The only part of the daily grind I ever enjoy is a twenty-minute chunk after work, starting when I wedge myself into the apartment building’s public bathroom that everyone (the crusty, the wrinkled, the just plain disgusting) uses, because I’m too cheap to find a place to live with its own toilet.
The shabby wallpaper is the type that begins to peel only a few days after you put it up. I’ve got my ass sinking down the hole in the toilet seat, with one leg bent up near my forehead and the other against the opposite wall, suspending me over the murky water, gray in the poor lighting.
I hold the clear plastic syringe between my teeth and yank up my sleeve. In the nook of my arm is the familiar blue vein, and I slide the needle through the layers of skin and into my bloodstream. I can feel it rush into me as the water behind a dam that has just broken surges forward, and I watch the body of the syringe slowly drain of fluid until it is dry.
I stumble out of the stingy bathroom and go back to my apartment. Mrs. Livingston, the oldest resident in the building, is taking her mutt Prissy for a walk, and she frowns at me as I duck into the safety of my closed door.
I lock the door carefully behind me, and when I turn around, there’s a girl standing next to my microwave.
“Hi,” she says. I stare at her blankly, my brain coursing with the coke and heroin. Heroin is really morphine, with something or other stuck in there to make it the smack that it is. But then when you inject it, or snort it, or whatever, it just gets turned back into morphine again. Fun stuff.
“The door was open, but you weren’t here.”
No kidding.
Something about her looks familiar. Maybe it’s the way her breasts spill out of her too-small top, or the way she pouts her pinched lips. I vaguely remember her as that chick from the club I went to last night. How did she get my address? God. Has this freak been stalking me?
“Oh,” she says when she spots the syringe in my hand. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
She’s interrupting more than she knows. She’s interrupting my daily routine. My life. I stride over to the few lines of coke on my fold-out kitchen table, and her forehead wrinkles like a turtle’s fleshy neck. Honestly, the cocaine won’t do much for my high right now. By the time I snort it, it will take at least fifteen minutes for the inside of my nose to absorb the drug, and by then my speedballing high will be gone; you get high so much faster when you inject the stuff. The coke is really just there to ease the low of my first high. And she’s screwing it all up. No way is this chick going to mess with my time.
I snort a line, then another. I wipe my running nose with the back of my hand and, in an attempt to be polite, ask her if she wants some.
“No thanks,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t do drugs.”
“Well, I don’t drink,” I say, always the devil’s advocate as I recall her slurring and staggering last night. At least I don’t go wobbling around New York City stoned every night.
“Well, drinking’s okay,” she says. “Booze never hurt anybody.”
“Your drunk is my high,” I shrug. I feel the thick paste trickling out my nose again and go to wipe it, but this time it’s blood, not snot.
When I’m finished and my nose feels raw (I snorted all but one, and only because as I was about to take a sniff the chick said, “You’re going to do all of them?”), I culminate my routine by going out onto my little concrete balcony, the one asset of my New York City apartment, and smoke a reefer. She joins me, her nose wrinkling again. I’m tempted to tell her to stop crinkling her face up, or else it will stay that way.
Out here in the sunlight, she’s not as beautiful as I remember. Her body’s great, but she’s got dark circles under her eyes that she can’t seem to cover with her sallow concealer, and her nose looks like it belongs on a bird rather than a college student. The phrase “You’re pretty when I’m drunk” comes to mind. Or more appropriately, “You’re pretty when you’re drunk”, or “You’re pretty when I’m on ecstasy”.
“I like you,” she says. I blow out a perfect smoke ring. “More than all the other guys I meet at clubs. I decided I’d come here, because guys are too stupid to call the girls they hooked up with the night before. And then I remembered I hadn’t even given you my phone number, so you couldn’t have called.”
A tragedy, I’m sure.
Without any sort of warning she’s sort of thrown herself at me, and her kisses are a lot wetter than I remember. It’s when she starts groping at me that I realize in my dreamy state what she’s after. As if I have time for that! I push her away, maybe a little harder than I should have.
“What’s wrong?” she demands. She smoothes her hand over that tight shirt. “Don’t you want me?”
I might, if only I could smell her seductive flowery perfume or her fruity shampoo, but my sense of smell has been totally numbed by the coke. Maybe, if speedballing didn’t make me jittery, restless, and irritable, I would be able to guide my dancing hands to the curves of her hourglass figure. But today, that is not the case.
“What I want is for you to leave, and let me enjoy my effing high,” I say, and put out my cigarette right on her pretty little turquoise shirt. Now there’s a black mark in the middle of her perfect, round breast, and she screams and slaps me, even though I know from experience it doesn’t hurt all that much. I take her large wrist and graciously drag her to the door.
“You might be half decent if you weren’t a goddamn druggie,” she says with contempt. I yank open the door and wave her out; down the hall, Mrs. Livingston and her shiatsu have returned from their walk, and Prissy is barking like a mad cow, assuming cows could bark.
“Oh for Christ’s sake, shut up, Prissy!” I yell. The chick frowns at me, and Mrs. Livingston’s eyes widen. Then she puffs up her chest and marches down the hall toward us, Prissy in tow.
“Let me tell you, young man,” she begins, but I shove past her—she’s right in front of the staircase that this girl needs to go down to get the hell out, so that I can enjoy what’s left of my high. God, I don’t have time for any of this!
I will later swear to the police that it was an accident, and it really was. How could I have known that Mrs. Livingston, despite her anger like a ruffled rooster, is really just as fragile as any other old lady? When I push by her too hard, she begins to fall down the apartment’s carpeted stairwell. I try and catch her, I really do, but all I grab hold of is her gaudy necklace, which promptly breaks, and I hold the broken silver chain in my shaking hand.
The chick and I watch in horror as the woman goes thump, thump, thump down the stairs, and I know even before we stampede down to whisper her name and check for a pulse that she’s dead.
“You and your high!” the girl screeches, beginning to cry and beat at my chest with weak fists. She’s surprisingly hysteric for someone who never knew the woman or her annoying, yappy dog, whereas I feel nothing.
“If that isn’t a wake-up call, I don’t know what is,” she says, her voice shaking. But I’m all ready tuning her out, instead figuring out whether I have enough smack left this afternoon to make my eyes roll in their sockets.
