Neptune's Lair

When I met her, word on the street was that Esmay was beyond help.

Her friends called her “crazy” and “borderline.” By the religiously-inclined of former times, she might’ve been thought of as demon-possessed.

During drunken fits she’d get into fist fights or threaten to throw herself from freeway overpasses.

She walked a thin line and repeatedly upset rumors of her demise, taking immense pride in being what she called “stronger than dirt.”

She had a breathalyzer in her car. Two years ago, she’d overturned her Hyundai in an incident where she was discovered to be three times over the legal blood-alcohol limit.

She made financial ends meet by renting her body out for clinical trials, hoping the entire time that she’d taken placebos instead of the experimental medications upstart pharmaceutical companies produced for everything from bipolar disorder to angina. 

There were times she’d come home from one of these “lab-rat money runs” with side effects, bad ones. But they’d eventually subside and she’d make jokes about how at least she hadn’t become the victim of sudden death syndrome. That Esmay. Tougher than dirt. As resilient as rubber.

Even though she smoked all my stuff, drank all my wine, and frequently resorted to flings with Little Dicky, a former boyfriend I suspected provided her with something I couldn’t, I felt something for her.

I made what I called “minimum rage” flipping beef patties and assembling burgers at a late-night boardwalk diner called Cracker Jack’s.

Before the week was up, with Esmay’s and my drug debts, I’d be begging tourists for change to buy spare cigarettes.

For a while, we resided in a tent on the rooftop of a building where Desmond “Tutu” Phillips, a friend since freshman year in high school, was the apartment building manager. Desmond risked losing his job for giving Esmay and me a key to the restricted access rooftop. Despite our unconventional ways, he had the patience of Jesus with us. 

Even so, I’d still piss over the side of the building and Esmay would relieve herself where- and whenever convenient.

When we got too grungy, we’d take care of our hygiene needs at the showers meant for beachgoers.

At night we read copiously by battery-operated lantern light and shared a predilection for somber stuff. Our favorites were Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Camus and Hamid.

When we tired of the Cracker Jack’s grub I’d bring to our squatter pad, we’d get high and end up eating Red Velvet cake and whatever else she’d send me to shoplift from the supermarket a 10-minute walk away.

On the stroll back home, paranoid from the nearly toxic Cosmic Kush, and with my backpack stuffed with our pilfered renegades’ sustenance, I’d be startled by the sounds of passing cars, thinking a cop was sooner or later bound to stop me for stealing Esmay’s and my daily booze and bread. Although I feared the cops, I always suspected my weed paranoia was caused by a much deeper-seeded guilty conscience: I should’ve confronted Little Dicky a long time ago. Also, I had left my mother’s side when I felt her senescence was becoming a burden. There’s no way I had the resolve or character to be the care giver for an aging parent. When I confessed these thoughts to Esmay, she’d dismiss my concerns and say I needed to stop overthinking things.

I remember once when Esmay and I were walking home from a party, she said, pointing to a couple of graffiti-spraying gangbangers, “Javier, I’m scared. That guy with the Supreme hoodie has a gun. He pointed it at me.”

Never sure whether she really meant such things, but fueled by drug- and alcohol-induced courage, I confronted the guy.

“Hey, man,” I said to the one Esmay had referred to, “You know what I am?”

“A janky spic boy with a death wish?” he answered with a sneer.

“No, I’m a delinquent out to get delinquents. What you gonna do with that heater?”

Turns out he didn’t have a gun, just another can of neon spray paint, but he wasn’t overly enthused by the tete to tete I had with him. He and his friend didn’t kick my ass, but Mr. Supreme sprayed me in the eyes with the paint. Esmay started mouthing off to him, but even though I was partially blinded, I pulled her away for fear that we’d both get battered.

Those are the kind of stupid things I’d do for Esmay, but the important thing to me was she would call me things like her “ballsy little soldier” and lavish me with affection after I’d go out on a limb for her. I put blood, sweat, and tears into the relationship and rarely did I think it wasn’t worth it.

The end of our star-crossed romance began after Esmay came back from the free clinic where Doctor “For the People” Randolph Hamilton told her she had cervical cancer. 

After she heard the diagnosis, Esmay became determined to go “out with a bang.” She began visiting Little Dicky more frequently. She demanded I steal tequila instead of wine from the supermarket, and when she drank the Patron I’d bring to our squatter’s abode, her temper became hair-trigger sensitive. 

The only respite I’d get from her gloomy rages would come when I’d invite her to the beach when the moon was full. Apparently, Little Dicky had something against doing things that smacked of romance or chivalry with her. Moonlit midnight swims in the Pacific were one such pastime Dicky didn’t seem to have a taste for. 

On the nights Esmay and I’d sink our toes into the wet sand while the moon’s phantasmagorical light reflected onto the dark side of the Earth, she’d momentarily forget about her terminal diagnosis. 

She’d also forget about her mortal condition whenever we’d watch movies at the rooftop squat. 

I don’t know if it’s the case with most people, but when I’m high and watching a good flick, I’ll hear messages in the movie’s dialogue. I’ll also interpret anything someone says out loud about the film to have personal relevance. I’ve heard these phenomena are called “thoughts of reference” by those in the field of mental health.  Schizophrenics have them, but I guess when I’m high I might get a little schizophrenic. 

Makes me wonder why I keep smoking the Cosmic Kush, but one night while viewing Scarface with Esmay for the fifth or sixth time, she said something along the lines of “God, it’s just so good. I can’t get enough of it.”

To my cognitively distorting, and high, mind, Esmay wasn’t talking about the film’s extended denouement where Tony Montana gets shot by his sister, then exterminates a battalion of rival narco gangster “cockroaches” before he ends up floating face down, bloodied and bullet-riddled in his “the world is yours” Miami drug-boss mansion. No, Esmay wasn’t talking about the film. My mind interpreted her statement as referring to her relationship with Little Dicky. 

Before Montana gets the shotgun blast in the back that finally does him in, Esmay exclaimed, “Jesus, we all know he’s doomed!”

When she said that, I couldn’t help but believe that she was referring to our friend and benefactor, Desmond. If for whatever reason Desmond was doomed, Esmay and I would soon be off the rooftop and into the street—nowhere for a loving couple to be, especially when one in the pair has terminal cancer.

I didn’t know whether Esmay’s words would attract fate, but I knew that her despair was making her behave more erratically. She started to break down in tears when she’d think of having to be holed up in a hospital or hospice, awaiting the inevitable during the last stages of her disease.

That night after the movie, and while coming down off the perception-altering shrubbery, I decided to take a course of action.

The next morning, I bought two tabs of acid off Tripster Todd, a boardwalk dealer of LSD and various other hallucinogens.

I told Esmay that we’d go for a swim at the beach after I got off my shift at midnight.

We walked to the beach at close to 2 AM. On the way there I picked a purple flower whose name I didn’t know from a garden in front of a well-tended house. As we walked, I put the flower in Esmay’s hair.

The moonless night sky’s inkiness was blinding.

The tide was low and we had to walk a good distance to the water. There was no one on that portion of the beach except for us.

As she dipped down into the waters ahead of me, Esmay expressed her gratefulness for not having any open wounds, given that a recent outbreak of carnivorous bacteria made coastal immersions risky for bathers thusly exposed.

Before going waist deep into the water, I surreptitiously took the two tabs of LSD I’d bought from Tripster. After letting the acid dissolve, I gave Esmay a prolonged French kiss.

In little time my vision, swayed by the acid, started playing tricks on me. Although there was virtually no light on the beach, my eyes summoned a warm radiant glow in the heavens above.

“Jav, I feel funny,” said Esmay. I splashed her with water and told her that she was okay, that everything was going to be okay.

I knew what I had to do. I played out a dialogue in my mind where I said, “You need to confess,” and asked her why she was always going to see Little Dicky. 

In my mind she responded, “My lips are sealed.”

“That’s exactly what they aren’t,” my courageous imagination told her.

We were up to our solar plexuses in the ocean. I took hold of her shoulders and dunked her beneath.

She came up, laughed, then giddy from the acid, childishly said, “Jav, I’m going to die.”

I said, “No you’re not, luv. You’re going to live forever. Remember, Esmeralda Lucero is tougher than dirt.” I repeated the dunking gesture, this time less playfully, taking a fraction of a second longer than Esmay deemed comfortable for her to be under the tide.

The third time I dunked her was even more forceful. She struggled in my grip under the water. I crossed a threshold.

She freed herself from my hold, surfaced, then said, “What do you think you’re doing?” more in the form of an exclamation than a question.

I smiled. The white of my teeth infuriated Esmay more.

“It’s not funny, you hijo de puta! Why do I feel like I’m tripping?” she screamed before trying to dig her nails into my eyes.

The time had arrived. I knew the cure.

I put her neck into a vise-like hold in the crook of my right elbow and dunked her under the dark waters again.

Her arms flailed about. She tried to kick, she writhed, but I held fast. I could hear her submerged cries, but they were muffled and accompanied by an up-bubbling of exasperated air. 

Her writhing gradually slowed down, until she managed a last, weak exhalation and final spasm, and then yielded her spirit to the Pacific Ocean. I left her body floating where I had drowned it.

Even though no one had heard or seen what transpired, I was still tripping on the acid, and the walk back to Desmond’s apartment building was haunted by bogeymen and illusionary images of people pointing fingers and whispering accusations.

I climbed the stairs to the rooftop where my unhoused person’s hovel was located, lit a cigarette, and was overcome by an urge to write a song. I took out my notebook and a pen and started scribbling.

Moonless night

World’s delight

Me, you drowning

Out of sight

We fear most

Give up the ghost

But before we do

Let’s make a toast

On our tongues

Still feeling young

Summon moon

And avoid the sun

We’ll be scared

Cause we’ve dared

Court Pluto

In Neptune’s lair.

I put the pen down, satisfied with the verses and thought of the poor and beaten down, of the fact that we are all victims to the onslaught of implacable and incorrigible Time. I thought of what could have been and of what now would never be between Esmay and me. 

After another cigarette, I laid on my rooftop sleeping bag, unable to forgive myself—despite my best intentions—for the simple thing, the merciful thing, I’d done. Before I knew it, I had cried myself to a still and unrepentant slumber—the sleep of both the wolf and the lamb, of the innocently voracious and the imperfectly innocent.