Heading Toward Home

I'm having trouble matching the speed at which I travel to the variable velocities of life.  Sometimes the mania to get things accomplished is belied by the slowness with which things can be done.  At other times, though, when I am slow and beat and only comfortable upon the couch, life's events whoosh by so that I seem to miss every opportunity.  And  it is always just like that now, me out of synch with external events until I reach a state of catatonia.  Once, it seems, my gears were synched so perfectly with things.

And so I try to pick up old patterns and old routines to see if the ship can't be righted.  To wit, I've been going to the gym twice a day.  Ouch.  I know how that sounds, but it is not as bad as it seems.  I started to tell you about it, but there is nothing more idiotic than talking about your exercise routine except maybe a report on your diet and the supplements you take.  Thank God I have not completely slipped.  In truth, though, it helps me feel better.  Endorphins.  They take away the need to drink so much.  Endorphins are God's way of saying he loves you.

So the model, the girl who is sleeping in her car and working two jobs, had asked about getting together last night, I guess, and I said something about dinner.  By afternoon yesterday, though, all I was thinking about was a second workout, a beer, the couch, and another HBO series On Demand.  But I got a text.

"You still want to get together tonight?"

No.  But yes.  So I texted back to say that I was tied up but would get in touch later.  After the gym and after showering, toward what would be evening were it not summer, I texted and said I was going to dinner.  Were they still interested.  Yes, she said.

And so I drove to the bar on the highway to pick the two of them up.  It would be fine, I said.  I needed to eat dinner and we would not go anywhere fancy.  We would go to a good, cheap Greek restaurant.  You know the one.  The place where you order at the counter.  Roasted chicken, hummus, pita, and the obligatory rotating rack of mystery meat.

I needed gas badly, so I stopped at the 7-11 where she worked mornings which is just a few blocks from the bar where they have parked the car and are living.  When I pulled in, I saw the two of them standing on the sidewalk in front of the store with three shady looking creatures, fellows who you would definitely say were up to no good.  They blended in pretty well.  Hmm, I wondered.  Had I not stopped. . . .

So I honked the horn and caught them by surprise.  Tommy walked over as I put the nozzle into the tank.

"Hey.  We don't have to go to dinner," I said.

"We just came up to get a pack of smokes," he said.

Jesus, I'd forced myself to come and now I was being partially dissed.

"We need to park the car back at the bar.  We'll meet you up there.  I need to change and put on a shirt with sleeves."

"Oh, you don't need sleeves.  We aren't going anywhere fancy."

Tank full, arrangements made, I drove up the the highway the few blocks to the bar and parked to wait for them.  And wait.  I was ready to leave, both pissed and relieved, but I decided to call her first.  They were parked around back, she said.  They'd be right there.

When she got into the car, I could see she was exhausted.  She had not slept between working at the 7-11 at seven o'clock in the morning and bar tending all night.  Her voice was slow and low.  She collapsed into the front seat.  Tommy seemed better, but of course he had not worked.  He was in charge.  He was the man.  He was making the deals.  They were talking about some fellow in hipster code that I couldn't quite follow.  They were getting pills or selling them.  I couldn't tell.

"What are you guys getting," I asked.

Tommy was a patient at a pain clinic.  They were talking about a different clinic that they didn't use that had just been raided over on the coast.

"Man, I'm glad we never used that one," she said.  "They took all the records, everything."

"Yea, the other place has got their shit together.  They deal just the right amount.  They keep their clientele small so they don't draw notice.  They're the only one to use."

"What are you getting?" I asked.

"Dilaudid."

"Jesus.  How are you taking it?"

"I'm selling it.  I get a thousand dollars for my script."

I said something about being dealers, and it didn't set well, I guess.

"I'd rather sell drugs than. . . " she said.  I didn't hear the end as I was startled by the tone of her voice, that stupid sneering voice children use to warn other children that they are not to be trifled with, the one that lets you know there is nothing else to say.  Of course.  There was nothing else to say.  It was fatigue and anguish and all the rest that she was going through, and it was revelatory.  It was the voice she had used with her parents through her teenage years, I was certain, that contemptuous, mocking, accusatory voice that told them she didn't care what they had to say, that she was smarter than they were, that they were dumb.

We sat at the small, cheap table under the florescent lights eating and talking.  All around us were couples and families with children, people whose lives were nothing like the people with whom I was sharing a meal.  I felt like an anthropologist visiting an alien culture.  Or at least I sounded like one as I asked questions and solicited answers as if I were carefully documenting the strange ways of an unfamiliar culture and its people.  They didn't seem to notice the other diners.

"What do you think of these other people," I asked, "who go to work and come home to watch television and raise children?  What do you think of their lives?"

"They're dead," she said in that tone now becoming too familiar.  "They watch life and don't even know what it's about.  They take all their opinions from t.v. and sit and work and are zombies."

"You don't think they are happy?"

"No.  They're not happy."

"But they are, though.  As happy as one can be.  It is just another way of masking the pain of life, of softening the hard edges.  They have vacations at resorts and they have golf.  They are like Victorians.  There are things they don't do or at least they don't talk about it.  They hide the rough stuff behind table cloths and doilies.  It's like drugs.  It softens the blow.  Can you imagine living without drugs?

"No," she said flatly.  And there it was.

"It's a lot easier being a drunk, you know.  You don't have to spend all your time dealing and hustling with other people.  They have stores everywhere.  They never run out.  You just stop and pick it up on your way home.  You don't have to figure out who has what and how much they are going to charge and how pure it is going to be.  You have your whole day to do something else."

I wasn't being fun any more.  They were checking out.  I was just another other.  They were talking to one another in hipster drug code again and I was having difficulty following along.  I should have taken out my notebook and recorded this strange dialect like a good field reporter, but I no longer really cared.

Back in the car, driving back to the bar, the talk turned to LSD.  Tommy had taken some when he was thirteen.  He was in a club and somebody asked him if he wanted to do it.  He didn't know anything about LSD, he said.  He'd heard of it, but he didn't know what it did.  The fellow told him to tilt back his head and he pulled out an eye drop bottle.  A drop in each eye.

"Holy shit," he said.  "I didn't know what was going on.  Tentacles were reaching out at me from the television screens.  I was freakin'."

"Yea," she said, "some people freak out.  I love to go down the rabbit hole.  Some people go down there and just freak out, but I like to go down in there and stay awhile, then come back up."

"It's hard to get now," said Tommy.  "The whole distribution got fucked up now when Phish quit touring.  There's no money in it.  It's not a money drug.  It's a lifestyle."

I realized that my body was tense.  I was tired of living with them in some odd fashion of "their world."  I'd gone as a correspondent, a visitor looking around like a Minnesota family on vacation in Jamaica wondering at the Rastafarians they saw all about them.

"Look at that, Margaret.  See how they do that?  That's their way down here.  Everybody does that.  Wow!  I can't wait to tell Allen about this.  He'll shit himself.  He won't believe it.  You want to try some?  Maybe we could try some.  What the hell, right?  I mean. . . hey. . . you only live once, and we'er on vacation.  I'm going over to talk to that fellow and see.  What?  No, no, it'll be O.K.  He doesn't look dangerous.  I'll just see.  C'mon.  We're never going to be here again."

When we were back at the bar, I turned off the engine, but their doors were already open.  They were ready to go.

"Thanks for dinner," Tommy said with a sleepy voice.  "I got to go inside.  I need a drink."  There was no invitation there.

I said something to her as she was getting out of the car, and Tommy said, "Man, you need to quit it.  I got to deal with all her shit after leave.  Every time, she's a mess."

"What are you talking about?" I asked him with amused confusion.

"You tell her she's getting fat, that her skin is bad, and then she gets all bummed out and starts whining and complaining.

Really?  It is funny what people take away from a conversation.  I wouldn't have thought it.  That was about one minute of conversation we'd had together a while ago.  She said she was bloated and I'd jokingly said that it wasn't bloat, that she had put on weight.  Maybe I'd said something about her skin breaking out.  I couldn't remember.  Mostly, I thought, I'd told her how beautiful she was.

But I'd grown tired and maybe as tired of them as they were of me.  I'd been playing the concerned figure long enough and was tired of that, too.  I was tired of letting them think they were cool and that I was not.  I was tired of letting them think they were dangerous and that I was not.  And without thinking about it further, I turned to Tommy where he stood and looked him dead in the eye for a moment without saying anything.  I was done.  We all were.

I didn't watch them as they walked back up the sidewalk.  I knew what it looked like already.  It felt good to be alone again.  I turned the wheel and made the U-turn, then hit the gas and pointed the car toward home.