yeah, the title says it. i love literature, read a lot and have been writing on and off since i was 18, but apart from a few short stories have never finished anything. at the moment i'm working on something that is directly influenced by my addictions as well as a lot of personal traumata. oh, and my love for hard boiled crime fiction. i have no idea if i have any talent, i've given what i have so far to a few select friends and their feedback was positive, although that could be because they don't want to hurt my teeny-weeny feelings. so now i decided to post one chapter here, where people will not hesitate to tell me that i am a talentless hack if that's their opinion. any constructive criticism is welcome, and keep in mind it's still a rough first draft so it's still chock full of errors, akward sentences etc. so here goes chapter three of what hopefully one day will be a publishable novel. oh, not for the easily offended i should add. i decided not to post the first chapter as the dialogue in it is atrociously bad. since i've lived in germany all my life i sometimes have problems writing good dialogue, as i speak german 98% of the time. the copy/paste completely fucked the formatting of the text, you'll have to excuse that, i'm too lazy to reformat it.
3. Cheap Vodka
It is one of these days again. You know the kind, the really horrible kind, the ones that make you wish you didn't have friends, a raging alcohol problem and some severe unresolved anger issues. Because if even one of these things fell from the equation I wouldn't be sitting in my bloodstained clothes, drinking ouzo straight from the bottle while contemplating if a pair of tweezers or a scalpel is a better tool for digging jagged shards of glass out of my left hand – which I'm also reasonably sure is broken – while having to turn the music to a fucking jetengine worth of noise so I don't hear one of my best friends fucking in my study, which had been somehow converted, seemingly by magic wand and in the blink of an eye into some demonic dyke fuck pad that would give every bible-thumping, homophobic anus-face an instant heart attack. I mean really, did you ever notice how these fucking appaling wastes of what's sometimes called intelligent life, how their faces all look like assholes? And I'm serious here, with the flabby cheeks and the puckered mouth, I think if I had enough to drink and was really in the mood for some good solid buttfucking, well I might just break out the KY and wonder what kind of degenerate puts lipstick on their cornhole. Also, after at least six hours, it's always a bad sign if wounds don't stop bleeding.
This wouldn't be so bad if I still had my stash of dihydrocodeine, fucking thanks Cass, apparently this is some sort of weird aphrodisiac forthose people, so let's count grievances here:
Hand full of glass, check, yup.
No painkillers.
Prolonged bleeding.
Very, very possibly going to jail.
Okay lifelong friendship or not– oh wait someone stabbed me in the fucking foot too.
Yeah.
I hurl the empty ouzu bottle against the wall, limp to my bedroom and get the gun. Holding it feels good, feels right, even though I know I couldn't rack the slide if my life depended on it. I haven't yet dared to pull my foot out of my sneaker and I can feel some of the blood drying and I think it's a good sign, and I'm also glad that it was a box cutter and thus the razorlike blade went only, oh, three quarters of an inch into my actual foot, but hey, it's having a fucking competition with my hand in the good ole bloodloss marathon.
Most of these days I just feel like harmless stuff, maybe breaking someones nose or his legs if my day had been really atrocious, but today, today warranted fucking ethnic cleansing.
I drop the gun on the floor, limp to the freezer and grab the pint of vodka there. I hate the stuff straight but it seems to fit today's theme, the one that slursfuck you to me on a nanosecond basis. Two quick slugs from the bottle remind me that alcohol thins blood and I really shouldn't be drinking, but I am not one to do the sensible thing. Ever.
In the kitchen I juice a lemon while noticing with a mixture of morbid fascination and dread that dark red, veinous blood is seeping from my sneaker. I pour the juice into the cocktail shaker along with some vodka, honey and GBL. Shake, strain, fill up with club soda, drink. Fast. When I'm done and ready to fuck up Cass' evening the way she fucked up mine I accidently stub my food against one of the legs of my kitchen table and howl with pain, impaling through my very being with white hot intensity. After I've finished my drink and chase it with vodka straight from the bottle (blew my last five on a cheap fifth of vodka) I take off my shoes (owww), pooled up blood splattering on my floor, then the rest of my clothes (gonna kill something and nothing's gonna stop us tonight) and when I'm good and naked I press the palm of my hand against the gaping, vaginial wound in my foot, stinging pain running through my being. I've haphazardly wrapped a kitchen towel around my left hand, which does little to stop the bleeding and the wound in my foot will need to be sutured.
So, naked and bloodstained, clutching only the frosty vodka bottle, and lighting a cigarette with my ruined hand I limp toward my study, leaving neat, red footprints on my floor and making wet sucking sounds as I go along, sounds that I hear again when I burst into the room.
--------------------------------------
I'm sitting at my dining table, my foot propped on Cass' lap, blood seeping down her naked thighs. There are some really nasty bruises forming along her ribcage, and suddenly I'm glad I fucking lost it in the way I had. Cass cleansed my wounds with iodine, and was now injecting cocaine into my foot. She had given me an IV shot of tramadol and a real fuckload of gabapentin and it's taken the edge off the pain. In fact I'm quite high. And my body is really rebelling. I've already thrown up once, a stomachful of booze and bile erupting from my mouth and nostrils, and it has left a disgustingly acrid taste in my mouth that I'm trying to wash away with more vodka.
Which, incidentally, just tastes like death. I'm shaking and I think if I hadn't lost so much blood I'd have an erection, which would be the first one in a really long time.
Yes, right, something I should mention: before eloping to Portugal Cass was studying medicine. So she knows what she's doing. Hopefully. Now she's fitting a blue thread through something that looks like a small fishing hook and I really hope that the cocaine shot anesthesized my foot enough so I don't feel it going into my flesh. And I don't, just a weird sort of pressure where she's sewing me shut. It takes four sutures to close the wound. Afterwards she applies some gauze and then thickly bandages my foot. Then: my hand, which is shaking uncontrollably and is discolored from both bruises and the iodine bath. She's about to inject the rest of the cocaine into my wounds but I tell her to just mainline it home and pull the glass out without it. She shrugs and does what I ask and-
Liftoff. Now the tramadol shot felt good, but this is a different world entirely. An absolute, all-powerful euphoria envelops me, and for a moment I picture myself being wrapped into the beautiful gossamer wings of a guardian angel, soft blond hair tickling my neck. But the picture quickly fades when Cass yanks a half-inch shard of glass out of my palm. She tells me to move my fingers, and I do, and after checking if my sinews and nerves are okay (more or less) she starts to closes the wounds expertly that would not mend on their own. This hurts. Shards of pain pierce through my speedball high like obsidian chips hurled at buckshot speed.
------------------------------------
I should probably elaborate on what happened. Age old story really: some assholes made some insulting remarks to Cass, and hey, an instant later the first one was coughing up parts of his nose, but unfortunately he had quite a few friends with him so I found myself in a full-scale fight and sadly totally outnumbered. Someone hit Cass with a pool cue which then made me pull my collapsible baton and bash the nearest one over the head. Vibrations sang to my hand, telling me that it was a very good hit indeed, and with a sense of accomplishment I backhanded the next one across the jaw.
Someone hit me then and I retaliated by smashing my whiskey tumbler into his leering idiot face. Hence the hand full of glass. And then it would have gotten even uglier, as the guy whose head I split open, now prone, stabbed me in the foot. I started stomping the everliving piss out of him, and I probably would have killed him if the bartender had not been so nice to pull a shotgun from under the bar and break up the fight. And before I knew what exactly had transpired I was speeding home at nearly twohundred kilometers an hour.
„What exactly did those assholes say to you anyway?“
„They called me a dyke cunt.“
„That was quite a nice punch.“
„Thanks. And I'm sorry I got you into that mess. I didn't even see that you were hurt so bad or I woulda patched you up right away. Why didn't you say anything?“
„The pain only started filtering through the adrenaline later on.“
„Yeah, I know that feeling. Now, as your doctor I hereby order you to take it easy for the next days. You really lost a lot of blood.“
She sweeps her hand around the room, which looks like an abbatoir or a murder scene.
„You took all my dihydrocodeine.“
„Don't worry. I got enough of these-“ she picks up another tramadol ampule and shakes it, „-to get you easily through the worst. And if it's not enough I'll go score something really potent. We just might have to load you up on antibiotics, because if any of your wounds get infected, it'll be hell to pay. Now lay off the booze, take some downers and go to bed. Drink a lot of water, take some supplements. You'll also need to rest in order to recuperate. Here,“ she puts two ampules down on the table, „these'll do for now. I'll change the bandages tomorrow. Now go the fuck to bed. I'm gonna get my pussy vigorously-“
„You shut the fuck up.“ I hiss. No amounts of drugs will ever appease this feeling I get when I hear this, the feeling of inadequacy, of knowing deep down inside that I will never be loved. It is enough to make the bile rise in my throat, quite literally, and I spew a mouthful of bile and vodka onto the floor, the yellow liquid mingling with the blood.
Cass, still stark naked and her thighs encrusted with my blood goes to leave and I get to admire the perfect symmetry of her ass for a brief moment, but it's not with any sort of lust or craving (at this point I am a few thousand lightyears past that) but with a detached wonder at the beauty of things I will never have. Like catching a brief glimpse of some rare and nearly extinct animal. I put some Acid Bath on the turntable.
I get some of the weed Vic left here and throughly mix it with tobacco and some oily hashish, then throw a few ice cubes into the bong and pack myself a decent bowl. I hit it with a vengeance and all the shit in my bloodstream makes the smoke feel velvety and soft down my tarred throat. I finish off the bowl, get myself a bottle of beer and 30mgs of zolpidem from the pill stash, light a smoke and contemplatively down it after chasing the pills with a mouthful. The icy hop juice is gone quick and I go to bed where I smoke another bowl and wait for the pills to kick in.
---------------------------------
When I wake up monochrome daylight is filtering through the drapes and my foot is throbbing with an angry insistance. I drink the rest of the beer next to my bed, drag my carcass out of bed and with shaking hands try to get dressed but instead have to race in the general direction of the toilet only to throw up about three feet away from the fucking thing. When the shaking subsides a bit and the heaving has stopped I get a fresh beer from my fridge and light my first cigarette of the day. After three drags I look at my hands and notice that there's no chance in hell I can hit a vein with them. So I wake up Cass. And by extension, Janine.
We sit at my dining table. I am in such a sorry state it defies description. The throbbing in my foot has turned to jagged pain. The beer hasn't taken the edge off and I'm now downing the second one posthaste. Cass has drawn up an ampule of tramadol (100mgs) and diazepam (10mgs) and is now slipping the needle home while Janine keeps my arm steady, which takes both her small, manicured hands. Her black-lacquered fingernails push into my scarred, white flesh and for a moment I feel a pang of regret for not being the one fucking her. But then the solution is introduced into my bloodstream and it melts away, fast, fast, fast. My stomach still feels scoured though.
Janine, busy little bee that she is, has already removed most of the blood and bile. I kind of liked the look, myself, but the olfactory notes were perchance a wee bit rustic.
„Hey?“ Cass says, „thanks for backing me up.“
„Always. God, my stomach is fucking killing me.“
„Tried smoking a bowl?“
„Good idea. Hey“ - I call out to Janine - „thanks for cleaning up my mess.“
„She likes cleaning, that one. Especially with her tongue.“ Cass says smiling.
„Swear to god Cass any more sexual innuendo and I'm drugging your next drink and selling you to a pimp.“
„You don't know any pimps. Also, that was way past innuendo.“
„Fuck you.“
And I start packing a bowl while Cass takes a Camel from my pack and lights it.
„Jesus Christ, no wonder you wheeze like you're about a hundred after a few flights of stairs. How many of these you smoke?“
I thought for a moment. „One and a half, two packs a day I guess.“ I light up the bowl and let loose. Inhale/hold/exhale. Pleasant headrush. As familiar as the inside of my mouth. THC was the second intoxicant I discovered after alcohol. But it was the first time I ate shrooms that sealed my fate. Then and there, on that night almost nine years ago, my curiosity for drugs started which all too quickly turned into an obsession. And on top of being obsessed with drugs they're also addictive. I would have probably become a top-notch pharmacologist had fate dealt me a just slightly different hand, earning untold sums – billions upon billions - for some giant pharma conglomerate who have about the same respect for human life as John Wayne Gayce.
My head lolls and I look sideways at Cass and still feel a bit of enmity because I'm so fucked up – in the bad sense, not the good sense – but mostly I'm just grateful that she's a part of my life again. I didn't realize how much I missed her until I saw her again. But, the lady professionally cleaned my wounds, stitched and shot me up and all of that barehanded, so fuck it. My rage is as easily subdued as it is aroused usually. She takes another drag on my Camel.
„Why without filter anyway?“
„Filter smokes just don't taste like smokes to me. I don't know really. I reckon I'm fucking up my health in lightspeed anyway, so that's just really, really secondary. Like starting to smoke American Spirit or some equally trichromosomal behavior.“
„Is that even a word?“
„What, behavior?“
„No, asshole, trichromosomal.“
„Fuck knows, I was first gonna say retarded, then spastic, then congenital... and then well it just popped into my head. Has a nicer ring to it than those other three, wouldn't you say?“ We're both pissing ourselves at this point. I hand her the bong, she me what's left of the cig. Before lighting up she asks,
„So we all good?“
„Course. We always are. Even though there's the persistent eventuality I'll sell you into sex slavery.“
“Haw haw. You're an asshole.”
Just to make a point I should heavily lace her next drink with everything my arsenal of downers, tranquilizers and soporifics. Let's see; a nice margarita, laced with zolpidem, selegiline and lorazepam, the salt rim replaced with crystalline GHB should do the trick. The selegiline is a selective MAO inhibitor, that also prevents the breaking down of dopamine in the brain, amplifying the GHB tenfold. The thought made me giggle, but it would be a shameful waste of perfectly good drugs. I guess I should just consume it.
Cass eventually fucks off with Janine to buy groceries, which leaves me with nothing much to do but sit on my balcony, take bong hits and drink margaritas laced with GHB per my original plan. I omit the benzos though, as there is something like too much of a good thing. Two old-fashioned glasses downed, both containing three grams of the potassium salt of gamma-hydroxybutyrate, a shitload of tequila and Cointreau, and I feel delightful, especially on top of the other shit in my bloodstream. Everything moves in slow motion, everything is good, I am home. I sit back and let the breeze wash over me, some weirdly potent chemical synergy working my brain over, telling me that things are good, life is good, we are all okay. I know it's as far from the truth as one can get but I don't take drugs to be reminded of how dire and pointless life really is, now do I?
--------------------------------
I jerk awake and it's dusk. The high is completely gone and I'm left once more where I started up: sore, cold, miserable, nauseous, shaking but above all craving. I heave over the balcony and stumble back inside, each step making me curse and turning my mood blacker and blacker, until I reach the fridge and can whip up another quick cocktail (a screwdriver) and lace it with GHB, swallow a few zolpidem to take the edge off as my hands, once more, are shaking, vibrating really. A combination of withdrawal and dozing off outside in nothing but boxer shorts and a t-shirt, fuck I'm cold. Pain, and just enough to be really bothersome, damn nigh intolerable. I don't consider myself to be particularly tough, but I can take pain about as good as the next man. By which I mean, I can stomach a lot less of the shit than I'd like to. I'd love to be all stoic and manly and shit, but it hurts, so fuck all that and bring on the analgesia. I down the drink in one pull, light a cigarette, pour another and repeat. The acid in the orange juice and the sharp taste of ethanol make my mouth water, my saliva turning sour, a sure sign that my stomach wants to purge itself of the its newest poisonous contents but I'm far too experienced, not to mention too wounded, to let that happen. Some buttermilk and a bong hit settle my stomach back down, and for the first time today I look into a mirror while I'm fumbling for my toothbrush. A ghost is staring back at me, gaunt, pale, eyes ringed with exhaustion and hangover, dark hair with an evermore visible webbing of white, and I cock my head and examine the bruise on my right cheekbone (how did I get that?) and for a moment it all goes out of focus and I think I'm about to lose consciousness as my vision darkens and my legs crumble under me and I smack into the sink chin first.
Oh the joys of drug abuse.
There's a warm tap-tap-tap on my white t-shirt, and I realize that I opened up a gash on my chin and almost choke on a piece of tooth. Blood drips from my face in the rhythm of a metronome, I don't even bother. I run my tongue through my teeth and realize that one of my lateral incisors is chipped down to a nub. Wonderful. Finally I manage to pull myself standing again, absent-minded and feeling horrific to the very core of my being, I brush my teeth. The taste of toothpaste is repulsive, although not quite as repulsive as the thought of poking around my arm with a needle while my hands are barely able to light a cigarette.
As I spit the foam from my mouth, pink from bleeding gums, something marvelous happens: the drugs kick in. The first lightheaded tingles of the GABA agonists taking hold, taking over really, and things get better so fast that I can't stop myself from grinning a little. Better, yes, so much better. It does little for the pain, but it does a lot for my constant self-pity. Because suddenly it doesn't feel so personal anymore, and I limp back to the fridge to get a beer, which tastes off because of the toothpaste still lingering on my tastebuds.
I realize that I haven't eaten in way too long. I also realize that Cass isn't back but I guess she's doing something romantic. I hope she isn't. I hope she's scoring drugs. There's no space for romance in my life, and by extension, there shouldn't be in anyone elses either. What's denied to me should rightfully be denied to everyone. And while I know this is a childish thing to think, I also know that deep down I function this way and this realization should cause me some sort of discomfort but it doesn't, it just hangs there, suspended in sedatives, and really, who gives a fuck.
I smoke, and drink beer, and ponder what a 10mm round would do to my head if I fired it through the roof of my palate. It's a soothing thought, sort of, to be able to end one's life at a whim, to just say enough and blow my head apart with a high-powered pistol round.
The drip of blood from my chin slows. Obviously I immensely enjoy bleeding.
I pack another bowl, put some music on. Take a good hit. And phone Vic. Misery loves company I guess, but I keep forgetting the part about company not giving a fuck about misery.
Minutes pass, an hour passes. I'm not sure. Of anything. Except that I need a new beer. And that I should turn on the lights. And.... well. I'm not sure.
Everything is hazy, everything is black. The only illumination being the orange glow of my cigarette. And my thoughts are running wild once more, trying to figure out where it all went wrong, where it all went to shit. But there are no answers to be found, none whatsoever, just more questions, and I decide that I need something stronger than beer.
------------------------------------
Familiar faces all around: Vic, Cass, Janine. My spirits are considerably lifted once more, after Cass shot me up with another diazepam/tramadol cocktail. Now I'm sipping a Rusty Nail, music is running in the background and Vic is relating his latest tale of sexual debauchery, which I'm so used to by now that I can just edit it out of my mind and focus on the music. Still, company, not to mention an intravenous injection of potent drugs, feels good.
If Vic wasn't so incredibly exhibitionistic about his exploits, I'd probably think half of them are embellishments deriving from a sick, twisted mind. But as things are I know he's speaking the truth or at least some basic version thereof, and the crescendo of his voice as his narrative concludes annoys me somewhat, but its familiarity is almost soothing.
Sometimes, especially when very stoned, I picture Vic as a character that escaped some utterly depraved sitcom. One with lots of unsimulated sex and drug abuse. Sometimes he just seems so goddamn two-dimensional, like there's some part missing making him a believable human being.
Now, while this could very easily misconstrued as the pot calling the kettle black, as my interests aren't very wide either, in fact they don't extend far (any) behind getting fucked up and reading, but at least I don't go around telling every fucker every excrutiatingly lurid detail (on top of a shitload of hyperbole) of every time I get wasted. It would sound something like this:
“So folks, get this, I was at home, and I felt like shit, as usual. But then I spotted this beautiful fridge, a Miehle, handcrafted in Germany by half a dozen nubile virgins while they sang Bach chorales. Anyway, this fridge, woah, it was absolutely, breathtakingly stunning. So I walked right up to it, and hey, who'd guess, it was easy fuckin' pickings. So I got myself a beer, stripped and gently ran my fingers down it's chilled, graceful neck. I whispered to it, all sweet and breathy, making promises of a better future for both of us. Finally I opened it, got a bit of lube, and drank the whole fucking thing with my asshole! Beer suppository, fuck yeah!”
Okay, maybe not verbatim, but you get the idea.
I finish my drink, and mumble, “We need to get Vic a catchphrase.”
“Glad you could join the conversation,” Vic says, “now, where would we 'get' a catchphrase? And can you please tell me what convoluted thought process lead to that?”
You don't want to know. “It wasn't a dialogue, it was with a lot of goodwill one of your infallibly disgusting stories of sexual conquest.”
“And without a lot of goodwill?”
“Grounds for capital punishment by firing squad.”
“Since when did you become such a prude?”
“Since I let Jesus into me. He wasn't gentle about it either.”
3. Cheap Vodka
It is one of these days again. You know the kind, the really horrible kind, the ones that make you wish you didn't have friends, a raging alcohol problem and some severe unresolved anger issues. Because if even one of these things fell from the equation I wouldn't be sitting in my bloodstained clothes, drinking ouzo straight from the bottle while contemplating if a pair of tweezers or a scalpel is a better tool for digging jagged shards of glass out of my left hand – which I'm also reasonably sure is broken – while having to turn the music to a fucking jetengine worth of noise so I don't hear one of my best friends fucking in my study, which had been somehow converted, seemingly by magic wand and in the blink of an eye into some demonic dyke fuck pad that would give every bible-thumping, homophobic anus-face an instant heart attack. I mean really, did you ever notice how these fucking appaling wastes of what's sometimes called intelligent life, how their faces all look like assholes? And I'm serious here, with the flabby cheeks and the puckered mouth, I think if I had enough to drink and was really in the mood for some good solid buttfucking, well I might just break out the KY and wonder what kind of degenerate puts lipstick on their cornhole. Also, after at least six hours, it's always a bad sign if wounds don't stop bleeding.
This wouldn't be so bad if I still had my stash of dihydrocodeine, fucking thanks Cass, apparently this is some sort of weird aphrodisiac forthose people, so let's count grievances here:
Hand full of glass, check, yup.
No painkillers.
Prolonged bleeding.
Very, very possibly going to jail.
Okay lifelong friendship or not– oh wait someone stabbed me in the fucking foot too.
Yeah.
I hurl the empty ouzu bottle against the wall, limp to my bedroom and get the gun. Holding it feels good, feels right, even though I know I couldn't rack the slide if my life depended on it. I haven't yet dared to pull my foot out of my sneaker and I can feel some of the blood drying and I think it's a good sign, and I'm also glad that it was a box cutter and thus the razorlike blade went only, oh, three quarters of an inch into my actual foot, but hey, it's having a fucking competition with my hand in the good ole bloodloss marathon.
Most of these days I just feel like harmless stuff, maybe breaking someones nose or his legs if my day had been really atrocious, but today, today warranted fucking ethnic cleansing.
I drop the gun on the floor, limp to the freezer and grab the pint of vodka there. I hate the stuff straight but it seems to fit today's theme, the one that slursfuck you to me on a nanosecond basis. Two quick slugs from the bottle remind me that alcohol thins blood and I really shouldn't be drinking, but I am not one to do the sensible thing. Ever.
In the kitchen I juice a lemon while noticing with a mixture of morbid fascination and dread that dark red, veinous blood is seeping from my sneaker. I pour the juice into the cocktail shaker along with some vodka, honey and GBL. Shake, strain, fill up with club soda, drink. Fast. When I'm done and ready to fuck up Cass' evening the way she fucked up mine I accidently stub my food against one of the legs of my kitchen table and howl with pain, impaling through my very being with white hot intensity. After I've finished my drink and chase it with vodka straight from the bottle (blew my last five on a cheap fifth of vodka) I take off my shoes (owww), pooled up blood splattering on my floor, then the rest of my clothes (gonna kill something and nothing's gonna stop us tonight) and when I'm good and naked I press the palm of my hand against the gaping, vaginial wound in my foot, stinging pain running through my being. I've haphazardly wrapped a kitchen towel around my left hand, which does little to stop the bleeding and the wound in my foot will need to be sutured.
So, naked and bloodstained, clutching only the frosty vodka bottle, and lighting a cigarette with my ruined hand I limp toward my study, leaving neat, red footprints on my floor and making wet sucking sounds as I go along, sounds that I hear again when I burst into the room.
--------------------------------------
I'm sitting at my dining table, my foot propped on Cass' lap, blood seeping down her naked thighs. There are some really nasty bruises forming along her ribcage, and suddenly I'm glad I fucking lost it in the way I had. Cass cleansed my wounds with iodine, and was now injecting cocaine into my foot. She had given me an IV shot of tramadol and a real fuckload of gabapentin and it's taken the edge off the pain. In fact I'm quite high. And my body is really rebelling. I've already thrown up once, a stomachful of booze and bile erupting from my mouth and nostrils, and it has left a disgustingly acrid taste in my mouth that I'm trying to wash away with more vodka.
Which, incidentally, just tastes like death. I'm shaking and I think if I hadn't lost so much blood I'd have an erection, which would be the first one in a really long time.
Yes, right, something I should mention: before eloping to Portugal Cass was studying medicine. So she knows what she's doing. Hopefully. Now she's fitting a blue thread through something that looks like a small fishing hook and I really hope that the cocaine shot anesthesized my foot enough so I don't feel it going into my flesh. And I don't, just a weird sort of pressure where she's sewing me shut. It takes four sutures to close the wound. Afterwards she applies some gauze and then thickly bandages my foot. Then: my hand, which is shaking uncontrollably and is discolored from both bruises and the iodine bath. She's about to inject the rest of the cocaine into my wounds but I tell her to just mainline it home and pull the glass out without it. She shrugs and does what I ask and-
Liftoff. Now the tramadol shot felt good, but this is a different world entirely. An absolute, all-powerful euphoria envelops me, and for a moment I picture myself being wrapped into the beautiful gossamer wings of a guardian angel, soft blond hair tickling my neck. But the picture quickly fades when Cass yanks a half-inch shard of glass out of my palm. She tells me to move my fingers, and I do, and after checking if my sinews and nerves are okay (more or less) she starts to closes the wounds expertly that would not mend on their own. This hurts. Shards of pain pierce through my speedball high like obsidian chips hurled at buckshot speed.
------------------------------------
I should probably elaborate on what happened. Age old story really: some assholes made some insulting remarks to Cass, and hey, an instant later the first one was coughing up parts of his nose, but unfortunately he had quite a few friends with him so I found myself in a full-scale fight and sadly totally outnumbered. Someone hit Cass with a pool cue which then made me pull my collapsible baton and bash the nearest one over the head. Vibrations sang to my hand, telling me that it was a very good hit indeed, and with a sense of accomplishment I backhanded the next one across the jaw.
Someone hit me then and I retaliated by smashing my whiskey tumbler into his leering idiot face. Hence the hand full of glass. And then it would have gotten even uglier, as the guy whose head I split open, now prone, stabbed me in the foot. I started stomping the everliving piss out of him, and I probably would have killed him if the bartender had not been so nice to pull a shotgun from under the bar and break up the fight. And before I knew what exactly had transpired I was speeding home at nearly twohundred kilometers an hour.
„What exactly did those assholes say to you anyway?“
„They called me a dyke cunt.“
„That was quite a nice punch.“
„Thanks. And I'm sorry I got you into that mess. I didn't even see that you were hurt so bad or I woulda patched you up right away. Why didn't you say anything?“
„The pain only started filtering through the adrenaline later on.“
„Yeah, I know that feeling. Now, as your doctor I hereby order you to take it easy for the next days. You really lost a lot of blood.“
She sweeps her hand around the room, which looks like an abbatoir or a murder scene.
„You took all my dihydrocodeine.“
„Don't worry. I got enough of these-“ she picks up another tramadol ampule and shakes it, „-to get you easily through the worst. And if it's not enough I'll go score something really potent. We just might have to load you up on antibiotics, because if any of your wounds get infected, it'll be hell to pay. Now lay off the booze, take some downers and go to bed. Drink a lot of water, take some supplements. You'll also need to rest in order to recuperate. Here,“ she puts two ampules down on the table, „these'll do for now. I'll change the bandages tomorrow. Now go the fuck to bed. I'm gonna get my pussy vigorously-“
„You shut the fuck up.“ I hiss. No amounts of drugs will ever appease this feeling I get when I hear this, the feeling of inadequacy, of knowing deep down inside that I will never be loved. It is enough to make the bile rise in my throat, quite literally, and I spew a mouthful of bile and vodka onto the floor, the yellow liquid mingling with the blood.
Cass, still stark naked and her thighs encrusted with my blood goes to leave and I get to admire the perfect symmetry of her ass for a brief moment, but it's not with any sort of lust or craving (at this point I am a few thousand lightyears past that) but with a detached wonder at the beauty of things I will never have. Like catching a brief glimpse of some rare and nearly extinct animal. I put some Acid Bath on the turntable.
I get some of the weed Vic left here and throughly mix it with tobacco and some oily hashish, then throw a few ice cubes into the bong and pack myself a decent bowl. I hit it with a vengeance and all the shit in my bloodstream makes the smoke feel velvety and soft down my tarred throat. I finish off the bowl, get myself a bottle of beer and 30mgs of zolpidem from the pill stash, light a smoke and contemplatively down it after chasing the pills with a mouthful. The icy hop juice is gone quick and I go to bed where I smoke another bowl and wait for the pills to kick in.
---------------------------------
When I wake up monochrome daylight is filtering through the drapes and my foot is throbbing with an angry insistance. I drink the rest of the beer next to my bed, drag my carcass out of bed and with shaking hands try to get dressed but instead have to race in the general direction of the toilet only to throw up about three feet away from the fucking thing. When the shaking subsides a bit and the heaving has stopped I get a fresh beer from my fridge and light my first cigarette of the day. After three drags I look at my hands and notice that there's no chance in hell I can hit a vein with them. So I wake up Cass. And by extension, Janine.
We sit at my dining table. I am in such a sorry state it defies description. The throbbing in my foot has turned to jagged pain. The beer hasn't taken the edge off and I'm now downing the second one posthaste. Cass has drawn up an ampule of tramadol (100mgs) and diazepam (10mgs) and is now slipping the needle home while Janine keeps my arm steady, which takes both her small, manicured hands. Her black-lacquered fingernails push into my scarred, white flesh and for a moment I feel a pang of regret for not being the one fucking her. But then the solution is introduced into my bloodstream and it melts away, fast, fast, fast. My stomach still feels scoured though.
Janine, busy little bee that she is, has already removed most of the blood and bile. I kind of liked the look, myself, but the olfactory notes were perchance a wee bit rustic.
„Hey?“ Cass says, „thanks for backing me up.“
„Always. God, my stomach is fucking killing me.“
„Tried smoking a bowl?“
„Good idea. Hey“ - I call out to Janine - „thanks for cleaning up my mess.“
„She likes cleaning, that one. Especially with her tongue.“ Cass says smiling.
„Swear to god Cass any more sexual innuendo and I'm drugging your next drink and selling you to a pimp.“
„You don't know any pimps. Also, that was way past innuendo.“
„Fuck you.“
And I start packing a bowl while Cass takes a Camel from my pack and lights it.
„Jesus Christ, no wonder you wheeze like you're about a hundred after a few flights of stairs. How many of these you smoke?“
I thought for a moment. „One and a half, two packs a day I guess.“ I light up the bowl and let loose. Inhale/hold/exhale. Pleasant headrush. As familiar as the inside of my mouth. THC was the second intoxicant I discovered after alcohol. But it was the first time I ate shrooms that sealed my fate. Then and there, on that night almost nine years ago, my curiosity for drugs started which all too quickly turned into an obsession. And on top of being obsessed with drugs they're also addictive. I would have probably become a top-notch pharmacologist had fate dealt me a just slightly different hand, earning untold sums – billions upon billions - for some giant pharma conglomerate who have about the same respect for human life as John Wayne Gayce.
My head lolls and I look sideways at Cass and still feel a bit of enmity because I'm so fucked up – in the bad sense, not the good sense – but mostly I'm just grateful that she's a part of my life again. I didn't realize how much I missed her until I saw her again. But, the lady professionally cleaned my wounds, stitched and shot me up and all of that barehanded, so fuck it. My rage is as easily subdued as it is aroused usually. She takes another drag on my Camel.
„Why without filter anyway?“
„Filter smokes just don't taste like smokes to me. I don't know really. I reckon I'm fucking up my health in lightspeed anyway, so that's just really, really secondary. Like starting to smoke American Spirit or some equally trichromosomal behavior.“
„Is that even a word?“
„What, behavior?“
„No, asshole, trichromosomal.“
„Fuck knows, I was first gonna say retarded, then spastic, then congenital... and then well it just popped into my head. Has a nicer ring to it than those other three, wouldn't you say?“ We're both pissing ourselves at this point. I hand her the bong, she me what's left of the cig. Before lighting up she asks,
„So we all good?“
„Course. We always are. Even though there's the persistent eventuality I'll sell you into sex slavery.“
“Haw haw. You're an asshole.”
Just to make a point I should heavily lace her next drink with everything my arsenal of downers, tranquilizers and soporifics. Let's see; a nice margarita, laced with zolpidem, selegiline and lorazepam, the salt rim replaced with crystalline GHB should do the trick. The selegiline is a selective MAO inhibitor, that also prevents the breaking down of dopamine in the brain, amplifying the GHB tenfold. The thought made me giggle, but it would be a shameful waste of perfectly good drugs. I guess I should just consume it.
Cass eventually fucks off with Janine to buy groceries, which leaves me with nothing much to do but sit on my balcony, take bong hits and drink margaritas laced with GHB per my original plan. I omit the benzos though, as there is something like too much of a good thing. Two old-fashioned glasses downed, both containing three grams of the potassium salt of gamma-hydroxybutyrate, a shitload of tequila and Cointreau, and I feel delightful, especially on top of the other shit in my bloodstream. Everything moves in slow motion, everything is good, I am home. I sit back and let the breeze wash over me, some weirdly potent chemical synergy working my brain over, telling me that things are good, life is good, we are all okay. I know it's as far from the truth as one can get but I don't take drugs to be reminded of how dire and pointless life really is, now do I?
--------------------------------
I jerk awake and it's dusk. The high is completely gone and I'm left once more where I started up: sore, cold, miserable, nauseous, shaking but above all craving. I heave over the balcony and stumble back inside, each step making me curse and turning my mood blacker and blacker, until I reach the fridge and can whip up another quick cocktail (a screwdriver) and lace it with GHB, swallow a few zolpidem to take the edge off as my hands, once more, are shaking, vibrating really. A combination of withdrawal and dozing off outside in nothing but boxer shorts and a t-shirt, fuck I'm cold. Pain, and just enough to be really bothersome, damn nigh intolerable. I don't consider myself to be particularly tough, but I can take pain about as good as the next man. By which I mean, I can stomach a lot less of the shit than I'd like to. I'd love to be all stoic and manly and shit, but it hurts, so fuck all that and bring on the analgesia. I down the drink in one pull, light a cigarette, pour another and repeat. The acid in the orange juice and the sharp taste of ethanol make my mouth water, my saliva turning sour, a sure sign that my stomach wants to purge itself of the its newest poisonous contents but I'm far too experienced, not to mention too wounded, to let that happen. Some buttermilk and a bong hit settle my stomach back down, and for the first time today I look into a mirror while I'm fumbling for my toothbrush. A ghost is staring back at me, gaunt, pale, eyes ringed with exhaustion and hangover, dark hair with an evermore visible webbing of white, and I cock my head and examine the bruise on my right cheekbone (how did I get that?) and for a moment it all goes out of focus and I think I'm about to lose consciousness as my vision darkens and my legs crumble under me and I smack into the sink chin first.
Oh the joys of drug abuse.
There's a warm tap-tap-tap on my white t-shirt, and I realize that I opened up a gash on my chin and almost choke on a piece of tooth. Blood drips from my face in the rhythm of a metronome, I don't even bother. I run my tongue through my teeth and realize that one of my lateral incisors is chipped down to a nub. Wonderful. Finally I manage to pull myself standing again, absent-minded and feeling horrific to the very core of my being, I brush my teeth. The taste of toothpaste is repulsive, although not quite as repulsive as the thought of poking around my arm with a needle while my hands are barely able to light a cigarette.
As I spit the foam from my mouth, pink from bleeding gums, something marvelous happens: the drugs kick in. The first lightheaded tingles of the GABA agonists taking hold, taking over really, and things get better so fast that I can't stop myself from grinning a little. Better, yes, so much better. It does little for the pain, but it does a lot for my constant self-pity. Because suddenly it doesn't feel so personal anymore, and I limp back to the fridge to get a beer, which tastes off because of the toothpaste still lingering on my tastebuds.
I realize that I haven't eaten in way too long. I also realize that Cass isn't back but I guess she's doing something romantic. I hope she isn't. I hope she's scoring drugs. There's no space for romance in my life, and by extension, there shouldn't be in anyone elses either. What's denied to me should rightfully be denied to everyone. And while I know this is a childish thing to think, I also know that deep down I function this way and this realization should cause me some sort of discomfort but it doesn't, it just hangs there, suspended in sedatives, and really, who gives a fuck.
I smoke, and drink beer, and ponder what a 10mm round would do to my head if I fired it through the roof of my palate. It's a soothing thought, sort of, to be able to end one's life at a whim, to just say enough and blow my head apart with a high-powered pistol round.
The drip of blood from my chin slows. Obviously I immensely enjoy bleeding.
I pack another bowl, put some music on. Take a good hit. And phone Vic. Misery loves company I guess, but I keep forgetting the part about company not giving a fuck about misery.
Minutes pass, an hour passes. I'm not sure. Of anything. Except that I need a new beer. And that I should turn on the lights. And.... well. I'm not sure.
Everything is hazy, everything is black. The only illumination being the orange glow of my cigarette. And my thoughts are running wild once more, trying to figure out where it all went wrong, where it all went to shit. But there are no answers to be found, none whatsoever, just more questions, and I decide that I need something stronger than beer.
------------------------------------
Familiar faces all around: Vic, Cass, Janine. My spirits are considerably lifted once more, after Cass shot me up with another diazepam/tramadol cocktail. Now I'm sipping a Rusty Nail, music is running in the background and Vic is relating his latest tale of sexual debauchery, which I'm so used to by now that I can just edit it out of my mind and focus on the music. Still, company, not to mention an intravenous injection of potent drugs, feels good.
If Vic wasn't so incredibly exhibitionistic about his exploits, I'd probably think half of them are embellishments deriving from a sick, twisted mind. But as things are I know he's speaking the truth or at least some basic version thereof, and the crescendo of his voice as his narrative concludes annoys me somewhat, but its familiarity is almost soothing.
Sometimes, especially when very stoned, I picture Vic as a character that escaped some utterly depraved sitcom. One with lots of unsimulated sex and drug abuse. Sometimes he just seems so goddamn two-dimensional, like there's some part missing making him a believable human being.
Now, while this could very easily misconstrued as the pot calling the kettle black, as my interests aren't very wide either, in fact they don't extend far (any) behind getting fucked up and reading, but at least I don't go around telling every fucker every excrutiatingly lurid detail (on top of a shitload of hyperbole) of every time I get wasted. It would sound something like this:
“So folks, get this, I was at home, and I felt like shit, as usual. But then I spotted this beautiful fridge, a Miehle, handcrafted in Germany by half a dozen nubile virgins while they sang Bach chorales. Anyway, this fridge, woah, it was absolutely, breathtakingly stunning. So I walked right up to it, and hey, who'd guess, it was easy fuckin' pickings. So I got myself a beer, stripped and gently ran my fingers down it's chilled, graceful neck. I whispered to it, all sweet and breathy, making promises of a better future for both of us. Finally I opened it, got a bit of lube, and drank the whole fucking thing with my asshole! Beer suppository, fuck yeah!”
Okay, maybe not verbatim, but you get the idea.
I finish my drink, and mumble, “We need to get Vic a catchphrase.”
“Glad you could join the conversation,” Vic says, “now, where would we 'get' a catchphrase? And can you please tell me what convoluted thought process lead to that?”
You don't want to know. “It wasn't a dialogue, it was with a lot of goodwill one of your infallibly disgusting stories of sexual conquest.”
“And without a lot of goodwill?”
“Grounds for capital punishment by firing squad.”
“Since when did you become such a prude?”
“Since I let Jesus into me. He wasn't gentle about it either.”
