“Okay, fine,” I said. “Yes, she has fucked me with a strap-on. Happy?”
“Don’t get so defensive, man. I’m your doctor.”
I let it slip that time.
Doc said, “When was the last time?”
“For the blood?”
“No,” he said, smiling. “When you let your pervert girlfriend sodomize you.” I looked at him and he smiled and laughed. “You need to lighten up.” He was driving and not looking at the road much as he hunted for his smokes in the backseat. I gripped the door handle and flashed visions of car wrecks and blood. Being a passenger scared the shit out of me — if I had any, I would have taken a few Valium before getting in the car. He said, “Everybody loves something up their ass during sex.”
“Really?”
“It can sure as hell seem that way when you work the ER.”
“I can’t talk to you at all, man.”
“C’mon,” he said, “I’m trying to help. When was the last... penetration?”
“Weeks ago.”
“Okay,” he said. “And this blood?”
“The last few days.”
“Today?”
I nodded.
“Well, it’s not that,” he said. “Are you shitting blood? Or is there blood in your stool?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Color.”
“What?”
“It’s an issue. What color is the blood?”
“Red,” I replied. “Blood colored.”
Doc nodded. He put in a CD — Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ Rockin’ and Romance. He cracked the window and lit an American Spirit, then offered me one.
I shook my head. I had quit smoking almost ten years before. One of the hardest things I ever did. Doc had quit for years and only recently started again since his divorce. I really would have liked one then, but I held out. “Shit causes cancer, dude.”
“Media hype,” Doc said. “And red isn’t the only color blood can be. Especially on the inside.”
“So is red good?”
“Nothing is good,” Doc said. “No blood in your shit is good. That’s our goal. Our vision. An America with no blood in our shit. That’s the ticket I’m running on. The no-blood-in-your-ass ticket.”
“Red is less bad?”
“That is true,” he said. “Red is much less bad. If the blood in your stool is a greasy-looking dark red, almost black, that is a major and immediate concern.”
“And this?”
He shrugged. “Probably nothing. How many Vicodin a day are you taking?”
I was, until a week ago, taking about thirty, but I was stealing, when I could, from Doc’s stash, when he had a stash, so I went with a low estimate. Our supply had run out five days ago and I’d halved my intake from twenty, to ten, to five, to only three the day before. My eyes felt like sandpaper and the suffocating heat in my head made every pump of my heart throb painfully all over my body. Like every nerve ending burned with Fourth of July sparklers. “Ten to twenty if I can. Less, lately.”
“That’s probably it right there,” he said.
Jonathan was singing about his jeans and how they were a-fraying as I looked out the window at the blur of objects racing by.
I knew I couldn’t continue on the way I was going. My short-range plan involved the morphine and, after that, a meeting with this guy Leroy Marcus about some pot he wanted me to sell. The morphine was supposed to be my last for a while — the plan was to use it and slowly wean myself off, taking Vicodin when I had to, in order to detox as painlessly as possible and start clean. Go back to meetings. Be humble and start over. I’d done it before. I could do it again.
I had, at that point, quit various opiates somewhere between thirty and fifty times in my life. Which meant thirty to fifty intentional detoxes. Withdrawals that made you sorry for ever being born — which sometimes seemed the point of the whole thing. The self-loathing burning hot enough to make the sorrows you suffered from withdrawal seem something like justice for the liar and cheat you’d allowed yourself to become. The twisted core of wrongness at your center everywhere you went was something that made suffering seem valid and just, in some way.
“I can’t drop all five hundred on the morphine,” I said.
“You have to.”
“I can’t. I need at least a couple hundred for tonight.”
Doc said, “You got a game?”
I shook my head. “You know Leroy Marcus?”
“That ’roid rage guy?”
Leroy had an earned reputation as a guy you didn’t want to fuck with. He’d been a boxer and had ended up recently with an ultimate fighting obsession. Leroy liked violence — seemed to like getting hurt as much as he liked hurting people, which made dealing with him an uneasy proposition at best. Someone who’s not afraid of getting hurt, someone who actually welcomes the pain and raw savagery of the fight, is not someone you want to face off with. My dad told me when I was a kid, you never throw a punch unless you’re willing to kill the guy — because he might be willing to kill you. Leroy probably got the same lesson somewhere along the line. But he threw punches and I didn’t.
“That’s him,” I said.
“What the fuck do you have going with that beast?”
“A pot deal,” I said. “I need at least two hundred to sell some medical-quality shit he has.”
“You smoking pot?”
I shook my head. “Pot’s dollar signs to me. I’m trying to make some money.”
“Pot’s legal now, dude.”
“Not legal,” I said.
“More or less. Any fuck off the street can get a script for it. How you going to make money?”
“Buying a couple hundred off him and selling it to a buddy in Long Beach for about double. Quick cash. No risk.”
“You can’t trust Leroy. There’s plenty of risk just walking in his door.”
That was true enough. “I need money,” I said.
Doc smoked the end of his cigarette and rubbed it out on the outside of his door — the side of his car was streaked with the ends of his butts. He’d pinch out the tobacco and let the filters pile up at his feet.
“We’re scoring morphine — a real fucking drug — in Tustin,” he said.
“Are we?”
“We are.”
I felt the sickness overcoming me. “We better be.”
“My point is,” Doc said, “we’ll get enough to make some money off it, if you want.”
I had tried over the years to make money with heroin, with Dilaudid, with OxyContin, and a variety of other opiates. All I ever did was end up doing them all, either fast or slowly. But they never made it, for me, from intent to deal to ever actually dealing.
Doc said, “What if we spend your whole five hundred bucks on the painkillers?”
“Then I’ll do them.”
He looked hard at me.
I said, “I’ll do half of them.”
“Right, but what if you let me tuck a couple hundred aside and deal that.”
“For both of us?”
“Of course for both of us, man,” he said. “Who you going to trust to make a buck? Me, or Leroy Marcus?”
Neither of you, I thought. Leroy’s a brutal beast of a businessman and you’re a dope fiend. But given the choice, I answered honestly. “I’d rather be in business with you.”
Doc merged off 22 onto 55 South, where it splits going to Riverside one way and Orange County the other, and we were headed toward Tustin, just a few miles away. We seemed to have reached some tacit agreement about the extra two hundred and the profit on the deal.