Veterans Day 2014 – Part One

A Gentle Face

Three weeks later Charlie removed the bandages. There was a scar and a couple of bumps along the incision but basically the bullet hadn’t done much damage. Not much unless you take into account the lost time, the ongoing pain, the feeling of being taken for a fool and the return to the always iron-grey drift of hard-core narcotics, this time in the form of prescription painkillers. Medicine, Charlie reminded himself, not for the first time. Yeah, medicine. But for what? The pain from the wound was minor. The pain from having been caught out in the open, between the Bridge and the tracks, and the sense that he had missed all the signs, that was harder to get past.

He was deeply entrenched in a relationship going its own way, a past that was never too far past and a present driven by randomly terrifying remnants of the dreams he had bought for “ten dolla” a rock crack cocaine. His conscious work-a-day world was made up of looking for lost things – lost money, deals gone wrong, broken dreams. It was obvious to anyone who looked more closely that the lost thing Charlie was looking for was his innocence, or maybe it was more like something to believe in, something of value. In that regard he was no different from any forty-something guy who had run down Easy Money Street and made a hard left onto Cocaine Valley Road, mistaking the shrouds and speed bumps for someone else’s unfortunate future. By the time he found his way out he had slept in its ditches, under its bridges, lost his hope and his kindness in clouds of pewter grey smoke that drifted into every sunset.

This wake-up call had been coming from a long way off, Charlie figured, as he stepped off the elevator into the doctor’s office at the hospital. Frenchy, a local street institution with good drugs, a fast delivery system and more hookers working for him than there were cheerleaders at the local high school, had declared war on him. Claimed Charlie had stolen one of his best earners. Charlie knew better. Frenchy called his business a model of vertical integration, horizontally speaking. As he had told Charlie one night several weeks before, if Charlie didn’t make good on the broad and the dope that were missing, Frenchy would see to it that Charlie was horizontally integrated into the ocean with enough holes in him that there would be no chance he could ever float away. For emphasis, Frenchy shot Charlie in the arm.

She wasn’t with Charlie anymore. She had been going down slow, a needle junkie with bad skin and the heart-rending lost look of a homecoming queen who took a chance one night under the bleachers and wound up on the Stroll halfway across the country. She was nineteen when he met her. Nineteen goin’ on a hard forty.

A hooker heart and a child’s mind, a body breaking down by inches. Hadn’t been with him for months now. Last he saw her she was going through the gate, getting on the eastbound 10:25, heading home to Mom and detox. The street run was over for her; the terror of dying from the next hit had taken her over, had driven her past everything that had ever mattered to her except this one thing. From somewhere deep inside she had come to believe that she wanted, if not to live, then at least not to die, or at the barest fuckin’ minimum, not die like this.

Charlie thought about all this in the time it took him to get from the elevator door to the receptionist’s desk at the Doc’s office. The bandages were off; he was there for a last check-up. He had glimpsed what he knew to be a drug score “in progress” as he walked in from the parking structure. Something in the way the girl had moved reminded him of Michelle, of his own stupidity of the months before. Charlie stepped up to the desk and gave them his name. He reached into the little plastic kid’s sand bucket filled with left-over Halloween candy and grabbed a piece of red licorice. He put it in his mouth as he went through his information with the dyed blonde at the desk.

On his way to a chair in the waiting room he realized that he was smiling. Red licorice. Odd.

Michelle said she had seen the OD’d dead bodies too many times, too many middle-aged guys out for a last run on the wild side, a latter-day Springsteen “suicide glide through the promised land,” that came to an abrupt halt in the silence of a strange hotel room and the sound of a door closing behind her. Her rage had left her years ago, driven away by endless heroin and cocaine, by the pills and the whiskey on bad no-dope nights, by the johns and their hopeless sad stories. It had been replaced with something worse, more corrosive, more hopeless. She had been tougher then, tougher, and more remote. But something had changed, something had closed in: the fear, the cold hand around her heart had come back. She knew that hand, had been running from it for years. It had driven her from home in the suburbs, put her in the wrong beds, put the pipe in her mouth, the needle in her arm.

She was afraid of dying every day, from nearly everything. This surprised her when she became aware of it, since it had seemed to her that death was a peaceful place, quiet, without a frenzied first shot and the steady decline into never enough. Dead bodies left her cold until she saw her face one grey morning in the sightless eyes of Jack – “Call me Jackson” – from somewhere out of town.

She had called 911 and left. No one knew she had been there; she didn’t think she had touched anything – it was his room in a hotel where she wasn’t known. She walked away knowing she should have been afraid, shaken up in some way. She felt nothing but disgust. No, it wasn’t that; it was resignation, a sense that this was her lot, that this kind of thing was the rule and not the exception, that the next time the whitish grey liquid shot up her arm, the next time the blood washed back into the syringe, the next time the world exploded in a rush of sound and light, of silence and warmth in slow, slow motion, in time to the erratic beating of her ravaged heart, would be the last time. That sirens far off heading in her direction would be coming for her, that her last breaths would have already happened, that she would be watching from someplace else. That the run was over.

All she had ever wanted was to go home, to have a cup of tea and a piece of toast with strawberry jam in a white kitchen at the table with a yellow cloth and Snoopy dishtowels on the backs of the chairs. She wanted to pull out her report card, show her Mom the three A’s and a B and the note that she had made the cheerleading squad, could she please get it signed and returned. On this morning she knew that it had never happened that way, never, not once. So she kept walking until she got to the bus stop where the Number 6 was heading back to the east side. It was her 19th birthday.

Maybe she would call Eaton and get some shit. He would be out early today.

Image Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz All rights reserved.

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