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Junk

Andrew Spano

It was one crappy afternoon when Danny died.
The streets of Chinatown stank like shit,
and the heat had already melted candles
and made the tap water taste like piss.

We were coming back from I don’t know where
when we got to the house and saw the ambulance
and the little crowd of curious Chinese
and the gurney with Danny there white and limp.

The EMT pumped a plastic bottle of air
into his face, mouth and nose sucked
by the rubber mask of the respirator. I could tell
by the lazy way he pumped that it was all over.

And by how they loaded Danny into the back of the truck
the way DPW guys stow their shovels for the day,
then mope over to the cab doors and hoist
their beefy selves onto the bench seat and head back to the yard.

The crowd stared, thinking in Chinese, as the driver
cranked the engine to life with his cargo in back,
then let out the emergency brake, put it in drive
and rolled off to the hospital a block away.

It was one crappy afternoon when Danny died,
died after only snorting a few lines of fine brown shit
his friends got off the street nearby from the hustlers
who chanted “You straight?” in my face day after day.

He died right there on the same spot where, a year later,
Chris would lie choking on his own memories
like he was gargling broken glass, only a few years
older than Danny’s nineteen, after doing a couple lines of the same shit.

“He’s dead, he’s dead!” Jess screamed as she banged on my door
one sunny afternoon. I jumped up, ran downstairs, my head
a hand-held video camera jogging with drama, the scene
a boy in a white t-shirt as cold and grey as meat.

His face was smooth, his eyes white, his lips
blue like a swimmer’s too long in surf.
As I stared stupid at his gargling, and the EMT’s burst in,
pushing me away and putting that same plastic bottle on his face.

It worked this time, and he jerked back to this world
where, once, he found himself in jail with a kid who said,
“I know you. You sold me my first bag,” as the kid did his day
before arraignment on a charge of possession, Class A.

It was a crappy day when Danny died.
This time I saved the ventilation tube they shoved
down Chris’s throat, brought it back to my place,
and washed it off in the sink as a memento mori.

It sat there on the bookshelf for a year until I heard
he was back on the shit again, so I rode my bike
out to the bar where he was and bought him a beer and said,
“Here’s the thing that makes you different from Danny.”

At first he didn’t know what it was, sipped his beer, then looked
straight forward into the mirror behind the bottles.
I threw it in the trash can by the door where
greasy paper plates of pizza crusts

gathered flies from the street, and sunlight
bled through the windows the bugs left footprints on.
We gulped our beers and watched the game.
“Don’t worry, Chris,” I said. “It was just junk.”



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