Be Safe

by Doug Weaver

  “Sex is great.”

  “Sex is a place holder – something you do in between doses. I mean, when all is said and done, it’s the drugs that I like – the ritual of everything – and the high, of course. Especially when I first started slamming the shit into my veins when I had decent veins, damn! How much fun was that! I used to love to jack off with the register, just to show off, you know, when you draw up some blood and it’s really easy because your veins are pretty much pristine, and you push the blood back in and draw it up again and again – just like jacking off. And if you’re really good, you can push a little bit more of the drug in each time you push it down. I love that shit. I bet that would have freaked the hell out of Rick.”

  “Could be.”

  “When they told him that AIDS probably wasn’t going to kill him, he was probably all relieved and shit and probably said ‘Thank god,’ and drove to the nearest AA meeting. You can’t point out to him that he’s probably just a pussy who didn’t really enjoy getting high.”

  “Because that would piss him off. You don’t want to piss off the boss.”

  “You gotta stick to the Cri-Life recovery narrative. You gotta keep your CDW happy. You gotta keep ‘em all happy.”

  “Okay.”

  “One more little bit of advice. You gotta work the Twelve Steps here – I’ve only been here for a little over two months, but here’s the thing. When you get to Step Four, which is writing down all the shitty things you’ve ever done that you feel guilty about, when you read that list to your sponsor, you have to cry. If you don’t cry, you’ll have to stay on First Phase or Second Phase, which means you have to stay here on the premises all the time – no weekend passes or anything, which would really suck, so” –

  “Remember to cry.”

  “Yeah. Because Rick will call your sponsor to find out if you cried or not.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Because it’s supposed to be cathartic, like confessing your sins to a priest.”

  “Or taking a shit.”

  “Exactly. There’s a few guys you need to stay away from too. You’ll see who they are. Really loud. Really amazingly annoying. There’s a couple of guys who’re here from some prison up north, they’re like gargoyles. They hate gay guys, but they so don’t want to get sent back up state for being anti-gay – there’s this whole You-need-to-respect-everybody-here-no-matter-who-they-are-or-what-they’ve-done-because-everybody-deserves-a-chance doctrine that Rick and all the CDWs really take seriously here, so these two guys – Robert #1 and Robert #2 – they’re both named Robert. Robert #1 is good-looking and kind of slender with a ton of tattoos – and he’s got some brains. I stay away from him because I get the sense that he’d just as soon stab you as say hello, and he’s totally unpredictable. But Robert #2 is interesting. I hung out with him in the med line once – he takes meds for some condition, like me, and I guess maybe you too, but I don’t think he’s got AIDS, but probably some kind of behavioral-type of drugs because – well you’ll see – there’s not much inside his skin beyond an on/off switch. Anyway, I’m standing right next to him and he’s watching me read one of those announcements they tape to the window that says who’s gotta go where, like doctor visits and going to court and the various times and shit. And I’d never strike up a conversation with somebody like Robert #2 because he’s got bad skin and he’s really short and fat and looks kinda like Quasimodo – they’re a real couple, Robert #1 and Robert #2. Inseparable. But Robert #2’s watching me read this announcement really closely, and he, just like we were friends or whatever, he comes up to me and says he doesn’t know how to read. And I just look at him – I mean it’s kind of obvious I’m not going to try to teach the guy to read while we’re waiting in the med line – but the interesting thing is that he’s not like upset or anything about this – he was kind of laughing when he told me this. But I asked him – because I right away wondered how he got through school – even like elementary school, because I thought everybody has to know a little bit of how to read to make it to high school. But I said something that sounded really fucking lame, like Oh, really? which isn’t a real question but whatever. But he comes up to me and he seems sincere, but still kind of amused, and he points to the words in the sentences and he kind of like confesses to me that he’s always been good with the concept of reading and comprehending words, like he knows there need to be words that signify things like ‘dog’ and ‘apple’ and ‘pussy,’ but what’s always freaked him out were the spaces between the words, like he was completely freaked out by the spaces because he didn’t know what was happening with them, like the boundaries of each word were like little cliffs you could fall off of that emptied out into black holes or whole areas of uncharted space that exist around and in back of the words, where the spaces lead to – like there was a whole universe with its own rules going on behind the words and the sentences. But the wholesale unknown of what lay beyond each word wasn’t really his issue. Robert #2, being a good dope fiend, was completely okay with accepting that overdoses might kill you. He was okay with that kind of unknown, the really big stuff, which, in most dope fiends’ minds, makes them sort of Explorer Scouts or whatever or heroes who cheat death on a regular basis – that whole line of bullshit that we’re all guilty of – I mean, I would totally rather die of an overdose than maybe one of those old fashioned diseases like Kaposi’s Sarcoma or pneumocystis pneumonia or some shit. Robert #2 was afraid of a much smaller part of the unknown, basically of not knowing how to act in the spaces between and what was going on in back of the words, and he was afraid he’d be made fun of – like there were people and governments – at least some kind of rules back there that he thought he needed to know so he could blend in and hang out without having to study to learn the rules, which makes sense, because he was probably afraid that there was like some kind of Code with all the rules governing all this unknown space behind the words, which it’s pretty obvious would just compound Robert #2’s problem, because he’d have to know how to read in order to make sense of the Code, unless it was like part of some kind of oral tradition, which makes as much sense as there being a written down Code with all these rules, but Robert #2 wasn’t thinking about oral traditions versus written. And I totally got it, because I mean, I’ve been in that same spot so many times before. I think a lot of us have. Like remember the first time you dropped acid and went to a gay bar – or even if you didn’t take any acid – and you felt like everybody was watching you, which they probably were, but that kind of scrutiny usually ended with a huge payoff, like getting a huge cock up your ass at the end of the night or whatever, which, if you’re blazing on acid, even if you weren’t a hundred percent homosexual at the beginning of the night, that kind of experience would have made you a true believer by the next day. And this confession by Robert #2 – not about taking cocks – but the whole being freaked out by reading thing made me think that this guy, if he wasn’t so goddamned ugly, would be cool to hang out with. That and his other half, Robert #1, who’s really a pretty scary dude, and he totally influences Robert #2, like about a hundred percent.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know. What do you say to something like that? I thought it was really interesting though. Hey, there’s another guy that smells bad – a black guy who always wears a long black leather coat kinda like Neo’s coat, no matter if it’s cold or hot, and they say he never bathes, but he’s got money because he’s always got tons of cigarettes. He’s from New York – he was a reggae singer in New York, kind of famous I think. But he’s got a thing for Catholic priests – and if you’re out of cigarettes, all you gotta do is tell him you’re a priest and he’ll buy you a whole carton of whatever kind of cigarettes you want.”

  “Cool.”

  “It’s almost 4:30. Let’s go eat.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It
never occurs to me that people might rely on God to help them seek my ruin. It’s a weird thought: Please God, help me to smite Bert. I know I’m not perfect by any stretch – even when described in a less than charitable terms my life can easily appear as no more than an endless series of mistakes. But god? It would be thrilling if it weren’t actually happening to everybody here in Korn’s house, which is going to include me in about ten seconds.

  I hold my breath and enter. Korn shuts the front door quick and tells me to head back to the rear of the house where everybody hangs out. Even as recently as a few months ago Korn used to glance quickly up and down the street to see if the Glicks or the Silversteins were watching when he answered the front door – but he knows better now. They’re always watching, which makes any hopeful admonishment from Korn or anybody else here to be safe pretty much a moot point now.

  It’s quiet inside. No music; no TV – just the muted jargon of water sloshing in the washing machine – a syncopated distracted rhythm that’s only slightly more energetic than tapping your foot to the beat of some dance song from the Bee Gees, which makes the sound easy to ignore; and of course there’s the constant low even hum of the drier. The distant sound of a metal spoon or fork clanks into the kitchen sink. It doesn’t hit any errant dishes, just the porcelain of the sink. The vague sound of a guy crying somewhere way in the back, the sound muffled by multiple walls and furniture and whatnot.

  People talk at the rear of the house, but because of its rambling design it’s impossible to make out much more than fragments of a few sharply angled vowels and some accented plosives and fricatives, but no actual words. It’s a sprawling ranch-style affair with room after room laid out in a naively generous manner that speaks to its provenance: that time in Los Angeles when city planning relied on simply the property of addition to shape its neighborhoods and its dwellings. There’s so much money and so much land all you have to do is add a room or a half-acre of land…whatever strikes your fancy.

  I walk toward the back. Jimmy S. is lying on the floor in the hallway asleep. But he’s deep in spaz sleep meaning he’s pretty much a scientific anomaly. Meth leaks out of his pores, which smells weird, and he jumps around when he sleeps like he’s the poster child for the dangers of meth use: Don’t Let This Happen To You. And everybody kind of knows that he’s not jumping around because he’s dreaming intense shit – I mean even if he is dreaming, which is doubtful, it’s probably dreams about boring stuff like eating breakfast or slicing up bits of okra for dinner – nothing fun anyway. I feel kind of sorry him for a minute because all that jumping around is caused by burned out neurons because he’s awake more than anybody in the universe and his poor brain connections just want to take a little ten-minute break, just a little breather. But then it’s kind of annoying too, like I wonder what’d happen if the place got raided and the cops see him flopping around like that in the hallway. I wonder if seeing him in the middle of this bouncing around would facilitate an arrest of everybody, and if so, if they’d arrest him or call for the paramedics to wheel him away on a gurney. Or would everybody inside the house be arrested en masse, where the whole process could be boiled down into a process that’s like a simple equation where there would be no difference in weight or importance between buyers/users or visitors and residents, like everybody here at Korn’s house would be assigned the same role of integer no matter what their standing here was; whether they lived here or not, regardless of the degree of criminality influencing them. And the mathematical process – the work that math does like addition or multiplication – all that would equal the act of making an arrest. And all law enforcement – all the cops – would adhere to the rules of the inverse property of multiplication where each of six cops equals 1/6th of an arrest in total, and then, invoking the identity property of multiplication, this number of cops is multiplied by four meth freak visitors plus one meth freak owner plus two meth freak renters equals one arrest times seven meth freaks, or each arrest would equal 1/7th of an entire bust, or if some people, by virtue of standing or taste, would create a new and ever more complicated algorithm that would result in what might amount to more or fewer arrests or just arrests that have different levels of seriousness.

  I step over Jimmy. I don’t want to wake him – he’s easier to take when he’s unconscious, because I kind of don’t want to hear about how much money he made at the Spotlight, that hustler bar where most of Hollywood’s dowager empresses hang out and are willing to spend their monthly stipends on bargain cocktails and overpriced cocks hanging between the legs of over-aged prostitutes who’ve been banished eastward past La Brea because all the millennial youth seem to land in West Hollywood – and who in his right mind would choose Grandpa Walton over some teenager? Jimmy S. is over fifty, so whatever. Here’s just a sample of Jimmy’s prose style, which he’d posted on a homo hook-up site in order to entice some eligible swinging dicked youngster into an extended period of nasty butt-fucking:

  Hey – Lol wtf just saying P.arty N’ P.lay lovrvthe fack that I can saythatvn love my life at the same time I say lol tex message ohhh wait callll lol anyways love clouds but get to th point horned out –porNo Gay straight dude fantasy love it my topfav am sure xxctra lol in more then one –well hey crazy bread crumbs as a favorite in highschool lol Colton live life to say dsmm werar I a momas boys oooo lol Monique love her n say day onevlol new years lol fuck u knocknout –pingrr lol nkuckel our life’s u–say can’t oooo nonloco jutvubresf love ubmessage mebyeah easier 02-0

  Smoke Yes, Drugs Often.

  8”, Cut, HIV don’t know. Prefer meeting at: Your Place.

  Jimmy comes off as a guy who is completely devoid of guile – not that he’s not bright or completely uneducated, but more like somebody who was pretty straight forward, even if he didn’t want to be. But posting something like this is pretty damned clever. Who could resist that? And really, if you weigh what the alternative might consist of – a recitation of academic achievements and theoretical bullshit that would only attract someone with an equally rigid stick up his ass, this is a pretty sweet little composition that would serve as the honey to lure any number of skateboard riding youths and whatnot out onto the pavement and into his bed sheets. He must have been higher than fuck when he wrote it though, because he’s not a complete moron when he’s not completely twacked. Note the HIV disclosure at the end of this missive: “don’t know,” which in many minds absolves the posting party of the responsibility of intent.

  Jimmy’s still a pretty good looking guy though – square jaw, red hair done in a low-grade pompadour on good days. And his body’s still intact, meaning if you see him from a distance he might be mistaken for somebody who’s maybe fifteen or even twenty years younger than he is, but as he gets closer and closer, what strikes you is that gravity is in the middle of an all-out assault on the tensile strength of his skin until he gets right up next to you, and then he just looks like a piece of driftwood in shrink-wrapped flesh-colored bed sheets. The worst part of Jimmy S. though is talking to him. He’s one of those poor guys who’s been stuck on the same sex rush since the first time he got high – really high – like back in the 1990s or even the ‘80s, and he squanders his entire high following the dictates of an enfeebled imagination, which amounts to seeing a pickup truck parked outside a house or even an apartment building during daylight hours and deducing that it portends wild, drug-fueled homosexual activity going on behind the walls, the reasoning being something like this:

  Truck = man; parked outside a dwelling during daylight hours = shirked responsibility of a job = obviously completely twacked like you = either in the middle or at the end of a previous night’s group sex, which has ebbed for the moment, so they would be happy to see a new piece of meat (like your own damned self) introduced into their orgy, so find a way to get inside, but do it quickly because your high won’t last all day.

  No one wants to be subjected to yet
another one of these descriptions of sexual searching – they’ve earned a place in kind of a micro mythos on Kenmore Avenue – and anyplace else where Jimmy hangs out. For some reason I stop myself from muttering the words Poor Jimmy – it’s so easy to judge somebody else, especially for doing stuff that you yourself are guilty of – at least mostly anyway. A lot of the meth addicts I know – including yours truly – have been stuck in that same endless sexual loop, but I must say that mine was imbued with a certain ironic quality from the get go.

  I was dating this cute young blond – a barback at one of LA’s more twisted bars called Plug. I loved that place for any number of reasons, but mostly because if Plug had had a motto, it would have been: If you can’t do it at Plug, you can’t do it anywhere. Anyway, I started seeing Billy on pretty much a regular basis – and for somebody with a practically non-existent cock in terms of size he was absolutely great sex. Billy and I conspired together about sexual fantasies, conjuring far-fetched scenarios where we’d insinuate ourselves into the lives of various men around town whose personas were shaped by their professions: Airline pilots, cops, construction managers, Muslim clerics – you get the picture – and making ourselves so desirable that sex with these men would just seem like the natural progression of things; that wild butt-fucking that might remain out of the ordinary in general would become inevitable with us. Even though our plans never matured past the conspiratorial stage, I’m pretty sure that this time with Billy planted the seeds that led to me waking up one morning dressed in black leather motorcycle jacket, high-heeled shoes and come-fuck-me fishnet black nylons and a slutty red skirt inside a confessional at St. Vibianes Cathedral, which is in Downtown LA. My recollection is spotty but I remember that I’d slammed a ton of meth early in the evening and headed off on foot for the Alameda Corridor, that engine of economic vitality for pretty much all of the Southland, and which is known to be populated on a twenty-four-hour basis by swarthy Hispanic workers who unload the never-ending river of freight trains laden with everything from Froot Loops to Chevrolets and who I believed I could entice into taking advantage of me. But there I was at about eight in the morning sitting in this confessional – just waking up and sweating like a pig. I have little recollection of exactly how I got myself inside the church, but I’m pretty certain that at the time my little foray into Catholic land – since up until that time 99.9 percent of the thresholds I’d crossed in my life had little to do with salvation or resurrection – or even sin for that matter. Even though in college I spent an impaired night in Russell’s apartment discussing the word threshold itself with a number of folks who fancied themselves members of the thinky class when really we were just high as fuck, because the ‘h’ in “threshold” seems to be doing double duty, forming the final member of the sh sibilant sound while at the same time it’s also reported for the substantial duty of being the initial letter of hold: thresh/hold, which is like pretty much the opposite of the ‘l’-heavy proper name Llewellen, where the repeated ‘l’s are pretty much just decoration.