Chapter 2: Shady Sadie pt. 2

That was all I needed to hear. Toddler and Miles never made it to the parties here and it was isolating to have to hide my gear all the time so nobody would freak out. I motioned for her to come with me and walked towards the stairs. She grabbed the Pinnacle bottle by the neck and followed. Halfway up the stairs, I heard Danny holler “Get it, Jamie!” from the other side of the living room. I was glad I was in front of the girl now, not facing her, because I couldn't help but laugh to myself. Though she didn't know my name, it was obvious the comment was directed at us. Upstairs, we crept passed the hushed quiet of the room and down the hall to the master bedroom.

    This room was the only area of the house that was strictly off limits to even those of us at that stayed at Newt's. It was the dizzy sanctuary of Newt's train wreck of a mother on the rare occasions she came to her own home. The rest of the house could be destroyed but it didn't seem to matter to her as long as her bedroom wasn't out of sorts. This boundary didn't stop me from turning the room into my personal shooting gallery when things got too hectic downstairs. While Newt was preoccupied with his cocaine, he wouldn't notice us slip in. The short haired girl strode over to the bed, sipped the Pinnacle and set the bottle down on the nightstand. She produced a needle from her waistband and a translucent blue nickel bag from her bra. I had never seen anyone so beautiful.

    “Do you have a cooker?” she asked, delicately opening the tiny baggie. I scanned the room for something suitable and settled on the cap of the Pinnacle bottle. I took a swallow of the sugary liquor and set it back down, taking the cap to the bathroom to give it a quick rinse and grab a couple q-tips. I had used this room to get high often enough to know that cotton swabs were stored in the second drawer on the right. Bringing the cap and cotton back to the nightstand, I estimated that the nickel bag held about a half gram of of powder. I had enough dope for a couple shots in my wallet I wasn't about to turn down a freebie.

    I pulled my rig out of my pocket and set it next to hers to cook with. It wasn't polite to dose out my own shot seeing as it was complementary. If you were shooting with people you knew were clean, cooking shots together made it easier to get even doses but she only put about a point and a half in the cooker so I assumed she was mixing them separately; unless she was a serious lightweight, splitting what she put into the Pinnacle cap wasn't going to get us very far. The dope was gray, almost white. All the stuff we got was tan which meant we didn't cop in the same area. Using my rig, she drew some water from a glass on the nightstand and sprayed them into the cap.

    She paused long enough to pick up the Pinnacle and take another sip after which she offered the bottle to me. The coke was starting to wear off and the shots of vodka I had taken earlier were taking over so I put my closed lips to the bottle and pretended to take a swallow. She pushed the powder around in the cap gently, being careful not to spill the mixture. Her playful demeanor from our exchange downstairs had been replaced with a quiet seriousness. She pulled a bit of cotton from the end of a q-tip and rolled it between her thumb and forefinger before dropping it in the cap. Her nails were painted a bright blue green. I decided the color fit her. I sat down next to her on the bed, drawn closer to the dope by forces I didn't fully understand. As she drew the liquid through the cotton into my syringe, the mixture was nearly clear. With the tan dope we got, shots were yellow or brow and the darker it was, the stronger the shot tended to be. The pale mixture in my syringe was disappointing. It didn't look like it was going to have much of an impact. I noticed the small amount of liquid in the barrel which meant she intended to split the shot between us. A weak shot split between two people wasn't going to get me anywhere but I had to tell myself not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Even if it was a waste of time, free was free.

    I reached for my wallet to pull my stash out and throw a bit in but thought better of it. She was cute but not cute enough to warrant sharing heroin. I thought about how soon after the hit I could get away from her to take a real shot in private. I couldn't stand watching a the process of cooking without getting a good rush afterward. I held out my hand for my rig but instead of handing it to me, she took my wrist in her hand and rested my arm on her thigh. As she unbuckled and removed her belt. I protested.

    “I don't really like other people hitting me.” It was true but it wasn't just that. What concerned me most was having somebody who thought this tiny hit was a decent shot sticking me. Tolerance was a mark of experience. With veins as blown out and scarred as mine, I didn't want an amateur digging around in my arm.

    “Relax.” she said gently, tying the belt around my bicep. Even when nurses were getting ready to set an IV in me, my heart would pound. The idea of a greenhorn sticking me was flat out stressful. She handed me the end of the belt to hold in place with my other hand and I pulled it tight, hoping the veins would swell into easy targets. If I wasn't as drunk as I was, I would have had to look away from the blue vessel she was tapping to the surface of my skin; this time I stared. The pinprick felt unnatural in the hands of someone else. I looked to her face. Her mouth hung open slightly and her microscopic pupils were carefully trained on my arm. She looked a little bit too fucked up to be doing this but it was too late to back out. I felt her adjust the needle slightly and looked back down to see a crimson bloom of blood flow into the syringe.

    Watching the register was almost as good as the actual hit for me. I drew in a breath and held it, loosening the makeshift tourniquet gently to keep the needle steady and in place. She pushed the plunger slowly and the liquid drained into my body. I felt her eyes on me and looked up to see her grinning as she removed the needle and set it on the nightstand. I tensed as an explosion of pins and needles traveled up my extremities and into my spine culminating in a warm, electric shock wave bursting behind my eyes. The muscles in my back and shoulders slackened and went limp. I laid back on the bed, unable to sit upright, my vision going dark and blurry at the edges. My last lucid thought was wondering if she would sell the rest of that wonderful half gram.

                        -----------------

    I awoke the next day in the late morning to Maggie the chubby boxer lapping at my lips. I looked around and slowly registered where I was. I prayed Newt hadn't seen that I had been in here. How Maggie had made it onto the queen-sized bed was a mystery. She could barely even get up and down stairs with her stubby little legs. Her belly dragged on the duvet as she leaned over the edge precariously, looking longingly toward solid ground. I sat up and lifted her to the floor but regretted moving immediately. My vision swam. I felt still undigested alcohol slosh around behind my navel and my brain throbbed, soggy and swollen. I was still somewhat drunk so the brunt of the hangover was yet to come. Getting something in me to ease the morning along was a priority. I doubted the house had any coffee and, even if it did, chances are the pot didn't work so a shot of dope would have to do. I reached for my back pocket and noticed my wallet was missing. Frantically, I tossed the duvet back. My wallet must have fallen out of my pocket while I slept.

    It was nowhere to be found, I jammed my hands into my front pockets, hoping desperately that it was there but only found my cell phone, lighter and pack of cigarettes. I checked my back pockets once more to no avail. In the pocket where my wallet had been, I felt a small slip of paper. Taking it from my pocket, I unfolded it and saw a phone number I didn't recognize. The handwriting looked feminine and I was immediately confused. What exactly had happened last night after we had gotten high? There wasn't much of a chance that we had hooked up. I would have been too far gone.

    The only thing I knew about her was that she was a junky just like me. As a fiend, if I had fallen out and seemed completely gone, my wallet would be the first thing she went for. She had obviously been in that pocket if she left her number but that didn't make sense. Why would you roll somebody for their wallet then leave a way for them to find you the next day? If she thought she would be able to play things off like somebody else took it, she was kidding herself. You can't bullshit a bullshitter.

    I saw the bright orange plastic cap of a rig sitting on the nightstand and picked it up. The needle was mine from the night before; I recognized the wear on the numbers on the barrel. It had been rinsed and the cap was still on. If somebody had walked in to see me sleeping in Newt's room with a needle near by, I was in deep shit. The Pinnacle bottle, the cap we used as a cooker and the q-tips were gone. It looked like she had cleaned the nightstand along with my pockets.

    There was no coffee and no heroin to be had but there was definitely some booze left over. This wasn't a morning to handle sober. I fought through the dizziness and got out of bed slowly, looking around to see if my wallet had fallen on the floor. Dizzy, I set one foot ahead of the other in the direction of the kitchen. Danny was already awake and probably had been for a couple hours now. He was up to his usual morning routine.

    Though he was just two years older than me, it was impossible to tell by looking at him. He had thick facial hair and a stocky build that could have let him pass as somebody in their late 20's. He had been living in the house for several months. In exchange for a bed, Danny worked to maintain the house. His responsibilities as groundskeeper included some post party clean up. The guests who hadn't made it home the night before were usually woken up and ushered out of the back door by Danny before anybody else was awake. Once the leftover people were gone, he turned to the leftover alcohol. I came into the kitchen as he was emptying the warm, flat, half-empty beers from the night before into a salad bowl. On a cutting board, a smile pile of cigarette butts sat next to a nearly empty ash tray. Danny was a heavy smoker but he was also unemployed. Each morning, he salvaged cigarette butts, gutted them with a kitchen knife and rolled the stale tobacco into zigzags. One of the cardinal rules of my social circle was to avoid bumming a smoke off Danny unless you had some sort of death wish.

    Even more disgusting than the way he up-kept his nicotine habit was the way he supported his alcoholism. He stepped over to the fridge and pushed his hands under the ice maker. A torrent of cubes fell into his fingers which were still black with soot from his cigarette surgery. I sat at the breakfast bar opposite the sink. Ice overflowed from Danny's hands and clattered onto the wood floors. The crack of each cube hitting the floor echoed painfully in my ears. He kicked the extra cubes to the side and walked back over to his bowl, unloading the ice. Flat beer splashed onto the counter as he stirred the bowl with his fingers. He shook droplets off his hand onto the counter and floor. This wasn't something I wanted to watch with my stomach in the state it was in

    “Aren’t there more beers in the fridge?” I crinkled my nose

   

    “Oh, what's up man?” He said, cheerfully pouring the dregs of a Natural Ice into the concoction. “Morning!”



    “Dude, don't drink that. Have you checked the fridge yet?”



    “Yeah man, we've got plenty.” he said and lowered his face to the bowl, sipping at the surface.

   

    “Come on man...” I held my hand up to my eyes. The stench of stale beer and his loud slurps made the horror scene hard to block out. “Please just have a regular beer.”



    “I'm not gonna waste all this!”



    “You're a fucking animal.”

   

    He shook a finger at me in mock sternness. “We finish our drinks in this house. There are sober kids in Africa.” I laughed but the way his hand shook after a night of boozing told me he was drinking for more than entertainment.