Emmy ran off with Fast Forward. All graduated and scholarshipped to UT Knoxville, then drops the bomb that she’s not going. June was floored: so smart, so beautiful, Emmy could be anything. Except the girlfriend of that grass snake. June laid down the law, Emmy stopped coming home. Age-old story.
But in this version, new to me, the mom doesn’t rest until she’s turned over every rock on the planet. We heard it all from Maggot, after he took up residence on our couch. Emmy got three days’ head start on her getaway, supposedly hanging out with Martha Coldiron. June finally called over
there and learned Martha had been kicked out of her parents’ house some
weeks prior. Now June was fit to be tied. She called the cops. She called our house at all hours, in case Emmy showed up there. June distrusted Maggot and would only speak to me. If I lied, she’d have my balls on the barbecue. I said yes ma’am. I gave her Fast Forward’s cell phone number, which he wasn’t answering lately. He’d left the Cedar Hill place. Rose was right, he was just a shit shoveler there.
I said all the things you say: Emmy will turn up, she’s no fool. But had a bad feeling. Whatever Fast Forward had been to me, I could see he was bad medicine for Emmy.
“Don’t be so sure,” was Maggot’s opinion. “I bet she’s got him eating out of her hand.”
This was around three in the morning, which seemed a safe hour to go on about our lives. We were sitting on the floor of Dori’s bedroom. “Eating
what?” Dori wanted to know.
“It’s just a saying,” I told her. Sometimes she would trip up on the smallest things.
“Eating vajayjay,” Maggot clarified.
“Out of her hand?” Dori often got a little giddy at these times. Maggot put the 80 on the aluminum foil and Dori flicked the lighter underneath. The brown blob bubbled and melted and gave off its happy little smell of metal and burnt tires, sliding around on the shiny foil. I went first, then
handed the metal straw to Dori and took over handling the foil. I might have been crap from the knee down, but still had my reflexes. You have to tip it
this way and that, to keep it swimming around. Chasing the dragon, breathing its fire. We sucked smoke until nothing was left but a snail trail of melted rubber. And all I could think was: Eighty dollars.
Not a productive mindset, I know. But that pill was two days’ work at the farm store, a week at Mr. Golly’s. And I was doing neither. I had some money saved back, but it was going fast. I relied on Turp and my other guys for tips on who I could buy from that wouldn’t take the car and leave me in some ditch bleeding from the ears. Dori argued in favor of the heroin that
was all over the place now, just bam, overnight, it’s smackland. Pretty cheap. We were buying our own now, not filling Vester’s prescriptions on Vester’s Medicare, so Dori was like, Why not get the best, baby? And I’m trying to keep us on the straight and narrow, pointing out what a beautiful thing it is to have no fear of the cops. They’d not bother you over oxy. You could have a hundred pills on you, no problem. If you had a prescription, they couldn’t touch you.
Also, there was the problem of me and needles. Dori was so sweet and tolerant with me. Chasing the dragon was our happy medium.
Mostly it fell to me to call around, make a plan and execute. Dori tried to help, she’d stayed friends with one of the home-care nurses named Thelma that had morphine patches to tide us over. Those were common as litter.
Dori would shoot the gel, but it’s mixed in there, with the drug not totally dissolved in the jello part. Thelma warned her about that. It’s easy to OD. She and Dori cut and dyed each other’s hair. Thelma being this older lady, divorced, big talker, with nobody to go home to so she would outstay her welcome, but what can you do. We owed her. Procurement is wearying,
you’re running circles to get where you started. I did think of going back to school in the fall, getting my head and body back in the game. Some part of me believed that would happen. September would come around, my knee
would feel better. I would quit the dope. But for now we needed our own prescriptions. We had to go deal with the pain clinic.
Due to it being Dr. Watts, we agreed on me not going in. I waited in the car. Dori went nowhere without Jip, so he was sitting on the spot she’d just left, giving me a nasty eye. Gray whiskers around his mouth all yellowed,
like an old man that chews tobacco. This was going to be a day. Heat waves over the pavement. It was the end of the month, so not a long line, but some. With the windows down I was getting that whiff of three days, no showers, too many cigarettes. Mostly men. I hated Dori going in there alone, in her little shorts.
She flew back out the glass doors looking slapped. Got in the car and fell to pieces. “Baby, baby,” I said, trying to hold her and not panic while Jip growled. She had her hands pressed up to her face hard, like she’s trying to hide lost teeth. “I miss Daddy,” she said, which killed me. I wanted to be man enough. I pulled her hands away and kissed her wet cheeks and wide, scared eyes. She looked like she’d seen the dead. Told me that man in there was a piece of shit.
“I know he is, baby. We’re just here to get a job done. Did he write you?”
She shook her head, holding Jip, not looking at me. “That motherfucker is gaming this whole county.” Said Dori, that until last year probably put out the cookies for Santa.
An office visit was two hundred and fifty. Plus another hundred and fifty for so-called staff fees, to reduce waiting time. Dori said he spent thirty
seconds explaining this to her, then thumped his pen on his prescription pad and stared at her tits, waiting for her to pay up or get out.
I told her we just needed a plan. After we got our first prescription, we’d game the man right back, like she’d done before. Count out what we needed, then come back at the first of the month with the long lines and sell to people out here in the parking lot. I got her to stop crying and see the reason of my ways. Four hundred dollars up front, though. That was our problem.
“He said he could overlook the fees. If,” she said. Staring out the windshield, stone cold.
“If what?”
“If he gave me an exam.” “What are you talking about?”
She looked at me. “Fucking me, Demon. That’s what I’m talking about.”
Two traffic lights and numerous stop signs stood between that pain clinic and the house, and I ran them all, a reckless driver crazed with rage, thinking life couldn’t treat him worse.
A week or so later we got really hard up, and Dori said maybe she ought to go back there, go through with it. She loved me that much. She couldn’t bear seeing me so sick.
I tried not to hate her for saying that. But ended up hating myself, for want of better options. I promised Dori I would get work and take care of her. She was all I had.
If you’ve not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help.
People talk of getting high, this blast you get, not so much what you feel as what you don’t: the sadness and dread in your gut, all the people that have judged you useless. The pain of an exploded leg. This tether that’s meant to attach you to something all your life, be it home or parents or safety, has been flailing around unfastened all this time, tearing at your brain’s roots, whipping around so hard it might take out an eye. All at once, that tether
goes still on the floor, and you’re at rest.
You start out trying to get back there, and pretty soon you’re just trying to get out of bed.
It becomes your job, staving off the dopesickness for another day. Then it becomes your God. Nobody ever wanted to join that church. A bad day is waking up with nothing, no God, no means. Lying in your stinking sheets, smelling what you hope is yourself and not your girlfriend. Someone has beat the tar out of you, it seems, and crushed some bones. Possibly a person, this comes with the lifestyle, but more likely it was the junk putting its fists through all your personal drywall on its way out of the building.
Empty, you are a monster. The person you love is monstrous. You watch her eyes roll back in her head and her pretty legs racking, like the epileptic girl we all knew in grade school, Gola Ham. We were terrified of Gola.
I tried to quit, more times than Dori did. Thinking I was the stronger of us. That was me being stupid, she just knew more. One of the times we tried, we both saw guys in camo with assault rifles coming in the windows, where there couldn’t have been any guys or windows. We came to despise our bed, for how little we managed to sleep in it. Day and night run together. You finally start to doze out of the misery and then your legs jerk, kicking you back to your wakeful hell. You might go twenty-four hours,
thirty, countdown to the end of the world. At some point you’ll look at this person that’s your whole world and offer to go get something, the little hit that so easily brings her back. You do it as an act of love. I’ve known no greater.
Our housekeeping, oh my Lord. We were kids playing house. The frozen food boxes piled up, bags overflowed, trash doesn’t leave a house by itself. The mice though will give it a shot. Due to the washing machine situation, Dori would leave dirty clothes piles to molder, and ransack the Dead Mom closets. Gypsy skirts, big-shoulder blouses, movie of the week was our girl Dori. I did my washing in the sink, till the plumbing went to hell. She had no sense about what could or couldn’t be flushed. Let’s say if Jip were to
squeeze out his little circle of turds on my underwear left on the floor, true example. Dori would try to flush the evidence.
If I scolded her, it wouldn’t go well. I’d yell, she’d get all pitiful. If I brought up looking for work, she didn’t want me leaving her alone. We
were storybook orphans on drugs. A big old apple tree stood out in the yard, and that summer we ate wormy apples off the ground. I can still see her, so hungry, dirt on her knees, kneeling on the ground in a dead person’s housedress.
After we failed to pay the light bill, things got dire. I tried KFC, no luck. I’d have taken any shit job at all, other than a cashier. I wasn’t entirely out of my mind. The oxy will put your hands in that till. I kept looking. I loved Dori and I adored her and sometimes I needed to get away from her. After another eventful day of feeling useless and unemployable, I’d go smoke a bowl with Turp, to hear about football camp and other guys living my childhood dreams. Or I’d go see Maggot, that had moved back in with Mrs. Peggot. Big pot on the stove, kitchen all spick-and-span, just like old times except with the guts scooped out. Mrs. Peggot was thin as a twig and walking in her sleep. Sometimes wearing her dress inside out. She’d ask me how I’d been keeping, set down her stirring spoon, walk in the living room, and stand by his empty chair. Then come back and ask how I’d been keeping. Maggot was no better, seriously strung out. I had orders from June to interrogate him as to the whereabouts of Martha or news of Emmy, but
he knew nothing. It’s like he and Mrs. Peggot both missed the train. Their only news was that Maggot’s mom was getting out of prison. No date set, but the hearing was coming up.
The one person to cheer me up reliably was Tommy. One evening I went and found him in Pennington Gap, sure enough renting a garage from the McCobbs. Rack of garden tools on the wall, stained cement floor. He had a hose running from outside rigged up to a bucket for his washing. Hot plate, microwave. He put Dori and me to shame as far as tidiness, his books in
shelves and his clothes folded in milk crates. A bed that was made. Bathroomwise, he had to use the one in the house. Weren’t they supposed to be putting one in out here? He said well, the McCobbs didn’t own that house, they rented. And their landlord wasn’t aware he was paying them to live in the garage. There you go, the McCobbs. But Tommy threw his hands wide to indicate his hose-bucket sink, his bed beside a hand tiller with sod dangling from the tines, and asked if I could believe how far we’d come in life. “My own place!” he said. A man among men.
I was lucky to find him home, most evenings he was at the newspaper office. They had him come in at day’s end to janitor up everybody’s unholy mess. Then the ad lady quit and they gave Tommy her duties of laying out the paper and making up the ads. His boss was Pinkie Mayhew that wore men’s trousers and drank on the job. People said the Mayhews had run the Courier since God was writing his news on stone tablets. Pinkie and two
other people did all the photos and stories. Then Tommy came in nights and put the whole thing together. He said I could hang out over there any time, he could stand the company. So I did.
Tommy was carrying a lot of weight down there. Most of that paper was ads. The front page obviously would be your crucial factors, Strawberry Festival, new sewage line, etc. Then sports and crimes. They had other
articles coming in over a machine, from the national aspect, and Pinkie would pick some few of those to run. All the rest was ads. Classifieds were laid out in columns, but the ones for car lots, furniture outlet, and so forth would be large in size, and Tommy had the artistic license of designing them. He had border tapes to dress up the edges, and what he called clip-art books that were like giant coloring books, on different subjects.
Automotive, Hunting and Fishing, Women’s Wear. He’d find what picture he wanted, cut it out, and paste it up on the ad. A sofa for the furniture
store, or he’d get creative, like a pirate ship for Popeye chicken. It depended on what pictures he could find in those books, which got picked over and cut to shreds. They didn’t buy him new ones very often. So he’d end up
looking for the needle in the haystack, turning these pages of basically paper spaghetti.
Tommy was like a new person, a man in charge. He had clothes now that fit him, not the outgrown sausage-arm jackets of old. Plaid flannel shirts mostly, with the sleeves rolled up. He still had the girlfriend Sophie that worked at her newspaper in Pennsylvania, a much bigger operation than the Lee Courier, Tommy said. But he was proud of this one, showing me around: machines, computers, Pinkie Mayhew’s office with a stale ashtray smell that could knock a man flat. If you’ve ever opened a drawer where
mice have ripped up toilet paper to make a nest in there, the entire space filled with white fluff? Pinkie’s office.
Tommy showed me how to feed print columns through the hot wax rollers and help him stick them on the pages. It was all done on a big
slanted table with light inside. They had blue pencil marks showing where to line things up. The whole place smelled like hot wax. Little cut ends of waxy paper ended up all over everywhere, sticking to your shoes or the
backs of your hands, like a baby eating Cheerios. This was the unholy mess that Tommy had to clean up. Honestly, he was holding that outfit together. I’d started coming in due to boredom, but he needed the help. He offered to pay me out of his check, but I said Jesus, Tommy, you have to quit being so nice to people. I still had his T-shirt.
One night I found Tommy pulling on his hair, looking for clip art he wasn’t going to find. He had a Chevy dealer ad, with nothing left in the
automotive book but tow trucks, Fords, and fucking Herbie the Love Bug. I said, Look, let me just draw you a damn Silverado. And knocked it out.
Gave it extra shine, one of those star-gleams on the bumper. That’s how it all started: clip-art Demon. I could do about anything. The Lee Courier started having a whole new aspect to its ads that probably was getting noticed. Tommy said I was a miracle art machine. I told him if there was ever a sale on skeletons, he’d have to take the wheel.
