I noticed it. Deep in the cities, the skies were glitter palms and duck fat. I was a doggone light beam; I stretched from kitchen to dirty kitchen, sick to hose and back again. At night, I played fugitive. Stepped into cabaret bars to look at the pretty men the one might look at a rare chrysalis found in a silent, unmoving clean of woods. You can’t breathe. The feeling is church.
He is so pure not even the angels can look, Spencer once said.
And there, among the spiderwebs and crystalline spoons and hot pink hallelujah, I understood what she meant. In the kitchens, the work was long and hard on my back. I crushed ibuprofen and rubbed it on my young gums. I winced. I never stayed at one place for too long, liked to lurk and leave with different names and things stuck in my brain like a wad of gunk. Natalie with brown hair in the autumn. Ezekiel shattering seven glasses at once. The sunset like an aborted genius. But the places were all the same; food & drugs. It was Jonathan—a big, nearly grotesque in how large he was—man with a beard in which particles of candies got caught. He was fond on chocolates. It was him that put my first pill in my mouth, the praise of the purified pharmaceuticals. Chain, love.
We were in the back of the restaurant, a place where the most wondrous, delicate and horrible things happened to me. At the end of an especially difficult night, one of those nights that suffocated and killed. The kitchen was a grisly hunchback coming towards you at full speed and the tropical birds are clicking and you’re lost in time. I was tired, the back of my eyes ached and my hands had no cure. We were smoking Newport and already half drunk. The night was musty like sex and hot as shit.
I began weeping into my stupid palms. This startled Jonathan who had likely been playing out the latest football game in his head inch by beautiful inch. I couldn’t stop. I was twenty eight and nothing made sense. Not anymore. And like a saint, there was the pill—little diamond, small miracle. I ate the thing.
Next time, you owe me, Jonathan said. Don’t ask how I know there will be a next time. These things, I know them.
I went back inside to clear the sink. As time rose, all the noise—sweating and cold sweating and ordering and barking and knifing—did not lessen in tempo or in fever but it was as though I were plexiglass, transient. Able to finally withstand the noise. My eyelids felt warm. I craved sleep. A cot and dreams. All sorts of dreams, dreams in which I embarked on Antarctic expeditions with a mousy woman by my side. A cold hustle. I walked home in a cartoon stumble, almost eating shit every couple of blocks. And when I did get in bed at last, I did not sleep but played with the frayed threads of the blanket thinking about a show my father used to watch late at night when I was a child, a prick of gun at his side.
A sitcom, I said. I felt the words step out of my mouth. An all America sitcom centered around the lives of Bunny and Albert. Bunny and Albert, I said. Bunny and Albert.
I must have spent hours like that, the lights black and cold. When I did fall asleep—NO DREAMS.
