“What?”
“I think the reason I’m so fucking miserable is I’m in the wrong place by mistake. Probably the wrong time too. I don’t know. It’s like I have nothing in common with this shit. A hundred years ago you could just buy some heroin at the fucking store and people’d leave you the fuck alone. But it doesn’t work like that anymore. They want you to agree with them now.”
“Why do you whine so much all the time?”
“I wish I could act like normal motherfuckers, you know? But when I try and fake it they can tell and they fucking judge me. How do they always know I’m against them? Shit. Fuck em but it’s discouraging.”
“This is boring.”
“I want you to kill me.”
“BORING.”
“I’m serious.”
“You’re being stupid.”
“No fucking shit I’m being stupid but I’m serious.”
“I’m not going to kill you.”
“Goddamnit, Libby. I’m asking you to do something for me. Can you please just shut the fuck up and do it.”
“This is retarded.”
“C’mon.”
“No.”
“…Please.”
“NO.”
“You say you love me, don’t you? If you really mean that then you’ll do it.”
“No.”
“C’mon. Please.”
“…Right now?”
“Yeah. Right now. Why not?”
“…Okay.”
She straddled my stomach. Her crotch was cool and wet. She put her hands on my throat and leaned into it. She was trying to crush my trachea, I guess. It would have been better had she put the pressure on my carotid arteries. Then I’d have been out in a few seconds and she could have done what needed to be done. But the trachea hurt too much, especially slow like she was doing it. And there was the question of whether or not she could get it crushed all the way. I was surprised that she was really doing it. But I had no choice but to go along with it because it’d been my idea. So I just lay there. Her lip was shaky. We stared into one another’s eyes. I couldn’t breathe. Maybe she did love me. Maybe she was the best thing that ever happened to me. But I had to breathe. I grabbed her hips and threw her over my head. It took her farther than I’d have thought and she went headfirst into the radiator. I got up and she was laid out on the floor. A look of surprise.
She said, “What did you do that for? You told me to kill you.”
I said, “It was a test. And you failed.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
The rest of winter was graceless.
I dated Megan: she didn’t pay for a bag of coke I’d got her so it turned into a date and suddenly we were dating and I’d met her sister and her mother.
Megan’s mother looked like a bowler.
Megan’s sister said she’d kill me if I ever hurt Megan.
I knew I had to get out. I got to panicking.
I tried about everything I could think of to get Megan to be the one to break up with me so as to spare her feelings. I acted batshit crazy; she liked it. I ignored her phone calls for days; she kept calling. I stopped paying for things; she paid for everything. I stuffed her socks in her mouth; she had an orgasm. Nothing worked.
So I had to tell Megan it was a mistake. This happened at her place. I had come over and gone right into it, hoping it’d be quick and painless. But Megan started crying. Her Chihuahua Tony was there. He saw everything. He was wearing his little Dracula cape, and Megan was on the sofa. You’d have thought somebody had died. She wanted me to feel shitty about not liking her more. I thought it was selfish. I said she was really overdoing it because my heart had already been murdered and so had everybody else’s that I knew of so what was her excuse? We hadn’t been seeing each other a month yet. This wasn’t a big deal. But Megan wouldn’t stop with her bullshit. She was doing a fuckload of crying, and Tony climbed up onto her shoulders and tried to lap up her tears and Megan said, “TONY, GO AWAY,” and she threw Tony on the rug and Tony climbed back up and tried lapping up her tears again.
“TONY, I’M SERIOUS.”
She threw Tony on the rug again.
I said I was sure she was a fake because it was impossible that she could be so upset about this. I said girls did cold-blooded shit to me all the time and no one ever gave a fuck about that. Why wasn’t it a big deal when a guy got shit on? I’d been shit on a thousand times and it was the twenty-first century and she was being rude.
Megan’s sister didn’t kill me.
No one has yet.
* * *
—
I HAD to take some kind of opiate or I couldn’t go to school. I’d get panic attacks. It was all the people that did it to me. Either people terrified me or they made me feel like I was a fucking bastard in comparison. There was no in between.
When I had no choice I’d try and go to school without dope and I might lose my nerve in the parking lot and stay there in the car and smoke cigarettes and listen to the radio, maybe fall asleep. Then I’d go home. But this was stupid.
* * *
—
I MANAGED to piss Joe off.
He’d dropped in to see me on St. Patrick’s Day. He wanted to maybe go and drink something and he caught me with my eyes cracked out of my head. So he got to making an intervention of it.
He said, “Maybe you should chill out on this stuff.”
I said drug use was the only thing I didn’t have a problem with.
He said, “I wish you could hear how fucking crazy you sound when you talk.”
“Why are you bothering me with this?”
“You’re my friend, man. I have to tell you if you’re fucking up your life.”
“I’ve kind of had it with friends.”
“Alright. Good luck then.”
“Yeah you too.”
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT I broke into the coke safe and shot about 8 grams all told probably. The night stilled. I began to hallucinate. A car was parked somewhere beyond the light. It was watching me and my eye trembled. I heard a radio. Men were on the stairs. There was a shadow in the hall. Somebody was kicking my door in. I flushed an ounce of coke down the toilet. I threw a shoe box full of used syringes out the kitchen window. The shoe box landed on the roof of the convenience store next door and the syringes scattered all over the roof. I surrendered to a phantom SWAT team.
I said, “Let’s do this nice and peaceful.”
I opened the door.
No one was there.
The sun was rising and the cars were coming out when I climbed up to the roof of the convenience store with a broom and gathered up the syringes. I was dressed up like I worked. I tried to act like I belonged up there.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I picked Emily up at the Greyhound station. She was on her way to Elba. She had been living with her dad down in Florida and she’d started shooting dope there.
I’d had no idea.
It was a three-hour layover.
Emily said she wanted to get high.
I took her with me to meet up with Three-Hundred and she paid for the heroin.
We went to Walgreens for rigs.
I said to her, “Can you go in and get the rigs? You look more respectable than I do. And I’ve kind of burned this place up.”
She said okay.
She went in and came out with rigs for us.
She was an angel.
We didn’t shoot up till we were back in my apartment. I cleaned some spoons off real good. We had saline wound wash from the Walgreens. I’d given her extra money for it. It was a special day.
She shot up like she knew what she was doing.
When it hit her she said, “Fuck.”
And it hit me and I was right as rain. If you know, then you know what I mean. If you don’t, then don’t ever find out.
I kissed Emily.
She kissed me back.
I said, “I’ve been a real fucking bastard since you left. I’m no good.”