Chapter
Three:
Tar:
A Vegetable Conspiracy
Along with
Shopping
Carts and Crop Circles!
Adriane’s house
was now empty except for the dogs, Sushi and Tofu. Nick moved out everything
but his desk in his office. She had three bedrooms that were unoccupied. She
liked it well enough that way but it did get lonely. Now that Mickey is sober
she preferred her using and drinking friends. These contacts broke the
monotony. One friend, Jane, always brought over a taste of this or that and,
depending on what she was high on, could be entertaining. Adriane called her,
my angry dyke. They had a thing back when in Casa Serena but that ended when
Adriane hooked up with Nick. Jane got unbearably nasty for a while but they
could still get together for a drink or a few tokes of pot.
Adriane was in her
bathroom twisted around inspecting a black spot on her hip where she had been
muscle popping. It had been growing larger and it felt sore when she was making
her lonely bed. She heard Jane honk from the street. Adriane hated it when
people did that; especially Jane. She went to the balcony overlooking the front
yard and the street in time to see Jane scaling the fence.
“Stop, Jane, I’ll
open the gate!”
“That’s okay, I’m
almost over it now.” Jane caught her tennis shorts on one of the spikes,
ripping them open, her ankle hit sideways as she jumped to the ground and
tumbled onto the lawn.
Adriane couldn’t
restrain herself from laughing.
“That’s okay,
bitch, go ahead and laugh…” she was half-laughing and half-crying for the pain.
Adriane was down
the stairs and out the door before Jane could get up. Laughing, she yelled,
“Hey, do I look fucked up or what?”
She helped Jane
up, giving her a shoulder as the two of them comically hobbled up the steps to
the door. Setting her down on the couch where she could put up her foot in the
music room, Adriane got her a drink and they sat there looking out the vista
from there all the way to the Channel Islands
saying nothing until Jane spoke up at last, “So, where is Nick now?”
“Nick… I don’t
know, hanging out in Buellton… I don’t care.”
“I saw Rod the
other day down at Pasqual’s.” she smirked.
“Yeh, so what? I
don’t care about that fucker…”
“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.” She didn’t want to hurt Jane so she added, “At least not
now.” But she meant, at least until he’ll freezes over.
“Good then, let me
have another drink and I’ll get my ass out of here.”
Adriane took
Jane’s glass to the kitchen and poured another drop of orange juice into a
glass and emptied the last of her pint of vodka.
“No ice!” Jane
called out.
“Okay, okay, no
ice, madam.” Adriane 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.”
Adriane was getting
tired of all the implications… the implied longing… the need to capture … her,
Adriane’s, soul. There was always someone needing to control or have her… Nick…
Jane… Robert… and, at one time… Mickey. She 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.”
She got up and clinked the empty pint against Jane’s glass.
“God damn, I’m not
trying to get in your pants, Adriane.”
“Yes you are! and
I sometimes wish I didn’t have a fous-fou-nette for the boys to play with.”
“Yeah, I can just
see you: A Brazil-waxed Barbie Doll,” saying that, she got up and hobbled into
the room with the fireplace.
Before Adriane
could respond Jane tossed her glass into the fireplace where it shattered. They
stood glaring at each other for a minute and then Jane made for the door.
Adriane waited to
hear the car start and went back up to the studio where she sat on a stool
wondering if she should call Billy for some tar. Tar, shit…. She remembered
when she first shot heroin. It had almost romantic, mysterious names like
“Horse” and “China White” or just plain “H” back then. Now what everyone gets
is something brown and ugly, nothing pretty, like a stew from dragon’s
droppings. It sits in Afghanistan
Recalling what
Mickey says, she smiles, “Cocaine and heroin are not part of a CIA plot or
anything like that. It is actually a part of a vegetable conspiracy to take the
animal kingdom down; back to where it once was… not so much to make vegetables
out of us all but more to just even things up.” He says he got that vision
while stoned on mushrooms but spoke of it as though he believed it. One day
millenniums ago the vegetable kingdom got together and held a Powwow. The
creatures of the Earth were decimating the whole population of the plant kingdom
and something had to be done. Even the trees were being defoliated at an
alarming rate and so on. During that council Poppies contended that dinosaurs
avoided their seeds and Mushrooms complained that they rot in the dung before
any being can discover their wonders. We have to get rid of these dinosaurs and
help the mammals develop consciousness enough to partake in our delights. So
they agreed that the dinosaurs had to go and eventually they did. Millions of
years evolved the mammals into what we call humans. The first troops came out
of the trees after a few found magic-mushrooms in the turds of the herds they
learned to follow and hunt. The shaman of the troops talked to the mushrooms
and other mind-expanding plants and the shaman were taught to develop medicines
and other supposedly helpful uses of the vegetable kingdom thus causing human
consciousness to rapidly expand. On the way to the peak of this expansion the
human beings would become further and further alienated from the powers of the
Earth until they would eventually blow themselves up. This was all a part of
the vegetable conspiracy. Few would survive but, hopefully, the mushroom said,
having learned their lesson they managed to treat the plants with more respect
than their predecessors and lived in harmony as subjects of the vegetable
kingdom. Poppy’s contribution would seem minor but they would contribute to the
process by assassinating the best minds of each generation through addiction to
their juices, thus leaving the doors open for the less evolved to hasten our
demise in case someone would catch on to the plan before it could be realized.
Tar would be the pinnacle of weapons used for this purpose.
He had other
esoteric considerations involving aliens and shopping carts and spoke it with the
same conviction. He said that stray
shopping carts were morphed aliens from Disco-Centauri that took on the
appearance of shopping carts as they prepared to land on Earth. That is why we
see them willy-nilly scattered about in alleys and on curbs throughout inner
cities. They are very inconspicuous that way and lend themselves to being taken
by their contacts that, after landing in the same manner, morph into homeless
bag ladies and so on. Their hosts can be seen, apparently, talking to
themselves while hauling around all their personal belongings in a so-called
shopping cart: just waiting for the chance to make their move. Some carts are
picked up in trucks that gather them up and take them to supermarkets where
they are conveniently pushed into each other to mate. He also says this with
equal conviction and it is hard to say whether or not he is serious about it.
One can imagine shopping carts gathering in wheat field making crop circles
before they morph into other forms to escape being seen! That is why no one has
caught anybody making crop circles. The sole source of food on Disco-Centauri
happens to be a cocaine-type mineral fluid they have sucked their planet dry
of. After extreme shortages, causing untold death and misery between warring
nations on Disco-Centauri, they launched-out in an imaginative and nearly
successful invasion of the planet Earth. Unfortunately, it took every resource
available to them to manage this fete and they are stuck here if they fail.
This vision he got from a massive dose of X or LSD.
Adriane never
liked psychedelics… they made her too… they took her places where… “Oh, I don’t
really want to think about it… where they take me… to dark places… never where
everything is beautiful. My visions are horrors. Heroin shuts them off and I am
a rock.”
She contacted
Billy on his pager. Pagers were already old-school back then but Billy didn’t
trust cell phones or landlines. Before he called back, her mind was made up.
She wasn’t sure whether her mind had anything to do with it but just the
thought of fixing awoke the hunger. Those vodka hangovers were getting worse
and she needed something that could get her through the day. Letting go of
resistance was a relief of sorts… Billy could fix that…
The hunger grew.
That is what it does. She knew that it has a mind of its own and you are… your
dreams… your hopes fade to black… black tar consumes what is left of them. It
becomes what you are… a junkie. She knew, “So many times I have gotten clean.
Life began to look good again… the scars on my arms started to fade… but
somehow that wasn’t good enough. There is this appetite that can’t be quenched.
I often hear people say that all we need is a good job, some meaning and
purpose to our lives… a Hollywood love-life… a
spiritual awakening… It doesn’t matter to me… even God can’t do enough for me
to relieve this craving. What is that? Where does a junkie go from where I am
at? I have tried it all. One rehab after another... one spiritual path after
another to take away this craving…. What can I do but surrender to it?”
“I would just do
muscle-pops from now on. I’m not putting tar into my veins. It isn’t as quick
but it does the job and I don’t have to fumble around, probing for a vein that
isn’t collapsed. I just put that spike in my butt and act as though I am just
fine. No tracks to hide; no long sleeved shirts; no rush either but that’s
okay. No one can tell I am a junkie unless they get my pants off. Who is going
to get that far with me unless they know already what I am about?”
She and Billy talked
about old times and eventually went to bed. After she was done she pushed him
off. “You have to go now, Billy.”
“But, Adriane,
why?”
“Because, I have
other things to do,” she was looking as the tin foil opened up showing the
gooey tar. That alone was on her mind. She only wanted to have sex after she
hit-up and Billy was compliant. He left the house disappointed because she
wouldn’t let him stay. It was always that way with sex. She wanted the guy to
go away no matter how close they’d been.
After all, she’d paid for the shit with cash and not her body. She had
sex with him for herself but now she wanted to get on with it on her own.
She hit up again;
heroin came to her at the cellular level. It didn’t talk to her brain… talked
to her body… relaxed the muscles… it hummed through the blood stream… a gentle
orgasm… “Here I am, dear one… you have been waiting so long for this… I am
here.”
And her body
answers …. “Aaaah.”
No comments:
Post a Comment