I have my eyes closed but I know that it’s morning because I can hear the birds chirping in separate, random bursts, like a bunch of clocks each with a different alarm announcing the arrival of another daytime.
I have such an intense headache I feel like I’ve had an axe driven through my skull by Paul fucking Bunyan himself.
Do I have any aspirin?
My eyes are open now, and I’m staring through the venetian blinds, trying wake up, and I can see that the sun is rising somewhere past all the apartments, past the city and out over an ocean I can’t see and never take the time to go to.
The light from that burning ball of gas lingering out there in the heavens will break through the blinds and burn my eyes and I’ll stare right at it until the last bearable second because that’s how stubborn I am. It’ll burn my corneas and my rods and cones and whatever else is in these eyes, and I’ll feel like I’m dying but I won’t back down until I have to. It will be bright, and it will hurt, and I’ll hate it, because I’m hung-the-fuck-over.
I blink a few times to wet my eyeballs, as I finally pull away from the light. You win, Sun, you win.
I stand up and slam some Tylenol down my throat. When I take my first steps I feel like the room is on a tilt and I grab at the air, as if there were some imaginary handle I could grasp in an effort to hold myself up. I get a foothold that my hangover and I can agree with, and slowly I creep to the bathroom to puke the night out of me.
I’m staring into the toilet at someone else’s puke, which means someone is in the place with me, because I know I didn’t erupt last night. Or did I? At least I think I didn’t. It’s probably Tim Tim’s puke. I think he’s still here. I flush the toilet and listen to the water flow through the pipes as I get comfortable and wait to get my sick on.
I start to comb through last night’s mental inventory. I remember the night was hard drinking with Kevin and Tim Tim and with Pink. I remember Tim Tim passing out after he had explained to me all about a tank of nitrous oxide he had with him, and that he had stolen it from a dentist he turned a trick for. I remember him saying that he was going to do the whole fucking tank before the night was over. That was his goal.
It’s good to have goals.
I’m dry heaving.
I remember Tim Tim going on about each type of fucking anesthesia as he was sucking gas off the tank, and how each has a different effect on a specific part of the nervous system, which results in a depression or numbing of nerve pathways.
I need numbing.
It’s been about forty-five minutes, and still I’m gripping the porcelain, white-knuckling the edge of the bowl. I reach my hand back and take a blind shot at the handle of the toilet tank. My finger tips hit the edge of the lever and flush the old puke stink away, which is instantly replaced by fresh stink. Again, I listen to the water gush through the pipes, knocking and bumping it’s way to wherever shitty water ends up in this city, and though as sick as I am, the shot of fresh stench in my face isn’t even enough to pop my cork. My stomach locked in tight pain.
Here I am, stuck in vomit limbo thinking of Tim Tim going on and on about that stupid tank he stole.
“General anesthesia affects the brain cells, which causes you to lose consciousness.” Then he took another hit off the tank. He said, “Regional anesthesia has an effect on a large bundle of nerves to a particular area of the body, which results in losing sensation and shit, to that area, without affecting your level of consciousness.” Tim Tim took another pound off the inhaler attached to the tank and then he said, “The cool thing is that local anesthetics cause you to lose sensation in a very specific area. I mean…that’s pretty fucking cool- it’s control, man!” I remember watching him hit the final huff off the tank, and then I remember him hitting the floor. Yeah, that’s “control”.
With each beat of my heart, another intense flash of pain through my cranium and outside I hear the sounds of cars on the highway. People coming, people going, productive people in the world moving and alive as I’m playing contortionist over the edge of the toilet, my gut wrenching with the pain of death.
Finally, I get to my feet. I open the medicine cabinet. I skip the mirror because I hate what I look like. I slap more pills down my throat from an unmarked bottle in the cabinet. I chew them into a bitter paste and wash them down with my own saliva because I’m too lazy to turn the faucet on even though there’s a cup on the edge of the sink. I’m starting to remember pieces of what happened last night beyond Tim Tim and his tank, it’s all in fragments right at the moment, vignette with the residue of excess. I close the medicine cabinet with my head hung low, I skip the mirror-look again, and I glance at the cup on the edge of the sink, and scoff to myself as my laziness really knows no bounds.
I look out the bathroom door, and I see Tim Tim, passed-out on the living room floor, cradling his nitrous tank, which is probably empty by now, like a teddy bear, or a blankie. I walk in softly, but kick Tim Tim hard; he wakes up from his coma.
“What time is it?” he asks.
I watch Tim Tim rub the gunk from the corners of his eyes. He looks like a child in this light. The whole place filled with that morning, yellow-angled hue. He’s a mess, such a scrawny little mess. He looks like the Artful Dodger, from “Oliver Twist”, crossed with the rug from the set of a porn film from about 1976.
“Day time,” I say. I spark up a smoke and sit in one of the rickety kitchen chairs. Tim Tim sits up with his legs folded over one another, and stands his nitrous tank at the foot of the couch noticing how light it feels.
“Shit, Laird, how much did I do last night?”
“All of it, I think. You did so much of that shit I thought you were going to float away.”
“Far out,” he says; a grin on his face stretching from pointy ear to pointy ear as he playfully knocks on the tank and stands up, making fists into the floor with his bare tiny feet. He takes another drag on my smoke and he hands it back. “Where are the chicks?” Tim Tim asks, sitting down next to me while taking a cigarette for himself from my open pack and lighting it.
“Were there chicks here last night?” I look around the room and I don’t see any chicks, but the place is a mess on top of a mess on top of a mess so maybe a “chick” could be hiding someplace, but I doubt it. Anyone in their right mind would be half a click away from this dump. I guess that’s why we’re still here.
“Maybe I dreamed them?” Tim Tim says, rubbing his head quizzically.
“Gone back to hooker-land, I guess,” I say as I tap my cigarette ashes into an empty bottle of High Life and watch Tim Tim stand up and stretch his thin body in the yellow of the sunlight. He’s a marmalade-colored boy skeleton, and he cracks at the joints softly.
I take a deep breath of smoke-filled room air. I run my fingers through my hair as I scan the mess. “I’m not going to clean this place up. I should just torch the whole fucking building.”
“I know a guy that can help you out with that,” Tim Tim says looking out the window.
“Torching the building, or cleaning this place?” I say, still scanning the mess until my eyes meet every piece of garbage, every bottle, every can, and I stand up and start walking towards the bedroom. And that’s when I notice Kevin is gone.
“Torching the building,” Tim Tim says with a half crooked yet very serious grin splitting his boyish face.
“Figures,” I look around the place some more, still no sign of Kevin. “Is Kevin still here?”
“No bro, I don’t think so. He got super-bummed towards the end of the night and went to chill out by the pool. I was gonna go with him, but I got too blitzed and I couldn’t pull the tank that far. So, I just stayed here sucking fumes. You were passed-out already.”
“Where the fuck around here is there a real pool? Kevin’s not going to just go chill out by our cement hole.”
“Fuck…yeah, good point, I don’t know what he said, I was really fucked up.” Tim Tim stands up and grabs what’s left of my coffeemaker pot, which is essentially just a handle with a big chunk of broken glass attached to it.
“Use your fuckin’ head, kid.”
“I guess he’s not here,” Tim Tim says smoking the cigarette, which has been dangling between his lips the entire time as he tries to make heads or tails out of the busted coffeemaker pot. He doesn’t so much as take the cigarette out of his mouth. He just talks around it, holding the broken coffeemaker pot. “You do know your coffeemaker pot thing is broken, right?”
“Where the fuck is he then? We had a thing today, man. We had to meet a guy about a…thing.” I pick up another cigarette; I light it and let the nicotine warm my lungs as I try to calm down.
“Maybe he went for breakfast?”
“Fuck that. Kevin hates breakfast.”
“Kevin hates breakfast?” Tim Tim asks. “Shit…I love bacon.”
“Yes, Kevin hates breakfast, so that’s not where he is.”
“Why does he hate breakfast?”
“Because breakfast beat him up in the school yard when he was a little kid, breakfast stole his girlfriend- how the fuck do I know? You could ask him yourself if he was fucking here.”
Kevin and I have an appointment. I don’t usually have appointments, and he doesn’t usually break them. The clock over my stove says that it’s almost nine o’clock. The appointment is for an hour from now, at a little Greek diner near Crossbay Blvd. I don’t own a car, and I’m wishing the clock could be broken. But it’s not. The coffeemaker pot thing is.
“That’s the most important meal of the day,” Tim Tim says. He’s got his nitrous tank parked near the kitchen table now, and he manages a small hit from it. I thought it was empty. He hacks a little bit and laughs and then he smokes. “He shouldn’t miss breakfast, it’s bad for you.” He takes another hit. “Maybe he left a note. People usually leave notes when they go places, don’t they?”
I look at the refrigerator, the door of which is hanging open, and I can see from here that they drank all of my beer last night. There is a note on the freezer door.
It’s the back of my electric bill- by the way I haven’t paid it yet- and I can see that it’s four days over-due. I read the note.
Afterward, I need a drink.
“What’s it say?” Tim Tim asks, as I sit down at the other end of the table, literally feeling my brain swelling through my skull.
“It’s not so much what it says, it’s what it means.”
“Is it bad?” Tim Tim sidles up to me, hovering over my shoulder, his nitrous inhaler dangling from his hand. I look up into his little kid eyes, his eyes look like Bambi’s eyes, or like the eyes of a character from some Japanese animation, big and bright, then I look down at his tank
I ask him, “Do you have any more of that shit left in there?”
Tim Tim smiles.
I need numbing.
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