Black Neon

by Tony O'Neill

  “Nah,” Lupita said with a dry smile on her lips, “you ain’t the first to tell me that.”

  “I am sure. I assure you that my photographs of you will soon be hanging on the walls of the most prestigious galleries in Europe!”

  “Uh-huh. Seems more likely they’re gonna end up on some fucking amputee porn website. Is that were you get make your money, pal? You, like, one of those Internet perverts or something?”

  “Pornography?” Jacques spat the word out. “Is that what you think of me? Some kind of low-rent exploiter of women?”

  Lupita fixed herself a blast for the other nostril, before handing the shit over to Genesis in the front seat.

  “Sure, why not? I mean, it’s either that or drugs, right? A guy like you, driving around in a fancy-ass car with enough coke to destabilize the economy of a small Central American country? That’s what I figured. I mean… let’s be honest. You don’t seem to be the drug dealer type, ya know? Fellow like you looks like he wouldn’t last two minutes in that game… No offence.”

  Taking a blast of the coke, Genesis cooed in her best Betty Boop voice, “Of course we don’t think that, honey… Lupe’s just teasing. You said you’re an artist, right?”

  Jacques laughed. “My dear, I not think that your beautiful girlfriend here shares your confidence in my honesty. For my sins I am an artiste. A low rent exploiter of my own talents, if you will. But enough bullshit. My dear, can you pour a little more of this nose candy between those beautiful breasts for me?”

  “Sure thing, baby.”

  Genesis poured a monstrous amount of blow between her tits, which were still moist with Jacques slobber. Jacques looked into the rear view mirror and fixed Lupita in a maniacal gaze.

  “I am an artist, my dear. An artiste and an explorer. I am here to find America’s soul!”

  With that he stuck his face between Genesis’s tits again, snorting wildly. The car swerved, and around them drivers honked and screeched on their brakes.

  “Well good luck with that my friend,” Lupita said, a dangerous look on her face, “’Cos I really doubt you’re gonna find what you’re looking for down there, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  vi

  In Pop Gun Eddie’s apartment, halfway down on the bottle of Rebel Yell, Randal felt a familiar despair gripping his insides. Still feeling hollow and jittery because of drug-lack, he knew that the booze could at least be counted on to coat his screaming nerves and help him forget his misery. It was a transient solution though. Unlike meth, booze burned its way through Randal’s system quickly, requiring more and more to maintain the illusion of comfort. Instead of the clarity and focus that meth granted him, the more booze he poured into the gaping hole in his psyche, the slower and sloppier Randal felt himself becoming. He could feel the whisky doing its job as he drained his glass. Next to him, Jeffrey and Pop Gun Eddie crushed their methadone tablets for injection. Artificial goodwill bubbled up inside Randal, the notion that people were subtly becoming friendlier, stories more interesting, even the smells that permeated Pop Gun’s squalid apartment seemed less gag-inducing the more he drank.

  The rising despair stemmed from the fact that Randal remained stubbornly aware that this was an illusion, that after the next drink his current state would inevitably give way to something else. Randal would morph into a loud, sloppy cartoon of his normal self. The benevolent goodwill that Randal felt toward all men right now would become an embarrassing over-friendliness, followed by the urge to confess all of the darkness that was inside of him, to confide in strangers, to laugh loudly at banal bullshit. Then there would be a sustained period of self-loathing. This ugly phase would end only when he slept. Tomorrow he knew he would wake with a burning head and a sour belly and begin the frantic recriminations: reliving every stupid word, every phony smile until he could take it no more. He would be forced to either drink again, get high, or punch himself repeatedly in the face.

  For now he just drank and tried to drown out the nagging part of his brain that knew what was around the corner, losing himself in Jeffrey and Pop Gun’s brow-furrowed murmurs as they probed their bloody arms with needles and absently talked shop like a pair of old businessmen swapping trade secrets.

  “Well, you know, Rachel always tells me to soak ’em first…. Says it gets the blood up…”

  “Nah, that’s an old wive’s tale. You gotta drink water. That’s the key. If you’re even a little bit dehydrated, the shit won’t flow. You know, my Uncle John… he did a movie with Lucille Ball. The Magic Carpet. Now John, he never fucked with no dope, he was strictly a juicer. But he swore to me that Lucille was heavily strung out on this shit called bufotenine, which is a heavy hallucinogenic extracted from the venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad. Claims she used to inject the stuff into her ass on regular basis.”

  “No shit? What about Desi?”

  “I dunno about Desi. But I did hear that Albert Most – fellar who founded the Church of the Toad of Light in Colorado – was a fanatical fan of I Love Lucy, and that’s what hipped him to the whole toad-juice thing. Those guys collect the slime and smoke it. It’s, like, a sacrament, ya know?”

  Randal looked at his glass. Maybe this time, he thought, he would finish this drink and leave it alone. After all, it was the middle of the afternoon and they were supposed to be out finding Jacques. Pop Gun Eddie had given them a lead, albeit a slender one. He felt good now, good enough at least, and maybe if stopped while he was feeling good he could sidestep tomorrow’s recriminations and regret. He drained his glass feeling determined, and cautiously upbeat.

  After feeding his hit in slow and easy, pushing the chalky mixture into his calcifying veins, Jeffrey sat back and sighed. “Man, that shit is a hell of a lot more bearable if you shoot it.”

  “Yeah, the juice ain’t worth a shit. These pills came from a place south of the border. Got a buddy who makes the trip to Juarez regular, got a family who run a little farmacia who know him pretty well down there. He always sells me a little excess to cover his travel expenses.”

  Jeffrey noted Randal’s empty glass and said, “I’m gonna need a minute, man. Don’t think I could walk right now. You wanna get another drink?”

  Randal looked at Jeffrey, and then back at his empty glass. Sensing that he had no choice in the matter he said, “Sure. Why the hell not?”

  After he’d poured the drink, Pop Gun looked Randal up and down. Next to him Jeffrey sank into a heavy nod.

  “You’re real worried about this French guy, huh?”

  Randal looked up from his glass with a puzzled expression. “Me?”

  “Yeah you. He a pal of yours?”

  “A friend? Not exactly. I can’t stand the fucking prick.”

  “Well if it ain’t this French fellar, what is it? Something’s bothering you. You’ve been starin’ at your glass the last twenty minutes like a man with the weight of the fuckin’ world on his shoulders.”

  Next to him, Jeffrey yawned and stretched. He contentedly picked at the bleeding spots on his hollowed out face. “Eddie’s right, man. You’ve been a real downer today. You sure you don’t want one of these pills? It’d take the edge right off…”

  Randal shook his head. “I told you, man. I’m trying to stay off all of that shit. And it ain’t Jacques, okay? I’m only looking for him because I feel bad for Gibby. Plus… I’m being nosey. If Jacques really does fuck up this movie thing then an asshole I know called Kenny Azura is gonna get some major egg all over his smug fucking face, and I can’t wait to see that happen…”

  “So what is it?” Eddie asked, with all the sweet con of a therapist dripping from his voice, “What’s bugging you?”

  “It’s me, I guess.”

  “Howdja mean?”

  Randal took a deep breath, considering whether or not to answer. He looked at his old friend Jeffrey, with rivulets of blood drying on his skinny arms and his dope-num
bed eyes half hidden behind sleepy lids. Then over to Pop Gun Eddie with his monstrous swollen balls and useless pecker.

  Shit, it wasn’t as if they were gonna judge him.

  “I’m going through a… well, I guess you’d call it a crisis of faith.”

  Jeffrey laughed. “Jesus Christ Randal, don’t tell me you fucking converted or some shit when you got clean! If that was the case, I’d know the fuckin’ world was comin’ to an end…”

  Randal shook his head. “Not that kinda faith. It’s just that… fuck, man. I was so sure of everything before I went clean this time; you know I mean I was so sure about how it all worked. But now…” Randal drifted off, his eyes searching futilely around the crummy room for the right words.

  “Gimmie an example,” Jeffrey said.

  “Well, the whole drinking thing, for a start.”

  “Drinking thing?”

  “Before I checked into treatment, I never really liked booze, yeah? Wasn’t my thing. I mean I liked a drink, who doesn’t? But not the same way I liked to get high. Ever since the first time I went into treatment all of those asshole therapists would tell me that I couldn’t drink no more, tell me I was an alcoholic. I’d just laugh at them. You remember the guys in Clean and Serene, right? All those fucking arguments we’d have with the counsellors?”

  “Well, yeah.” Jeffrey sneered, “It’s a lotta horse shit.”

  “Right! Except… except this time when I came out of the treatment centre, I cut out everything for like six months. Booze too. My fuckin’ brother had me on a real short leash and was giving me piss tests and all that kind of shit.” Randal looked over to Eddie. “My brother’s into the whole twelve-step thing in a big way. He got clean in the fuckin’ Eighties. He’s been hooked on those meetings almost as long as he’d been a cokehead, you know? But he follows that shit to the letter, never misses a meeting, sponsors like six guys, the whole bit. A real pillar of the fuckin’ community.”

  Eddie nodded sagely.

  “So I’d never been this clean for this long before. Harvey has control of our pop’s estate, and he’s been threatening to cut me out of my inheritance if I don’t get my shit together. I had no choice. For six months, I was living like a fuckin’ monk. After a while, Harvey gives me a bit of space, thank Christ. But I’m determined, you know, not to fuck up this time. I stay totally away from the speed, you know, that was really my thing. But I started drinking again. I needed something to ease the pressure, you know? This time though, it was kinda… different.”

  Pop Gun leaned forward, his brow furrowing. “Different how?”

  “Well, just knowing that the booze was all I could do… it made me treat it different. I’d never drank every day before. Never felt the urge. But all of a sudden, that’s what I’m doing. Four o’clock every day I’d have a cocktail. Just the one. And that first fucking sip… it was like… ‘Ahhhh!’ Relief, you know? Then pretty soon it’s not just the one cocktail, it’s a bunch. And it ain’t happening at four o’clock, it’s three. And then two. The drinking was different, I guess ’cos I was drinking to try and fill the hole that was left by the meth, you know? And it wasn’t just how much I was drinking – how the booze worked on me was different too.”

  “You mean you started getting hangovers and shit?”

  “No, not that. But the next day I would feel… depressed, I guess is the word. Really down. I found myself watching the clock, just waiting for four o’clock to roll around. That’s why I started drinking earlier and earlier. Because I’d get too fucking impatient. I just felt like…”

  Randal drifted off, mortified by the words that were about to come out of his mouth. He fidgeted uncomfortably. Before he could force the words out, Pop Gun Eddie beat him to the punch.

  “You felt like an alcoholic?”

  Randal almost physically recoiled at this suggestion. “No,” he said quickly, before quietly adding, “I guess. Not really, but… yeah.”

  All three of them sat there for a while saying nothing. Randal rubbed his hand over his face. He was suddenly bathed in sweat. Jeffrey looked like he may well have been sleeping, eyes closed to serene half slits. Pop Gun Eddie straightened up and cleared his throat.

  “You know what I think?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I think that there’s no way in hell you’re an alcoholic.”

  “I agree,” Jeffrey chipped in. “I’ve known you too long, Randal. And I’ve known plenty of alcoholics. You’re a natural born speed freak. You ain’t a juicer.”

  Even though it was a pair of bedraggled dope-fiends telling him this, Randal was ready to seize upon any suggestion that this deep, dark fear he harboured was unfounded. “You don’t think?”

  “Your problem,” Pop Gun continued with an air of ragged authority, “is that you think too much. You still going to them meetings?”

  “Yeah. Now and then.”

  “You see, that’s the problem.” Pop Gun waggled his finger at Randal in a gently chastising manner. “Those meetings got you pathologizing yourself. Analyzing yourself, defining yourself in those terms. That’s why your drinking changed. Now you’re ashamed to drink! You weren’t before. Now you judge yourself, and you view everything through this prism of addiction. Every time you drink you get down on yourself. You’re hiding it from those guys at the meetings, I’ll bet. Your brother know you’re juicing?”

  “Of course not. He’d freak.”

  “Sure he would! Even though what you’re doing is perfectly legal and socially accepted, you gotta hide it because those cats look down on that kinda behavior. They’ve got you thinking like an alcoholic, Randal. That’s why you’re drinking like an alcoholic.”

  Jeffrey laughed. “I like that Pop Gun. You could start a support group with a slogan like that.”

  Randal smiled at this, and Pop Gun sat back with a big stoned grin on his face.

  “I guess you have a point.” Randal conceded.

  “A point?” Jeffrey said, “The man’s speaking gospel, Randal. Look at me, man. I know I’m physically dependent on this shit, yeah? Of course I do. But I don’t care. I’m a dope-fiend because that’s what I want to be. It’s all I can be, truth be told. The difference between what I do or what Eddie does and what you do is fucking simple. I ain’t ashamed of how I live my life. That’s why I stay away from those damn meetings. The way those fuckers operate… it’s just like the church, and I had a gut-full of that shit when I was younger. Those fucking meetings, they thrive on shame, man.”

  Jeffrey bent over, picked up his glass, and finished his drink. Between the methadone and the booze he felt pretty fucking good right now. He sat back, crossed his legs, and stared at Randal like a skinny, stoned Buddha.

  “It isn’t the drugs that fuck you up, Randal,” Jeffrey said. “It’s the shame.”

  Randal looked at his feet for a moment, taking in the filthy, cigarette-scarred carpet. Then he looked up at Jeffrey. “But what about you? You’re saying that this is it? You made your choice? When I roomed with you at Clean and Serene you were pretty determined to stay off dope, remember that? I mean, I know none of the shit we’d planned turned out like it was supposed to… but what the fuck has changed in a year that makes you feel so sure that what you’re doing is right, now?”

  “What changed is simple. It was nuthin’ to do with what happened with the sex tape, or even with that cocksucker Damian ripping us off. It was just that after I got clean… it just made me remember why I used in the first place. You get complacent about it when you’ve been using a long time. The grass is always greener, yeah? Shit starts to bug you about your habit. All of the hassles and the bullshit… you get tired. Like those guys who marry these beautiful chicks, and eventually they end up cheating on them with some fucking pig. It ain’t that their wives ain’t beautiful any more, or that they even wanna fuck that pig. They just get too comfortable in their surr
oundings, and forget how good they got it.

  “You get tired of the hassles, so you get clean, sort your life out, all of that shit, you know? But you end up switching your one big problem for a ton of other problems. They might be different problems, but they’re problems all the same. Being clean is a hassle, man. It’s the same shit that you’re going through right now. You gotta fill your time with some other shit, otherwise you’re gonna go batshit crazy. The big joke is that the stuff that’s legal and available, like booze or god or whatever…. Most of it is a hell of a lot worse for you than smack.

  “It took me a long time to make peace with it, but the truth is that I prefer just having one problem to deal with than a few dozen. My life might be in the fucking toilet right now…” Jeffrey stretched his arms, as if presenting the bloody, track-marked things to Randal to emphasize his point, “but I wouldn’t swap places with you for a million bucks. No offence.”

  “None taken.”

  “You’ll probably live longer than me. You got an apartment, and a car, and clean clothes, and all of that shit. I got a whole lot of problems, but it’s nothing that more dope can’t fix. At least I don’t have to beat myself up about who I am. At least I don’t have to do a bunch of shit I hate to compensate for the fact I can’t do what I wanna do. That’s a trade-off I’m prepared to make…”

  “I guess you got it all figured out,” Randal muttered sourly.

  “Look man, I ain’t trying to do a sales pitch here. If you stay clean, then good luck to you Randal. It’d make me happy to see you live to be ninety, so long as you were happy. For me, a preacher in favour of dope is just as hokey as a preacher against it. I’m just telling you where I’m at in my life. Barring some kinda message from God himself… and believe me, I ain’t holding my breath on that count… this is the way I’m gonna live, and it’s probably the way I’m gonna die.”

  Randal picked up his empty glass, and stared at it. “Doesn’t that sound kinda fatalistic to you?”

  “Fatalistic?” Jeffrey snorted, “I hate to break it to you Randal, but you’re gonna die too. Whether you get high or not it doesn’t make a shit load of difference as far as I can see. All you gotta decide is this: how do you wanna kill time in between?”