Whats the use in tryin?
All you get is pain.
When I needed sunshine I got rain. – The Monkees “I’m a Believer”

Officer Ben is yelling something at me and I just don’t get what the problem is. I just don’t want him to see what a mess the garage is. It’s getting late and Ricky is going to be home soon and there’s a cop here and he hates the cops. Frankly, this whole breakfast for dinner thing has really lost some of its charm. I don’t understand where it all went wrong!

We joked on the ride from the grocery store, he told me his name, and we started to chat, he even let me sit in the front! He made them all feel OK and let me go and get more eggs and clean up the mess, and then we got in his big police car and we drove home. I sang along with the radio and he really seemed to like that. He was all smiles and then I opened the house door and suddenly he’s completely freaked out and I think I’m going to cry. He is asking about the smell _{that smell that smell for days} and he’s got his hand on his gun and I just don’t know what to do. He pushes his way past me and goes into the garage and I think I heard him sick up, and I went to get some paper towels to clean it up. I am rooting around under the sink and I hear him come up behind me and I look back and see he has his gun out now, he’s got it pointed at me, and he’s not pretty anymore. Officer Ben’s not happy and there’s nothing smooth and I can just tell we’re never going to be friends. He’s saying something about where my hands are and telling me to get up and asking me if I have anything I want to talk about and I can feel this migraine starting right in the back of my right eye. I feel the cold heavy handle of a plumbers wrench under the sink _{cold, heavy}, and I’m trying to concentrate on the questions he’s asking. He’s asking something about my husband and if there are any kids in the house, and I think about kids and then I see the wrench fly up and hit his hand. It made a horrible sound, like someone eating cereal and the gun makes a roar and I can just tell it hit my cabinets. Why would he shoot my cabinets? What kind of a person comes into your house and does that? The wrench is coming up again and I can see the fear in his eyes and it’s making him so ugly. He looks just like Ricky right now, he has that same anger inside him. He wasn’t ever nice, he wasn’t ever going to help me. He was going to bring me here and touch me. _{he was going to try to touch me} He’s just the same as the rest, I can see that now.

And now the wrench is hitting the edge of his jaw and he and I will never be friends. I watch his head wrap around the wrench and see that look go out of his eyes, and get replaced with something… blank. His shoulder speaker is squawking something now and I just can’t make it out. I put down the wrench and grab those paper towels, it’s time to go clean his sick up in the garage. Boys will be boys, and sometimes that means cleaning up sick. I walk into the garage and there’s that smell _again, and for just one second something glints in my eye and I look out next to the Bronco and there’s something there. Something bad. Something I should have taken care of. It’s like when you leave the house and you think you might have left the iron on? I can’t put my finger on what it is that is out of place. It has something to do with that stain, I think. Something to do with the light coming off the floor. Something. And then I see the car keys on the ground, and I hear the shoulder speaker on that _{mother fucker} cop squeak again and I think maybe it’s time for me to leave. Ricky is just going to have to take care of his own dinner tonight and I hit the button to open the garage door, grab my jacket off the hook, because who knows if it’ll get rainy later, and I get into the Bronco.

I turn on the radio, and they’re playing Suspicious Minds, and I barely notice when I ram into the back of the cruiser _{that son of a bitch blocking me, trying to keep me here} and I turn up the radio so I can hear it over the roar of the engine.

She slumps back into the papasan with a giggle. I grunt as she lands on my hip, and there is a comic moment of rearranging while we make spoons. I yank the blanket back over us, and feel the her body hot against mine. Dead silence falls over the room while my body inevitably reacts. Her mouth is making silent words, testing them on her tongue while she tries to figure out how to react.

“Just ignore it,” I tell her “it’ll go away.”
She laughs again, and buries her face in her hands.
“I told you I was gay, right? We went over the… lesbian thing?” she laughs out into the darkness.
“Just… just ignore it.”

I try to position it so it’s not as noticeable. I can smell the Southern Comfort on her breath, and feel her chest expand and contract, expand and contract, noticing as it turns from laughs to giggles to the regular rhythm of sleep. Somewhere in noticing that, I fell asleep.

“You little pervy liar.”

She is hitting me in the arm and I can feel the wetness of a drool spot under my face. My shirt has wound itself around my chest and is choking me a little. I jerk to my feet, trying to figure out what she means. She’s laughing and pointing and I look down at my tented out fly. I choke out some embarassed noise and try to hide it behind my cupped hands while I rifle through the junk on the floor. She has fallen onto the beanbag in front of the TV and is wiping at the tears coming out of her eyes. The red faced embarassment has sent enough chemicals through my brain that I can feel it softening and I’m laughing a little too.

“You said it’d go away, you drunky perv.”
“I, uh… I thought that…”

The laughs are subsiding and coming in fits now. I wipe at my wet cheeks and pull my jacket on, meandering for the kitchen for a glass of water. I turn on the light and immediately regret it, turning it back off and feeling around for a glass.

“You underestimated it.”
“That’s the first time anybody has ever underestimated my cock.”

She smirks at me and grabs my glass of water, drinking it down in one desperate motion.

Continued from Mayonnaise.

A dozen pictures, on real photo paper no less, of some two bit hood standing around on half a dozen streetcorners. So, he’s a drug dealer. I’ve maybe seen him before, I see lots of folks, but I don’t know his name, and I don’t know him well enough to pin down what crew he might have connections to, not even enough to say what drugs he might sell. But, if he’s like everybody else, it’s heroin and meth. I shuffle over to get a better look and the stupid gun pops out of my drawers and onto the bed, the plastic magazine spontaneously ejecting onto the floor. Fuck. I grab the damned thing and stick it back under the mattress. This is stupid. I can’t make any sense of it. The guy is obviously not swimming with the big fish, and people who have the sort of resources to tail me and the balls to casually fuck with me can usually find little fish all by themselves.

I go back to the sink and notice my toothbrush bounced from the bowl and ended up behind the toilet. I pull it up and stare for a minute at the curly hairs and fuzz stuck to the end. Fuck this, I’ll get a new one later. I turn on the shower and listen to the water heater groan into life, shuddering out a few sprays of ice cold water, then a trickle of brown, and finally glorious, steamy water. I dial it down to just below scalding and step in. I can feel it pulling the beer right through my pores, and stare down at the drain to watch it spiral away.

***

I’m back on the street, and it’s sunny as hell. This is the wrong side of 10am, regardless of how good that shower was. Plus I still have a coating on half my teeth. I’m making my way down to the corners to see if I can get some more ideas on Mr. Picture Guy. Still no clue who he is, if I don’t recognize him, he couldn’t be responsible for too much weight. If Leo doesn’t recognize him, he probably doesn’t even deal, which will leave me straight up a creek.

“Mother fucker.”

The yell doesn’t really startle me, around this place, you hear a lot of shouted expletives, but there’s a certain part of your brain which knows when a yell is directed at you.

“Hey, Leo”

“Mother fucker. You gotta lotta nerve.”

“You gotta lotta nerve mother fucking me first thing in the morning.”

“Haha, don’t trip, don’t trip. it’s all good. Y’all know I’m just playin’ with a nigga.”

Leo is tall, gangly, white. He learned how to speak street through synthesizing drug dealers from after school specials and the skit tracks on rap albums. He would come off as a regular wigger, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s missing most of his teeth. Everything he says has extra lip flap in it, and there’s an odd lisp and nasal resonance. He’s got no septum, it’s sort of distracting. He likes to say it’s from all the gak, but the rumor is he got sold a bag of dish detergent when he was a kid. Even though it didn’t do anything, and it burned like hell, he just kept snorting it until his mom took him to the hospital. He’d stuff pennies in his ass if he heard it would get you high.

“You know this guy?”

I shove a profile shot under his nose and he holds his hands up and starts to back away. I grab his belt and pull him close.

“Leo… Do you know this guy?”

“Shit, I don’t know nothing from nothing.”

There’s a phlegmy whistle when he inhales. I can tell he’s lying, because when he really doesn’t know somebody, he pretends he does, to try to get money from me. Sometimes it works. When he says he doesn’t know somebody, it means he’s afraid of them. That’s weird, this guy isn’t even on my radar. Why would Leo know him?

“You don’t know nothing, huh?”

I stick another picture in his face.

“Yeah, man, that guys like. I don’t know him. Never seen him.”

I flick a finger at his jacket, and he pulls back like I’m gonna punch him. Leo is many things, but skittish isn’t on the list.

“I come down here looking for info from you twice a month for the past three years and you have NEVER known nothing. Even when you actually don’t know anything, you run your mouth, so you come clean now, who is the guy in the pictures?”

“Nigga I told you. There’s nothing, he’s nothing. Nobody is nothing. I gotta bounce, dog. Holla.”

He turns away and starts to walk. I kick him in the back of the knee and he drops to the ground. I’m on him as he starts to scramble back up, the stupid little chinese 25 in the crook of his neck.

“Listen you little shit. I’m gonna go find your mom and tell her where your apartment is unless you get straight with me right fucking now.”

“Fine, shit, B, just fucking, shit, just… just let me up off the ground, just… is that a gun, you pull a gun on me over this?”

“Yes, I’d pull a gun on you, trying to lie to me and then walk away. Get the fuck up. You try to run again I’ll give you one in the ass to think about.”

There’s no way I could hit him in the ass with this thing unless he sat down on the gun, but he doesn’t know that. I shove him into one of the doorways to a burned out row house. I peek around the corner and we seem to be alone, just bird shit and trash.

He looks at one of the pictures, sighs. Starts to fidget. He lights a cigarette and I unconsciously finger my empty pocket again while he takes a drag.

“OK, B, OK. So. That guy moves a lot of weight. Like a lot.”

“Why have I never seen him before? He’s not a corner guy, and he sure as shit don’t look like he does home delivery.”

“No, like. Not like, moves weight. He moves weight. Like… in a car. From one place to another.”

“So he’s a courier. For who?”

“He’s more like THE courier. He’s working for folks above my pay grade. I just know not to fuck with him and that when people start asking, you start not knowing nothing or you end up dead.”

He’s leaving shit out, I can tell.

“And?”

“And nothing, he works for motherfuckers up on high and nobody talks to him unless he talks first. He knows when to bring weight in like the fucking junk fairy or some shit. You get big enough, he shows up and starts to talk volume with you. He don’t take credit, he don’t front, he don’t bring bad product, he don’t get fucked with by no police.”

“Who buys from him?”

“Who don’t buy from him? Everybody who can be selling his shit is selling his shit. Those who fuck up and fall off, they don’t get supplied anymore and they go out of business.”

“What’s his name?”

“I heard it was Ricky but I don’t know the motherfucker to say hello.”

“Yeah, well – you didn’t know nothing about him five minutes ago, but now you’ve got his fucking biography, so why don’t you think hard about what his name was.”

“Straight up, straight up. Ricky, that’s all I know. On the real.”

A pile of bird shit and trash starts to move, and a hand wipes across a face that just appeared.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP”

The junkie rolls back over and goes back to sleep. I’ve kept Leo long enough, and he’s got nothing else for me. I gesture him toward the door and stick the gun back in my pocket. Courier named Ricky, moves weight, everybody likes him, has some deal with the cops. More than I had before.

“Hey, Leo.”

“Bitch, what the fuck?”

“When’s the last time you saw Ricky around?”

“I don’t know, a week? Week and a half?”

“Is that normal?”

“Fuck no, they’re down to the fucking baking soda and baby formula right now. Nobody is getting proper high.”

“And you didn’t think that was pertinent to this discussion?”

“Nigga you need to speak fucking english.”

Leo walks out into the sunlight and the pile of bird shit and trash cuts a wet fart and begins to snore. I stuff the pictures back into the envelope. A missing person, or more accurately, some missing product and a missing person. Which favor to call in… which favor to call in.

Ch 3.

Now that I’ve scored, tripped, and recovered, the really hard work begins. Interacting with the real world long enough to score again. It didn’t used to be this way. I used to have a job, I used to have insurance and benefits and a retirement plan. I used to have an estate. I used to think all that stuff mattered. I used to think TV was fun. I used to like food. Now it’s all just one big obstacle course, a series of rites and acts I have to perform to get high one more fucking time. All those skills I used to have, they’re all gone, they’re all worthless. The world has moved on and nobody wants a sysadmin anymore. They want something else, a wonderkid, a superman, they want someone who will do it all for them and lap up whatever money spills their way. I did that world once.

I’m done.

I start off at the day labor site. Nobody ever shows up looking for help, but sometimes there’s a guy with a line on some N. It’s always a good idea to be thinking one step ahead. Oddly today there’s someone there looking for a few guys to set up chairs at the convention center. He asks me if I speak spanish, and I say no. He asks me if I speak chinese and I say no. He stares at me like I’m something he flossed out of his molars for a minute, and looks around at the rest of the people there. He asks me if I do drugs and I say no. This is a litany, it’s a rosary prayer. No, I don’t do drugs. No, I don’t have any warrants. No, I don’t have any convictions. No, nobody is gonna come looking for me in the middle of the job. Yes, I will work for ten an hour, yes I will work for ten hours a day, no, I won’t report shit to the government. The guy appraises me one more time and thumbs me toward his truck. I walk to the tailgate and clamber over into the bed. A few minutes later, two other guys get up in the bed with me, one guy I know, Kevin or Peter or some jerkoff name like that. The other guy I’ve seen, but don’t know what kind of jerkoff name he might have. The truck lurches and we all fall off the bench, the whine of the electric motor giving way to a gentle cyclic thud. Hydraulic electric hybrid or something ridiculous like that. Only in America.

Kevinorpeter looks over and asks me if I know what the job is. I shrug. We turn to number three. The other jerkoff shrugs. This whole gig is starting to feel kind of weird. Normally if you don’t speak chinese, the cold call guys won’t take you because they have plenty of people who _can’t_ sell in China. If you can’t speak spanish, the manufacturing guys won’t take you, because you won’t be able to understand the management staff. If you can’t speak either you’re pretty much left to mucking out toilets or delivering take out, because just about everything else is cheaper to do with a couple bots. After all, why have five guys you pay nine thousand bucks a year landscape your property when you can pay fifty thousand for a Malaysian knock off of a Japanese landscaping bot which will last for ten years. The bot never gets hungry, never has a bad fight with a girlfriend and fucks up a hedge, it never breaks into the offices to steal all the TVs and laptops it can find.

We’re stuck with it now, I guess. We all kind of tune out of our shared confusion and feel the cold soak into our bones. Hopefully we’re gonna go hang posters on streetposts somewhere they haven’t standardized enough to automate, or something. I dig my hands into my armpits and shiver to pass the time.

Ch 2.

It’s ending now. Words work again. My brain is capable of doing something other than radiating concentrated joy. It’s bittersweet, but sometimes this is the best part of the trip. I’ve had my fun and now because I can actually articulate stuff, I can enjoy it too. Everything is just fanstastic! I feel like I’m waking up from the best nap in the world, but multiplied by a thousand. There’s no aches in my body, no pains, I can feel each beautiful ray of light as hit hits my skin. I can feel the photons racing to hit my retina from every object in the world. Life is pretty good.

And then it’s over. The aches are there, the place in my knee that pops when it’s cold out, the disk in my spine that’s not quite as elastic as it used to be, the cavity I have been pretending doesn’t exist. Then the smells hit. My armpits, the unknowable horrors that are inside the fridge, the urine, the overfull catbox in the corner, the cold turd which has curled up around my sack. When you can’t move for ten hours, things happen. You get used to it. I waddle like an overgrown toddler to the bathroom and start the shower warming up. I peel down my pants and assess the damage. I barely recognize the person that looks back at me from the mirror. I’ve lost sixty pounds. My hair is a stringy greasy tangle. My penis sags between angular, grotesque hip bones, my balls look huge against my skinny shit stained thighs. Hey there, handsome, what’s your name? It was… a line from a movie, I think. Or a book. I can’t remember anymore. Nano gives and Nano taketh away.

The good news is I haven’t gotten any bedsores yet, that’s when you know N has you down for the count. I check my back and my ass. In really high end N joints, they have beds that massage you, that roll you around so you don’t get any settling. I once saw some Japanese hotel that had a special hyperbaric chamber just for junkies. That would be the life. Instead, I’m scraping some preowned beans and rice off in the yellow orange spray of my shower. Smearing it with my toe to make sure it doesn’t clog the drain. I wonder if they catheterize you when you go in the massage bed. I bet they do. I think idly about what I could use as a catheter around here, but I don’t think it would be safe to stuff anything I have around here into my body. Maybe I should just get a tarp for the chair instead.