My house was now empty except for the dogs, Sushi and Tofu. Nick moved out everything but his desk in his office. I have three bedrooms that are unoccupied. I liked it well enough that way but I did get lonely. Now that Mickey is sober I only have my using and drinking friends, my contacts and so on, to break the monotony. One friend, Jane, always brought over a taste of this or that and, depending on what she was high on. She could be entertaining. I call her my angry dyke. We had a thing back in Casa Serena but that ended when I hooked up with Nick. She got unbearably nasty for a while but we still can get together for a drink or a few tokes of pot. I was making my lonely bed when I saw her pull up… she honked. I hate it when she does that. I went to the balcony overlooking the front yard and the street in time to see her scaling the fence.
“Stop, Jane, I’ll open the gate!”
“That’s okay, I’m almost over it now.” She caught her tennis shorts on one of the spikes ripping them open as she jumped to the ground. Her ankle hit sideways as she tumbled onto the lawn.
I couldn’t restrain myself from laughing.
“That’s okay, bitch, go ahead and laugh…” she was half-laughing and half-crying for the pain.
I was down the stairs and out the door before she could get up. Laughing, she yelled, “Hey, do I look fucked up or what?”
I helped her up, giving her a shoulder as she hobbled up the steps to the door. Setting her down on the couch where she could put up her foot in the music room, I got her a drink and we sat there looking out at the channel saying nothing until she spoke up at last, “So, where is Nick now?”
“Nick… I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“How about Mickey?”
“Mickey, oh, we’re just friends now.”
“Does than mean I have you all to myself?”
“No Jane, that won’t happen again.” I didn’t want to hurt her so I added, “At least not now.” But I meant at least until he’ll freezes over.
“Good then, let me have another drink and I’ll get my ass out of here.”
I took her glass to the kitchen and poured another drop of orange juice into a glass from the last of my pint of vodka.
“No ice!”
“Okay, okay, no ice, madam.” I knew better than to take up room in the glass for anything but vodka. “You’d better like it because that is all I have.”
“Are you still just buying pints?”
“What is it to you how I buy it?”
“I’m just saying… say, don’t worry, I have a jug in the car.” She held up her glass as though she were toasting, “Here’s to us.”
I was so tired of all the implications… the implied longing… the need to capture me… me, my soul… always someone needing to control or have me… Nick, Jane, Robert… and once, Mickey. I went off on poor Jane, “What do you mean, ‘us’?”
“Us… I don’t mean anything by it.”
“Then why do you say that… there is no ‘us’. There is you… you are sitting there… and there is me, I am sitting here and we are having a drink.”
Jane winced, “Got it, okay?”
“No, you don’t get it, Jane. You still want it to be ‘us’ and I just want a friend I can trust.” I got up and clinked the empty pint against her glass.
“God damn, I’m not trying to get in your pants, Adriane.”
“Yes you are and I sometimes wish I didn’t have my fous-fou-nette for the boys to play with.”
“Yeah, I can see that: A Brazil waxed Barbie Doll,” saying that, she got up and hobbled into the room with the fireplace.
Before I could respond she tossed her glass into the fireplace where it shattered. We stood glaring at each other and made for the door.
I waited to hear her car start and then went back up to the studio where I sat on a stool wondering if I should call Billy for some tar. Tar, shit…. I remember when I first shot heroin. It had almost romantic, mysterious, names like “Horse” and “China White” or just plain “H”. What we get now is something brown and ugly... nothing pretty, like a stew from dragon’s droppings. It sits in Afghanistan and ferments in twenty gallon barrels… it is steeped in the greed of warlords and the blood of peasants before it comes to fester and create abscesses in the body and soul of junkies like me.
Mickey says that cocaine and heroin are not part of a CIA plot or anything like that. It is actually a vegetable conspiracy to take the animal kingdoms back to where it once was… not so much to make vegetables out of us all, but, more so to just even things up. He says he got that vision on mushrooms. I never liked psychedelics… they make me to… they take me places where… I don’t really want to think about it… where they take me… to dark places… never where everything is beautiful. I go where the horrors are. Heroin shuts them off and I am a rock.
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