeping up a piece of wood and turning it over and over in wet green darkeness until it becomes blunt soft and bleached like the bone of a creature foreign to this earth, starfish, seahorses, arcing dolphins, tentacles of kep rising up on the waves, ocean washing out a piece of glass, rolling, licking cold across the sharpness until it becomes a rounded translucent tongue, lifting up an abalone shell and dropping it down, basing it against the shoreline, rattling it along coral reefs until it splinters into grains of iridescent sand ... "ssss" I tell the ocean. And then meekly collect my shoes, go back to the shore where Sergio sits smoking a clove. We roll the tobacco from the clove end with some dope and smoke it. "Mmmm," Sergio says and I say "ya."
posted by Asher Abrams at 12:48 PM
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