The Speed Chronicles (5 page)

Are you crying?

Want to talk about how Lurleen (Darla? No,
Zelda
) would boot the vag-needle, let it stand up and quiver by itself, then grand finale with a Heimlich-like shudder and pass out forehead-first on the bar with the rig sticking out between her legs? The pink tip made it weirdly like a little dog's organ, aroused. (You suffer compulsive thoughts—sometimes just images—that you do not want to think, but cannot stop thinking. This is one of them.) Sometimes she'd wet herself. Who wouldn't? “
Five more bucks!
” she'd croak when she came to and saw her condition. (Remember when mysterious Chasids began to speak to you out of the ceiling? A rabbi would just appear: you'd realize you were staring at him, and that he was talking. You'd think, maybe he was
always
there. And it took THIS MUCH crystal to see him. The sad old shtetl eyes followed you from the TV as he spoke. Vaguely reassuring, vaguely menacing.)
Does your life ever feel like a continuum of one aberration, misreflected in a series of cracked rear-view mirrors?
You'd think: misreflected? How lame. Then you'd rethink. He's right! Every speed-freak car you ever twitched in did have a crack in the rearview. (You once drove across the state of Utah, steering the wheel from the passenger side when the 300-pound Cherokee who picked you up hitchhiking snorted something that gave him a heart attack going ninety-five on an empty interstate. You couldn't move him, so you just steered until his husk of an Impala ran out of gas on I-15, outside of Bountiful.) All the tweak-mobiles had cracked rearview mirrors. How does that even happen
once? And how does Rabbi Bowlstein know
?

You don't even want to talk about this, but here you are, talking about it.
Keep babbling, Chatty Speed Guy. People are really into it. You're crushing them
. Sartre knew what hell was—and it wasn't other people. That's a mistranslation. His translator had the twitches from
le meth
and spilled
vin rouge
on the words
dans ta tete
. THE OTHER PEOPLE WERE IN YOUR HEAD. If you were on speed, you'd know what he knew: speed means being your own audience for the running commentary of death. Or worse than death. More of
this
. What you're feeling right now.

CRASHING
2
: WHAT'S
THAT
LIKE? Remember how you felt the first time you couldn't get it up? The scalding rage. The way Cheeto-dry Cindy Carmunuci looked at you when you stopped trying to cram your sixteen-year-old shame-handle into her. Look at you. Twenty years later, the episode still has you assuming the Cringe Position. You raised your sweaty face, your eyes met hers, and she looked at you like you were some kind of a cripple. A
sex-gimp
. Crashing is that feeling. That kind of fun—some version of—nonstop. From the minute you wake up. (If you sleep, which you don't. You're not an amateur.) If you died and the coroner knew what he was doing, your cause of death would read:
Extreme Awareness
. Every conversation was toe-curling in real time, and worse when you relived it later, which you did, without surcease, even when you were having
another
conversation. There was the babbling in your head, the babbling from the person in front of you, and then all the Other Random Voices. You ceased to think. You only obsess.

WHAT PEOPLE WHO WERE NEVER ADDICTED DON'T UNDERSTAND. You did not do this shit for pleasure. You did it for relief. (Plus the voices. Did you mention them? How you'd miss them when they were not around?)
But when it was working and you felt good and you were really smooook, when every cell in the universe was humming to you, in the key of happy hell, and you were humming with them—when that shit was going on, and you felt abso-fucking-lutely tingly-tits optimistic … it was … it was … it was … Shoot enough and the world whooshed to quiet, and you were content just to sit, maybe drool a little, calm as a hyperactive toddler after his first lick of a Ritalin lollipop. When that happened, you never thought: “I am only this optimistic and one-with-the-cosmos because I'm on amphetamines.” When a drug works, you don't feel like you're on a drug. You're just focused and vaguely orgasmic. Body and brain in stunning sync, running full-throttle. One cunthair from complete loss of control, but perfectperfectperfect
.

WHAT A GOOD DRUG DOES.
Is make you believe perfection is what you are going to feel forever. Then take it away … Throw you out of the cushioned fun-car onto a rocky shoulder. Shrink your 900-page thoughts back to garble. De–Dorian Gray your brain. Which makes you go from want to need. (“Maybe things weren't moving fast, or maybe things were moving too fast. I don't even remember anymore. I had it made. And I woke up. One morning. I looked down. And fell off my life.” Paul Newman
, WUSA.
Screenplay by Robert Stone.) This is what's making crashing so … uncomfortable. So disappointing. So—ARE YOU STILL TALKING?
Remember the fake punk in Berlin who bit off his finger?

Be honest, Sparkle-pony, how's your life going? Really? Have you looked in the mirror lately? No, really looked. Good for you. Hold onto that magic.

(Of course you have ADHD. It's not like there's not a medical reason to stand in a puddle and stick your finger in a socket.) You were talking about—what was her name? Not Lurleen, now that you think of it, it was something showbiz … Dee-Lay! Dee-Lilah! Dee-Neero, maybe? One of Dee-Neero's through-the-pantie shots ended up abscessing—giving her what she called “cauliflower vagina.” “That's pretty good,” you said. And she said she had a degree in English, but they didn't pay her to talk about Chaucer with her thong pulled sideways. Which—it made sense at the time—led to her splashing the customers way before the “Squirt Craze.” Which you found out about thanks to the social elixir that was quality trailer-park methamphetamine. Which—are you going to do this all fucking night? Speed never made you smarter. It just let you be what you already were longer. It turbocharged stupid. (The weird thing about Dee, you just remembered, was that she wanted to have a stroke. “
Like, if I can shut off my whole left brain, it'd be just fucking BLISS
.”) Her sometime boyfriend Donnie, who might have also been her brother, but said he was her agent, spent five hours explaining how he actually thought up the “Squirt” concept in your dealer's doublewide; a model so spectacularly lush it had a hot tub. Donnie was one of those Valley porn guys who had gone into “lawn care.” Strictly legit. But still. Drunk, with some crank flecks in his
Magnum, P.I
. crumb-catcher, he'd go all misty-eyed. Sigh right at you over the tub-scum frothing his chin. You weren't supposed to get into hot tubs on amphetamines. Guys got heart attacks. So Donnie told you. A little too enthusiastically. “Time it well, you go right to the edge, kiss a coronary on the mouth …” Then, wrapped in a beach towel, he'd pull out his wallet and unfold a yellowed issue of the long defunct
L.A. Reader
. (He did this more than once, pretty much nightly.) Once he unfolded and smoothed it, he'd let you see the picture of him, the cover story, young and smiling, wearing the same hair as Harry Reems, posed in a Hawaiian shirt with his arm around what may or not may not have been an underage Tahitian woman. In the photo her red nails were visible, fingers wrapped up to the mouth blowjob-style around a swirly-glassed green bottle of old-fashioned Squirt soda pop. The headline's in BOLD LETTERS over his Reems hair:
NOT YOUR FATHER'S SQUIRT
. Under the soft drink, in smaller print, the kicker:
Is it marketing if my new wife does it?
Below that—and you remember, because you knew the guy whose uncle laid out the cover, a total crankaholic whose aorta was going to pop on a bus in three years—below that, in the so-small-only-speedfreaks-would-notice thought balloon superimposed over the Belle of the South Pacific:
Would you believe it, my little Roxy can write her name on the ceiling!
(There is a world of secret messages when you're really hitting the pep pills. Reality is a crossword puzzle you can solve in your head—until you forget what words are.)

It's like you're outside and it's ten in the morning, and the sun is just scorching the rubber T-shirt you never saw before in your life. Which you realize after you've been peeling it off for half a day is actually your skin. You take a deep breath, groan out a rush that makes your fingernails itch, and suddenly dialogue that explains everything is projected in the sky. The letters remind you of your father's eyes, except you don't feel the seething.
This is what this means
, the letters say.
That is what that means
. Did you mention how sometimes your eyes bleed? You could write a book about bleeding eyeballs.
The more that wants more wants more, and the more that can't do anymore wants more too
. One day you wake up and you're letting your appetite sign your checks. You know that feeling? What was my name again?

IN THE DE-SPEED WING

DAY ONE. You write a poem with doorbell and cerebellum appearing in the same sentence thirty-six times. They give you something for the shakes and put an ice cube in your mouth, which cracks badly at the corners. Your blood appears to be plaid.

DAY TWO. A counselor later to become famous in a rehab reality show keeps asking you in group what “your deal” is. After the fifth time, when he's standing right over you, you finally start to answer and he laughs and yells in your face from two inches away. “
Bullshit!
” It's not your fault there are secret webs between things; that with enough amphetamine in your system, you see DEEP AND MEANINGFUL PATTERNS among seemingly random phenomena. How it all CONNECTS. After that you think—
So what?

You are tired of not being a centipede. You just want a patch of dirt, somewhere you do not have to keep pretending to know how to be human.

DAY THREE. Circle the date, you're well enough for restraints! A Kush-breath orderly straps you chest-and-ankles over the gurney blanket, then wheels you down the hall. He leans in, like he wants to smell you, so close you know if you inhale you're going to test positive for something. Maybe THC, maybe chlamydia. He kind of smile-whispers: “
The first word in boundaries is bound!
” His voice is half hard-core speedfreak, half twink Widmark, psycho-giggly Tommy Udo pushing an old wheelchair lady down the stairs. (Most people only have one half. Once you realize that, life is not necessarily easier, but it's explainable.)
They put fluorescent lights in the elevator to make you epileptic, then cure you with expensive stimulants
.

DAY FOUR. You see the albino. He had some kind of paint-thinner-methedrine incident in his mother's carnival. Grabbing men and women's palms on the midway, reading them and weeping:
You don't fucking want to know!
You can't remember if he's the one who hung himself or became regional vice president of Nabisco South America.

Once you start trying to control your feelings, you have already lost control
. Shame is like a rush in the wrong direction. Are you saying you've never wanted to obliterate the history of your own mind? There was a rumor: the guy who really burned down the L.A. downtown library on April 29, 1986 was a peckerhead tweaker trying to fry Jews and Mexicans out of his brainpan. But that was then.

This is now: You climb Everest, then you do laundry for the rest of your life. (The first time you go to a laundromat, without speed, you hate that the spinning laundry is boring … It used to explain the universe. That's how you knew you were really off speed. You had no fucking clue about the universe, except that it made you self-conscious. Speed and laundromats. Because sometimes you just have to do something. And washing clothes is always the right thing to …)

Describe “the burden of nonstop awareness.” Why? Just go look at the lights at Rite-Aid at four in the morning, when it's just you and the eighty-year-old security man watching a hunched-up guy with shades and a leg brace screw the top off his Robitussin DM, guzzle half a bottle like it's Thunderbird, then smack his lips and take off his sunglasses. Eyes
that
peeled back don't come without a lot of speed-work. You recognize each other like Masons. The pharmacist, whose nametag says
Bairj Donabedian,
stares at you and picks up a telephone. When did life get this good
?

ALL FUCKED OUT AND STILL AWAKE
. Why is everything you remember bad? Now it comes back to you. What was her name? The ex-lawyer who dragged her little boy to the motel. Gave the kid an already-colored-in Yogi Bear coloring book? Even after the boy'd gone through half the book, he still had this hopeful look on his face before he turned every page. You were all in this motel room with a dozen other versions of you. All white guys. All waiting. But you couldn't help notice this kid. Every time he turned a page on that coloring book, he had his crayon in the air, ready to go. And every time, he was just
shattered
when he saw that it was already colored on.
Have you ever seen a five-year-old age
?

You were just there to cop. But you saw anyway. Each filled-in Yogi and Boo-Boo killed the kid a little more … Watching this, even your cells hated themselves … (Just because you give somebody something for the first time doesn't make you responsible if what you give them destroys their entire life. Does it?) Carmine—that was her name.
Why do you do this to yourself?
Carmine gave the child to the grinning simp in the cowboy hat. And what did you do? (You could have said something. You didn't. If you were staring straight at a pedophile—and there had to be at least a
chance
—if you
were
, you had other priorities. But still …) There's right behavior. And behavior that's right on methamphetamine. You did your job! You took advantage—of
empathy!
You glared at the little boy's mother—if Carmine really was his mother, and not his pimp! You registered the youngster's wince when Smiling Cowboy Man plopped a hand on his hunched-up, scared-shitless little-boy shoulders. But while you glowered at the woman who handed him to strangers, as if she were somehow morally reprehensible, what did you do? You stole. You wet-fingered a wedge of fresh meth off the motel desk like you practiced with a speed-thief trainer. You glowered at Carmine while you stole her drugs. It was a kind of morality. Was it stealing if they didn't know you did it? How much of your mental activity is spent worrying what other people can see? Is it pathology? Or is it Memorex?