When the past is gone all that’s left is the story.
You called out of nowhere, asked me to come get you, asked to let you live at my place. I told you that the only rules are no tricking while you live here and all the sex and dope we can stand. After a time the sex becomes vital, inescapable. It’s almost as if there is no dope. It’s almost as if we’re in love.
Every sensation gets locked in. Made exquisite by the next toke, time freezes, there is no next day. Eventually it’s too much of everything; feeling, stupor, guilt, rage, dope, sex, then, inexorably, not enough of anything. In the end there is nothing left but drugs, waiting, violence.
A fight gets out of hand one night. There are police and social workers, restraining orders, resentment, rage and an unholy sense of having finally become one of them, the junkie nightmare right here on Sixth Avenue.
You come to my place every night. There is always something missing when you leave. When we fight about it you tell me it’s because I see other women, other hookers. What do you expect? I’m high and that’s what I do when I’m smoking shit. Damn it, Sweetheart, that’s how I met you.
One night you call Tio, one of your drugstore cowboy, movie guy losers to score. Turns out you get high with him using a forged check of mine to get the money to buy the dope. He calls me the next day because the check bounces and he’s pissed. He wants to call the police. I tell him why bother, it will just fuck up his sex life.
I wait up for you every night. And, you come over every night. You go out to score, come back hours later with stories and not very much dope. One time you don’t come back for days. When you do come back the story is fantastic, something about a Hell’s Angels’ tribunal with justice meted out to your enemies.
Every word is a lie.
I throw you out for the last time by putting all your garbage bag suitcases on the street, shutting down the house, selling all the furniture, leaving town, leaving the country.
You may be young and a stone junkie hooker but we both know that what has happened here was not so simple. You own a piece of my darkest, highest places, my deepest failures. For all that it wasn’t, it was a true thing.
In the hours before another fragile dawn I miss you.
Photo Credit
“The Effects of Rain” mdpNY @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
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Recent Michael Lebowitz Articles:
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About Michael Lebowitz
Whew, Michael – a wild ride! Intense verisimilitude! I’ll have to read it all again just to absorb the gut impact of it! Wow!
Thanks Dan…best news is that those days are gone, the wreckage of the past is in the past and it becomes story. Tim O’Brien once said, “… Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. ” There will be more of these, some of it true, because, it seems, I have to put it to rest. you know that feeling I’m sure. Thanks again.
I hear you Michael – “those days are gone, the wreckage of the past is in the past, and it becomes story.” I do know what you mean by that. But the other part is that you have a gritty, lay it all out there writing style that makes the reader feel what the character was going through in a very visceral way! Yup, we have to write about it to put it to rest – but you write about it extremely well!
great to be back in Witzerland.
you are always YOU.
but over time i see Graham Greene venturing out into some of the dark alleys. Him and Chandler; checking out the new kid in Dogtown.
Better, indeed. Indeed.
Powerful, so powerful. “Stories are for joining the past to the future…” ~ so true.
Anyways, love your writing.