Authors: Elias Anderson
Cherry elbowed Jim in the side, knocking him from his
reverie. Frog was staring at him.
“So,” Jim said. “You got anything good?”
Frog nodded slowly and the deal began...they talked price
and quantities and how it was to be split and bagged and Jim had handed the
money over and Frog was filling bags when the phone rang.
Frog stopped for a moment, staring down at the floor.
“That should have been unplugged,” he said.
It rang again, Frog was still just sitting there.
It rang a third time, and Jim asked Frog if he wanted to get
that.
“I unplugged it,” Frog said. He fixed his cold insect eyes
on Jim. “Did you plug my phone in?”
“What? No?”
“I’m not fucking around, Jim. Did you plug my phone back
in?”
“I’ve been right here at the table with you since I got
here,” Jim said. Frog seemed to contemplate this for a moment and before he
could move to the next assumption, Jim cut him off.
“She has been, too,” Jim said, just as Frog’s eyes rolled
over Cherry. They lingered on her a little too long, both for her and for Jim.
Frog shrugged and went back to loading the bags when the
phone started ringing again. Frog leapt up and strode across the room to where
the phone was plugged into the wall and pulled it out.
“It’s the Brain Police,” Frog said.
“Pardon?” Jim asked, and regretted it. Wasn’t it always best
to just ignore things like that?
“The Brain Police like Zappa said here come the Brain
Police, and that record came out what? Thirty years ago? If they were around
then, think of where they are now! They probably have their own fucking Bureau
of Investigations. They got, they, every time you pick up a pay phone, Jim?
That’s on tape. You think the traffic cameras are a new thing? No way, no
fucking way! It’s just now they’re getting bold, man, they got the federal
grant and your no-knock warrant and your fucking Patriot Act, so now we got
wires in all the payphones, dig? They got...you ever been to the mall man? You
know those trees they have inside the mall? Just planted there, right in the
middle of the fucking floor like we’re not supposed to notice that?”
“I think those are for decoration, dude,” Jim said.
“Deco-what? No, man, see, they’re in your head man. They got
in your
fucking
head. It’s not decoration, man, it’s, it’s not...it’s
functional, right? Am I the only one here that’s ever heard of fiber fucking
optics, asshole? They can put a camera in a hole the diameter of a fucking
pencil, man, and I don’t mean those big novelty pencils you used to pick your
ass with in the third fucking grade, but a regular pencil. Number fucking two.
They got audio and visual, man. Even inside the pigeons, I think the tan ones
for sure but maybe all of them, hard wired bionic and
every
square
foot
of public property is monitored!” He stood and with one fluid motion picked a
half empty bottle of whiskey off the table and heaved it at the television. The
bottle didn’t break but the screen shattered and the tube inside exploded,
sending out a thick, acrid smoke.
Cherry bit back a scream and dug her hand into Jim’s
forearm.
“You wanna pull the batteries out of that there smoke
detector, Jim?” Frog asked. Jim did as he was asked and Frog continued.
“And that TV, man, they watch you through the TV. Anywhere
there are people, they got eyes and ears, brother. I don’t mean like out in the
fucking desert or whatever, but any place populated, dig? Anywhere people
congregate
.
Where they
assemble
. Where they spit the fucking truth into the
hurricane deaf ears at the top of the fucking ladder, and the Gray Men, they
sit back and--”
“Brain Police,” Jim said. Cherry pinched his arm again, but
it was too late to keep his mouth shut.
“What?” Frog asked.
“The Brain Police, man. You said all this was run by the
Brain Police.”
“And...?”
“And then you said the Gray Men. Who are the fucking Gray
Men?”
“Gray Men? I didn’t say--Cherry, did I--”
“Gray Men,” Cherry said, and took the rest of their product
from Frog.
Frog smiled, laughed to himself. “Who the fuck are the Gray
Men? That doesn’t even make any sense.” Frog took out a knife, the same one
he’d pulled on Cherry in fact, and dipped the tip into his little mountain of
crank. He snorted it, shook his head, rubbed residue on his gums.
“You wanna lock that door on the way out?” Frog asked,
re-counting the money they’d given him.
“Sure thing, man.” Jim said. “Get some sleep, huh?”
“Yeah, yeah I should.”
They locked the door on the way out. Cherry and Jim
exchanged a look.
“I think he’s getting better,” Cherry admitted.
“Yeah, me too. That kick in rehab really helped him.”
By the time they returned to Nik’s with the fresh batch of
crank things had predictably wound down. Jim and Cherry were up though, still
way way up, as they had sampled the goods on the drive. Jim had hesitated at
first. He had already been up for a solid twenty-four hours and was feeling
drained. This was the turning point. He could either go home, pop a couple
downers and watch TV for an hour or so and then crash, or he could take what
was sitting so welcoming so sublime in the little spoon of Cherry’s pinkie
fingernail and turn a one-dayer, which he could do standing on his head, into a
two or three or four day marathon. That was how it worked with Jim.
Part of him just wanted to take his stash home with him and
curl up under some blankets, maybe take Cherry with him...they could sleep for
a good twelve hours or so, get up, shower, go out to breakfast, and then still
have their newly purchased gack to look forward to.
He was so fucking beat, though. It was a long drive from
Frog’s back to Tattoo Nik’s, and he wasn’t one hundred percent confident with
his ability to remain sharp and focused until he got there to drop off everyone
else’s shit.
“Let’s do this,” Cherry said, as if reading his mind. “Let’s
just do a little bump, enough to get us back to Nik’s, we can hang for a while,
then get Soup to drop us at my house, and we can crash.”
“Perfect,” Jim said. This time when the little black-painted
nail appeared under his nose he didn’t hesitate. Cherry did herself up and
talked as he drove. He could listen to her talk for days...had in the past,
literally. They’d once just the two of them scored and locked themselves in her
apartment and just spun for three and a half days, never leaving that one room,
always talking, talking, talking. She knew more about Jim than anyone else,
even Two Step, with whom Jim had been best friends with since they had been
eight or nine. He’d known Cherry barely over a year, and already felt as if
he’d spent his entire life with her.
They would often crash together. It was just nice to have
someone there when you woke up, someone who knew what you meant when you said
you had the hot-eyes, or that your jaw was thumping. Someone who had been to
war with you and come out the other side. They hadn’t had sex yet, hadn’t even
kissed, but after tonight Jim finally went over the hump of wondering if it
would ever happen to knowing it was inevitable, now just a question of when,
instead of a question of if.
Maybe even tonight, if he played it right. If he could just
cut himself loose from the rest of them and stick to Cherry’s plan. Even if
they hung out for another hour by the time they got back to her house they would
still be far too amped to sleep, and while he envisioned making love to Cherry,
sober, the thought of a long, hard speed-fuck was not without its allure.
So they knocked on the door and greeted Tattoo Nik loudly
when he finally opened it. The energy they exuded was contagious, and they
started handing out the bags of it when they walked into the living room,
giving everyone what they’d bought and paid for. Two Step switched the music,
which had been a mellow kind of acid-jazz, over to some old school Black
Sabbath and Soup picked the mirror up off the floor and tapped out a good sized
bump and passed it around and when it got back to Jim he and Cherry exchanged a
look and a smile that said, maybe just one more, and they fixed again, once
more admiring the genius of Tattoo Nik’s new ink, passing the digital camera
back and forth to see the whole effect all over again, the whole room draining
into his arm.
“This be the high-speed chicken feed, man,” Two Step said.
“Who’d you get this from?”
And they told the story of Frog and how though he was still
out there he at least didn’t pull a knife on anyone and when Two Step asked why
they went to him first they recounted what had happened to Sammy, Jim trying
hard to convey what he’d felt, the fucking sorrow he’d felt, upon seeing Sammy
come crawling out from under the trailer like a fucking bug from under a rock,
covered in dirt from head to toe and babbling about permits and while the
others nodded their heads and agreed and ground their teeth same as him,
taptaptapped
their feet fast like him, he got the feeling no one besides Cherry really
understood what he was trying to say.
The hands on the clock spun like a top. If they could have
looked outside the passage of night into day into night and back toward day
again would have appeared as a few pulses from a strobe light. No one left. At
around five o’clock PM on the second day Tattoo Nik and Soup started smoking
it, just a little, mostly everything still went up the nose. Once you fired up
though it was hard to go back, because you knew how much higher you could be if
you just smoked it and you felt like you were wasting your gack but at the same
time there was a dread pall around the very idea of smoking it, of taking that
little hand-torch to the glass. Two Step, Jim, and Cherry passed the glass up
and just kept hitting the little bumps off the mirror. At one point back he
couldn’t remember when Jim had heard both Nik and Soup say no way, man, I’ll
never smoke the shit. Smoking it is for total fiends. This? This here isn’t a
habit. This is just blowing off steam.
So if they could get bored putting it in their nose, who was
to say they wouldn’t get bored smoking it? And what was left after that?
Nothing, except for shooting it. They’d all known people who
ended up that way, and needle just sucked the life force right out of them,
used them up, left them dead or so brain fried they’d be better off OD’ing.
“Didn’t we say we were going to be leaving soon?” Jim asked.
“Hmm? Cherry asked.
“When we got back from Frog’s. Didn’t we plan on taking off
pretty soon?”
Cherry laughed and leaned over, putting her lips against his
ears. “That was thirty-six hours ago,” Cherry whispered and the mad spin of the
world for Jim ground to a halt. He got the mental equivalent of whiplash. He
stared at the date on his watch, at the time. He looked over to Soup who was
scraping up the last of his shit into a pipe. Nik and Two Step were trying to
determine whose turn it was to go and score again, and should they even bother?
After a short discussion everyone agreed it was time to crash. Everyone did
themselves up just enough to get home. The tiny bumps they did were what Tattoo
Nik referred to as “maintenance bumps,” just enough to keep you going long
enough to get to where you could crash. Nik passed this up, stating that being
already home, he would need no such bump. Jim smoked a cigarette and asked Soup
if he could give them a ride, and everyone but Nik got up to leave.
Downstairs Soup climbed into his car. Two Step sat up front
riding shotgun as he always did, he knew the streets better than just about
anyone, making him the logical choice for navigator and co-pilot. He fiddled
with the air, the music, constantly adjusting everything in such a minute way
he was the only one to know the difference. Jim, as always, was more than happy
to share the backseat with Cherry.
After everyone was gone Nik went to his bedroom and wrapped
his belt tight around his calf and from under his bed took a box. In the box he
kept a scorched spoon and a little bag of crank, a paperclip bent straight, a
little clamp, a tiny bottle of water with an eye dropper as the lid, a lighter,
and a fresh needle. He sat on the bed with the lid of the box open to act as a
small table upon which he could work. He took the spoon and put the handle
inside the clamp, securing it to the box with the bowl of the spoon hanging
over open space. He had done this too many times before, he was a natural at it
now and it scared him but didn’t stop him. He started to sweat, just a little,
as he emptied powder into the spoon and then resealed the bag. He took the tiny
little brown bottle of water and unscrewed the dropper lid, dropped a few drops
of water into the spoon and recapped the bottle. He picked up the paperclip and
stirred everything a little then flicked the lighter to life and held it under
the bowl of the spoon with one hand, stirring the poisonous little stew with
the paperclip. When it was ready he dropped in a small piece of cotton and
watched it soak up his dope. He took the needle and plunged it into the cotton,
sucking up everything. This done he placed the box on the floor, carefully, and
looked down at his foot, which was a little red below the belt, just the same
as it was when he shot up the first time.
Good veins, Nik thought. I have good veins.
The doctors even told him so when he was younger and cared
about such mundane things as giving blood, they told him he had excellent veins
for giving blood and the veins were standing out, huge, prominent, begging to
be used, each one screaming me me me to Nik and he smiled and poked the needle
into his flesh and drew in a little blood and then paused, to take a deep
breath. Slowly he pushed the plunger back down, filling himself with the
burning light of a thousand suns, he pulled the belt away and his skin turned
bulletproof, muscles to steel cables, his lungs huge engines sucking the life
out of the world around him and breathing back out fire and the bells huge
cathedral bells tolling inside his head deep and resonant at a tone so low they
were almost felt, rather than heard. Nik put his box back under the bed and
jumped to his feet, bouncing on his toes like a fighter and he screamed,
putting his hands up in front of him and shadowboxing, throwing five or six
punches at what seemed to be the speed of light, looking back and forth, quick
darting glances that see everything, he sees more than everything, he sees the
everything
behind
everything; he sees the reason and purpose and energy
field around every single thing and in his head he hears that same beat Two
Step is always rattling out but now it’s a thousand times faster; he grabs his
keys and heads for the front door, for he has work to do.
For Tattoo Nik, the day is just beginning, and he’s already
been up for four.