I met a glass man in a glass house. I was sixteen.
I don’t remember why I was there; I just know I was drifting off of the roof and back onto the floor, my body twisting like a contortionist, crawling
through cracks on the sidewalk into the vents of the brown-carpeted floor.
He asked me what my name was and I said, “Annie.”
He asked me if I meant to go on being called Annie and I said, “Maybe.”
The Glass Man let me in but he would not let me out.
His house had leather cushioning and hyperglycemic walls. His vinyl floors were made of acrophobia and his beds were made of needles. Once I was in his house I didn’t want to leave it. It was a bittersweet experience, to live in the glass man’s house. At least I wasn’t alone.
The Glass Man asked my purpose.
I answered him, “To breathe.”
And that was it. That’s it.
1.
I was taking loop diuretics. Alcohol is excessively caloric, so is the diet most druggies live off of: pizzas ordered by rich faggots with nothing better to do or eat, potato chips, Bacardi. Mostly the people who bought the drugs bought the food, and mostly they were fat, some morbidly so. I didn’t realize at first that the drugs would make me thin on their own, rid me of my appetite. But toward the beginning, before I found out, I used the pills, and I have the empty bottles and packages to prove it. Bumex, Edecrin, Lasix, Demadex—those are the prescription kinds you have to barter for. Ex-Lax, a less potent kind, could be stolen from the local grocery store.
In the very beginning, when I lived with my parents, I stole their prescription drugs. My mother had perpetual migraines and the Neurologist prescribed hardcore drugs for it. In general, three tabs of Oxycodone, that world-class number, plus one hunter-orange capsule of Gabapentin, could be traded for four or five hits of ecstasy, or two tablets of meth. Hydrocod, a heavy-duty pain pill, could be traded for bottles of laxatives. I even traded Valatrex, a large, dark blue pill that instantly ridded you of cold sores, to a girl with genital herpes, who was happy to take three or four pills in exchange for glass. The pills were meant to be consumed and get rid of sores on your lips, but each to their own.
I didn’t consider myself a drug dealer because we weren’t dealing, we were bartering.
They told me that marijuana isn’t bad for you, that it just kills brain cells, and brain cells get killed breathing. They said all it does to you is makes you relax and causes you to lose your short term memory. But I didn’t want to forget anything, I wanted to remember every detail, so I never smoked marijuana, or cigarettes, either. I smoked crack, and I did meth, and I heard that wouldn’t do anything to me but whoever said that, I can’t remember his name but his face is clear in my mind, whoever that was is a liar.
* * *
I didn’t like the way he was staring at me.
I was young, fourteen, and he was sixteen at least, a Junior, an upperclassman, and staring at me.
I looked at the tiles on the floor, opalescent patterns forming half-squares connected with black lines. I looked at my shoes, black sketchers with one broken shoelace tucked into the webbing, looked at the water-fountain, the cafeteria line. Looked back up.
Now he had a smile to go along with that near-opaque stare, partially hidden behind a canopy of thick, curly hair. It was dyed black with white-ish blonde undertones, a thick blue streak, a quirky side part, bangs. It looked like he spent a lot of time on it but never washed it. And that smile-that Aladdin-esque smile, it was a lie; I know it was a lie because it looked so safe.
I chewed my nails and flipped my hair so it would cover half of my face. He grinned and looked the other way, as though thinking, then back at me.
Then he stood up, separating from the gothic-lesbian-druggie group of friends he was with, and like Moses parting the Red Sea, came at me through the thick cafeteria.
I was very logical about it. I looked the other way, pretending I hadn’t seen him, and ducked into the ASB offices, pulling out a stack of paperwork and beginning the long job of filing it away for future reference. I was ASB Secretary.
My memory amazes me. The old Annie was overachiever extraordinaire.
I’m not going to be stupid and cliché and say something like “that was the poignant memory in my life, that was that life-altering second,” because a), it would be stupid to blame my problems on Trev, and b), it would be inaccurate. Trev didn’t get me into drugs. I got him into them.
He didn’t come straight through the ASB door, instead he circled around to the elementary playground outside and smiled at me through the window, waving and gesturing for me to open the side door. When I saw him there I grinned. He was so unobtrusive, so harmless.
I opened the door for him.
He walked into the glass house.
* * *
I used to smell things, when I lived at home. Things that are typical in every normal home, like Lysol and permanent ink markers and dry detergent. I loved the smell of detergent, I sometimes ran my fingers through the salt-like grains and lifted them to my nose and inhaled until I could taste them in my throat. I smelled the Jergens soap and the lavender Soft Scrub while scrubbing the toilets and sinks and bathtubs. I liked to stand in the dogs’ shed and sniff the scent of new wood panels and dog food.
I just liked smelling things. Normal things like cookies and flowers and perfumes had no real appeal to me, but I picked up thick, old books and held them to my nose until I couldn’t distinguish the smell anymore, and I intentionally hid cleaners and Pine Sol and dusting supplies in my bedroom, and rub the soaps on my walls. Not so I could get high off of the fumes, just because I found the scents addicting.
At my new house, at the drug house, there aren’t any of those old familiar things to smell. There’s liquid detergent that has no enticing scent and the only soap in the bathroom is Suave shampoo, thick as Jell-O and as artificially blue. Everything smells like B.O. and the stench is ground into the carpets and the greasy walls, and everybody laughs too loudly at The Simpson’s on T.V., and I don’t even like the Simpson’s, makes me feel my brain slowly seeping onto the floor.
There is a dog, though, his name is Bartholomew. Pete Stoner (yes that is his name) trained him to sniff out and bark at policemen, but that’s all he really does. Bartholomew is a Chihuahua, he’s a real yippy thing, gets on everyone’s nerves, craps on the furniture, that stuff, but if a policeman comes around we figure we’ll have just enough time to feed Bartholomew all the evidence and let the dog overdose to keep us out of jail. We’ve already done that to our last pet, Meow The Cat. Lauren saw the cops coming and yanked our stash up and mixed it in the cat food, then let Meow The Cat out the back. She died on our porch but she was just a stray anyway and I didn’t want to go to jail. Really all I lamented was the loss of our stash.
Bartholomew isn’t too different from Meow The Cat, we picked him up at an animal shelter and he’ll eat basically anything, because we forget to feed him most of the time, and mostly he eats old pizza crusts and stands there shaking. Well join the club, Bartholomew.
After snorting, Trev and I went outside and sat on the back porch. I still have my bangs cut to go over my face so no one can really see me, but Trev is always wanting to push it out of my thin, lined face so he can get a look at me. I look older than I am.
We sat and looked at the sky and said it was a curtain to keep the dust out, and the stars were poked holes in it, and Trev said that the ozone can evaporate for all he cares, and if the sky keeps evaporating too all there will be is miles and miles of light. That made me laugh, because there’s nothing wrong with light, but he said it with his nose all wrinkled.
* * *
It’s Monday, so I have to go to school.
Some people say that school is irrelevant, because we don’t have a future anyway, but I go maybe three or four days a week and get Ds and slide through because I figure, it can’t hurt, and it’s free, and a High School Degree is apparently something to be desired, say the infomercials, and I don’t want to be forty trying to get my high school degree through some stupid extortionate online program.
So I go to school with my hair in my face, and wearing my shabby clothing, make-up mussed, and I drag Trev and Lauren along with me when I can and they can. People in the hallways stare at me and it makes me wish I had never been an ASB secretary. The teachers and guidance counselor called it a “fall from grace.” I like to call it “treading lightly on the path to enlightenment.” My mother called it “Damning and ridiculous.”
Take your pick.
(meh there will be more)
But yes, *cracks knuckles, puts on "bitch hat"* Let's get down to it!