It’s late one night and I can’t sleep. Too much coffee. Too much ecstasy. Too much airplane glue and fifteen packets of sugar in my coffee. Too much shitty Dubstep dancing the dance magnetic through my brain. Tim Tim knows a guy in Jackson Heights who sells crappy, herbal rave bullshit hits of the stuff for five bucks a pop to any kid that can recognize a song filled with wobble base, and has a warm willing mouth- and Tim Tim’s an expert on both accounts.
I’m riding high and watching infomercials and it’s got to be four in the morning. The flow-bee, a fucking vacuum cleaner that cuts your hair. The shake weight. That fucking pseudo sex toy they’re hawking to women who want firmer arms, but we all know in reality, it’s just an excuse to give a hand job over a blow job because the ladies can say they’ve been practicing. A guy with Mike Brady’s hair-cut tries to sell me a cooking device that chops vegetables, slices fruit, sautés meat, and cleans your kitchen counters until you can shave in front of them. Only $59.99, Mike Brady tells me.
“It’s amazing,” he says.
I’m not all that amazed.
“You’ll love my nuts,“ he says.
I’ll love any part of your body you want buddy, if the price is right. And I’m still not all that amazed. So I flip the channel again and MTV’s replaying “Nirvana: Unplugged”, and I swear I can see Cobain’s skull glowing through his skin and long for the days when MTV actually played more music like this
I flip the channel again and TNT is showing The Matrix. It’s been on five times tonight. Keanu Reeves is swinging his arms in slow motion and I’m starting to sweat. I just took three Dexatrim because I want to stay thin, and because it makes my toes tingle if I chase them with cheap vodka. I take a long swig from the bottle and I can feel it burning a hole through my stomach. Keanu is looking right at me and I’m freaking the fuck out.
On CNN, Bernard Shaw is telling me that an asteroid might hit the Earth in 2028 and that we’re all going to die, but that it’s okay. The State Department doesn’t believe the asteroid to be terror-related. Outside I can hear sirens and screams- probably a domestic dispute. I can hear shouting and yelling and fifty-thousand people stomping their feet and cheering, and it’s just that they’ve segued to highlights of the Yankees game. Somebody won the game, somebody broke his leg in a collision at second base in the fifth inning, and a fan fell from the upper deck and broke her neck in the netting behind home plate. A shot of the fall- skinny, blonde hair, short, tumbling over and over and smacking head-first into the netting until her neck was on a right angle with her shoulders.
“… terrible accident,” the sportscaster says. “However, the authorities have not ruled out the possibility that the woman was pushed.”
There’s an open beer on the coffee table, and it’s warm. I take two big sips and it’s disgusting, but my mouth is dry. I take another sip. All the lights are off in my apartment except for that cold blue television glow waving and flickering all over my walls like water.
“However,” old Bernie says, “police do not believe that the fall was terror-related.”
I’m thinking about Pink and her phone number. I’m thinking about giving her a call. I’m thinking about Tim Tim and a little aspirin bottle of ex and I’m hoping he’s still alive. I’m thinking that Vermin never sleeps and that if I want to connect, all I need is to remember his phone number and scrape together a pair of Alexander Hamiltons to help me sleep.
I’m wondering what Vermin’s phone number is.
Another flip of the channel and I’m watching The Breakfast Club on AMC when I fall asleep, and I dream about gloves with the fingers cut out, magenta pubic hair and Molly Ringwald with a mouthful of cock.
When I wake up in the morning, my back hurts and my head feels like a tennis shoe. I take the cap off the bottle of vodka and I do a double-shot that lights my stomach on fire and burns my larynx to the ground on the way down. The TV is still on, and Paul Newman is pointing a gun in a man’s face and snarling and laughing. He winks at me. I turn the TV off and I go into the kitchen, which doubles as a dining room, and I look at the table with the broken leg. It has drawers full of silverware and cabinets full of plates, but as I’m opening doors and slamming drawers, I’m starting to figure out that it’s been a while since I’ve been grocery shopping. I don’t remember the last time I went “Real” grocery shopping; the kind that your mother teaches you about, so that one day, when you’re all grown up, you can be a functioning adult with adult food in the cupboards. She’d teach you about the meats and veggies. The steak, and chicken meals that don’t come in microwaveable boxes; but instead the kind of meat you’d get at a deli or a butcher shop. The last time I remember any meat any one ordered, it was literally attached to my body.
My memories are getting hazier and hazier, old ones replaced by new ones, filled with white lines on blue paper, numerical sequences I don’t understand and have no recollection of stripping away past memories like a harsh acid. These flashes fill in the slots where old memories used to live with a painful bulging sharp ache. It’s an ache that’s quick and with distinct purpose. A pain that hits me so hard and so fast and with such power it makes me feel as if it’s grooming me, preparing me for something more. The pain saps my strength for a mere instant. Then, when strength returns, it’s so quick and so brisk it’s like feeling the first blast of a cold rush of air on my naked body, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up and my arms cover with bumps and I have a memory of blue lines on white paper, stuck in my mind, suffocating me, making me long for a breath of the soft air outside the hard walls of this dying city.
And now, I’m looking for anything to put in my stomach. There’s a box of powdered donuts in the cupboard that expired a month ago, a can of tuna fish and a big can of Chef Boyardee take one out and wolf it down- dry and hard but the powder helps it go down. I feel around in my pocket and I find a five dollar bill, and I decide to take a walk up the road to pick up some bread for the tuna or even a burrito or something. It has to be Sunday. Nobody’s around. I can see Shea in the distance and the sun isn’t quite up yet. I haven’t been up this early in a year and I think about that soft air way beyond the Stadium. I figure that I didn’t get very much sleep until I see the lights of a couple of bars and clubs in the neighborhood. Sonny’s, a place where you can overpay for a girl to sit in your lap while you overpay for a watered-down domestic beer, has its doors open already. I start to figure out that the sun’s going down instead of up and I don’t know why I’m not really sober yet.
I see the Waldbaum’s around the block, but I walk right past it and past the video store and a Baskin Robbins and a Hallmark. I just keep walking. I don’t stop. I don’t feel sick or tired or light in the head. I don’t change my pace or hesitate, not even for traffic. My feet carry me all the way down to Howard Beach and I’m walking down 148th avenue. It’s dark out now. There’s a pit bull bouncing around inside of a fenced-off lawn and six pre-teeners are playing basketball about five feet from the fence and making fun of the dog and it’s barking, and I’m thinking about my childhood, trying to block out the images in my mind of white lines on blue paper. One of the boys, short, fat, with crooked teeth looks up at me and asks what the fuck I’m looking at.
“Exactly,” I say, and I keep on walking and he doesn’t know that I insulted him and that’s probably for the best. The kid picks up a rock- not a basketball, an actual, honest-to-whatever ten-pound piece of slate and he hands it to a tall kid with red hair before climbing over the fence. The dog starts to bark and to pull at his chain, the choker digging into the fur around his neck as Red passes the rock to the fat kid, who sidles on up to the dog and smashes it down hard on the dog’s neck as I cross the street with my head turned back over my shoulder. The six kids, big, tall, skinny, small- all of them- pick up rocks and start to pelt the pit bull bitch and as I pass a little Korean grocery and a video-mart and I can hear the dog barking and whining and the boys howling and hooting and hollering like animals.
I need another drink. It’s dark now, has been for a few miles. As I pass the little video store and head on up the block past 82nd street, there’s a man coming up the street, bundled up for winter with a heavy coat, a woolen cap, and a heavy, knit scarf. He’s wearing galoshes. It was 85 degrees yesterday and today feels, well, similar. A hot, humid kind of similar. Holding a steaming cup of coffee, he comes walking down 82nd and I slow my pace so that I can get a better look at him before I hit 81st. His eyes are red and filled with fragmented veins- I think he’s been crying.
“How’s it going, man?” I ask, passing him.
He doesn’t say a word. I stop as he walks past me and I’m not even trying to look uninterested anymore. I stop right where I am, and I’m standing in the street after dark, watching a man, early forties, gray hair, gray eyes, gray fucking skin and a gray scarf kneel down next to a sewer grate and start to talk to it.
“God forgive me,” he says. “God forgive me.”
I start to walk towards him, because, well, at least he’s talking now, and he takes the lid off his steaming cup of java and he pours it down into the grating in a long, hot pour, taking care to shake out the final drops and getting every little bit down into the sewer and my head fills with pressure as white lines on blue paper flash thru my mind with snapshot quickness.
He looks up at me and I look at him. “He’s asleep,” the man says. “That’s all. Just sleeping.”
I turn around, looking around, and I don’t see anybody. I’m starting to lose my buzz from the Vodka, and the x wore off hours ago, so pretty soon I’m going to grind up, and start bumping that Dexatrim back home and I’m going to see if I can lose weight while I zone out in front of the TV. My head is killing me and I can barely breathe when I finally speak I take a quick moment to shake off the pain left over from a series of dagger-like strobes of numerical sequences that left my mind a nanosecond ago.
“What are you looking for?” I ask him. “You lose someth…”
“There’s something in there,” he says, his eyes wide open, dilated. “There’s something in the sewer,” he says. “I swear to God, I’ve seen it.”
I’m thinking I should have stayed in bed. I’m thinking I shouldn’t have taken so many Dexatrim with the x last night. I’m thinking…I’m thinking I want to wake up. I’m thinking of the supple comfort of the atmosphere beyond the walls of this dying city.
“It came out of the sewer last week…came right out of the sewer over by the el tracks and I swear to God, I saw it swallow a man whole.”
I look down into the sewer, and I can still smell the coffee- Hazelnut, two sugars. It smells pretty good. “Where’d you get the coffee?”
The guy grabs me by the lapels of my fatigue jacket and he pulls me so close that I swear he’s going to kiss me. Only for money, I’m about to tell him. Only for money.
“Something,” he says. “There’s something growing under this city.”
I shake him loose and I start to walk down the way he came, thinking maybe there’s a Dunkin Donuts or a gas station or something with a good cup of coffee and a whole serving tray full of sugar and it’ll wake me up and I’ll forget that I ever saw this asshole. Then I think about the white lines on blue paper, and realize, maybe there’s something growing inside of me, too.
I’m heading up the street and I can him bawling, bawling. “Help me!” he screams. “Help me, God!”
The sun is a memory and the sky is this huge, purple mass of clouds and darkness and little, peeking glances of stars. The moon seems as if it’s fallen straight out of the heavens, and the streetlights make everything orange and blue, a sick, diseased yellow. I look back over my shoulder, still nobody around but that guy, and he’s got his head sticking down into the sewer.
I close my eyes and I take a deep breath and I think the Dexatrim is making me sick to my stomach and I have to take a shit. I think I see somebody walking past and laughing at that old man, giggling into her boyfriend’s shoulder on her way to a bar or a club, or a restaurant or some other nice, normal place where women with high-heeled shoes and high, squealing laughs go to.
“This city is dying,” the man with his head in the sewer screams and I just keep walking. And as I walk, I think, and as I think, I remember, maybe this city is already dead.
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