8/21

VILE SELF PORTRAITS, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

There’s something inside of me that wants me dead.

I’m thinking this as I cut up matte powder on a paperback copy of Antwerp with an expired red debit card. Bolaño never touched junk and his liver still went kaput.

Maybe he shouldn’t have faked it.

I sniff two strips and tip my head back to let the drugs drip into my brain. I’m in the front seat of The Saturn shitbox sedan with the book in my lap and a rolled bill in my hand. The sky is oozing. I’m a dead man breathing dust. Sniffing it up. Slipping through the sieve for sand. I’m outside the band’s practice space at some near-abandoned warehouse. Littered with the fragments of lives already lived and forgotten. Decades-old cigarette stubs. Candy wrappers. Condom scraps. Fractured glass. Stepped on by a billion different pairs of the same soulless shoes.

I can feel how cheap the car is when I open the door. It’s more of a go-kart than a sedan. If I ever get in an accident, that’ll be the day. On the highway doing a cool seventy-five as I switch lanes, lose control, and test the airbags.

And atheism.

August. The sun radiates and tries to knock me down, but I won’t let it. Dope gives me conviction. Makes me moody, too. I just want to lock myself inside and nod until the drugs are gone and so am I. Heroin is a soporific warmth. A cradling kiss of heat.

My entire wardrobe’s in the trunk. I’m selling weed to eat. Screaming in a hardcore band with a few burnouts I hate. Dilettantes. The band sucks, but I need somewhere to sleep. An abominable depression has paralyzed me. It’s an old friend who drops by each year to remind me that life is the saddest landscape imaginable.

To remind me I’m on my own.

She left art school in Cambridge and moved back to New Hampshire to forget her dreams of being a painter. Got a minimum-wage job at a kiosk in the Salem Mall. Sold tiny diamond earrings to fools. Mined by emaciated children on some hellscape in Africa. I’d drive an hour and a half to stay the night with her, then wake up sick in the morning and speed back to Boston to cop. I lied and lied.

It was just a façade.

He worked several stores away from hers selling slave-sewn sweatshirts. Corporate retail. She mentioned him once, how they were friends, how they got lunch sometimes at the food court. How she talked and he listened…

…I have the key to the practice room.

There’s never anybody here on weekdays. It’s mostly older guys in cover bands. Hair metal tour t-shirts tucked into loose blue jeans. Wispy white strands combed over oily skulls. Local IPA drinkers reliving their glory days. Escaping their malignant wives, menial jobs, and disappointing children. Nine rooms of that and then us young fucks.

Last door on the left.

The spaces have concrete walls. Every door is coated in shitty band stickers. Our room’s the smallest. There’s a ratty couch pushed against the back wall. A table covered in graffiti. A drum set with dimpled toms and a cracked crash cymbal. Cheap amps and microphones.

I shut the door and clumsily lock it. I sit on the couch and nod off into oblivion.

I dream.

Julia is floating through a field of sunflowers in a fluttering white dress. The wind is pushing her toward me. Her eyes are mine, two sapphires I’ll steal.

I reach out.

I come to clawing at the gray concrete. I dump a bag of dope onto the table. Contemplating a spike. I crush the dope with my expired red debit card. When I turn the card over, there’s dope stuck in the indented numbers. 1, 2, 6, 9, 5. I tap them out and cut them up. I make two parades of powder, take the pre-rolled bill from my pocket, and they disappear. All that’s left is the taste of the dope as it glides down my throat.

I hope it takes me back to her.

The warmth beats through me, and it almost feels like love. Family. Trust. Success. Winning the game. Shaking hands. Seeing how proud your father is by the look on his face. Feels like her kiss. The first time we met. Everything breathed at once. The unobtainable glint in her eyes burned itself alive.

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VILE SELF PORTRAITS© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO DRUG ADDICTION