CRASH.

Remember. This is not memory. Just touch your face. In the no-mirror dark. This is now. Not then. It’s now. Not day, not night. (What crystal takes away is time, and time between.) You fire the pipe. Breathe in. Hold. Close your eyes. Feel your ventricles. The hum of your aorta. Your singing fear. Blow it out. Again. Suck it in. Hold. Dust motes murmur atrocities. Some day you will blink twice and the world as you knew it will slide apart. You will walk through the patio doors of destiny. Blow it out.

LISTEN.

(Don’t sleep.) Read every word of five year old newspapers. (Don’t sleep.) Hold a landline to your ear, hear distant whispers. (Don’t sleep.) Now you’re vigilant, determined to be right—this time—when the BAD THING comes. You are not your little-girl, cotton-panty self. (Don’t sleep.) Sleep means nightmares; sleep means trying to stop the monster. Frozen. Before the scars. Before—

You open your eyes. You think, again, “this is now.” Not then. Nine days up, memory porous, your mind some shimmer of lucid decay. (Or is it twenty-nine?) One thing, you know. One thing you repeat: “I am not my mother.” But still…Why is the couch so foul? Where did these stains come from? Why is the world around you always crumbling, when you know, in your writhing heart, that you yourself could shine and shine and shine and shine and shine?

SMURF

At a low point—long before heroin,
before crack, before non-stop narco-catastrophe became a lifestyle—I experienced an unsurpassed low. I smurfed. That is, I scored pseudoephedrine products at Rite Aid for some Okie skeek who cooked in the trunk of his rusted-out Pontiac. Smurfs were the low-lifes who hit every pharmacy, 7-Eleven, and grocery store in the Tri-State area, ephedra-hopping, tossing the legally permissible three packets of Sudafed, Actifed, Sinufed, (or any of the other feds), into a bag with Contact, Claritin, Allegra D, or the ever popular Mucinex D, whose TV commercials featured scuzzy green lowlife bacterium slobbing up apartments. Like the tweakers they secretly supplied, they tainted the planet just by existing in it. What made self-cooking tweakers special was their capacity to spontaneously combust.

Reward for braving glaring fluorescent lights and rounding up over-the-counter cold medicine was an eight-ball of product fresh out of the oven.

I never stuck around to lick the bowl. I just traded the bubble packs of cold medicine for cooked-up crystal. I didn’t want to hang. The dealer gave off a waft of ammonia redolent of industrial strength piss-cakes in bus station urinals. Pontiac himself had scorched his face so many times his face resembled a wad of dough with red eyes and pink bubble gum stuck on for a nose. The cooker’s code involved never admitting an accident. One day I was stupid-high enough to ask about his putty-mug. “So…uh, what happened?” “What happened? What do you think happened? I fell asleep with my face on an electric burner.” You don’t contradict a man with no features. Especially when you were smurfing for him. There were lower rungs on the meth food chain—it’s not like I was a bag ho. (I’d seen those. Crackheads called them strawberries. Little girls and boys who would do anything—and that means anything—to get their mouth around a pipe.) Which still sounds better than the bag ho. Still, nobody who’s smurfed has ever put it in their job résumé.