by B. L. Morgan
A part of my mind wanted to scream, “Get off me!” The other part of my mind didn’t want it to stop. It felt too good to stop, so cold and so good.
I closed my eyes and let it happen and rode it out to the end.
Part One
Good Morning Sunshine
This is when
The night crawlers
Come out.
...The Walker in Darkness
Chapter One
Symptoms June 8th
I feel like shit!
The sun ripped in through the window, scalded my eyeballs and drilled a path right to the center of my brain.
It didn’t feel good either.
I fell off the couch kicking my clothes out of the way and staggered to the window. The light slapped me in the face harder than an insulted two dollar whore.
Jerking the shade down I wondered what the hell or who in the hell I got into last night, but the slate was clean and I couldn’t remember a dam thing.
My skin felt hot, rough, and itchy, almost like I had sunburn but shit, I’m not one of those idiots who lay their asses out in the sun trying to look like a baked potato.
I’m a night owl.
Every since Sherry was murdered and I came back to this pit named East St. Louis I’d boarded the bus holding a one-way ticket to hell. The driver of that bus was Jack Daniels or any other whiskey I could get my hands on.
This wasn’t the first morning I woke up feeling like shit. To tell you the truth I couldn’t remember the last time I woke up feeling good. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt good about anything at all.
But this morning was something else.
I felt totally like shit. Every part of me hurt. Stumbling across the room toward the bathroom I snatched up my watch from the end table next to the couch.
The hands pointed to 4:30.
I glanced back at the window. The glare through the shade was painful.
“No fucking way,” I said to myself but realized it was true.
It was 4:30 in the afternoon.
I shaved and the mirror showed me that whatever or whoever got hold of me the night before beat the living shit out of me.
My eyes were red. That was kind of normal. But the dark Béla Lugosi circles underneath them was something new. So was my white as death skin color.
“I don’t give a fuck,” I told my reflection. It’s not like I’m a contender for Mr. America anyway.
After I scraped all the hair from my face I staggered back out into the front room.
Tom, my big calico cat ducked in through the window. He glided across the room and pounced to the arm of the couch looking at me with wary eyes.
He sat straight up and stared at me. Heading toward the kitchen I told Tom, “I hope you had a better night than I did.”
Tom arched his back and hissed at me.
“You little fucker,” I told him. “Do that again and I’ll teach you how to fucking fly.”
Then a thought hit me and I breathed into my palm and then sniffed at it. The smell of my own breath almost made me hurl whatever was in my stomach right to the floor.
I shook my head and blew out a breath to get a lungful of air that wasn’t tainted by my own fumes. I glanced back at Tom eyeing me from the couch.
“I guess I don’t blame you,” I said and snatched a pint of Old Black Label Whiskey out of the fridge.
This aught to help, I thought and headed to the shower.
The steaming water massaged me with a thousand smooth hot wet fingers and I stood with the whiskey bottle in my left hand with my head bowed beneath the flow spraying from the showerhead. With my other hand I ran my fingers through my hair and felt the water scald into my scalp.
It burned and soothed.
Pulling my head back from beneath the shooting water I opened my eyes. The water was hitting me on the chest and sliding down the rest of me. I saw on my right side directly above where I figured my kidney was there was a pink mark.
The pink mark was round and thick. It looked like a scar from a very old wound.
It touched it with my right hand.
That’s funny, I thought. I didn’t remember having a scar there, but not remembering it didn’t mean a dam thing. I get shot and stabbed so much that losing track of one of my scars is no big deal.
The water flowed over me and I stood there for a time not moving then remembered the Old Black Label. I knew one slug from that should take the edge off this hangover. A young fresh buzz always killed the old weak one.
The young comes in, the old goes out.
It was the way of the world.
I turned my back to the spray and brought the bottle up to my lips. The warm liquid full of alcohol, full of poison, full of the promise of bliss flowed over my tongue and down my throat. It burned going down.
That burn was a welcome flame.
It burned coming back up being violently expelled with a strong harsh stomach spasm that spewed the mouthful of whiskey and some ugly streamers of red and brown crud all over the wall.
I steadied myself for a moment with my right hand leaning against the wall and looked at the mess splattered there.
Jesus, I thought. That’s never happened before.
I held the bottle up and looked at the remaining liquid through the glass.
Nothing was growing in there so I figured it must be alright.
I sat the bottle on the edge of the tub and washed the vomit off the wall with the shower spray.
What a fucking way to start my day.
Chapter Two
A Friend in Need
Somehow I found my way to Johnny’s Bar and Grill and stumbled in through the door.
It was around six and the sun, that merciless son-of-a-bitch was still around two hours from the evening horizon.
While walking over the sun felt like flames on my skin. This was an ordinary summer day in East St. Louis. The temperature hovered in the eighties. I grew up in temperatures like this and was used to it. But for some reason, on that day walking over to Johnny’s Bar And Grill I felt like I was on fire. My skin felt like I’d been staked out in the Mojave Desert by Indians and left to die.
Johnny saw me as I stumbled through the door. With as dimly lit as he keeps his place I must have blinded everyone inside when I came in.
“Close the God-dam door,” Johnny shouted holding up his hand to shield his California Raisin face from the light. “Were you born in a barn?”
The door swung shut behind me.
My eyes adjusted faster to the darkness than they had to the light and an instant later I saw that there was only one other guy in the place other than me and Johnny.
I walked toward Johnny.
On the TV mounted over the back of the bar Star Trek was playing.
The other guy in the tavern looked like a vagrant. He was nursing a beer. I knew he had to be a paying customer or Johnny would have thrown him out on his ass.
The guy wasn’t paying much attention to Star Trek until Uhura appeared. Then he leaned forward and cocked his head to the side like he was trying to get a good view up under that tiny skirt she always wore.
I plopped myself down on a barstool directly in front of Johnny.
My best friend looked at me real close.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I asked.
“Man you look like shit,” he said. “I mean, you usually look like shit but today you look totally fucked up.”
“I got a head cold.”
“You got something.”
The drunk, a few barstools to my left mumbled, “I’m trying to listen to Spock.”
Johnny told him, “Shut the fuck up. We ain’t talking to you.”
And he did shut up.
“You had anything to eat?” Johnny asked.
“Nothing.”
“It shows.”
Johnny stepped a few feet down the bar to his left and reached under the counter. He came back out with a large box of Dominoe’s Pizza.
>
He laid the box on the bar and flipped open the lid. Three pieces were already gone but the rest still looked fresh.
“I got this about an hour ago. Figured I’d eat it all night. Go ahead and dig in.” he said. “You look like you need it.”
The pizza did smell good. It was a supreme with lots of sausage, pepperoni and tomato slices.
I reached for a piece.
The drunk said, “You didn’t offer me none.”
“Ain’t going to either,” Johnny told him. “You come in here all the time trying to get free beers, complaining about what’s on the tube. Be happy I ain’t kicked your ass out.”
The aroma from the pizza filled my head. Spicy meat, cheese, grease, bread, it all smelled great.
The box was in front of me. The pizza slice was in my hand.
“Thanks bro,” I told Johnny and took a large bite.
I chewed and it tasted great, all the flavors blended together. Fantastic!
I swallowed and took another bite.
“This is good,” I said through a mouthful of meat and cheese and swallowed again.
My stomach hitched like a car back firing.
I gagged and my entire body was racked by a violent convulsion. Like a sprung trap-door my mouth flew open and I spewed chewed pieces of pizza and brown, green and red crud into the box of pizza.
Johnny jumped back to get away from my wild projectile vomiting.
“God-dam boy!” Johnny yelled. “If you didn’t like Dominoes all you had to do was just say so.”
The drunk looked at me with pure horror on his face.
“You want the mother fucking pizza now?” Johnny asked the drunk who shook his head no. “Shit, my man just fixed this bitch up just for you.”
I stood up from the bar. Spots danced in front of my eyes.
“Sorry about that man,” I said and started to say something else except I didn’t get it out. My legs collapsed and I sat down hard on the floor.
Johnny came flying around the bar.
“What the fuck is wrong with you John?” He asked and helped me back onto the stool.
“I wish I knew,” I told him and held the bar with both hands to keep from falling over. Everything around me was pitching and rolling like I was in a rowboat in a hurricane.
Chapter Three
Julia
In the emergency room of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital me and Johnny was given a form. We were told to fill in the blanks and to sit and wait.
Let me tell you, that waiting shit is for the birds.
I filled in the empty spots on the paper giving my medical life history. A lot of that form I had to leave blank. Like the part that asked about medical coverage and insurance.
My thing had always been that I wouldn’t live long enough to need that stuff so why pay for it.
People came in through the emergency door. A few were bleeding and talking about the basketball game they were playing where they got into a fist fight with the other team.
You dumb mother-fuckers, I thought. I bet you didn’t win the game, got pissed off, then got your ass whipped too.
A guy walked in sneezing and hacking a cough out.
I looked at him.
If you sit next to me, I said to myself. I’ll strangle you right here. I feel bad enough already without having you throwing your germs at me.
The lights were bright neon and all the walls were white.
My eyeballs felt like they wanted to scream.
Antiseptic smells from medicines and hell I don’t know, other germ killing shit, drifted all around us. If I hadn’t thrown up twice already and had a completely empty stomach I would have heaved right then and there.
To tell you the truth, if I thought I was going to up chuck again I’d have staggered right over to the check-in counter and threw up on it to get somebody’s attention.
We waited and we waited.
Then we waited some more.
“God-dam,” I told Johnny. “I wish somebody was fucking sick here. If they were, then they wouldn’t’ be trying to make us die of old age.”
“This is the way the healthcare system works in this country,” Johnny told me. “The rich get what they want, when they want it. The rest of us ... we wait.”
“Well thank you Dan Rather for your insightful report,” I answered him. “The day I want to watch the news is the day I’ll drop dead from boredom.”
“I ain’t telling you nothing but the truth bro.”
“The truth sucks,” I told him.
“The truth is the truth,” he answered.
I stood up and stretched. The room spun around me. It was spinning so much today I was actually getting used to it.
“I ain’t fucking staying here,” I told Johnny.
Johnny stood up.
“Man, I took the time to bring your ass down here,” he said. “The least you can do is wait for them to give you something.”
An orderly, a clean looking polite young black guy walked over to me. He put his hand on my arm.
“Sir, we’ll get to you as soon as we can,” he said. “Please sit back down.”
I looked this guy, who seemed like a good hard working medical student in the eyes.
“You best take your hand off my arm before I give you a reason to test your dental coverage,” I told him.
He let go and backed up.
“I’ll take care of this,” a woman’s voice spoke up. It was a familiar voice. The voice of a woman who I tried to, but never quite had been good enough for.
It was Julia Richardson.
She led me into an examining room and closed the door behind us.
I looked Julia up and down. She filled out her nurse uniform just right, tasty dark meat and not too many potatoes.
I looked at her sweet chocolate face and her big lips made me feel like licking my lips.
I resisted that urge.
“Take a seat,” Julia told me and pointed at a chair beside one of those doctor tables that had the fold out leg holders where they tell you to spread-em.
I sat.
She looked at the form I filled out and pursed her lips then looked at me. She wasn’t smiling.
Julia went to a drawer pulled out, and unwrapped a thermometer, and a tongue depressor.
“Your complexion is pasty,” she said.
“I’ll admit it,” I told her. “I am a white boy.”
Julia didn’t even crack a smile although I figured she wanted to.
“Stick your tongue out,” she said, her tone was flat and all business.
“Get up on the table,” I told her.
Julia raised one eyebrow.
“You hop up on the table,” I continued. “Hike your skirt up and spread your legs and I’ll stick my tongue out and get to work.”
That got a crooked smile from her.
She looked in my face and now it was my turn to be all serious. That made her bust out laughing.
“You’re never going to change,” she said.
“Don’t want to,” I told her.
“You need to,” Julia said. “What I see here without a real examination is that you look worn out. You look like your drinking and tom-catting around is catching up to you.”
“Leave my cat out of this,” I told her.
“I’m not joking,” she said. “The way you’re living, you’re aging fast. People who live like you do don’t live to see old age.”
“So who gives a fuck?” I said and the words came out louder than I intended them to.
She took a pause.
“John ... I do,” she told me.
“So, that’s why you don’t return my phone calls, because you care; Right? That’s why you don’t want to give it another chance.”
“I have a daughter to raise,” Julia told me. “I can’t have a man around who’s drunk most of the time.”
“And what fucking reason do I have to stay straight?” I continued. “Maybe if we were together I’d have a reason to stop drinkin
g.”
“That’s not how it works,” Julia said. “You clean your act up for a good long time then we’d see what happens.”
“You think I’d let some God-dam broad tell me what the fuck to do?” I said and now I was almost at the point of shouting. “You must be on fucking drugs if you think that. And I ain’t even laid the meat to you either. What makes you think you got the right to tell me shit?”
Julia’s flat business tone came back. She sounded almost like a telephone message you’d hear if you called a bank after hours.
“We don’t have anything to talk about,” Julia told me.
“Why don’t you go get me a real doctor,” I said. “The last time I heard, you were still a nurse.”
“And proud of it too,” she said as she glanced at my form. Julia then glanced at me then quickly looked away.
“You don’t have any insurance,” she told me. “A doctor won’t even look at you and we’re not supposed to treat you.”
“That’s fucking great. The good old US of A, home of the brave and land of the free, if you’re fucking rich, right?”
“I don’t make the rules I just do with them what I can,” She told me.
Julia went back into the cabinet again. She came out with a large brown bottle. She handed it to me.
“This is all I can do for you,” Julia said. “These are very powerful multivitamins. The combination will help build up your immune system. My advice to you, whether you take it or not, is that you take two of these a day, get a lot of rest and eat regular good meals.”
Without another word and without a backward glance Julia turned and strode out the door letting it slam shut behind her.
Chapter Four
Meat
Me and Johnny was at the hospital a long time. When we went outside evening was starting to fall and I was starting to feel a hell of a lot better. The sky was a deep blue rapidly darkening to a welcome blackness. To the west the reddish glow of the fading sun could still be seen.
Light was leaving this world and night was on the way.
