Authors: Joseph Mattson

The Speed Chronicles (25 page)

BOOK: The Speed Chronicles

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The next day the withdrawal afflicted her only in throbbing nauseating wavelets, and the day after that she was perfect. Now she knew how to manage crystal: once a week would be best. For the other times there were Concentraxes, powder-trains of cocaine snuffed up through twenty-peso bills, crack rocks, tequila, beer, whiskey, and, of course,
the green angel
. The trick was to parcel out these various vitamins and staples, so that no single one could bite too deep. When all else failed, and certainly when anything succeeded, there remained orgasm itself.

Thanks to this superbly practical insight, Dolores soon found herself quite rich in pleasures and hours. All day she rested or played with herself; all night, so it seemed, she expressed her womanhood by taking in the penises of this world, whose friends, clients, and encounters all became stacked up upon each other. Sometimes she wondered whether this was what she had made all her prior sacrifices for, but the sensations of the Femerol still thrilled her sometimes in her spectacular nipples,
the green angel
was good to her, and many of her sexual encounters gave her great joy. She said goodbye to this man and that; sometimes she wished to find a woman to love and live with forever as she should have done with Rosa, but how could she expect to see anyone like Rosa again? In a lesbian bar in Tijuana the women had been far from kind to her, and in Xalapa there might be no such place; not even Ana MarÃa had known of one. So happily Dolores let herself be carried down the weeks and months. Surely there would come another purpose, or at least a new adventure. Descending the stairs to greet her neighbor Adelina, she smiled at the world, smoothed her hair, straightened her dress, and hurried off to buy just a little more crystal. She was already itching to get her sweet breasts sucked.

WILLIAM T
.
VOLLMANN
is the author of twenty books, including
Europe Central
, winner of the National Book Award;
Riding Toward Everywhere
, an examination of the train-hopping hobo lifestyle; and
Imperial
, a panoramic look at one of the poorest areas in America. He has also won the Whiting Writers' Award, the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His journalism and fiction have been published in the
New Yorker, Esquire, Spin
, and
Granta
. Vollmann lives in Sacramento, California.

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