Dreams of a Better Place - Part 1

...Lil' Trev is sitting in the lounge playing with his toys. His dad is watching the game highlights on their brand new 50" HD LCD Sony television and Trevor might as well be invisible. He is so relieved that the worst of Trevor's teething seems to be over and he has stopped crying, because now he can have some 'peas and quiet'. Trevor doesn't like peas. If Trevor walked over to the fish tank and stuck his head in it and drowned himself, his adoring father wouldn't notice until the commercial break.

Trevor doesn't know all this of course. He just knows that when his daddy lifts him onto his knees for 'ups' and bounces him up and down, it makes him happy as a clam. He just knows that what makes him cry the most is when his mouth gets the ouchies and he chews on his dummy to make it all better.

Trevor's mummy calls dad's shiny thingy the 'Idiot Box' but he is not interested in it, he is interested in his toy cars. He grabs his small truck with the big brown bear behind the driver seat and he moves it across the carpet towards the dumper truck with the pelican behind the wheel.

He makes them crash into each other, and he makes a wild 'kabooooooooooooom' noise...

****

Mark remembered nothing but pain, and the terrible noise of some sort of gigantic mechanical monstrosity roaring in anger. He imagined that it would have been the noise the Decepticons would have made in his old Transformers comics. Now feeling was returning, the aches and agony were turning into a dull throb, and soon even that feeling would be gone. He tried to inhale and he began to choke on something which he thought might have been sand, but it wasn't gritting at all, and it was much too fine.

Fine in both sense of the word. Hell better than fine, it was great, it was fantastic. This stuff tasted pure as pure can be without it making your heart blow up like a baked potato in a microwave. He inhaled through his nose this time, and his head immediately began to buzz and his train of thoughts sharpened like a razor. He coughed and retched as it filled his throat but it was a beautiful and bittersweet feeling. This new streamlined, bullet train, Concorde thought pattern made him realize what was actually happening.

He seemed to be lying face down in pure, beautiful cocaine. Probably so pure it was snow white instead of that dull motel room magnolia colour. White as the sheets of snow that were falling when he...

"Pedal to the medal, shag ass baby, run 'em down like dogs."

...When he what? He couldn't remember anything before, it was all a blur, pieces of a puzzle that didn't quite fit, those frustrating pieces that made you want to slam it with a hammer until you made it fit. He opened his eyes and he saw white. He saw small grains of it falling out of his hair, he saw his hands buried up to the wrists in it. Beautiful and fine, he'd never been able to afford blow like this.

His memory would surely return soon enough, in the mean time - he lifted his head. What he saw made him breathless, he tried to gasp a few words, Is this heaven? but all that came out was a kind of awed whisper. He was in a desert, or on a mountain top, or on a fucking beach, whatever! Except here, the endless dunes of sand or the endless drifts of snow were a blinding white vista of beautiful Colombian ivory.

Even more incredibly, here and there he could see crack pipes, joints, pills, syringes full or heroin or speed or whatever else jutting out of the cocaine, like small buoys in the middle of the ocean. Close to his left hand he saw a bottle of Jack Daniels jutting out of the cocaine with it's ass in the air.

He sat up and dusted the cocaine off his dirty clothes that hung loosely from his scrawny frame of a body. A part of his mind felt glee as he remember a brief fragment of memory. He remembered snorting every tiny grain he could find on his clothes, on the floor, on the table, on the toilet seat, anywhere he could find it after one particularly wild bender. He would never have to stoop so low ever again.

It had never really occurred to him that to most people, at least normal, law abiding, god-fearing people, he had already stooped pretty low. Probably a fair few stoops lower than low. If you had of told him this he would have laughed at you and probably shouted something along the lines of, "Fine then, if you're so damned holy then you're not getting a grain of my stash."

He grasped the bottle of JD and flipped it up in an arc and caught it in mid air, spinning the lid off it effortlessly. He still had some of his grace and dexterity from his extremely brief stint as a bartender, which was a great job, one of the only solid jobs he ever held. His memories seemed to be coming back in brief bursts every time he moved or thought, and he wasn't sure if he liked this. He remembered the night he lost his bartending job. He remembered broken bottles, blood - but not his, and his hands being pinned roughly behind his back and cuffed.

He tipped the bottle to his mouth and drank deeply as if it was water and he had been stranded in the desert for a week. He let the alcohol dribble down over his chin and stain the cocaine drift below him.

At first, the bitter and somewhat clinical taste of the alcohol brought his memories back in a flood, memories of every single drink he'd ever taken, but as his deep mouthfuls from the bottle went on, the memories turned into a haze and disappeared. He kept drinking and drinking and the bottle never seemed to empty, if his eyes were open he would see that it seemed to be refilling itself.

He only stopped when he was so drunk that he passed out and dropped like a useless slab of meat, the cocaine puffing up in dusty clouds, with his head luckily turned to his left so he vomited on the blow instead of back down his own gullet. With so much cocaine and alcohol in his system in such a short period of time, you'd think his body would have just given up there and then... but things seemed different here.

He lay unconscious with his own vomit pooling around him for god knows how long.