Are you crying?

Want to talk about how Lurleen (Darla? No, Zelda) would boot her vag-needle, let it stand up and quiver by itself, then grand finale with a Heimlich-like shudder and pass out forehead-first on the bar with the rig sticking out between her legs? The pink tip made it weirdly like a little dog’s organ, aroused. (You suffer compulsive thoughts—sometimes just images—that you do not want to think, but cannot stop thinking. This is one of them.) Sometimes she’d wet herself. Who wouldn’t? “Five more bucks!” she’d croak, when she came to and saw her condition. (Remember when mysterious Chasids began to speak to you out of the ceiling? A rabbi would just appear: You’d realize you were staring at him, and that he was talking. You’d think, maybe he was always there. And it took THIS MUCH crystal to see him. The sad old shtetl eyes followed you as he spoke. Vaguely reassuring, vaguely menacing. “Does your life ever feel like a continuum of one aberration, mis-reflected in a series of cracked rearview mirrors?” You’d think: mis-reflected? What a lame. Then you’d re-think. He’s right! Every speed-freak car you ever twitched in did have a crack in the rearview. You once drove across the state of Utah, steering the wheel from the passenger side when the three hundred pound Cherokee fellow who picked you up hitchhiking snorted something that gave him a heart attack going ninety-five on a dead-empty interstate. You couldn’t move him, so you just steered until his husk of an Impala rolled to a stop on I-15, outside of Bountiful.) All the Tweak-mobiles had cracked rearview mirrors. How does that even happen once? And how does Rabbi Bowlstein know?

You don’t even want to talk about this, but here you are, talking about it. Keep babbling, Chatty Speed Guy. People are really into it. You’re crushing them. Sartre knew what hell was—and it wasn’t other people. That’s a mis-translation. His translator had the twitches from le meth and spilled vin rouge on the words “dans ta tete.” THE OTHER PEOPLE WERE IN YOUR HEAD. If you were on speed, you’d know what he knew; speed means being your own audience for the running commentary of death. Or worse than death. More of this. What you’re feeling right now.

CRASHING TWO: WHAT’S THAT LIKE? Remember how you felt the first time you couldn’t get it up? The scalding rage. The way Cheeto-dry Cindy Carmunuci looked at you when you stopped trying to cram your sixteen year old shame-handle into her. Look at you. Twenty years later, the episode still has you assuming the Cringe Position. You raised your sweaty face, your eyes met hers, and she looked at you like you were some kind of a cripple. A sex-gimp. Crashing is that feeling. That kind of fun—some version of—nonstop. From the minute you wake up. (If you sleep, which you don’t; you’re not an amateur.) If you died and the coroner knew what he was doing, your CAUSE OF DEATH [toe-tag] would read: Extreme Awareness. Every conversation was toe-curling in real time, and worse when you relived it later, which you did, without surcease, even when you were having another conversation. There was the babbling in your head, the babbling from the person in front of you, and then all the Other Random Voices. You cease[d] to think. You only obsess[ed].