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Suicidal Birds

William R. Soldan

for Kyle Hohn

Your rocket ship is fast as shit—and your heart’s on fire
    Taz and I have been back at my place for all of five minutes when Julia calls to tell me Kev’s back in town. She says he stopped by the house earlier but no one answered. We were over on the North Side, I tell her, biting our nails in the middle of the sticks and waiting for Taz’s cook to show. She tells me he’ll be back around in a bit.
    Ten minutes later Kev’s knocking on the boarded up window of my front door. He’s got his acoustic guitar and looks straight for the first time since I’ve known him—not stoned, not strung out. Haircut. New clothes and shoes. Like he’s been clean for a while.
    But he’s got that look, like he’s raring to go.
    “What’s good?” he says.
    Taz is in his zone, acrylic painted dreads draped in front of his eyes, crushing up some crystal on a small mirror. He nods to Kev What’s up? and goes back to it. When Kev sees the shards scattered across the table, he looks so excited I think he might piss himself.
    He sits on the couch, tells us he just got back to Ohio about a week ago. He’s been gone since October, spent the last six months in San Diego ago with this chick Dana. “She’s going to one of those ‘alternative schools’ out there,” he says. “Ended up being some fuckin’ cult, man. Weird shit.”
    “Weird like how?” I ask.
    “I don’t know, man, just weird.”
    He says the two of them were living in a small cottage beside a huge water tower on her uncle’s property. “Then she decided she wanted to move out to the school campus or whatever, which was just some rundown farm out in the fuckin’ boonies. Some real Heaven’s Gate type shit. I went with her once and kept expecting them to start passing out cups of Kool-Aid.”
    “Peoples Temple,” I say.
     “Huh?”
    “The Peoples Temple are the ones who drank the Kool-Aid. Jonestown in the 70s. Heaven’s Gate was barbiturates and apple sauce.” I only know this because I recently read an entire book about infamous cults from cover to cover after running a rail as thick as my thumb. I read a lot of books.
    “Heaven’s Gate was in San Diego, though,” I tell him. “Maybe Dana joined a revival.”
    “Maybe. Anyway, she kept trying to recruit me, so I split one day while they were all out in the woods praying for the mothership.”
    Taz scrapes us each a nice pile. At that, Kev drops the subject, removes a spoon and rig from his jacket pocket and loads up.
    We each do our thing.
    I sit back in the filthy curbside armchair, take a few moments to let the speed B-boy through my system.
    Taz pops off and goes right to tearing apart a magazine, starting work on one of his collages. He’s got a glue stick and scotch tape beside him. Markers. He’ll be busy for a while.
    Kev’s pacing around the living room, trying to channel his sudden energy. His eyes, always ablaze with some new creative vision, are as big as the Kinks LP spinning on the turntable. He breathes deep, starts bouncing on the balls of his feet.
    I grab my guitar. “Feel like jammin’?”
    His narrow face stretches into a jester’s grin. He jumps, actually leaves the floor, and I imagine that he levitates for a minute, starts flitting around like a hummingbird. I join him and hours pass. When Julia gets home from work around six I barely even notice. Kev and I are both still hovering somewhere near the ceiling.

#

    It was about a year ago when I first met Kev on the way back from cashing my paycheck. He was on a bench outside Starbucks on High Street, playing a battered pawnshop guitar for spare change. He was a hodgepodge of styles. Wicker cowboy hat, curled up at the sides and shading his face. Green sport coat over a Sonic Youth T-shirt, safety pinned jeans, dirty and full of holes. Chucks held together with duct tape. Julia and I had spent some time out west a couple years earlier, living like street kids—playing music, selling jewelry, all that—and seeing him there struck a chord of nostalgia in me. I worked security at a frat bar at the time. Had a place, was paying rent, bills—more responsible than I’d ever been in my life. Tied down, in other words.
    I tossed him a buck and offered to buy him a beer. “I’ll be at the bar on the corner if you wanna join me,” I said.
    He said, “Cool,” and grinned as he fingered a Pentatonic blues box over the guitar’s grimy frets.
    About an hour later, he strolled in and we split a pitcher of Coors. He told me he was from near Toledo but had spent the winter in southern California.
    “Never made it farther south than Sacramento,” I said, “but me and my girl spent some time in Seattle.” I said we’d spent that time gacked on crystal and playing music, told him I missed it every day. The energy, the possibilities.
    “West Coast methamphetamines,” he said, as if describing the palate of a fine wine. “San Diego’s the place, man. Mission Bay. Fucking tourmaline skies.”
    He reminded me of this dude—Doc, they called him—in Seattle. Shot me up with crystal for the first time in a campus stairwell. Like a jolt of lightning through my dick straight to my brain, heart rate going zero to a hundred in three seconds flat. Needed to move. Needed to play. We spent the whole night wandering the unfamiliar city, and I played until my fingers frayed. In the early hours, we went up into the hills, watched the day leak back into the world and whorls of morning mist dance like specters on the pavement.
    It had been two years. I hadn’t been back to either place since, but a person holds on to times like those. I was bored, my beer was getting warm, and I felt lethargic in the summer heat, so I asked, “You got a hookup around here?”

#

    Kev walks in, says, “Check it out.” He’s holding an old school Big Muff fuzz pedal and grinning like a kid on Christmas morning. “Got a cash advance at work,” he says. “Only cost fifty bucks.”
    Before coming back to Columbus, Kev stayed with his folks for a week in Toledo or wherever he was from. When they saw that he was off dope and making an effort, they got him a car and a cell and agreed to pay his insurance and phone bill for six months. He’s pushing thirty, but maybe they think this time he’s really turned things around. And who knows, maybe he has. Two weeks and he’s already got himself a job delivering pizzas part-time.
    “What the hell kind of pizza place gives pay advances?” I ask.
    “I told ‘em I needed to get my oil changed and some gas,” he says. “Said I’d make it back in tips tonight or tomorrow.”
    Though I’ve never known anyone quite like him, I’ve always known Kev’s kind. No shame or hesitation when it comes to asking for favors. The type who, through some inexplicable charm, can get just about anyone to help him out. I’ve run into these people over the years, always got something lined up, will get you back next week. The way I’ve always seen it, if you play the pushover, don’t bitch about it when you get burned.
    But I’m certainly no exception. I like when Kev’s around. This is what I told myself when Julia and I decided to let him crash with us. And this is what I tell myself every time he bums my smokes, drinks my beer, gets high on my dime. It’s only because I like when he’s around. Not because I’m a sucker.

#

    Before he took off to San Diego, Kev and I had been writing songs. It started that first night I met him.
    We left the bar and walked to a dumpy little brick apartment building on Tenth, waited out front in the parched grass for his buddy Taz to show up. When two hours had passed, I said, To hell with it, gave Kev my number and walked home, about twelve blocks north.
    My cell rang around eight o’clock. Taz had finally arrived. Everything was all good, but he needed a ride. The three of us spent the next hour driving around in my car, parking, waiting, driving some more. Eventually, Taz met his guy outside a convenience store on Weber and the run-around was over. More than once I had wanted to throw in the towel on the whole deal, but by then I was committed. I wanted to justify the wasted time and gas, and I knew that if we finally scored it would be worth it.
    We got a quarter gram of glass, which back then was more than enough to turn us into laser beams and set the world on fire. Julia was home when we got back. A key bump and she was rearranging the magnetic poetry on the refrigerator and alphabetizing our CD collection for the rest of the night. I hadn’t touched my guitar in months, but Kev and I jammed until the sun came up.
    Musically we meshed, and the entire summer was spent this way—blast off, stay up for days, toeing the delicate line between oblivion and revelation. Kev called them our vision quests, convinced that the ghosts hovering in the corners of our eyes would soon give up the secrets to the universe if we just kept going. So we did. We had a shoebox full of microcassettes, hours’ worth of riffs, drop tunings and schizophrenic time signatures we could never recreate in a million years. We told ourselves we had tapped the hidden spring where the muse resides. We told ourselves during playback that what we were hearing was genius. But it was mostly just noise.

#

    I’m sitting on a chair outside the Ravari Room, the bar where I’ve been working stocking beer and checking IDs a few nights a week since quitting my last job. It’s eleven-thirty on a Thursday, and the place is dead. Just a couple guys shooting pool and a small group of the bartender’s friends hanging around, mooching free drinks.
    Kev comes jogging across High Street with his guitar slung on his back and a look on his face like he’s just come into something big. Either that, or it’s just his face. It’s hard to tell anymore.
    “I got us a gig,” he says.
    I’ve been afraid of this. It’s a very detailed and recurring sense of dread. It’s me in a crowded venue, surrounded by people. We’re about to play a show that Kev has lined up. It’s sound check and Kev’s gone, nowhere in sight. I’m by myself on the stage, and the owner of the club is chewing me out because we can’t go on. It’s the busiest night of the week and he’s going to lose money if there’s no band. I’ve never experienced anything like a premonition, but as soon as it’s out of his mouth, there’s the anxiety and I’m not so sure.
    “A gig,” I say. “Where?”
    “Bernie’s.” He smiles, holds out his fist for me to bump. “Next Friday.”
    “You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re fucking kidding.”
    “Nope.”
    I imagine the eyes staring, bodies getting restless, so I stand up, light a cigarette, and pace the sidewalk in front of the bar.
    “You might’ve run it by me first,” I say.
    “Sorry, man. It just sort of happened. My dude’s band needed someone to open for ‘em. The week after’s lookin’ good, too.”
    I do a quick mental inventory of what we have and what we don’t.
    What we have: Two acoustic guitars, neither of which have working pick-ups; a pig-nose Yamaha amplifier; an Epiphone bass with stripped tuning pegs; a Big Muff fuzz pedal with a fried transistor; a lead guitar player with his own Strat but no amp; a bass player with none of his own gear; and about six or seven songs we’ve never played the same way twice.
    What we don’t have: A working acoustic pick-up for my guitar; three adequately-sized amplifiers through which to play, pedals, a PA system, monitors, mics, mic stands; a name; a fucking prayer.
    Add back in the maybe three times the four of us have rehearsed in the same room with one another, subtract the drummer we don’t have, and based upon my calculation, that puts us somewhere between fat chance and fucked sideways.
    I stop pacing and sit back down. Kev’s leaning against the building’s brick façade, hammering out some power chords on his thirty-dollar axe, and I say, “Hey, look at me.”
    He stops strumming, turns my way.
    “We’re not even close to ready,” I say.
    “Sure we are.”
    I lean back, say with my eyes, I’m listening. Tell me the plan.
    “I talked to a drummer, plays for another band. He said he’d sit in with us. We’re gonna start running through the songs tomorrow. He’s good, man. He’ll be a good fit.”
    “That’s a start, but what about—oh, I don’t know—everything else?”
    “We can borrow some gear. I know some people.”
    “Of course, you do.” I drag on my Camel so hard the filter gets hot and flattens between my fingertips. Exhale. “We don’t even have a name yet,” I say. “But I guess you got that all figured out, too.”
    He sweeps an open hand through the air like a magician. “Space Station Stereo,” he says.
    I think to myself, Damn, that’s not bad, then nod and flick my cigarette into the street.

#

    During the day, I’d be at work, stringing together chord progressions in my mind and watching the seconds tick by on the clock above the bar, while Kev was playing our songs with these other two guys, Matt and Raja. He’d bring me a tape of him hammering out a lick and Matt laying down some jazzy lead over top of if it. Or a few measures of Raja slapping out a beefy ass bass line in the music store just before they got kicked out for not buying anything. Kev, wearing a lunatic’s grin and saying something like, “It’s coming together, man” or “This’ll sound wicked through a stack.”
    They’re cool guys, but they’re the equivalent of session players in the sense that we have nothing in common besides the music. Matt’s a big pothead that delivers pizzas with Kev, someone I would have hung around with a year or two ago, before things got crazy. Before things got—whatever they are now.
    And then there’s Raja. My first thought: Where the hell did you find this cat? Seven-foot tall Middle Eastern law school student. Pressed pants and Oxford shoes. Maybe twenty-three, younger than the rest of us by a few years. So straight I thought he was a narc when Kev first brought him over. But turns out he’s just a newbie. Weed’s the hardest thing he’s ever experienced. And part of me wants to tell him, Good for you, man. Take your time.
    I thought him not having his own equipment seemed fishy, too, because he’s as much as said his folks are loaded. But my guess is he’s full of shit or afraid they’ll find out he’s slumming and cut him off. Can’t fault him for either one.
    We’re all full of shit. Scared to death.

#

    Colt 45 and orange juice: Brass Monkey. The poor man’s mimosa. We’re on number three when Kev starts in about, “Have you ever heard the sound birds make when they commit suicide?” He’s really getting into it. Says he used to climb to the top of the water tower where he and Dana were staying, before she went all Follow-the-Leader. He’s been up too long, talking crazy.
    “I’d take my axe with me. Up there the notes just rode for miles, man.” He’s staring across the living room at the wall, or someplace beyond it, making a rollercoaster motion with his hand. “Sometimes I’d just record the wind.”
    I shake my head, laugh. “The hell are you talking about?”
    “I was up there and there were these sounds, bendy like a struck saw blade, but deeper, you know?”
    Julia sits cross-legged on the floor in a pair of short denim cutoffs and an old threadbare tank top, rolling a joint at the coffee table. She says, “What’s that got to do with birds?”
    “That’s what it was,” he says. “A whole flock of ‘em. Fucking things flew straight into the tower like kamikaze pilots. Tried to get in on tape, but it was over.” He looks over at us, almost disappointed. His eyes are glassy, webbed with red lines. Hair like he’s been electrocuted.
    Julia passes me the joint, but I’m not in the mood. Weed’s been making me squirrely lately. We made some brownies the other night and I lay in bed for hours with my fists balled up, thinking the SWAT team was about to swoop in the windows.
    “I can still hear ‘em,” Kev says.
    I mix another Brass Monkey, kick my feet up on the end of the coffee table. “What’s that?”
    “The birds. I still hear ‘em.”
    Julia grins at me on the sly and shakes her head. Her auburn waves spill over her soft shoulders and I try to remember the last time we spent any time alone, but I can’t.
    I tell Kev, “Maybe you should get some sleep.”

#

    I feel like I’m in fucking sitcom when we’re all in the same room. This new guy on drums, Buzzard. Biker dude, as wide as he is tall. Matt in his Grateful Dead T-shirts and corduroy pants, Raja in his fucking khakis. Kev. Me.
    But they can really play. When we all got together for the first time as a full band a few days ago, it was nothing short of weird. How the songs came out sounding like we’d been together for months. Kev keeps looking pleased with himself. Mad scientist, giddy as he watches his creation come to life.
    We just finished practicing, and things sound good, considering we’re still lacking all the equipment we need. I charged a new amp to my credit card. Four hundred and change. Crate. Two twelves and a three-switch pedal board. Not a stack, but loud enough. Kev assures me that the rest of the amps, mics, and an acoustic pick-up are all lined up for Friday and that the bar has its own PA system. He’s getting more scattered by the hour, but no one else seems concerned, so I’m trying to just go with it, trust that it will all work out.
    But then I’m alone again, surrounded by agitated spectators waiting for a show, and faith wriggles free.

#

    Our gig is in less than two hours, and Kev is nowhere to be found. I’ve been up for the last two days, practicing, trying to stay balanced. Kev’s been up seven, so I’m guessing he went to Taz’s looking for something to keep up the pace.
    Taz lives above Estrada now, a Mexican restaurant over on King with a patio decked out in Corona neons and plastic palm trees.
    I enter the door that leads to the second floor, and Electronic music reverberates off the walls of the narrow stairwell as I ascend the steps. No one responds to my knock, so I walk in, thinking Taz has got to be the only drug addict in the world that leaves his door unlocked.
    Stepping into the apartment is like stepping directly into the mind of an insane person. An onslaught of sensory stimulation. To my left: a wall of TV sets displayed sideways, upside down, and rightside up. Music videos, low-budget horror movies, snow. One of the screens is playing in ultra-slow-mo. On it is a scene from Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Vincent D’Onofrio going batshit right before lighting up the drill sergeant and blowing his own brains out in the latrine. All around: people in the cramped living room, texting on phones or playing with action figures, drawing on their shoes or picking at their faces. Closing in: collages. Various anatomical distortions that seem to grow on the walls like mold. Moving through the room, I duck under a pornographic mobile. Three-dimensional blossom of tits and mouths and eyes, dangling on a filament of fishing line. Others hang throughout the apartment, spinning in midair like grotesque planets.
    I peek into the other three tiny rooms, the bathroom, see more of the same. Crazed activities. Externalized psychosis.
    Kev’s not here.
    In the kitchenette, Taz is spinning records while two guys and a girl stand in front of a lit burner and do hot rails off the stove. Taz has on a pair of mirrored shades, and his multi-colored dreads are tied up, sprouting from his head like a gnarly looking flower. “Hey,” I shout to him, but he’s got a huge set of headphones pressed against one ear. There’s no getting his attention, so I join the others. They hardly seem to notice me until the girl offers me a glass tube. She’s flagpole thin with turquoise hair and a lip ring. Scrawny wrists mapped with needle marks.
    I take the tube from her, heat it up over the burner.
    The crystal melts on the way in, lines my throat with bitterness, and I exhale a faint feather of smoke.
    Things rev back up. Nerves in my teeth ignite. Balls clench. The threads of light and darting shadows that have occupied my periphery for days hone themselves into razor blades and I almost forget the pressure, the anxiety that led me here in the first place.
    I’m moving toward the door.
    I’m . . .

#

    There must have been some kind of neural misfire, a minor glitch in the central nervous system. The books would call it Substance-Induced Dissociative Fugue or Transient Global Amnesia.
    Temporal Dislocation.
    Blackout.
    Whatever it was, it’s over and I’m all of a sudden on stage. A low platform about six inches above the floor. The sound in my ears, the position of my left hand, they tell me we’re in the middle of our seven-song set.
    Kev’s swinging from the exposed plumbing in the bar’s low ceiling and wailing into the microphone. The sound is off, unbalanced, but we sound good. It’s a small place but packed, and people appear to be having a good time. But it’s hard to tell. Everything is moving in fast-forward—the undulating crowd, the other guys in the band, Julia in ripped jeans and tight white tee weaving through bodies with her camcorder—but my hands are moving at a normal clip. I tune my focus to the chord changes, the intuitive cues that tell me when something’s about to happen that we haven’t rehearsed.
    There’s nothing but feedback between songs and Kev’s garbled banter with the audience. He’s unpredictable but a good front man, knows how to engage a crowd. He’s wearing a space helmet. That’s new.
    During the improvisational outro of our last song, my acoustic pick-up falls inside my guitar but I keep playing, pulling out all the moves I can to distract from it: windmill, climbing around on the monitors, playing on my knees, scraping my strings against the amplifier.
    Things fall apart when someone passes Kev a lit sparkler.
    He tosses it into the center of Buzzard’s bass drum, and the foam rubber pad inside starts to smolder. A smell like burning hair and plastic.
    We keep playing, though the rest of the band looks worried, confused. As people run around, thinking the place is on fire, Kev announces that we’re also available to play Bar Mitzvahs and Divorce Court hearings.
    Then . . .
    Another glitch.
    Outside the bar’s side entrance, our gear is on the curb and Buzzard looks furious. Kev has that look again, like this was the start of something huge, something that was going to change the world.
    “We fuckin’ killed it,” he says.

#

    There’s a knot in my neck the size of a fist. Strained something carrying equipment last night, I tell myself. But really, it’s just the gradual accumulation of all the shit in my system telling me enough is enough. The eventual, inevitable result: mind breaks, body shuts down.
    My place was a wreck when I woke up this afternoon, still is, but I don’t recall the after party. It’s all been burned away, images on celluloid melted through with cigarettes.
    It’s Saturday, so Julia and I are off work. We sit around in our pajamas. We order tacos and I eat like it’s the first time. My depleted cells attack the food like a ravenous dog.
    “You’re gonna get sick if you don’t slow down,” Julia says. There’s something both funny and sad about that, neither of which I can fully explain, so I force myself to stop.
    While the food digests, Julia massages my neck and we watch the recording of last night’s gig. The video looks foreign to me. I recognize most of the players, but it seems false, like I wasn’t really there. The person wearing my clothes looks like someone else, someone forty pounds lighter than he’s supposed to be. But it sounds good. Or at least better than bad. Considering the circumstances under which it was created, I’ve seen a lot worse.
    “What do you think?” I ask her.
    “Besides almost ending in tragedy? she says, and I remember the sparkler, the smoke. “I’d say it was a success.” She laughs, but it’s a kind laugh. She’s always been our biggest fan. Maybe our only one.
    We watch the tape again, but I’m still not convinced success is the word.
    Julia takes my hand and places it on her breast, looks at me with dark brown eyes that also seem false. Someone from another life. We haven’t had sex in a while, been flying on different currents for a long time. She’s not into speed, so she shoots dope. She sits slouched in a chair, slackjawed, drifting. It’s only at times like now that I notice her once warm glow flickering like a dying bulb. But it’s also these times we find ourselves on the same ground, two old lovers meeting on the street, and I think there’s still time to turn it around.
    It’s just us in the house for once, so we catch up, sinking into the filthy couch. We get destructive, knocking bottles and cans off the coffee table with our feet, spilling an ashtray. I’m going for a while, which surprises me, because I’m usually a one-pump chump when it’s been this long. But then it happens: sharp pain in my chest. It’s happened a couple times before—a spike in my heart, pinning it to my ribcage while it sputters and clicks and tries even out.
    This is where you stop, a voice keeps telling me. This is when you stop ignoring the signs.
    But I ease back, grind through the gears, and it passes. Opened up now on flat road, and the only pain is the good pain. The pain of her teeth in my shoulder and nails in my back. The pain that holds me together when nothing else can.

#

    I’m hungry again, craving sweets, so I walk to Buckeye Donuts for a baker’s dozen. I feel good.
    It’s a balmy evening, and as the sun drops behind the university, the buildings stand black and backlit by the dying day. A bus hisses to a stop. A crotch rocket whines by. The street lights stutter to life.
    The closer I get the less hungry I am, but I don’t turn back. I’m trying to reflect on the last couple months—the band, me and Julia, the no longer hidden downward trajectory of our life together—but my neurons are still charred, misfiring, and I can’t settle on any thought long enough to analyze it.
    Ahead, the sign in the window of the doughnut shop spills its anemic light onto the sidewalk, where a guy with a single, nappy dread sells sticks of incense for a quarter apiece. I go in and get the baker’s dozen I no longer want, just so I can feel like I’ve followed through with something. When I come out, I see Kev lurking between the shop and a strip of brick row houses, holding his tape recorder and banging on a Dumpster with a stick. Still chasing imaginary birds.
    “Any luck?” I ask as I approach.
    He looks up. It takes a moment before his crazed eyes even recognize me. It’s obvious he still hasn’t slept. Going on nine days. Psychosis in full bloom.
    “Thought I had it,” he says. “But I lost it.”
    He returns to his search, like I’m not even here, and I think, Yeah you have.
    Walking back, I pass a group of frat guys in polo shirts with popped collars playing grab ass outside BW-3’s. One hollers something and vomits in the gutter while his buddies laugh and call him a bitch. Seeing the puke splatter on the curb, I become hyper-aware of how dirty everything is around me: the sidewalk littered with cigarettes and mashed chewing gum, benches and street signs scaly with dried spit. A trashcan overflows on the corner and a small swarm of bees hovers around a thickening puddle of spilled milkshake.
    I catch a whiff of a nearby Chinese restaurant, and the smell of grease and fried food is too much, so I hand the box of doughnuts to a homeless guy who assures me Help is on the way and pull out my cell.
    When I get back to my place, I don’t even go in to tell Julia, just jump in the car and go. For once, it’s quick at Taz’s. No waiting around. Afterward, I stop off at my man Pete’s to get a few balloons of dope for Julia.
    Within a half hour later, we’re back on our disparate currents. While she nods out on the couch, I remove a bunch of bleach and pine-scented cleaner from under the kitchen sink, then spend the rest of the night scrubbing the house from top to bottom, and lying to myself about everything.

#

    Kev’s curled up on the couch with cotton fever. Something beautiful about the phrase, I’ve always thought, but there’s nothing pretty about it. Endotoxin. Bacteria hiding out in a bit of Q-tip or cigarette filter or festering in a rig, enters the blood stream. Leaves you aching and sweating with chills like you wouldn’t believe. Like being dope sick, only no amount of dope will make it better. Has to run its course, usually a few hours, maybe a day.
    He showed up last night, sleepless ten days and counting, let himself in with the key I’d given him before I realized what a bad move that was. I came downstairs about 3 a.m. in a haze after spending almost an entire day in bed and found him sitting in the dark, staring up into the corner where the ceiling meets the walls. When I turned on the light he barely budged. He had on his headphones, probably listening through the racket he’d recorded in hopes of hearing that elusive sound. The birds.
    Yesterday, after cleaning the entire house, I picked up some more dope for Julia and did a little myself. Something to grease my creaky joints and help me sleep. I’d picked up four balloons and had two left. I’m used to being around tweakers and weirdoes, but still don’t want one hanging around my house acting like a mental patient, so I broke off a piece for Kev, told him, “You need to fucking unwind.”
    His works looked like they were pulled from the garbage. Now he’s in the fetal position, shaking and burning up. He looks like a corpse and I begin to wonder what illusions I’ve been seeing when I look at myself in the mirror. I know I’m not seeing what others are seeing. My mom visited last week and she didn’t do a very good job concealing it, the horror she felt. She hugged me, and I could feel her hands moving around my ribs and shoulder blades, examining their edges. When we pulled apart, her eyes were wet. She placed a hand over her mouth and turned away. She cried for a while and it was awkward. I had to go into the bathroom and get right before I could face her again.
    I give Kev some water and ibuprofen. “Here, this’ll make you feel better,” I tell him. It won’t help, but it might lower his temperature. I refill the glass and place it on the table next to him, then cover him with a blanket and go upstairs.
    Julia wakes up when I come back to bed. She turns on the lamp and we do another shot. Things are getting out of hand, I can admit it. Have been for quite some time. The chest pains, the tolerance, the new moral lines drawn in the sand every other day. At least this and not that. Still paying the bills, et cetera, et cetera.
    I look at her as she lies back on the pillow. She’s pale and much too thin. Faded red hair in knots, eyes foggy, mascara smudged. “Maybe we should think about checking in somewhere,” I say, already half under water as I lie back beside her. “You think?”
    Silence. Then: “Let’s talk about it in the morning,” she says, and turns out the light.

#

    Matt and Raja must have come to their senses, because they haven’t been around since the night of the gig. And Buzzard hasn’t called, probably still sore about the sparkler in his drum-kit. Not that it makes a difference. After a write-up in the Alive about the incident, no one wants to book us anyway. We’re a fire hazard. Bad for business.
    And there’s no telling where the hell Kev got off to. Fever ran its course after about twelve hours, and he was out cold for damn near two days. Then someone sideswiped him while he was on a delivery. Totaled his Toyota. The insurance company cut him a check, and we haven’t seen him since. There’s still a garbage bag full of his dirty clothes upstairs in the spare room, but his phone’s no longer in service. He could be anywhere.
    The truth: I’m relieved. I want to be a rock star as much as anyone, but when you look close at the order of things, start thinking rehab after playing only one show, you begin to say to yourself, Wait a minute. No. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.
    Been doing a lot more dope, though. Both of us. It was a while before I mentioned cleaning up to Julia again, but we eventually discussed it, even called a couple places. But everywhere has waiting lists. Three months. Six. Long enough to maybe change our minds. So we decided we’d kick on our own. Just have to plan it right, a few days off work so we can get over the hump.
    We’re starting tonight. She’s going have it worse than me, I think.
    It’s Thursday afternoon, and we’ve got till Monday. Count on my fingers, three-point-five days. I pick up Julia at the record store and we swing by Pete’s. One last score before we go home and get rid of anything lying around that’ll fuck up the game plan: old cottons, baggies, rigs, and whatever else.
    We grab some sandwiches on our way back because we’ll need the strength and won’t be able to keep anything down by morning.
    On the couch, we do up the single balloon and watch the evening news, buckle in and bunker down. Try to enjoy this little bit of comfort.
    Remain calm and wait to get sick.
    I wonder if Julia’s as scared as I am, look and see that she is and pull her closer to me.
    Drifting off, already thinking, Maybe you should get one more to hold on to, just in case, when I hear one of the news casters . . .
    . . . man arrested        climbing        Franklin County water tower and
nearly falling        when police
    fire department        on the scene . . .
        I hope
            he remembered to press record

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