Right then.
Right then.
The buzzer kept not buzzing.
I kept going to the bathroom. I shit like ten times in a day.
I sat there hating myself. Hating the room. Hating the smells. Hating the discarded Snapple wrapper. Hating seeing that same crumpled brown bag on the floor. Hating that I never picked it up.
I mostly hated this fucking movie Douglass put on about this sad, quirky boy in some small town who fell in love with a quirky girl who was a carnie, and she made him less of a wuss. I fucking hated watching two people fall in love, and I hated thinking of Peter, Peter, Peter. How many fucking memories were there, and did I have to individually grieve each one? Why couldn’t I just put them all in one big box and throw them away like he did?
Peter driving at night while I played DJ. Peter drumming on the steering wheel. Peter crying in my arms telling me he was a loser and was always going to be a loser. Peter on Christmas morning wearing a Santa Claus hat and waking me up with a plate stacked with chocolate chip pancakes. Peter trapping mice and taking them to the park because he didn’t believe in killing them. Peter screwing me before he went to work. Peter flicking his special Zippo I had bought him. Peter rubbing his dick and then smelling his hand, not knowing I was watching. The way he ate peanut butter out of the jar, taking a bite, smoothing it over, scraping the edges so he didn’t waste any. Peter handing me the iPod he had put all my music on. Peter lying on the bed wearing briefs that were way too small for him. “They fit me good, right?” he had asked. Peter, always smelling like soap, his clean, scrubbed skin. His perfectly clean asshole. If I had to eat off someone’s asshole, his would be my first choice. Peter playing an obscure Bob Dylan song to me on our anniversary in a terrible Mexican wedding shirt. How many fucking memories were there?
“Can we please watch something else?”
Douglass said, “C’mon. Let me finish this. We always watch what you want.”
This was the most untrue statement anyone had ever made in the universe. Douglass always had the remote. Any time I put something on, he complained till I gave it back. Douglass left the apple core sitting on the coffee table, because the apple-core fairy was going to come by and flutter away with it. It would sit there for days, just like that fucking brown bag. In order not to have a complete mental breakdown, I didn’t let my brain ponder what gross rotten thing was in that brown crumpled bag. Douglass was selfish. He just thought, “I don’t fucking live here. So I’ll throw shit everywhere.”
Addiction is so boring. Look at that dumb person doing the same dumb thing over and over all the time and not doing much of anything else. That’s addiction. Repeating the same thing, the same cycle, the exact same thoughts.
Sit there. Look at your fucking phone. You can stop it right now. You are officially boring the fuck out of yourself. Your problems are becoming old problems.
“These are old blues,” Joanna Newsom sang.
Eventually the guy showed up. After he had put us through hell for three days, we didn’t even mention it. Douglass handed him the money and went to the kitchen with the bundle. Knowing I was about to get high made my body feel high already. Someone told me about this girl who got wet as soon as she felt the dope in her hand. I heard the familiar rattling sounds of Douglass going through my spoons, even after I had asked him to reuse the same one. I smiled at the guy. He had a cute grin. Wore bright sneakers. He was always a dick on the phone and always polite in person. I rambled a little about how things were good, just to show him there were no harsh feelings. I felt weirdly embarrassed about all the texts and phone calls. He wished us a good day and slammed the door. And just like that, I knew it was going to be a good day.
Douglass came in and put the bundle on the coffee table, already ripped open. I didn’t count the bags. I didn’t care how many Douglass had taken from my portion. I would later, when I was down to my last two, but right then it was a bounty.
“Stay away from needles,” Douglass said as he wrapped a belt around his arm. He used his mouth to hold the sleeve of his shirt up. He put the needle in his arm. His mouth let go of the sleeve. His eyes closed. He went, “Damn!”
Even after the sickness subsided and the sweats stopped and that warm feeling came and another movie started, I was still not okay. When you go through day after day of numbness, you forget what feelings are like.
Douglass said, “When you’re so strung out, it takes more than what you’re used to to feel okay.”
“We should get clean,” I said.
Douglass nodded.
He said, “You are still young, but I’m running out of time.”
He said, “You can do something, or you can be a junkie. You are fooling yourself if you think you can do both.”
One of the only good things about getting high with Douglass was that he didn’t nod out like most long-term users.
The real junkie nod is frustrating to watch. They slowly droop forward until they are completely bent over. They keep dropping their cigarette. You watch them light it, lean over, drop it, and then wake up and pick it up and then instantly drop it again. You watch their head fall forward until it hits the coffee table. Every time, they say they are just tired. Every time, they say, “No, I’m awake,” and they light a cigarette and they slump over and they drop it. And you want to scream, “Put out the cigarette and just lie down.” How fucking hard is that?
“Why can’t he just lie down?” I asked Elizabeth the time we watched Noah do it.
“I don’t know why,” she said.
Douglass told me, “I have Tourette’s. I don’t know I’m doing it, so if I do it, just tell me and I’ll stop.”
He would hop and holler and make loud nonsense jokes and repeat himself over and over.
Sometimes I would say, “Can you please stop?”
“Stop what?”
My ass felt itchy, so I got in the shower, turned on the water, turned around, and spread my cheeks so all the water went inside my ass. I was freezing cold. There’s probably some guy out there who would be turned on by licking shit off your asshole. Whatever weird thing you can think of, there has to be some freak whose favorite thing in the world is that exact thing. When you think of everyone who has ever been born and everyone alive right now and every human that will be alive until an asteroid hits us or global warming sets off a series of natural disasters or we just ping-pong from planet to planet and leave colonies behind, out of all those people, there has to be someone who is into whatever your mind can come up with. Like some guy who jerks off by rubbing his dick on different kinds of cheese, or some guy who eats bugs as he jacks himself. Then there are the weird things everyone knows about, like men who are into amputees. I bet there’s some guy who jerks off by rubbing his cock on books. Like his dick gets paper cuts, and he cringes in pain, but he kind of loves it more than anything in the world.