A Couple of Ks From the Beach

Creedence on the radio, smooth waves of sun-sea basking me in light, salt clinging eagerly to the tangy white hairs on my skin.

           Who needs to be serious when you have all this?

           I take a big puff from the joint; it’s pure joy, a sweet aroma like you’ve never seen. It’s bliss, man, another world, in a head outside of yours, bigger than yours, like waaaaaaay bigger and somehow it’s everything you know, and you’re nothing but also everything and...

           I break into a coughing fit. Odd, bru, not groovy at all.

           “What’s in this man?” the words kick with a jarring force at the back of my throat, grasping to get out and get right with the world.

           “Nah man, it’s Dave’s special is all. Same thing, ain’t nothing but that same precious thing it’s always been.” Stavros grabs the tinged roach and takes a few gentle kisses as the clouds caress his puckered lips.

           There’s a chemical aftertaste I’m not used to. A noxious bite, alien; like a hospital after a scrub down.

           “No man, I’m saying... there’s something weird going on here.”

           “Relax,” Stav intones, leaning back in his seat til the thing almost bends off its stolid feet. “Count the ducks if you need to; you know the drill. No worries; you'll be all crunchy. That's a promise."

           The ducks, the parra patrol, guaranteed to hijack the internal critic and bring you back. A little visualisation we’d been working on. The good trip guides.

           So I see them. Doozy, Daffy, Dreary, and Dreggs—all the main ducks in their ties and crocs—I picture them in front of me. Doozy’s droopy eye and the drool hanging down from his mud-red beak looking like a blood stain. Daffy’s small specs, pinning his eyes and...

           We were five kilometres out of Buffalo Bay when the drugs began to take hold.

“And then?” Her eyes are a brilliant swimming green.

           “You know, I mean, you know how we got here, right?” Her hand slips off mine.

           “You’re always hiding things from me.”

           I grin. “I’m an addict; it’s what we do.”

            “I hate it when you call yourself that,” She’s spitting out the words.

           “Am, was, won’t be. Who cares? It was there and still is. Everything that happens to you is a part of you. Till the day you die.”

           Her brow furrows; it makes her look like a dassie with her buck teeth and blunt brown-speckled nose. I try to contain a chuckle, unsuccessfully.

           She punches me softly, but she’s holding back, There’s real frustration there; I can see it in her tight expression and painfully bent white joints. All the while, that crisp sea air around us fills the rift I feel between me and my humanity.

           “I’m sorry Si. I can’t help it.” She looks out across the bay, her gaze wandering. I know she wants to be somewhere over that horizon. Rotten seaweed washes up on shore, stinking up the air as we slide on past it. She’s sick of this town, sick of the same old faces. Maybe she’s sick of me. That’s why she digs so hard to uncover parts of me she hasn’t seen before. She’s running out of exhibitions and activities to keep her interested. “You got word back from that agency in Cape Town?” My voice is measured and flat, containing an uncomfortable mess in my soul like emotional tupperware. 

           She shakes her head.

           I stop, planting and sinking my feet into the wet sand.

           She walks on. Then looks back and cocks her head. “What?”

           “Oh nothing, just wanted to test a theory.”

           “Yeah?”

           “Checking if you’re still in there.”

           Her half-smile is brief and dull. Grey-brown clouds threaten from across the sea, rolling closer but far enough for us to see and avoid.

           “You know, B, you’ve gotten so cryptic these last few months. I mean, I always knew you were, but there’s something different now...”

           “Sinister?” My grin is devilish.

           “You trying to scare me?”

           I rope my arm around her waist and pull her in. "Never, my angel.” I go in for a kiss; it’s a gesture. She allows for one on the cheek and quickly pushes away. It’s soft, not aggressive. Drifting, not escaping.

           “You know, I’ve never been good with words,” I say. “I try but they get the better of me sometimes.”

           “That’s one thing, sure, but it’s another to completely ignore the situation and pretend. And I don’t know anymore what the case is.”

           I feel my face heat up. My ego takes a mild bruising there. She’s called me a liar, and I’ve been thinking of myself as nothing but authentic. I don’t know the words for that now. That’s maybe why I screw it up so badly.

           “Better than making up shit to describe a nonexistent situation,” the sentence escapes my lips like the hiss before the flamethrower ignites. It’s out there. She’s wounded and reeling; her mind is racing. I can tell by the infinity of expressions that flicker across her features in milliseconds, tightening then opening the muscles around her face over and over in a loop until eventually...

           Only a blank stare remains.

           She says nothing.

           I expected something. Anything.

But there was no response.

           “You’re going aren’t you?” I ask. She nods. “Fuck us, I guess, right?

           She sighs. 

           “Yeah, I guess.”

They’re listening to my story in that basement, harsh fluorescent light dazzling a droopy face here, a dreary face there, and a pinpointed spectacled face on yet another. They’re wondering what happened next.

           The air is mouldy but harmless. 

           “I guess I never really loved her,” I say. “I did once, I think but people grow apart, and there’s that glue, that thing you cultivated in the beginning that holds you together that even when you want to get out of it, you can’t cos that thing is there. It’s not love. It’s not lust. It’s not even like. Just pure familiarity, habit, expectancy, maybe dependency. It’s the same, man.”

           Like one chemical being poured into a variety of others in test tubes, the reactions are mixed. I see a red bubbling up, glaring eyes, and tensed brows; a blue fizzling out into a lack of understanding that turns into so much foam, and a green slowly hardening, liquid turning to gel then turning solid, lifeless and forlorn.   

           It’s always intriguing how an event in the external world can be taken on in so many different ways. In a sense, we are all unique.

           “But in a sense, we’re all the same. I should’ve wanted love, but I didn’t. I got told there was something wrong with me and, hell, maybe there is. But you just do what you feel at the end of the day. No grand calculator is tallying up and computing all the variables to a set result. In the final moments before a decision is made, even if the mind has raced analysed, and spewed out as many alternatives and consequences as it can, we go with our gut.”

           Things are tense, and something’s breaking. I’ve said too much against the grain. It’s not in the literature; it’s not part of the dogma. Someone needs to correct me. That’s how it goes with me. My words are just not right and not contextually appropriate.

           “Well I used to think that way and…” it’s an old timer; he’s so depressed (even though he doesn’t realise it) that he hasn’t shaved the scruffy whiteish grey fur that splotches parts of his cheeks, chin, and throat. He proceeds to lecture me on self-centeredness and surrender, higher powers, and character defects. I know it all. I am a know-it-all. But yet, I don’t know how to apply it. That’s one hell of a character defect, man.  But I know that.

I’m watching him, arm wrapped up in a rubber band, twitchy fingers, and fuckitall desperate eyes. It’s a bad combo. In seconds, he’s spiking up, and for once, I’m not worried about the drugs. All I’m thinking is, Jesus Christ, I’ll be amazed if this guy doesn’t get an embolism. That is bad form. But his eyes slowly redden and sag, his body melting like sex wax at the beach on a boiling day in December. He doesn’t care about anything anymore, and that’s all he wants. 

Fifteen years, and I still end up here.

I can taste it—that bitter chemical taste when smoked, that glorious prick into the bloodstream when jacked, the icy drip when snorted.

But something about the ending isn’t the same. Before it was glorious, it was the final destination—peace and wholeness—and everything in one.

But now it’s not. There’s a hollowness to the experience, a sense that this is nothing more than numbing, and there’s a fuller life waiting out there if you walk away. Get willing, able, open-minded, and honest; you know all the sh*t they say.

She’s turned dark, meaningless, and uncaring. It will be the last time I ever romanticise junk.

Somehow, I made it this far. I have no kids, but my nephews love me. I’m the fun uncle, and I’m always out there. There’s a child in all of us; only it seems to be stronger in people like me, more demanding. And you spend your whole life negotiating with them.

There’s no regret here. I have a little granny flat to call home, and it’s only a few kilometres from the beach. Her walls are that white stubbled concrete that I love to run my fingers over, and her smooth, gleaming charcoal tiled floors make it easier to clean up the animal refuse from all my pets. Compensating? Who cares. Love is love. Things didn’t magically appear once I got into recovery. The job came hard. I wasn’t as successful as I would’ve been had I never picked up the stuff.

But that was my journey. 

Almost every day, the beckoning of my own devising still haunts me. Just a couple of pills, it says, or some powder—a dop couldn’t hurt, right? Just for today. You’re big and strong now; you can handle it. And even if you can't, who cares? 

This is thirty-six years later.

But I’ve grown accustomed to what they are. I acknowledged them. They have no power over me. They’re merely whispers from an impotent shade. The ghost of a love that once was. Relationships never die. With people, with things. They always lie there below the surface, ready to be reignited. Lingering memories of intoxication and excitement end in soul-destroying chaos. Play the tape forward, man. Some love is way too toxic.

“You talking to yourself again?” My sister is lean for her age, with a face as sharp as a knife, while her hair and eyes are darker than a starless night sky. At least she visits. And cares.

“Just thinking, you know.”

Her eyes are always so dead-set and focused that they never soften. Once a girl, now sixty, she never doubts who she is for a second. “You should write all this down; maybe sell it.”  I used to tell her that all those years ago. When did I stop?

And why is she starting with it?

“Hmmm.” I’ve thought about it countless times. Like an angel watching over me, the ideas glow in my mind's eye, full of possibilities. My life in text. What a life. “I don’t know.” 

“You used to be so talented. You could do this, right?”

Maybe I was once. Maybe I thought I was; maybe it was all in my head, and I’m no different from the next guy. Whatever that was is gone now. Flushed down the toilet with thirty benzodiazepines on August 23, 2012. But I’m happy; my needs are covered. My life is mediocre, but it’s blessed.

“I don’t think I could make it good enough.”

She frowns but that passes. She can be gentle with me. “You’re too hard on yourself.”

She doesn’t get it. I’m not buying into that whole game, the one society pushes. Do this, be successful, work yourself to death, and spend every waking hour denying the call so that one day you can finally relax and enjoy life. I’ve always done my own thing, and somehow I got by.

“It’s not that,” I shrug. “I just don’t have the words.”