The Dreamer

THE DREAMER

The head was almost obscured by the big black bee-stung hands; but if one looked closely, one could still make out the panic-ridden face of a soon-to-be deceased...chicken. The sound that started to echo from its beak was not a shrill scream, but a dream-ending screech, that started low and continued to build, until at its crescendo, it startled me awake on a sudden turn at the 77th street subway station. Where poultry became real. I blinked once, twice, rubbed my eyes, and then muffled a sickness yawn.

Across from my now semi-focused eyes was the most out-of-place, blue-eyed, blond-haired boy. His hippie-like coiffure flowing lazily down one side of his almost laughably gorgeous face. The humorous, almost macabre part of his angelic visage was that in three short years he'd be in prison for the murder of a young mother. He would take a lamp, when surprised suddenly during a B&E, and bash her brains to a sickening silent halt, but for now he was my partner...one of two...he was Peter. My eyes still trying to focus were being hampered by sick-flowing tears with a mixture of a need and unspoken sadness. My blond associate finally became clear. He was giving me a head tilt to the right, a non-verbal way of saying "look at this". I looked and saw an old man scratching his nose, rubbing his face, all in a half-nod which embodied a lifetime of so many disappointments. I smiled. I understood what he meant. It was the hope that we too would be soon in that glorious condition. That tragic dichotomy: 'Of why have you forsaken me?' and 'do this in memory of me.' The clatter and clash of the broken and bruised subway car almost knocked our junkie Jesus to the floor and woke us to the here and now. I closed my eyes in a futile attempt to relax my legs and stop the incessant banging of my knees. My uncle thought this was the secret to keeping thin. In fact, it was one of the features of an anxiety that had been with me since early on in my life.

The waiting, the going, the getting was the way of the modern Burroughs. When we looked back in future years, the going would be romanticized, waiting would be pushed far back into our memories, and the getting would be the silent enemy never defeated.

The walk from the subway to the house was uneventful, except that two hippies stood out like a cellar in Oklahoma. My dark Italian complexion, made deeper by the days at the beach, playing the pocketbook game, helped a little. The pocketbook game was the source of our newfound wealth and the reason we were able to make this junk-chasing excursion. The game was simple. It took three thieves, an oblivious beach-going public, and a pocketbook or, better still, a loaded beach bag. One of the trio of thieves stationed themselves at the water's edge. He was the lookout for unsuspecting victims. When they left their blanket unattended and ventured into the water, he would raise his hand, this would start accomplice number one running towards the booty on that lonely blanket...he too had a blanket in his hands, while being chased by the last man of the trio. He would push him down on the target bag or wallet, and as he feigned anger, he'd scoop up any valuable possessions of the innocent swimmers and chase the fake antagonist off the beach...We had pulled that over two dozen times, and now we could use that bounty to cop the means to forget the guilt that came with such dirty deeds. As we made our way to our destination, we saw the storefront of the "Young Lords", the Spanish version of the Black Panthers. Next door was an old run-down brownstone. The hallway was plaster-filled poverty, smelling of dinner, supper, and dirt. It made it clean. We started up the worn-out steps made quieter by the early morning. As the destination came close, my mind wandered to the plaster wall on my right with its holes and graffiti. One passage stood out, written in black scrawl on the flaking wall, 'Why do you think they call it dope?' I smiled a 17-years-old wise-ass "Fuck you" to myself and then shouted at Peter. "Gimme the money." He seemed lost. "What?" he whispered. "The money," I said. "I have it in my pocket." "Okay, gimme."

As he handed it to me, he knocked on the paint-peeled door, a short, pudgy woman answered; her light blue house dress stained with a dozen meals.

"Papi, what you need?" Her voice had that sweet tone that the money in your hand manufactures. We copped 35 capsules. This would be the first and last time we ever had capsule dope. We took 3 apiece for our own private cookers. I hid 19 in my sock while a more paranoid Peter stuck his in a hole in the wall. I quickly took out my works. Kept in a small brown suede bag with a pull string. 

The eye dropper had a pacifier attached to it with a rubber band wrapped tightly around the neck, to give it a whoosh. I tore a piece of a dollar bill, a small strand of 'In God We Trust' and handed to Peter. I did one for myself and I placed it in my mouth, wetting it and wrapped it around the tip of the glass dropper. This collar would keep the Steelback needle secure. I placed the hypo down gently on my pants leg and started to empty the 3 capsules into my spoon. Peter used his old bottle cap with wire handle, it was a matter of preference. Even though our Spanish lady would not allow us to get off in her apartment, she had supplied us with a glass of water. Generosity knows no bounds.

My spoon full. I carefully sucked up the water into the dropper and squirted it slowly onto the white powder on the spoon. I raised the mixture with a surgeon's care, lit a Bic, and slowly cooked my concoction. The white floating powder became a light brown water. Picking up the dropper, I sucked the liquid up and used a tiny piece of cotton to collect all the germs and disease. All the hepatitis, all the dreams, loves, and innocence. The small dirty white ball protected us from it all. After a flicking of the finished product to remove any death-dealing bubbles, I slid the piece of dulled steel into my arm. I was looking at the tube, waiting for a different kind of bubble, that delicious bubble of blood. Then I could slowly squeeze the pacifier and shoot the brown liquid. Then wait for the warmth of the drug. The all-encompassing warmth, because nothing could replace the feeling of no more worries, no more problems, no more dirt, lost loves, shattered dreams, no more dead grandfathers, no more. No more questions. Like: will you? can you? When, who, why, did they, did you, could you. It quiets them; it makes them dull. The little gnawing pain in your belly goes away. It's the ultimate procrastination, the sleepy, sloppy junkie, sorrow delayed. Scarlett made real. Only there are no fiddly-dees in the street.

We booted the liquid probably half a dozen times, sending the blood back into the arm. Maybe it was to capture a glimpse of the initial rush. But eventually, we pulled the dropper from our scarred pit and hastily sanitized it with 2 or 3 squirts of water. From the wound in my arm flowed a river of blood, slowly making its way towards the cliff of my forearm, dripping 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 drops onto my jeans. It made a what looked like a pattern, a silly, deliberately recognizable face of despair. Then 6 and 7 changed the face to a pool of blue dirt, which my wrist swiftly smeared into a distant memory. It was time to go, and I went to retrieve the other caps from the wall, but they had fallen behind.

"FUCK." I shouted at the wall. I knocked at the door.

"Our dope fell behind the wall."

"Sorry, nuthin' I can do, you have to go, too much in hallway, go now."

"I need to get the dope," I protested.

"No," she screamed, "you have to go now".

"C'mon, let's get out of here," Peter said. We scurried sleepily down the steps, and at the almost bottom, we were greeted with, "Who got duh dope?" A machete-wielding Spanish take-off artist with an angry sing-song accent and an anger intensified by a craving and a little jealousy at these white boys copping and getting high without him. The brown-handled cutter was raised in one motion to Peter's throat. Again with a throatier, guttural snarl came "Who got duh dope?"

"Wait," I said, looking into the pinned, pleading eyes of Peter. "Stop, okay, stop." I was about to reach down into the sock hideaway when a wonderful George Harrison obscure album burst upon my thought process. "The wall!" I said triumphantly. "The dope is behind the wall!" The blade dug deeper into my almost bent-backwards partner's now bleeding skin. "No, no really! It's behind the wall, upstairs." I looked skyward with an encouraging nod. "It fell behind the wall, come on, I'll show you." Our attacker looked puzzled, pensive. Should he cut deeper or go and take a look.

"Okay, show me, let's go, show me." We walked slowly up the steps like coal miners after a long day, filthy with hope but tired at the tragedy of it all.

The wall fell like the crumbling ideals of the Roman Empire, with screaming Spanish and English combinations of "what the fuck are you doing?" My delightful dope dealer was livid. My new machete man told her in Spanglish to shut the fuck up. After a quick remodeling of the hallway, behind that shattered wall, sitting on a cross-beam was that playtime bag of capsules.

The man with the machete grabbed it and left. As I tailed him down the stairs, I could hear the ever-distancing shouts of "don't you ever come back!" My mind didn't give a fuck about that. I was too busy, buzzing incessantly in the man's ear, trying to reason with my new friend.

"Hey, part of that dope is mine." "Hey, we need to split that." "Hey, we're partners on that." "Hey, I was the one who told you it was in the wall." "Hey, hey! Where are you going. Hey!"

He stopped and turned to me, exasperated.

"Okay, just shut up!"

I smiled inside and motioned to Peter to catch up. We followed my new friend into an abandoned house to become blood brothers, in a heroin kind of way.

So, the ritual was repeated. The capsules were divvied up. The works, the belts, the blood, the booting, the head bob, and then the head nods; my nod slowly melted into a silent, soulful sleep, that finally turned black without my knowledge. I was lost in that darkness for a very long time. Then a white fluorescent light made me take notice that the brightly lit room I was now in smelled of alcohol and misery.

Behind a blue curtain in the far corner of the room stood a group of shadowy figures, all moving and gesturing like Chinese shadow puppets. Suddenly, a head popped out from behind the curtain and looked directly at me.

"She's dead," she said. I felt a scream rise in my mouth, but nothing escaped. A rush of memories shot by on a film screen, and then I heard the scream. It was coming from somewhere deep within the earth. As I was coming to grips with these oddities, the same nurse spoke again.

"Wait, we got her back, she's alive."

I heard myself saying, "Alex, it's okay," which morphed into "Lex, we have to go," then into "we got her back, Alex." These words floated in these 3-second snippets, dueling back and forth. Then finally, the 'Alex' morphed into 'Lex' which became a pleading "Lex, let's get out of here." I raised my half-closed eyes, shook off the daymare, and slowly rose to my feet. Peter stood before me with a twinkling smile.

"C'mon, let's go."

We stumbled, laughing, through the broken furniture, rat feces, and shattered glass, bursting free into the quiet morning of the neighborhood. On the way home, we were comrades with holes in our arms. The train ride was a mixture of dope-fiend tall tales and half-nod laughs. By the time we pulled into Newark, we were sad to see our new friend go. Two hours before, he had almost cut Peter's throat, but now the misery of addiction had us in hug-swapping, hand-slapping, nose-itching goodbyes. The train started slowly again and jostled us back into our seats. I stared out of the grime-streaked window, thinking of all the lives in all of the houses that whisked by. What was happening in the little apartment, so close to the train that the noise must have been part of the family? What evil was being done in that yard with the leaf-filled, dirt-encrusted pool? And so on and so on as the real lives melted before me. My eyes slowly half-closed, I gave a quick smile to Peter, and then my head slumped in sleep, banging gently on the glass.

Suddenly, my world turned white, not the sun-filled, joyous white of the morning, no, it was the bland, awful white of a sheet-covered body at the morgue. Everything slowly morphed into a greyish black, and a fog-filled darkness opened up onto a street filled with children laughing, yelling, and playing.

Suddenly, there I was, and from out of the crowd came a single voice,

"First to see the streetlights go on."

I turned to see who had won the night contest with no prize, and then waited for the whistle, my father's shrill signal that it was time to come home. I waited, but instead of my call to "Get the fuck home!", the street turned dark. Not the darkness of the blind, but of the dead. I felt for a light and was slowly rewarded with a grave-robber's awakening. In the air, I could make out Richie Havens' voice,

"Don't mind me, I ain't nothing but a dream."

Then the music got fainter and more cacophonous. I was alone, all alone. Except for a single shadow across from me on the other side of the street. It was illuminated by a fire burning in a trash barrel. Slowly it came into focus. It was my grandfather, my dead grandpa.

"What are you doing here, Where are you going?" I called out. He pointed down the road. I started towards him. He waved both hands, pleading me to stop. I just wanted to hold him one last time, kiss him on his weathered cheek, feel his warmth that I felt so rarely in my life.

"Can I come with you?" I pleaded.

"No!" "You have a life to live." He pointed towards the night sky and slowly walked away. I was about to follow him, when from behind I heard a voice.

"Next stop, Asbury Park."

Again, a little louder this time, "Asbury Park."

The train slowed to a dream-ending halt. I awoke startled and gazed over at Peter, he looked at peace. At peace with the present. At peace with the past. At peace with the old man nuzzling his head on his chest.

"C'mon, Pete, let's go, we're home. Peter," I said softly. He finally stirred, giving a disgusted shrug to the old man, pushing him roughly off his shoulder. He stood up smiling, he was still fucked up. I jumped down the four steel steps of the train to the dirt of Asbury Park, glanced down the street where it's "hard to be a saint," and saw, coming closer with a Jersey City walk, our third partner...Gary. He was a sports specimen turned addict, still with all the muscle that says 'don't fuck with me,' but also a grizzled street look that comes with the constant chaos that a heroin run demands. I wanted to tell him of our trials, of our death machetes, of all our troubles, but I thought, for a second, that I saw worry in his eyes. Was he glad we had made it home, because we had been gone so long? Had he thought we had been busted or beat? I hastened my steps, Peter lagged sheepishly behind, and as Gary threw his big hands over my shoulders, his mouth came inches from my ear. He was my partner, my friend, he was going to give this tired, worn-out, dreamed-out man a glimmer of compassion. He whispered softly with a sardonic smile,

"Who got duh dope?"