Heroin Chronicles

by Jerry Stahl

  Joe’s words of pain and sickness washed over her as she sat in the AA meeting later that day. Even the old-timers, the lifelong drinkers with red noses and rotted teeth and dead livers, looked at this bedraggled pair with a mixture of pity and concealed disgust.

  “… And that’s it. I’m going to keep going. I’m going to try and break my addiction this time. Thanks for listening.”

  “Thanks, Joe.”

  “Keep coming back!”

  “One day at a time!”

  Afterward they walked back toward the Hollywood and Western Metro. The car had been towed, after being illegally parked for two days.

  “I feel like shit,” Joe said. “I want to die.”

  Tania summoned up her best “sick” face. “Yeah. Me too.”

  “You lying fucking bitch. You’re high as a fucking kite. Don’t give me that shit.”

  “I’m not high! Honestly, Joe!”

  She reached out to him, but he shrugged her away. He moved ahead of her, down into the station. She caught up to him as he hissed, “Don’t try and bullshit me, all right? I can see it all over your damn face. You were nodding out in that fucking meeting.”

  Down on the platform, Tania stood next to Joe feeling like a chastised kid. She felt guilty, ashamed of her lies. On the display it said the next train to Pershing Square would arrive in one minute. She looked over at Joe. He was ashen. A droplet of sweat was forming on his nose. Even though the platform was pretty crowded, the people gave the two of them the wide berth usually reserved for the dangerously insane, or the stinking homeless. Black wind gusted through the tunnel as a train approached.

  “Tania?” Joe said in a quiet voice.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  And then Joe was gone. He stepped forward, straight off the platform. For a moment it looked like he was suspended in the air. He looks like Wile E. Coyote, Tania thought for a shell-shocked moment, before Joe tumbled forward, then vanished completely as the train whooshed past her.

  Thhhhhuuuuuddddddddd!

  The impact carried Joe away. The scream of brakes and the yells of shocked commuters echoed around the station as Joe flew off in a hail of blood. Tania felt it hit her in the face, like some obscene custard-pie gag. Joe’s insides splashed across the face of a screaming woman next to her with the impact of an open-handed slap. The woman fell to the floor screaming, covered in gore.

  People were running around in confusion. The train came to a stop halfway into the tunnel, with Joe’s mangled corpse caught in the wheels, ripped into meaty fragments across the track, shredded and starting to cook in the hot crevices of the brake levers. In the mayhem, nobody noticed a silent, decaying woman silently make her way off of the platform.

  She considered following Joe into the path of an oncoming train in the weeks that followed. As the sickness worsened, Tania found that the quickest, easiest way to do it was asphyxiation. The biggest problem was that when she held the plastic bag tight over her head, and the heat started to build as she instinctively gasped for breath, the urge to tear the bag off was almost unbearable. It took several attempts before she was able to see it through for the first time. After that, Tania was a pro. Once you rode out those two or three minutes of panic, death came on slow and easy, like sliding into a warm bath. Instead of rotting wounds or a bleeding anus, she was left with a red face—the result of the blood vessels constantly erupting under her skin. But she looked no worse, she supposed, than many of the alcoholics she had met at the meetings.

  But still, she did consider doing what Joe did. Maybe it would be easier to just cease to be, once and for all. The rush was becoming less and less, and the withdrawal symptoms seemed to intensify with each passing week. The past few months she had become a ghost, a shell, something that existed only in the shadows.

  A month or so later, something happened that made her change her mind about following Joe. She was visiting the quiet section of Griffith Park where she’d spread Joe’s ashes. She was just sitting there, watching the sky as the golden hour began to fade. The place was silent, peaceful. The noise and heat of the city may as well have been a million miles away. It was in this fleeting moment that she thought she heard it, an almost subliminal noise carried softly to her in the breeze.

  Tania …

  Taaania …

  Pleasssee …

  Pleasse …

  Just one more fix …

  And then I’ll quit …

  For goood …

  The tears came then, as she finally understood the true extent of Joe’s hell. She imagined him reduced by a crematorium’s violent heat to a billion little ashes, countless tiny fragments of carbon, dumped out of an urn and left to flit around in the careless breeze. She imagined Joe clinging to the underside of plants and trees, lost in discarded beer cans, and stuck in piles of fresh dog shit. And all of those infinitesimal specks of what he once was still burning with that terrible sickness, that unimaginable yearning, a billion fragments of Joe still futilely screaming out for the relief of a fix he could never have again.

  Tania stood stiffly, and addressed the breeze: “Goodbye, Joe. I’m sorry. I can’t help you anymore. I’ve got my own habit to feed.”

  And then she was gone. As the sun sank behind the hills, the park fell into miserable, pensive silence once more.

  SOPHIA LANGDON grew up in Tampa, Florida, and moved to New York City in 2003. She is a writer of short fiction and a poet. She is currently working on a short story collection titled What’s Normal About Love? and two books of poetry, Love Letters to My Master and Is This How the World Turns Out. She can be seen performing selections of her poetry at various venues throughout New York City.

  hot for the shot

  by sophia langdon

  Eliza stepped with light protracted steps to the bathroom two feet away from their bed, and headed toward the stash she had been hiding: her old cottons. She looked back at him as she closed the door. He was asleep. She was thankful for that. She didn’t want him to be awake, his eyes searching for her next move, looking for what he could get.

  She did everything with awareness of every creak, every footfall. She didn’t want to share. There wouldn’t be enough. She reached into the medicine cabinet, took one tampon from the back row of many, pulled it from the cardboard applicator, and emptied the hardened pelts of cotton hidden behind it into her hand. The faucet clacked and chattered. She stood unmoving for a moment, listening. Then let the dribbling of water fill a white top from a water bottle. She added the cotton stones, watching them soften and bloom. It would be a shot of mostly cool water in her veins. She began the extraction, hoping for gold. Hoping whatever made it into the syringe would take the edge off, get her a little well—it wouldn’t. She would once again be the victim of her exaggerated memory.

  Eliza settled onto the rim of the tub, her legs straight, locked against the door. The syringe in her mouth held in place by lip and teeth, she wrapped her hand tight around her upper arm, pumping her fist, searching for a welcome spot in the crook of her arm. She stuck the needle in, a little blood came swirling out, the edge got fuzzy. But it didn’t disappear. She got up from her perch and began to clean up: syringe flushed with water and back in the cup with their toothbrushes, he would know, but she would at least make an effort.

  Eliza caught her reflection in the mirror and held her own gaze. Her eyes maintained a permanent shade of fading pink, sharp high cheekbones held up her taut, hollow, brown skin. Her face littered with black spots. Souvenirs from scratching and picking, God knows what else.

  “I don’t look so bad. Nothing makeup can’t hide.” The mistake of her words hit her before she had time to find solace in her own sophism. She pulled back her long, black, thick hair—still strong. She let it fall down her back. Something to flick and play with, she thought, something for the johns to hold onto. She smiled, and too many black spaces where once there were teeth smiled back. “Fuck, I’m too young.” She gripped the side of the
sink, then let go, walking carelessly out of the bathroom.

  His eyes glazed with sleep, yet questioning, met her. His gaze traveled the distance between where he sat at the edge of the bed, to the dribble of blood rolling down her arm. “What about me? Where’s my fucking breakfast? I’d like to wake up, roll over, and get high too.”

  “Fuck you, Eli.”

  Eliza walked to the faux kitchen—a counter, a sink, a hot plate—and began to wash dishes; an assortment of kept takeout food containers, a seemingly endless supply of spoons, and a pot. Their apartment was the first in a row of the shiniest-little-shit-holes along Fifth Avenue in Ybor City, Tampa Bay. Eli’s vocation of dishwasher had kept them in deluxe digs for a while, before he managed to get fired from almost every restaurant on the ten-mile stretch of the Seventh Avenue strip. Now they worked together selling themselves, usually Eliza’s self, whatever it took to maintain their habits and the lifestyle.

  “Roll over and get high is all you ever do, you fuck,” Eliza mumbled.

  “What!”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  Eli stumbled around, checking the empty dope bags and gum wrappers that littered the apartment floor, wanting a miracle of found glory.

  Eliza finished up in the kitchen. She put on her self-styled lime-green and fluorescent-pink floral-print mini-muumuu, slipped on her white platform flip-flops, and headed for the door. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Brett’s.”

  Brett was their sixty-plus-year-old neighbor. He was rumored to be a plumber, but they had never seen him head out to a job in the two years they had known him or the three they had lived on shiny-shit-hole row. Five feet and scarcely an inch more, Brett was just tall enough to not be a midget. His face, and his disposition, gave you the sense that someone had started punching him when he was three, and just kept on hitting. Brett was always good for pills after a blowjob or a quick fuck. And this morning he was the only hope for her and bright-eyed Eli making it through the day’s obligations. Obligations that wouldn’t be met without chemical motivation, obligations necessary to get funding for things owed, and things hoped for, from Moses, their drug dealer—referred to as PRDD (Puerto Rican Drug Dealer) or the Biblical Bringer, depending on the day and their level of admiration for what he had to offer. Right now, all they had was her pussy, her mouth, and a pill-popping plumber to ensure they wouldn’t be shivering on a street corner.

  Eliza muttered as she walked to Brett’s. “It will be quick. It always is.” When she arrived she made small talk filled with innuendo: “Haven’t had my morning pounding. Eli’s wet as a noodle, scouring the place for something.”

  “Uhuh.”

  “God knows what he figures he’ll find. All I can think about is how I woke up with a need to be filled that’s still as empty as the bags he keeps checking through.”

  “Uhuh.”

  She stopped chattering long enough to grab them both beers from the fridge. She sat on Brett’s lap, rubbing his cock through his pants, her mouth pressed to his ear. “You willing to help my greedy little cunt?”

  “You’re too much.” A half-cocked grin on his face, Brett pulled her close and ran his tongue across her lips, parted them with it, and began to kiss her. He was gentle, in that way that lonely discarded men always are.

  Eliza unzipped his pants. Brett sucked in, his breath caught up by his need to fuck, to believe that she wanted him. She spat on her hand, lifted her dress, and stuck her lubricated fingers into her pussy. His hands followed hers. Fingers shoving into her well-trained holes. She moaned, and told him how badly she needed him to fuck her. He stood up and she laid on the dingy, cracked linoleum floor. She could feel the dirt rubbing into her skin. Her body called him down, no more need for words as she watched him remove his pants. Brett was short and the engagement would be shorter, but he was hung; God’s obscene joke to make a man equipped but inadequate. The initial entry pleased her, made her gasp even, but it was sure to leave her wanting more. Two minutes tops. He got up and went to the bathroom. He always had to take a shit after sex. She didn’t try or care to analyze it. The closing of the door was like a starter’s pistol. She moved quickly, making her way back to his room.

  His shelves didn’t contain knickknacks, or clothes, or books, just rows and rows of pill bottles with various names of patients and doctors. It was a fucking pharmacy, a pill junkie’s dream, an endless row of tiny tubs in varying states. She filled the deep pockets of her muumuu with Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet, Adderall, random barbiturates, and uppers whose names she’d never remember. She left while Brett was still launching shit rockets into the toilet.

  As she walked to the 7-Eleven a block away, Eliza wondered if Brett knew that she was ripping him off. Maybe he went to the bathroom so she wouldn’t have to beg, knowing his own fiendish propensities wouldn’t allow him to simply give her the pills. It was the sort of silly romantic notion she always tried to believe—soft, false truths.

  The guy behind the counter was the little brother of a friend from high school. A remainder from when she was headed toward success, he still reacted to her as if she were the key to hallway royalty. She wondered, did he want to fuck her or did he just feel a need to be polite, respecting what she used to be? He let her use the bathroom, he pretended not to notice when she was stealing, he generally gave her the run of the place.

  “Tommy. How’s your sister doing?” She never really stopped her forward motion to the bathroom.

  Eliza filled her cupped hands with water and slurped it into her mouth. She pushed Vicodin and Oxycontin in between her clenched lips. She sat on the toilet and removed the cache of drugs from her pockets, picked out Oxys, Vicodins, Percocets, wrapped them up and tucked her package between the lips of her snatch. She patted the bulge between her legs. “Rainy-day stash.” She flushed the toilet, a silly pretense, a game of making believe the store clerk didn’t know.

  She walked back to the apartment, the edge gone, her world a blurry sort of perfection. Occasionally patting her twat as she went, making sure her stash was still in place.

  “Hey, baby, I got some pills: Vikes, Percocet, various randoms.”

  “You didn’t get no Oxy?”

  “No, the bottle was empty.”

  “Maybe he hid them when he heard your ass at the door. Did you come this time before your lover hopped off?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Eliza emptied the contents of her pockets onto the coffee table, and grabbed her outfit for the day: denim miniskirt, white vintage Victorian top with cutoff sleeves and intricate folds running from the shoulders down the breast. She headed for the bathroom and counted five before doing anything. Eli busted in. She looked up from the water running into the showerless tub.

  “What?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Hand me my kit.”

  Eliza pulled the suburban-douche-bag leather kit, a junkie status symbol, out of the medicine cabinet and handed it to him. She closed the door, retrieved the package from her panties. She separated out the Vikes, Percocet, Adderall, set them on the flat edge of the sink, splashed water in the tub to feign activity, sat for a moment waiting for him to enter again. Feeling safe now, she began refilling her hollowed-out tampon with the booty of Oxycontin, and wedged it into its space at the back of the box. The other pills went into her skirt pocket. When she exited the bathroom, her eyes were surprised by the two lonely Vicodin waiting for her on the coffee table. She looked from the pills to Eli.

  “Baby, you know you don’t need as much as me to get high. Don’t worry, I didn’t do them all, I put some away for us.”

  “Uhuh.” This motherfucker, she thought, he’ll never be high enough, shoot your life into his arm and he’ll still be searching for the next. She stepped in front of the floor-length mirror next to their bed. Eli went into the bathroom. She visualized him checking the medicine cabinet, hoping she’d covered her trail. Her eyes caught the clock: it had somehow become tw
elve thirty and they had to be in Lutz by two. They’d be late for the shoot.

  She grabbed the phone. The lady who answered introduced herself as Ann-Marie. “Hi, this is Eliza, your two o’clock. We’re running a little late.”

  “If you can’t make it by three, forget shooting today.”

  “No worries, we’ll definitely be there before three.”

  Eliza hung up the phone and watched the not so freshly washed Eli as he pulled on her old tattered Diesel jeans, the denim tight around his stick-thin legs, which seemed to take up most of his six-two frame, and a black cowboy shirt meant for a child, the sleeves too short. He was checking himself out, mussing his hair to a tumbled perfection, fashion choices being assessed from the tips of his pointy black shoes to the last well-managed strand of hair. He was handsome. Piercing blue eyes jumped out from the paleness of his skin at a stark juxtaposition to his jet-black hair, eyebrowless face, and perfect, full, pouty, fuck-and-suck lips. She didn’t dare to say it, didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of hearing it.

  “Hurry up.”

  He grabbed her by the waist, stood her in front of him, pulling her hair back and kissing her neck. “Damn, we look good together baby.” He lifted her short denim skirt, simultaneously pulling the fabric of her panties into the crack of her ass. He turned her around to look at the perfect roundness gripped in his hands. The curve of her back met the meaty suppleness of it. He lifted and held it, squeezing. She stood on the tips of her baby blue Chucks. He could feel his cock getting hard and he passed his fingers along the wetness of her cunt. She shivered just a little.