Hummingbird

by Jude Angelini

I’m stuck in a loop. We all are. Mine’s just getting smaller.

  This bender’s been going on for damn near a year. If I ain’t been working, I been high.

  My brain hurts.

  I’m bored.

  I do another rail. My eyes go blurry but that’s it. It ain’t the ketamine’s fault. I’ve done this batch: it’s good. It’s me. I’m broken.

  No visuals. No insight. Just a loss of motor skills and bad vision.

  I tell myself, You gotta tighten it up. You need to get out of the house. You need to go live life.

  I get out the chair. I’m shuffling in circles, thinking.

  What’d you used to do on your days off?

  I sigh.

  I don’t know, go for a walk? Call my friends? Play backgammon?

  It’s been a while since I’ve hit my friends. They’re busy now, with their wives and kids and jobs to go to.

  I’m too fucked up to walk; I’ll play backgammon.

  I hop in the shower. I drink some more coffee and try to sober up.

  It doesn’t work. I’m still wrecked when I get behind the wheel. I head to the V-Cut. I’ll get a game. I’ll catch up with the fellas.

  It’s hard to drive a car. My depth perception is bad on a good day, right now it’s fucked. I can’t tell if I’m gonna hit people or not, I’m just guessing. I swerve into the opposite lane to avoid a guy on a bike and then swerve back into my lane to avoid an oncoming truck. He blows the horn at me, I wave sorry.

  I white-knuckle it the rest of the way and somehow I make it through the five miles of LA traffic just fine.

  I pull up. I parallel park. I scrape the rims on the curb. I’ll kill a couple hours playing backgammon. I can figure out the rest of the day later. I’m good for the next few hours.

  I walk in. It’s a ghost town. The place is dead.

  Now what?

  I get a coffee. I sit outside and sip it. I watch the cars go by. Killing time.

  Phone rings. It’s Andrea.

  I answer.

  “What’s up?”

  “You busy?” she asks.

  I say, “Nah, I’m just sitting here, lookin’ at traffic.”

  She starts in, “So I was driving yesterday and had a flash. You came to mind.”

  “Yeah?” I say.

  I hear her take a deep breath. I wait.

  She says, “Listen, I don’t know what you’ve been doing with yourself, but you need to slow down. You gotta stop, whatever it is. You have a lotta good stuff going for you. I’d hate to see you throw it all away.”

  I say, “Funny, I was just sitting here, thinking the same shit.”

  She sounds relieved. Those statements usually lead to fights. “So I was right?”

  I don’t tell her that I’m fucked up as we speak. I just say, “Yeah. I been going pretty hard lately. I gotta chill. I guess I’m just lonely and ketamine’s been keeping me company.”

  She says, “Sometimes you gotta sit in that and feel it.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  Life would be a lot easier if I could stand my own company.

  She says, “I’m around if you need me.”

  I say, “Thanks.”

  She isn’t, but it’s nice to hear.

  Some shit you gotta do on your own.

  I been on these drugs awhile now. Stuck in this holding pattern waiting for life to get better. Kill yourself a little bit at a time, just so you don’t kill yourself all the way.

  Andrea’s gotta get off the phone, she’s got a lunch to go to. I tell her I love her.

  I’m thinking, This is worse than the last bender. The last one was ’cause Grandma died. This one, I was just bored.

  I go in my phone and erase my K dealer’s number. I’m embarrassed it’s come to this; I don’t even have the willpower to leave her in there.

  I guess this is it for awhile. It ends on the sidewalk with a whimper.

  Don’t beat yourself up about it. Don’t lie to yourself. You go till you wanna stop, then you stop.

  Quitting ain’t nothing but a choice.

  I don’t pat myself on the back about it. I wouldn’t have stopped if the drugs stayed working.

  Now what am I s’posed to do with my time? Take up rock climbing?

  I laugh.

  I’ll prolly just fuck more and buy shit on eBay.

  It’s cloudy out. I’m holding my coffee in one hand, my phone’s in the other. I’m sitting on Melrose, watching the foreign cars pass me.

  Where they going? I wonder.

  Nowhere important.

  I say out loud to the parking meters, “I guess I’m done.”

  I don’t even feel good about it.

  All I feel is tired.

  be your dog

  I’ve been off whores for six years, then got faded and ended up at some call girl’s apartment in East Hollywood. It smells like Pine-Sol and Newports. Her roommates are there. They got the TV loud so they won’t hear her fuck and she’s playing dance music in her bedroom to drown out the TV.

  Her room’s cramped. There’s a divider next to the bed. I go to peek behind it, make sure there’s no one there waiting to club me while my dick’s danglin’. She freaks out, tells me to stay out of there, it’s private.

  I see what she’s hiding. It’s just some silk roses in a vase and a picture of a little boy.

  We get to it. I leave my pants on.

  I get home and I’m spitting out blood.

  How’d it get there? Is it hers or mine? Why’d I go down on her?

  Might be AIDS. I probably just need to floss more.

  That apartment looked like she had AIDS. I go to bed thinking I might have HIV. That’s gonna really narrow down my girlfriend options.

  I wake up paranoid, hit my homie with AIDS, and tell him what happened.

  He says, “It’s probably nothing. But better safe than sorry. You don’t wanna deal with that for the next forty years, just go get the PrEP pill.”

  I say, “What’s that?”

  He says, “It’s like the morning after pill for HIV. You just have to take it for a month and you’re set.”

  I hit the clinic and get it. I been taking it for a week. Doc says I can still fuck, ’cause I probably don’t have shit and if I did, it takes a while for AIDS to kick in.

  I feel better already.

  I’m at dinner with my hedge fund homie and his new bride. We eat sushi, everybody’s on their best behavior. Afterwards we play backgammon, drink tea, and talk politics. Then it gets late and they go home.

  I’m on Backpage looking at hookers again. I haven’t fucked since the whore from the week before and I’m thinking banging another prostitute might send me off the deep end. So I click on Erotic Massages. I’ll just get a girl to come over, have her rub her boobs on my back, and jerk me off instead.

  I’m going through the ads: it’s just fake-tittied blondes and Korean on call.

  I refresh the page and click on a new one. She’s just my type: a little brunette, girl next door, certified massage therapist. I get hard reading the description. I steady my breath; I put on my white voice and call her.

  She says it’s two hun’ an hour and she’ll be there in twenty.

  I straighten up the house, hide my valuables, take another shot of GHB, and do a bump of 5-MeO-DALT.

  I hop in the shower.

  Forty minutes later, she calls, she’s downstairs. I put on a robe and go get her.

  What’s waiting for me on the steps is not the adorable brunette from the ad, but a chubby Latina with a shitty red dye job and UGG boots.

  I let her in. She stinks of cheap perfume.

  She says, “How you doing so far?”

  She sounds like a chola. I guess we were both hiding our accents on the phone.


  I tell her, “I’m chillin’.”

  We walk down the hall, past my neighbor’s and into my apartment. She’s definitely not the girl next door in the pictures. She looks like she ate the girl next door in the pictures, with some corn tortillas on the side.

  But fuck it, we here now.

  “You want a drink?” I ask.

  “Just water.”

  I hand her a glass. She takes a sip and puts it on the coffee table.

  “Can I use your bathroom?”

  She’s in there a few minutes. Wonder what she’s doing. I go make sure my front door’s locked.

  She comes out, we go to my bedroom. I give her the two hundred. I strip naked, I lie on the bed.

  She doesn’t have lotion; I tell her use the coconut oil on the bed stand. She starts mushing my back. It feels good because I’m high, but this chick ain’t no certified masseuse.

  She stops. She’s antsy.

  She says, “I gotta go to the bathroom, my hands are cold.”

  I look back over my shoulder. I say, “Sure.”

  She’s in the john. I’m getting a weird vibe. I check out my desk, make sure she didn’t swipe anything.

  I see myself in the mirror on my door. My pupils are pennies. I shake my head. What the fuck you doing man? You got Mi Vida Loca in your home, where you sleep at.

  She comes out again. I lie back down.

  I say, “So when you taking off your shirt?”

  She’s like, “I don’t do that, that’s extra.”

  I say, “The ad said you do.” I pause, “You know I’m looking for a regular.”

  She says, “That’s another hundred.”

  I say, “I guess we’ll just go with the back rub and hand job.”

  She smears oil on my back. I shut my eyes and exhale the week away.

  She’s rubbing me for all of two minutes and then stops.

  She says, “You know what? Like basically, I’m feeling kind of uncomfortable and threatened right now…”

  I open my eyes, I say, “What?”

  She says, “I’m feeling kind of like in danger.”

  I roll over, confused.

  She goes on, “So, like, I think I’m gonna just go or something.”

  I sit up. I’m being talk-robbed by a prostitute.

  There’s not a lot I can do here. I’m in a nice apartment building; I had to write a letter just to get this spot. A pregnant couple lives next to me, they’re from Utah. They drive a Subaru Outback, and listen to Paul Simon. It’s gonna be hard to explain me kicking some chunti hooker up and down the hallway at one in the morning on a Tuesday.

  I can’t call the cops, high as hell, with all types of drugs in my apartment, talking ’bout, “This hoe took my money and won’t rub my dick.”

  So I switch to damage control.

  I say, “Hey, let’s not talk like that. Look, I feel like there’s some mix-up here. Why don’t you just give me a hundred back, you keep the other hun’ for your effort? You go on your way and we’ll call it even.”

  She sighs. “Like, it feels like I might get assaulted…and I really can’t give you the money back, because of my agency. So I’m just gonna go.”

  I’m looking at her dead-eyed, thinking, Why can’t people just do their job?

  She heads to the door and I watch her leave.

  I’m standing there butt naked.

  I say, “Well played.”

  And the door slams closed.

  I open my desk drawer, take out a Xanbar, and eat it.

  I plop down in front of the computer and click on some porn. It’s a dominatrix, making a dude lick her boot. She spits on him.

  How fucking stupid am I?

  I’m stroking my limp dick thinking about all the red flags I ignored.

  I’m only halfway hard when I come. It oozes out of me. I leave it there a minute before I clean up.

  I look at it.

  It looks sad, but it’s mine. I earned it.

  sadie hawkins

  This girl hits me on Snapchat and says she wants to meet up. Chicks do that a lot, but they’re usually in Nebraska or Kentucky or some other place that I need a connecting flight to get to.

  It’s flattering but it don’t mean shit.

  So I send ’em a, “Thanks you’re beautiful” message.

  Then they’ll shoot me a tit pic and go back to hanging with their husband.

  But this girl’s different. She lives in LA and I’m thinking that’s ballsy of her to reach out to me when it actually could happen. And as I’m thinking it, she’s saying in the video, “My girlfriend says I’m crazy for wanting to hang out with you…but you know…”

  And I do know.

  So I hit her back; her name is Claire. And we’ll link up when I get home from Detroit.

  In the meantime, we’re talking on the phone and she says something about school and a roommate.

  So I’m like, “How old are you, Claire?”

  She says, “I’m nineteen.”

  I say, “You’re younger than my fucking kid.”

  She says, “How old is your kid?”

  I say, “Twenty. You tryna be her stepmom?”

  She says, “No.”

  I’m thinking, What to do.

  Part of me doesn’t wanna fuck with her ’cause she’s younger than my daughter, and there’s a part of me that wants to fuck her ’cause she’s younger than my daughter.

  If I’m gonna stay single it’s bound to happen sooner or later, but nineteen is damn near prom night young.

  Then I figure, my kid probably needs therapy ’cause of my ass anyway so I might as well give her one more thing to complain about.

  To not sound like a total piece of shit, I say the obligatory, “Hey, maybe you should wait a few years till you’re like twenty-five and you know what you’re getting into before you mess with me.”

  She says back, “That’d be cool, but I have cystic fibrosis and I might not make it to twenty-five.”

  I say, “Word?”

  She says, “Most people with CF don’t live past thirty.”

  And now she’s explaining the disease to me, it’s something to do with her lungs and mucus, but I’m only halfway listening because I went from hard dick to lung disease and I don’t know how to act.

  What do I say to that? Should I feel sorry for her, ’cause I don’t?

  I say, “That’s fucked up.”

  ’Cause it is.

  She says, “Yeah.”

  I say, “And you wanna hang out with me?”

  She says, “When you know you’re gonna die, you act a little more brave. You go skydiving and try new things.”

  I say, “I’m not like skydiving.”

  She says, “I read your book.”

  We make plans for the Monday after I get back.

  Day of the date, she cancels. There’s a tear in her lung and she has to go to the hospital for a week.

  Two weeks later, I check in on her and don’t hear back. I’m concerned. With most chicks, when they don’t reply, they’re disinterested, but this one might be dead.

  I wait another week and try her again.

  She hits me back a month after that. She had complications, now she’s fine. She’s coming over next Tuesday.

  Day of, I clean my house. She shows up out front of my spot just as pretty as the pictures. She’s rolling around a shitty little dolly with an oxygen tank and tubes coming out of it.

  I pretend not to notice.

  I pick a spot close and we walk there. I don’t know what the etiquette is for oxygen tanks or if the tubes are connected to her so I just let her drag it along and walk on her street side. As I hear her wheezing, I’m wishing I hadn’t picked a restaurant halfway up the hill to eat at.

  Wait
ing at a traffic light, she’s telling me she’s been in the hospital damn near this whole time.

  I say, “That must be boring as hell, what do you do for fun?”

  She says, “Being in there’s not fun. But I decorate rooms for other patients to keep busy. It’s just so sterile there and it gives them a bit of home…” We lock eyes and she trails off, “I know, it’s stupid but I…I don’t know—”

  I interrupt her. I say, “It’s not stupid. Motherfuckers need more than medicine to heal. I think it’s dope.”

  She says, “Yeah, and a lot of us don’t get many visitors. So they’re happy to see me.”

  I say, “Claire, I think you’re pretty fucking cool.”

  Then we go and eat curry at a sidewalk cafe.

  At dinner we talk about her college and her nonprofit. She talks to me about her family. She’s telling me how her mom’s an ex-addict and her pop’s a womanizer. I’m laughing.

  She says, “What?”

  “And now you’re sitting here with me. Your dad’d be thrilled.”

  “I’m a cliché, right?”

  I say, “We all are.” I take a bite, I chew. I say, “So why you wanna fuck with me, Claire?”

  She says, “I haven’t had sex since I was fourteen and it was such a bad experience that I haven’t really done it again. Plus, it’s hard for me to meet someone because, for most people, all they see is my CF.”

  “And me?”

  “From your writing you seem open-minded.”

  I laugh but I get her point because I do see her sickness.

  I’m anxious. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to keep my dick hard. Am I gonna hurt her? Is she gonna hurt me? Am I gonna catch something? Is it gooey down there?

  I say, “You gonna be able to take the dick? I’m not gonna puncture you from the inside, am I?”

  She says, “I’ll be fine.”

  I say, “Is your shit contagious?”

  “It’s hereditary,” She says

  I’m like, “I guess I coulda Googled that before dinner.”

  Now she’s patting the top of her head with her right hand, “If I start doing this. It means call an ambulance because I can’t breathe. Besides that, I should be okay.”

  I nod, “Bet.”

  “Oh, and there are scars on my chest from my surgeries.”