Starve the Vulture

by Jason Carney

  “Want to suck my dick now?” I ask again, out of breath, a cold sweat covering me. A boisterous smile spreads across my face. “This is what happens when you fuck little boys.”

  He doesn’t speak. Spittle flies out of my mouth, landing on my chest and arm. I feel so alive. I unlock the door. There is no one in the hallway.

  8:00 A.M. (19:10 BEFORE GRACE)

  THIS DAY IS NOT STARTING OUT WELL. Barely able to stay awake, I lurch over the steering wheel. My right hand covers my right eye. The blinding haze is unbearable. I am only able to lift my head and focus my one good eye for a second or two, every twenty feet or so. I drive at half the speed of the traffic around me. The circular wound where the hot pipe jabbed into the corner of my eye a few hours ago throbs as if it were Mount St. Helens saying hello to the world. To those around me I must seem like an old woman moving through a school zone. The sound of the hazard lights clinking on and off in a metallic, robotic pulse annoys me.

  My hand does not stop the liquid from oozing down my face. The glare of the sun wreaks havoc on my eye as the flesh around it swells shut. I need to find a hole to crawl inside of and escape the warm cheery thorns of morning. A thick curdle of tears rolls down my unshaven cheek. I am a vampire, melting. My car swerves under the pressure; the honks of the motorist behind me are as irritating as the bumps on my raw tongue.

  I smell like shit.

  C’s place is ten minutes away. If I continue at this pace, I will arrive around noon. Out of dope, patience, and the ability to withstand the pain, I decide to pull over and get some Visine. A gas station looms on the other side of the intersection, two lanes to the right. When the light changes from green to yellow, I floor the gas. Somewhere in the back of mind, I have a hunch this is the best action. The car flies through the intersection, across the two lanes, barely missing another vehicle running the light, and slaps the pothole at the corner of the entrance. My body jars with the impact. Sweaty, congested, and nauseated, my world spins with a singular purpose.

  Get your shit together; go get your dope.

  I pull into the shade of the building. The hairs on my arm stand upright with a twinge. I grab the handle as a woman walks out of the door, coffee in hand. Her polyester suit reminds me of my grandmother.

  Freeda is probably at the front desk by now.

  I am shameless in abandoning my grandmother. While she travels halfway across Dallas this morning to rescue me, I travel two miles from where she lives to hide. The woman with the coffee smells of sickly sweet flowers and powder. I taste the alcohol of her perfume as I walk through the door and approach the counter. My grandmother disappears from my thoughts. My one eye scans the store, spots the aisle of aspirin and hygiene products.

  “There it is!” I say loudly. “In business.”

  I fumble with cellophane-covered Visine package, crushing the box more than freeing the contents. My fingers are useless.

  “Come on, fucker! Open the fuck up!”

  The whole store is now aware of my presence, even the construction crew over at the coffee pots shake their heads at my nonsense. I gnaw at the edges of the package with my teeth. Saliva builds, coats the glossy rectangle as if it were a bone in the jowls of a large unkempt dog.

  “Goddamnit!”

  “Excuse me, sir,” the clerk starts.

  I stare him down. Before uttering his next sentence, his facial expression shifts. “Damn, your eye is really fucked up!”

  I ignore him. The plastic tears, my hands are wet with spit. I wipe the grime on my jeans.

  Now my hands are sterile.

  Plastic wrap clings to my palm as I lift the bottle above my eye.

  “You need to pay for that, sir.”

  “In a minute. Emergency,” I respond.

  The liquid fills the irritated mess. The stream pushes the thick film out, my eye floods with relief, the cool sensation a temporary fix.

  “That’s it,” I say. “Hell yeah, that feels good!” In the middle of the store, helping myself, the bottle half empty when I lower it.

  Just get me to where I am going.

  “Woo, that feels good,” I tell the clerk. “How you doing today? Busy morning, everyone headed to work.”

  “Man, your eye is gross,” he responds. “You burn it? What happened to you?”

  “A death in the family. Four packs of Marlboro Lights, please.”

  He heads to the sink behind the counter, grabs a handful of paper towels, runs them under the water. I notice a rack of sunglasses and grab a pair. A quick glance, the glasses are a man’s style, all set.

  “Here, that Visine isn’t going to help you.” He hands me the dripping paper towels.

  “You care if I hang in the parking lot until I can drive?”

  “Once you pay you can do whatever you want,” he says. “You need to go to the doctor. You look like a leper.”

  I hand him the money, nodding, I have no time or patience to deal with his sarcasm.

  “I need to go to sleep,” I say, laughing as I step to the door.

  In the car, the laughter fades. My situation is bleaker than I allow myself to realize. I pushed my body as far as I could. Still, I plan to go farther.

  I fold a paper towel into a large wet square and force the light-brown, industrial-strength mess up against my eye. The cool sensation relaxes me. My shoulders release, the tension of the past few nights crawls over my bones. I shake. For a brief moment, I feel like my insides are glowing. As I tear the tag from the sunglasses, I notice tacky flames running down the sides. I do not care what they look like as long as they block out the sun. I have not smoked in almost an hour. My stomach grumbles.

  Food and sleep.

  My cell phone rings. C sends me a text, annoyed that I need to come over so early. I fumble through my money.

  Two hundred—I better hurry.

  The pain becomes bearable under the heightening of my urge. I throw the car into drive, my one good eye focuses, and my body cranes forward.

  NOTE TO SELF:

  TWENTY-SIX DAYS HIGH IN A HOTEL ROOM

  Junkies’ wisdom is a fractured wish,

  a distorted angel-absent language,

  a premonition that reiterates

  squandered yesterdays.

  Unholy, burnt-tongue psalm.

  Junkies’ wisdom is a boisterous lesion.

  It exudes limitless ideas of resurrection,

  walks with purpose of death

  on crack-tear palms.

  Junkies’ wisdom is an irrepressible,

  sinister devotion. A voluptuous

  one-eyed stare into oblivion.

  A butterfly

  pulling apart his fucking wings.

  THE PRIZE

  1979

  I WANT A PARTY LIKE THIS ONE, SOMEDAY.

  I feel proud in my light-brown suit, blue shirt, and thick polyester brown-and-blue-striped tie. My hair feathers to perfection, my shoes are without a scuff. The church fellowship hall buzzes under decorations. Streamers and balloons hang from the plywood walls in a carnival of colors without scheme. Thin plastic tablecloths wrap the folding tables, topped by purple and white arrangements of silk flowers. Toward the far side of the room, near the kitchen entrance, the tables of potluck scent the room. An excitement bubbles within me. My whole family crams into this small party room. Church members, Papaw’s colleagues, and a few close neighbors.

  Tonight is a very big deal.

  Mamaw and Papaw stand against the far wall. Papaw wears his Sunday suit, the black one. Mamaw wears a light-blue polyester dress with a soft silk shawl the same color wrapped around her shoulders. This little old woman with more girth than height looks uncomfortable receiving so much attention. She is the center for almost every person in the room. I have never known anyone as loved by his or her family. He towers over her, hands bigger than her head. They look wonderful together. Old and full of life, their pride reflects back to them from the faces in the room.

  A line of guests to their right pass
and shake hands, each group taking a moment to pose for a quick picture in front of their cake. I observe the respect in all of the guests’ gestures as they congratulate them on their success. Papaw and Mamaw never show affection to one another in public. I catch him glancing at her like a schoolchild with a crush.

  “You look beautiful, Mamaw,” he says. “The Lord sure has blessed us.”

  She blushes, extends her arm to the next in line, ignoring his compliments. They are simple people with simple dreams. Faith and family govern their world.

  “Jason, come get in a picture,” Papaw says, noticing me watching them.

  The line stops as I make my way over to them. Three fast steps into a slide across the linoleum on the slick bottoms of my new shoes. My arms open, fingers pointing to the air as if I am shooting guns. Proud that all eyes are on me, that Papaw chose me to be in a picture.

  “This is my oldest great-grandchild,” he tells the guests I don’t know. “Debbie’s son.”

  I feel the love he holds for my mother as he rubs my shoulders with his large worker’s hands. Mamaw reaches down and holds a napkin out to my mouth.

  “You got a little crust on your lips,” she says. “Spit.”

  I lightly spit into the wad of tissue and she scrubs the corners of my mouth.

  This is so embarrassing.

  “Jason, you look sharp tonight,” Papaw swells. “Strapping young man. Going to be a prizefighter someday.”

  I don’t know what he means. I don’t care. He tells me this all the time. I trust he knows what he is talking about. I tell myself that what he speaks is true. I stand full of pride between them. They are the only people in the world that would never hurt me, never speak a cruel word to me.

  “Just like me, son,” he continues. “I found the prize worth fighting for, fifty years ago. Luckiest prizefighter in the world.”

  The flash pops, my eyes blink in a brilliant haze. The outlines of the people in the room radiate beyond the boundaries of their flesh. For a brief moment, everything around me is made of light. The instant is euphoric, as if we are close to heaven. Both of their arms cradle my neck. I feel like they will always be with me right at the back of my being. I know God is a line of blood relatives—they stand single file behind me. Their spirits connect to my soul; they breathe life into my dreams. They give their breath for me to live. I can hear the awe of my mom, grandma, aunts, and cousins. This photograph is precious. They both squeeze me in a formidable hug. I think I know what the prize is now.

  I want to have a party like this one day.

  IN THE DARK

  1988

  LAKE RAY HUBBARD LIFTS HIS FACE MID-SNORT, the straw hangs out of his nose so that he looks like a one-tusked walrus. His dilated eyes have a perplexed look as a few granules plummet out of the end of the tube and back onto the glass-topped table. My gaze fixates on the ceiling and the heavy footsteps erupting from my grandparents’ bedroom on the second floor, a thousand miles away from what is happening in their living room and kitchen, but only a thirty-second walk. I am frozen. My heart races.

  This could be bad. Really, really bad.

  “Someone’s coming,” I say.

  “No shit,” he replies.

  We both instantly look at the kitchen table, which is covered in powder cocaine, a scale, a scoop, and some baggies. We think it looks like Al Pacino’s desk in the movie Scarface, though it’s only two eight-balls. This is a normal Sunday night. We bag and weigh all the twenties out for the week, set aside what is ours to snort, and get any ready we intend to trade to the neighbor for weed and speed. My grandparents go to bed at ten, so around midnight we usually proceed uninterrupted.

  “I hope it’s Freeda,” Lake Ray says.

  We both do. I can always sweet-talk my grandmother. My grandfather scares the shit out of me. His silence is very threatening.

  “Put up the weed,” Lake Ray Hubbard says. “I got this. Put these in your pocket.”

  I move into the living room with the Tylenol bottle full of little white amphetamines that he just handed me. The bag of weed is on an old Happy Days television tray I ate dinner on as a kid. I shove the tray under the couch and the bottle of pills between the arm and the cushion. I glance over at Lake Ray. He carefully arranges two plates upside down over our inventory and drapes a thin cotton tablecloth, previously shoved out of the way, over our mess. Then he turns off the kitchen light. The blue glow of the television engulfs the room. Lake Ray smiles confidently at me as he takes a seat in the recliner at the edge of the room. He leans back and the squeak of the rusty springs echoes the footsteps approaching the bottom of the stairwell.

  “Jase, you alone?” my grandmother asks from the darkness of the other room.

  “Lake Ray is here,” I say in a whisper, trying to appear considerate and quiet.

  “Oh, okay.” She’s standing at the entrance of the living room. “What you boys doing?”

  “Hey, Freeda,” Lake Ray whispers. “Watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall on MTV.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, at the far end of the couch, I see my grandmother clenching her purple robe shut in her left hand. I turn to look at her and smile.

  She is not wearing her glasses.

  I love my grandmother very much, but she does not see well, even when she is wearing her glasses. She wears spectacles for reading, but sometimes truly seeing requires too much effort.

  “Are we making too much noise?” I ask. “We’ll turn it down. You can go back to bed. We’ll be quiet.”

  I have been loud since I moved in here a couple of months ago. The downward spiral of my senior year covered three addresses. Here so that I could receive supervision, since my attempts at living on my own at the previous two houses were failures. After my mom got out of the loony bin, she gave our house back to my ex-stepdad as part of their divorce settlement. My mom and I moved into a small two-bedroom garden house. She left for Florida and a new job shortly after. My ex-stepdad got the first house that was ever ours. My mom got “healthy” and a chance to start over. I got the shaft, a two-bedroom garden home and a credit card to buy food.

  She actually said to me, “I don’t think it would be right for you to move halfway through your senior year.” After twenty-three different addresses, and fourteen school changes in twelve years, this was my mother’s way of saying, I am living my life and you are not invited.

  To celebrate, I threw the biggest party Mesquite had ever seen. Lake Ray Hubbard and I charged a three-dollar cover at the door for a keg and two thirty-two-gallon drums of trash-can punch. Earlier in the day we made a smart decision by moving all the furniture into one room. We collected almost seven hundred dollars. The small neighborhood convulsed with mayhem. Kids were everywhere. End-to-end cars blocked everyone’s driveway. You do not have to be popular to throw a good party, just offer teenagers the chance to get drunk and fuck shit up.

  The police came the first time at about ten thirty. They emptied the place. I acted innocent, as if hordes of uninvited teenagers had taken over the house. Never mind that they all carried fliers with a map I’d printed at Kinko’s. Some other kids started reproducing them for me at their schools. Thirty minutes after the cops left, the party doubled. Kids brought their own booze. Everyone drank, smoked pot, or got with someone upstairs. The shit was out of hand.

  What do I care, not my fucking house. We are getting healthy.

  When the same cops came back a second time after midnight, they found my grandmother and aunt beating kids into the street with their purses. Grandma came looking for my fourteen-year-old cousin, who was drunk with some girls upstairs. By that time, I was at the Waffle House tweaking my balls off.

  The party was infamous: so much so that Lee Ann Henry, cheerleader and outstanding Christian, called me on the phone the following Tuesday night to pray with me. I was surprised she knew my name. I took the phone call as a sign of success more than an opportunity to overcome failure.

  A week later, my mother gave me a stern w
arning over the telephone. I made sure to thank her for finally being happy and healthy. I was poison and getting away from me paid her big dividends.

  Now I am living back at my grandma’s for the first time since third grade. My grandparents can’t deal with me. I should not be their responsibility anyway.

  “No, y’all are fine. I just need a glass of water,” she says. “What is this crap you’re watching?”

  My grandmother seems perplexed and enthralled by the cartoon cult classic. Without taking her eyes off the screen, she moves around the sofa and sits on the edge.

  “This is weird, hammers marching.” She squints deeper into the screen.

  I squint deeper over Lake Ray’s shoulder, into the darkness of the kitchen.

  Go back to bed.

  I trace my tongue along the upper ridge of my gum line, the cocaine creating a numb sensation all over my mouth and nose. At the back of my throat, I taste the gasoline snot stuck to the walls. Lake Ray and I keep making eye contact and cannot sit still. We fidget and giggle like two junior high kids. Between the movie and the cocaine in my veins, I am having a hard time keeping it together. My grandmother seems unfazed and unaware. She sits in silence studying the images.

  “This garbage will rot your mind.”

  “Pink Floyd, Grandma. This movie is a classic.”

  “More like hippie drug stuff. I am too old for this shit, giving me a headache. I need an aspirin and some sleep,” she says, rubbing her forehead.