Heroin Chronicles (5 page)

Eliza settled onto the rim of the tub, her legs straight, locked against the door. The syringe in her mouth held in place by lip and teeth, she wrapped her hand tight around her upper arm, pumping her fist, searching for a welcome spot in the crook of her arm. She stuck the needle in, a little blood came swirling out, the edge got fuzzy. But it didn't disappear. She got up from her perch and began to clean up: syringe flushed with water and back in the cup with their toothbrushes, he would know, but she would at least make an effort.

Eliza caught her reflection in the mirror and held her own gaze. Her eyes maintained a permanent shade of fading pink, sharp high cheekbones held up her taut, hollow, brown skin. Her face littered with black spots. Souvenirs from scratching and picking, God knows what else.

“I don't look so bad. Nothing makeup can't hide.” The mistake of her words hit her before she had time to find solace in her own sophism. She pulled back her long, black, thick hair—still strong. She let it fall down her back. Something to flick and play with, she thought, something for the johns to hold onto. She smiled, and too many black spaces where once there were teeth smiled back. “Fuck, I'm too young.” She gripped the side of the sink, then let go, walking carelessly out of the bathroom.

His eyes glazed with sleep, yet questioning, met her. His gaze traveled the distance between where he sat at the edge of the bed, to the dribble of blood rolling down her arm. “What about me? Where's my fucking breakfast? I'd like to wake up, roll over, and get high too.”

“Fuck you, Eli.”

Eliza walked to the faux kitchen—a counter, a sink, a hot plate—and began to wash dishes; an assortment of kept takeout food containers, a seemingly endless supply of spoons, and a pot. Their apartment was the first in a row of the shiniest-little-shit-holes along Fifth Avenue in Ybor City, Tampa Bay. Eli's vocation of dishwasher had kept them in deluxe digs for a while, before he managed to get fired from almost every restaurant on the ten-mile stretch of the Seventh Avenue strip. Now they worked together selling themselves, usually Eliza's self, whatever it took to maintain their habits and the lifestyle.

“Roll over and get high is all you ever do, you fuck,” Eliza mumbled.

“What!”

“I didn't say anything.”

Eli stumbled around, checking the empty dope bags and gum wrappers that littered the apartment floor, wanting a miracle of found glory.

Eliza finished up in the kitchen. She put on her self-styled lime-green and fluorescent-pink floral-print mini-muumuu, slipped on her white platform flip-flops, and headed for the door. “I'll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Brett's.”

Brett was their sixty-plus-year-old neighbor. He was rumored to be a plumber, but they had never seen him head out to a job in the two years they had known him or the three they had lived on shiny-shit-hole row. Five feet and scarcely an inch more, Brett was just tall enough to not be a midget. His face, and his disposition, gave you the sense that someone had started punching him when he was three, and just kept on hitting. Brett was always good for pills after a blowjob or a quick fuck. And this morning he was the only hope for her and bright-eyed Eli making it through the day's obligations. Obligations that wouldn't be met without chemical motivation, obligations necessary to get funding for things owed, and things hoped for, from Moses, their drug dealer—referred to as PRDD (Puerto Rican Drug Dealer) or the Biblical Bringer, depending on the day and their level of admiration for what he had to offer. Right now, all they had was her pussy, her mouth, and a pill-popping plumber to ensure they wouldn't be shivering on a street corner.

Eliza muttered as she walked to Brett's. “It will be quick. It always is.” When she arrived she made small talk filled with innuendo: “Haven't had my morning pounding. Eli's wet as a noodle, scouring the place for something.”

“Uhuh.”

“God knows what he figures he'll find. All I can think about is how I woke up with a need to be filled that's still as empty as the bags he keeps checking through.”

“Uhuh.”

She stopped chattering long enough to grab them both beers from the fridge. She sat on Brett's lap, rubbing his cock through his pants, her mouth pressed to his ear. “You willing to help my greedy little cunt?”

“You're too much.” A half-cocked grin on his face, Brett pulled her close and ran his tongue across her lips, parted them with it, and began to kiss her. He was gentle, in that way that lonely discarded men always are.

Eliza unzipped his pants. Brett sucked in, his breath caught up by his need to fuck, to believe that she wanted him. She spat on her hand, lifted her dress, and stuck her lubricated fingers into her pussy. His hands followed hers. Fingers shoving into her well-trained holes. She moaned, and told him how badly she needed him to fuck her. He stood up and she laid on the dingy, cracked linoleum floor. She could feel the dirt rubbing into her skin. Her body called him down, no more need for words as she watched him remove his pants. Brett was short and the engagement would be shorter, but he was hung; God's obscene joke to make a man equipped but inadequate. The initial entry pleased her, made her gasp even, but it was sure to leave her wanting more. Two minutes tops. He got up and went to the bathroom. He always had to take a shit after sex. She didn't try or care to analyze it. The closing of the door was like a starter's pistol. She moved quickly, making her way back to his room.

His shelves didn't contain knickknacks, or clothes, or books, just rows and rows of pill bottles with various names of patients and doctors. It was a fucking pharmacy, a pill junkie's dream, an endless row of tiny tubs in varying states. She filled the deep pockets of her muumuu with Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet, Adderall, random barbiturates, and uppers whose names she'd never remember. She left while Brett was still launching shit rockets into the toilet.

As she walked to the 7-Eleven a block away, Eliza wondered if Brett knew that she was ripping him off. Maybe he went to the bathroom so she wouldn't have to beg, knowing his own fiendish propensities wouldn't allow him to simply give her the pills. It was the sort of silly romantic notion she always tried to believe—soft, false truths.

The guy behind the counter was the little brother of a friend from high school. A remainder from when she was headed toward success, he still reacted to her as if she were the key to hallway royalty. She wondered, did he want to fuck her or did he just feel a need to be polite, respecting what she used to be? He let her use the bathroom, he pretended not to notice when she was stealing, he generally gave her the run of the place.

“Tommy. How's your sister doing?” She never really stopped her forward motion to the bathroom.

Eliza filled her cupped hands with water and slurped it into her mouth. She pushed Vicodin and Oxycontin in between her clenched lips. She sat on the toilet and removed the cache of drugs from her pockets, picked out Oxys, Vicodins, Percocets, wrapped them up and tucked her package between the lips of her snatch. She patted the bulge between her legs. “Rainy-day stash.” She flushed the toilet, a silly pretense, a game of making believe the store clerk didn't know.

She walked back to the apartment, the edge gone, her world a blurry sort of perfection. Occasionally patting her twat as she went, making sure her stash was still in place.

“Hey, baby, I got some pills: Vikes, Percocet, various randoms.”

“You didn't get no Oxy?”

“No, the bottle was empty.”

“Maybe he hid them when he heard your ass at the door. Did you come this time before your lover hopped off?”

“Fuck you.”

Eliza emptied the contents of her pockets onto the coffee table, and grabbed her outfit for the day: denim miniskirt, white vintage Victorian top with cutoff sleeves and intricate folds running from the shoulders down the breast. She headed for the bathroom and counted five before doing anything. Eli busted in. She looked up from the water running into the showerless tub.

“What?”

He rolled his eyes. “Hand me my kit.”

Eliza pulled the suburban-douche-bag leather kit, a junkie status symbol, out of the medicine cabinet and handed it to him. She closed the door, retrieved the package from her panties. She separated out the Vikes, Percocet, Adderall, set them on the flat edge of the sink, splashed water in the tub to feign activity, sat for a moment waiting for him to enter again. Feeling safe now, she began refilling her hollowed-out tampon with the booty of Oxycontin, and wedged it into its space at the back of the box. The other pills went into her skirt pocket. When she exited the bathroom, her eyes were surprised by the two lonely Vicodin waiting for her on the coffee table. She looked from the pills to Eli.

“Baby, you know you don't need as much as me to get high. Don't worry, I didn't do them all, I put some away for us.”

“Uhuh.” This motherfucker, she thought, he'll never be high enough, shoot your life into his arm and he'll still be searching for the next. She stepped in front of the floor-length mirror next to their bed. Eli went into the bathroom. She visualized him checking the medicine cabinet, hoping she'd covered her trail. Her eyes caught the clock: it had somehow become twelve thirty and they had to be in Lutz by two. They'd be late for the shoot.

She grabbed the phone. The lady who answered introduced herself as Ann-Marie. “Hi, this is Eliza, your two o'clock. We're running a little late.”

“If you can't make it by three, forget shooting today.”

“No worries, we'll definitely be there before three.”

Eliza hung up the phone and watched the not so freshly washed Eli as he pulled on her old tattered Diesel jeans, the denim tight around his stick-thin legs, which seemed to take up most of his six-two frame, and a black cowboy shirt meant for a child, the sleeves too short. He was checking himself out, mussing his hair to a tumbled perfection, fashion choices being assessed from the tips of his pointy black shoes to the last well-managed strand of hair. He was handsome. Piercing blue eyes jumped out from the paleness of his skin at a stark juxtaposition to his jet-black hair, eyebrowless face, and perfect, full, pouty, fuck-and-suck lips. She didn't dare to say it, didn't want to give him the satisfaction of hearing it.

“Hurry up.”

He grabbed her by the waist, stood her in front of him, pulling her hair back and kissing her neck. “Damn, we look good together baby.” He lifted her short denim skirt, simultaneously pulling the fabric of her panties into the crack of her ass. He turned her around to look at the perfect roundness gripped in his hands. The curve of her back met the meaty suppleness of it. He lifted and held it, squeezing. She stood on the tips of her baby blue Chucks. He could feel his cock getting hard and he passed his fingers along the wetness of her cunt. She shivered just a little.

“Baby, you want me to fuck you?”

She pulled away. “We'll be late.”

“Okay.” He smacked her ass as she walked away from him.

Eliza grabbed her purse and the car keys off the nightstand. She stopped at the door, fanned a little air into her panties, and walked out. All the pills hit her as the sunshine seeped into her skin. She pulled her hair up into a loose chignon mimic of a bun with a black twisty-tie, before getting into the white mini–station wagon and turning the air-conditioning on full blast to fight the Florida heat. She watched the apartment door Eli had just rushed back through to get the directions their connection had given them. He waved the paper around as he came out.

Eli threw himself into the driver's seat.

“You okay to drive?” she asked.

She knew she wasn't. The pills were in control. She handed Eli the keys. They headed up Seventh toward Martin Luther King Boulevard, took that to the toll road, and got on. The car was gliding down the expressway when there was a loud boom. They looked around for a moment before realizing it was the sound of them hitting the railing along the side of the highway. Eliza snapped out of her stupor as the car screeched and scraped along the rail. Eli, his foot pushing the brake to floor, was trying to pull away and regain control. The car came to an abrupt stop. He looked over at her, his eyes stretched wide with fear and surprise.

“What the fuck! I thought you were okay to drive!”

“I am. I sorta fell asleep.” He smirked, and they both started to laugh.

The little white, and now steel-gray, station wagon was banged up good. The driver's-side door wouldn't open. Eliza got out and took a look. Eli peered inquisitively at her through the windshield before sliding across the seat and getting out of the car, the air-conditioning blasting, the radio blaring, the engine still running. They stood stupefied glancing back and forth between the car and each other, shook their heads, and shrugged before walking around to get back in. Eli slid behind the wheel. Eliza got in after him, slammed the door, and looked at the time on the dashboard clock.

“Come on. Let's get out of here. It's already fucking three thirty. We can't miss this.”

Eli smiled, revved the engine, and absentmindedly tweaked the key in the ignition making the car squeal. Knowing that neither of them would pass even the suggestion of a sobriety test, they took off, looking back to make sure no one had been called to check on their welfare. Forty minutes later they were pulling up at a ranch-style house with an immaculate yard, the peek of a screened-in pool enclosure beyond the rooftop.

“You sure this is it?” asked Eli.

“I'm as sure as your bad-sorta-fell-asleep driving.”

They both laughed, high, and a little nervous, as they approached the door. Eliza rang the bell and they both stood back toward the edge of the stoop. She held her hands together in front of her like a schoolgirl. Eli had one arm around her shoulder, the other behind his back. They waited.