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Dreaming in Hollywood Studios 💭

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I was waiting for my heroin dealer’s coke dealer.

John, my heroin dealer, could be relied on to have heroin 90% of the time. Other dealers were 50% on a good week. So I liked John, and tried to give him my business whenever possible. Sure, it was a mission to get to Main St from College and Bathurst, especially since my other dealer was at Howard Park and Roncesvalles, but I owed that guy $30 from two months ago and hadn’t gotten around to paying him back, probably because I’d recently gone back to blow after a long layoff. I hadn’t quit heroin or anything, and in fact had already grabbed a few points from John, but I wanted some coke too because I liked to be awake for the heroin high. Usually John would have everything ready at his apartment, which was eight minutes east on foot, but today his dealer was late so we were waiting together in that vast atrium below ground level but above the subway platforms

I typically saw John two or three times a week but our meetings were terse affairs, a few kind words during the exchange, meaningless banter or some grumbling about the Way Things Were. but today his dealer was two hours late and we were swiftly running out of common ground.

John was older than fifty and probably bound for the penitentiary. He’d been busted twice the previous autumn, with heroin both times, heroin containg fentanyl because all heroin these days contains fentanyl, but the cops inexplicably charged him with possession of carfentanil with intent to distribute, a crime that carries a mandatory prison sentence.

This all happened during the opiate crisis when fentanyl was in the news all the time. There were few facts but plenty of hysteria and misinformation. If a person in pain is administered an appropriate dose, fentanyl is a highly effective and safe painkiller, but carfentanil is lethal to humans at any amount, even a dose as infinitesimal as a grain of salt. I’d been buying and enjoying John’s heroin for over three months when they grabbed him, and there was simply no fucking way it contained carfentanil. That shit is for rhinoceros surgery, and John wasn’t a fucking zoologist. He was, unfortunately, an ex-convict with numerous prior offenses, making prison all but guaranteed. His trial kept getting pushed back and he didn’t know how to feel about it. On one hand, it delayed his inevitable incarceration. On the other, his lawyer was an addict and John was paying him in heroin.

“Motherfucker’s costing me a fortune,” he growled, pacing up and down. He was always pacing, like he was subconsciously rehearsing for jail. He had miraculous energy, John did, up at seven-thirty in the morning to head to Queen Station and sell to his nine-to-five clients, fanning out around town between ten and three, hitting the injection sites and miscellaneous workplaces (like mine...can’t tell you where, sorry). If you wanted drugs from him after three, you had to head up and over to Main St, where John was shooting up and making flaps for the following day, finally nodding off around midnight. He never stopped, John didn’t.

Another thing: he looked wildly different in age every time I saw him. And I don’t mean he was rapidly aging. He’d look thirty-five one day, like a senior citizen the next, then in his forties the next. It was fucked. I never asked him about it, though I wanted to. John was a unique guy. A fireball. Even when he looked old, he never stopped radiating fierce vitality. The thought of him behind bars made my chest feel funny. It wasn’t right to put him away like that, to stomp on someone so alive.

As we passed our second hour of waiting, I began to fidget. John had regaled me with detailed descriptions of seemingly every street fight he’d ever fought in, or watched from a safe distance, and I was bored. I didn’t doubt the veracity of some of the stories; we met at Yonge and Dundas one summer day and he was limping badly, his face covered in fresh cuts. But he was in a good mood. He swore he’d won, despite being outnumbered, a number that no doubt changed each time he told the tale to somebody.

He could lie sometimes, and he ripped me off a few times when I started buying blow because I actually thought a gram was $200, since a gram of heroin is $200, but after I’d bought three grams from him I learned that a gram of coke was in fact $100 and he’d been overcharging me by a criminal 100%. I didn’t pursue the matter, but the next time I told him I wanted blow, I made sure he knew I intended to pay $100 per gram moving forward. I still liked the guy. And it was my kinda fault for being so ignorant anyway. I wasn’t going to find a better dealer. I wasn’t. As I said, John always had heroin ready to go, but it was more than that. When you’re an addict, you get this exaggerated fondness and respect for your dealer. I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Doesn’t matter. Point is, I liked him. He was like the cool uncle you only see every other Christmas, the one your Mom insists you stay away from because he has a “checkered history” and always smells strange and musty, like he spends a lot of time gardening.

“Dumb motherfucker,” John muttered.

“Your lawyer?”

John looked at me like I was stupid. “No! My coke guy!” He was still pacing. He was on something, but it wasn’t heroin.

“Has he texted?”

“Only like...fifty times. Said he was leaving Broadview an hour ago. Then he said ‘just a few moments’ a half hour ago.”

I frowned. Broadview Station was twelve minutes away. But I knew John well enough to know that he would take any criticism of his coke dealer’s lateness as a criticism of him, John, an attack on his judgment of character. I had to sound diplomatic, almost neutral. “Is this guy… reliable?”

“Of course,” John narrowed his eyes at me. “He never ghosts me. He...oh! There’s one thing I should tell you.”

“Okay.”

“He kinda has this thing.”

“Okay…?”

“Uh…”

“Just say it.”

“He kinda thinks he looks like Robert Plant.”

I blinked. “What?”

“He thinks he looks like Robert Plant.”

“So...what am I supposed to do about that?”

“If he brings it up, just agree with him.”

“What?”

“Or if he asks you if you think he looks like anybody, tell him he looks like Robert Plant.”

“You want me to tell a grown man that he looks li-”

“YO!” a voice bellowed.

We looked. A man with sopping wet hair was grinning at us - well, at John - from the top of the escalator. He hopped off with an awkward lunge. Behind him a young woman was cresting the moving steps, sipping a bottle of Nestea and wearing some kind of sweater with a single sleeve.

“Hey!” John called back.

The cocaine dealer was wearing a wrinkled black and blue ski jacket he was keeping unzipped. Actually, “wearing” is too generous a verb for how he wore the jacket. The thing was hanging off him, almost like it was alive and trying to get away because it found him disgusting. He looked familiar, though, and as he got closer I realized something astounding. Astounding and...confusing.

The man looked exactly like Rod Stewart. Not Robert Plant, not even a little bit. But he looked every bit like Rod Stewart.

I turned to John in amazement. “Did you mean Rod Stewart?”

In a flash, John grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. He was not play fighting, he meant it. He sidled over to me and said through gritted teeth: “Robert. Plant. Okay?”

I nodded, terrified, and John released his grip and turned to greet our company. The man - Rod Stewart...I mean Robert Plant - hadn’t seen the scuffle. He was preoccupied with the young woman, who was nodding at everything he said but obviously not listening and obviously bored. As they approached I saw that she was wearing gauze on one arm, a hastily prepared cast of some kind, flapping wildly from that weird subway wind tunnel effect.

Rob motioned at them to follow us into the corner of the vast concourse, the corner with the bank of payphones. Nobody else was down there except for a busker in the very middle of the room. The guy seemed to know just three songs that he played over and over and over. As we were waiting earlier John had gone over and requested some Led Zeppelin but the dude shook his head, a pretentious I’m-the-artist-and-you’re-not gesture, and resumed his turgid trio of dirges. I didn’t recognize the songs and neither did John. They must have been originals. They were atrocious and also indistinguishable from one another. People passed him hurriedly in ceaseless procession, but nobody tossed coins and none of them gave us a second glance. It was a perfect place to buy or sell drugs. Yes, the omnipresent eye of the camera followed our movements, but does anyone actually monitor those things?

John had already taken his scale out of his backpack when I joined him at the payphone bank, Rod Stewart and his friend arriving moments later. He was still talking at her, and you could see from his body language he was bragging about something, something he considered an achievement of magnitude. You could see she was too tired to hate him. She would wear him down, over time, with her vast indifference. She would outlive him and inherit his empire. Or not.

Rod Stewart surreptitiously tossed a big bag of coke at John, who immediately got to work. relieved to have something to do with his hands, just relishing the task. I hope one day to love my job even half as much.

“Cover me,” John said over his shoulder. “All of you. Pretend you’re on the phone.”

Rod Stewart and his partner ignored him, which made me feel like I couldn’t. I had to show them whose side I was on. There were four phones, so I picked the one farthest from the wall, farthest from the booth John was using to weigh the coke. I figured Rod Stewart would use his bulk to hide John from the steady stream of people heading for the escalators. But instead he did nothing. He just stood there like the asshole he was proving himself to be.

Feeling stupid, I picked up the phone and turned my back to John. Rod Stewart and his companion were still oblivious to the world around them, only now the young woman was speaking, berating really, and I realized she was a mail order bride. She was growling at him in a foreign language, Romanian maybe, something Eastern European probably, when she looked at me and instantly softened and smiled and for just a second I believed her before realizing she was only trying to make Rod Stewart angry and jealous.

He turned and saw me and visibly balked, rearing back with a sudden jerk, and I realized he hadn’t noticed me until that very moment. (I was doing a lot of realizing that afternoon, a thought which was itself a realization, I realized.) Here we go, I thought. Once again, having waited too long somewhere with someone, I have found myself in a circumstance of imminent violence. All because I like drugs because they help me forget I’m me. I don’t like being me. I don’t like me at all. Lots of people don’t like me, for good reason. I “borrowed” money to buy drugs, I stole, I cheated, I lied. And I’m sorry for all of it. But I swear on everything I’ve ever loved that it didn’t feel like a choice. It really didn’t. I was on autopilot. I had one directive: Get drugs. And I did everything I could to fulfill that directive.

Does that mean I deserve a beating? Probably. But if I have to die a drug related death, can’t it be closer to downtown? One of my old home stations? (That’s the station nearest your place, which is probably self-evident so sorry for explaining.) I’ve moved many times, though rarely by choice. You get kicked out of places a lot when you’re a drug addict. In my case, not for behavior. I don’t drink all the beer in the fridge or stagger home at 3 AM and play loud music. I just have a tendency to spend the rent money on drugs. I spend all money on drugs, a standing policy that has brought me here, staring at an angry man who looks like Rod Stewart and wants to hit me. He is breathing slowly and glaring at me, just staring and not moving.

One must adapt to the highly fluid circumstances endemic to the purchase of hard drugs in low quantities. Rich people don’t have to put up with this shit. They buy in bulk. There is a delivery service here in Toronto, possibly fictional but whispered of in hopeful, reverential tones, that offers every drug ever. Anything you wish, right to your door. One former dealer of mine (dead from OD) told me the minimum order for this mythical service is 5k. My Roncesvalles-Howard Park man snorted at that figure and insisted it’s only 2 grand. John insists it’s $10 000. Imagine that. Having the kind of money to order any drug you want, or might want later on. That’s the life I liked to tell myself I deserved, not a life of evading marauders and ersatz-Rod Stewarts, waiting for my heroin dealer to weigh out a fucking gram of coke, after already waiting two hours before that for my heroin dealer’s coke dealer who looks like Rod Stewart but thinks he looks like Robert Plant whose companion from Eastern Europe has an injured arm he was obviously responsible for to show up and WHAT THE FUCK IS TAKING THESE PEOPLE SO LONG

YOU ARE DRUG DEALERS! DEAL DRUGS!

As the big galoot gaped at me, taking in my presence and blurting random vowels, John daintily picked a large rock of cocaine from his bag, not mine or his own, snorted it, and winked at me.

I couldn’t help it. I laughed one of those sudden laughs that sounds like a bark, further confusing an increasingly agitated Rod Stewart until John, turning back to his scale with a studious frown, like he’d been there the whole time, said casually over his shoulder, “that’s my boy I told you about. He’s with me.”

Just like that, like pressing enter on a password in a video game, Rod Stewart nodded and backed off.

Saved by John. What a guy. He’s with me. A wonderful phrase. Uttered by my dealer without forethought but nevertheless filling the father-sized hole in me, a warm sense of belonging, of mattering, spreading through my lower region...or else I was sicker than I realized (despite all the realizing going on elsewhere) and needed either heroin or a toilet very soon.

But even if the feeling was gastrointestinal distress, it didn’t diminish the sweetness of John’s sentiment. I was with him. I was not with Rod Stewart. I grabbed the phone because John told me to, making my allegiance plain, and it felt good to have John reciprocate. I decided to snort some H right then, to sustain the warmth inside me, when four police officers - Toronto Police, not Transit Cops - materialized seemingly out of nowhere at the bottom of the escalators and sized us up.

There was nowhere to run and they damn well knew it, and they knew we knew it, so they were taking their time, as police like to do when they know they’ve got you, like a cat toying with its prey. Taking pleasure in the kill.

More than a little belatedly, Rod Stewart and his friend from Eastern Europe picked up their respective phones and began nattering nonsense as John hurriedly swept the cocaine crumbs away and stuffed all three bags of it, his own, mine, and Rod Stewart’s, down the front of his pants. If we aren’t arrested, I thought, ask John if he’s wearing underwear.

Taking a deep breath, I grabbed my phone, closed my eyes and murmured an agnostic prayer, which goes please please please please please please please please please until someone tapped me on the shoulder.

Expecting a looming cop, all sarcasm and accusation, I was flabbergasted to see John grinning and pointing at the cops, all four of them, standing in the center of the room, interrogating the talentless busker, who was sputtering and kinda scared, and in that moment I forgave him his crimes against music and loved him for being my diversion. Our diversion.

The TTC has a recorded announcement that plays over the speakers inside every single station, something about reporting misconduct or felonious acts. I can only remember the ending: If you see something, say something.

We watched as the cops led the guy out of the station, his body language dramatically changed, gone from confident musician to sniveling inmate. He shot a helpless glance at me as he got on the escalator. I gave him a soft wave and a kiss. I’m an asshole.

“Poor fuckin loser,” Rob Stewart said, shaking his head.

“Here,” John handed me my bag, mercifully free of pubic hair, and I went home and snorted coke and heroin in alternating increments all night and into dawn until both were gone and I went to sleep and when I woke up I felt empty and lonely and depressed so I crawled out of bed and tried to figure out the quickest way to get drugs again.