The Columbia girl told me her story while we smoked a cigarette outside, waiting for girl #3. “I was just checking out the ads. So I answered one, and then I met him at a Starbucks, but I couldn’t go through with it, so I actually just bailed on him. But he kept insisting I meet him again, so I did, and then I don’t know. He doesn’t take long. And he’s okay.”
Brian kissed me. It felt awkward while the other girl was there. She wasn’t that pretty.
I cuddled with him in bed. He felt my hair. He unbuttoned his shirt. He told me to suck his nipples. It felt oddly feminine to be sucking on a nipple.
The third girl was a trip. She was Puerto Rican. She walked in talking on the phone, loud as hell. “Yeah, this white dude, I’m here now, Julio, lemme get down to business.” She plugged in her phone and turned up the clock radio. Brian muttered something about his hearing and the horrible music. She didn’t care. She introduced herself as Liberty. I giggled. I was getting wasted on the wine Brian had brought.
Liberty came out of the bathroom in a crazy getup. She had a belly she was not ashamed of. Suspenders went over her tits and then clipped onto garters. A crazy booty and a tongue ring. She targeted me. Reeked of vanilla, which made me hungry and nauseous. She started sucking my tits and made a big show out of biting my nipples. Brian stood there with the Columbia girl going down on him.
I was on all fours with this girl licking my ass and finger-banging the shit out of me. I was screaming.
I played with her pussy, but it was so obvious I didn’t know what I was doing. She removed my hand and said, “Let me.”
Brian wanted to see Liberty go down on the Columbia girl. I went to the bathroom and did another line. When I got back to the room, Brian was lying down, and the Columbia girl was going down on him. I felt oddly competitive when he said she gave the best head ever. He asked me and Liberty to suck on his nipples.
“This is fucking awesome,” he said over the blare of the clock radio playing some actively annoying song with a techno beat.
Then I went down on him, but he wasn’t making the same sounds as he had with the Columbia girl. I wanted to be awesome at giving head. I was going to have to work on that. He looked directly at me and asked Liberty to go down on him.
Liberty got between his legs.
“Hey, no teeth!”
“Sorry, I like it rough,” she said.
“I said no teeth!”
“That’s the way I do!” she said.
“That’s better,” he said. “Okay, now stop.”
But she didn’t stop, and he grunted.
All that money and five condoms and this dude got off from a BJ after five minutes of getting head.
He said it was late anyway, and he had to get home. “Nothing like young women to make you feel alive.” I felt bad for his wife, as though I was part of a mean private joke he played on her. I hoped she killed him one day and got away with it.
I got three hundred bucks for forty minutes of accumulated action.
“Do you do this a lot?” I asked Liberty.
“Well, since I got out.”
“Got out?”
“Yeah, I was locked up for smoking crack,” Liberty said.
“Someone named Liberty wasn’t free,” I said, cracking myself up.
I gave Douglass the money and told him to call the dude. Douglass said the guy was going to stop by in the morning. But he didn’t stop by the next day, or the day after. Three days we waited for him. The cash was on the bookshelf underneath a heavy statue of a girl with her eyes closed. We had the money, and there was nothing on Earth we could do to make the dope get there any faster. It was the same feeling I had when I was in a cab, late, stuck in traffic. No matter how much money you have in your wallet, the cab doesn’t move.
We grumbled and watched terrible movies. Douglass was king of the remote. I was too weak to put up a fight. I didn’t want to be alone, but being around Douglass wasn’t much better. I tried to cuddle with him, but he said, “I can’t do this cuddling thing right now, babe.” Sweat was making my body rot. I rubbed between my tits where there was a little puddle of sweat. I smelled it. There was something sickly comforting in the smell of hotdogs and sweat. I wiped underneath my left tit and rubbed off a thin layer of skin.
Douglass decided to try to score out on the street. This was an act of desperation. If you got busted, it almost always happened when you scored on the street. That’s why I only dealt with delivery guys. I didn’t want him to go, but the dealer wasn’t even answering our texts. I gave him all my money. Douglass’s phone was broken, so there wasn’t going to be any way of getting ahold of him. Our plan was not a very good plan.
I tried to embrace getting clean so I would never be in this position again, dope sick, lying on my unwashed sheets, and thinking, Finally, it’s over. Finally, I will be clean, and this whole stupid ordeal will be over. I sobbed.
You have to be tough to be a drug addict. You have to sit there a lot of the time and be sick. So many times I thought, I am not too much of a wuss to be a drug user.
The true mark of any addict is the ability to deal with being dope sick. Some people chain-smoked and paced around and made frequent trips to the bathroom to shit or puke. Other people were silent and looked for ways to busy themselves. I methodically went through the ashtray, putting aside butts with some tobacco left. Later, Douglass would roll cigarettes using these stale bits of tobacco. Douglass stared at the television. We were the weird people in a waiting room. In every waiting room, there is a loony, and I was that loony.
Douglass, being a seasoned junkie, was the calm one. “You just have the flu. Imagine you have the flu. It’s only a matter of time. Do you think we will never score again?”
I didn’t tell him I had Suboxone, which I had been taking over the last two days.
You can’t be junkies and be friends. To be a junkie means constantly choosing yourself over anyone else. And it’s hard not to grow resentful when you are paying for someone else’s habit.
At our worst, Douglass was a parasite feeding off my sickness. At our best, we were a team, a tag team of vultures. We lied to one another all the time. “I lost my fucking bag. It was right there. Can I have one of yours?” Douglass stole from me. I heard him open my dope drawer while I was pretending to sleep, and when I sat up, he shut it quick. We would talk about our broken hearts, our lives, our plans. But there was always a line. I would let him be sick if it meant I could be high.
Douglass shocked me when he came back within half an hour with no drugs but almost all the money. It was twenty short. “I had to buy a drink,” he said as he sank into the sofa. There was still a hundred, so we had enough for a bundle.
The rash underneath my tit had gotten worse. Flaps of skin kept flaking off. My head grew sweaty, and when I rubbed it, dirt gathered under my nails. My stomach felt caught in-between vomiting and shitting. The eggs Douglass had made the morning before smelled pungent but not entirely unappealing. How could he sit there and eat an apple? Had he spent twenty bucks on two bags for himself? Had he shot up in the bar bathroom? Had he thought what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me? Had he thought since he was the one who could have gotten busted, he deserved a couple bags? It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to accuse him. Twenty bucks for a drink in a shitty bar? I stared at Douglass’s phone. I kept rereading the texts. I tried to come up with some kind of timeline. One hour ago the guy said he’d be here in twenty minutes, so maybe twenty minutes meant two hours. Even if he had left when he had texted “twenty minutes,” he had to be here in two hours. I kept imagining him driving around the corner, parking, walking down the steps and through the courtyard, expecting him to buzz right then.