The loneliness is so deep there is no explanation but the drug, no solution but more of it. The Roast Beef was so shower curtainy no one ate at Arby’s but speed freaks, who didn’t eat.

SHALOM REST HOME

When you were seventeen, you visited your grandmother in the Shalom Rest Home and pilfered her Desoxyn—time release Dexedrine. “Front line,” you saw in the ads in old medical magazines—“in the war against Narcolepsy.” (Back before the internet, libraries were great places to speed; your personal nook in the old magazine racks, where you’d spend hours combing microfilm for references to amphetamines. Taylor Mead, On Amphetamine and In Europe: Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth, Volume Three (Boss Books, 1968, 251 Pages). Black beauties could kick you up the stairs all day, but you’d feel jittery. Desoxyn was different. Time relaxed. Because of that little downer snuck in among the up.) Hardcore speed freaks believed the sedative was brown, the speed green, and would spend the entire time on the drug using photographers loop, and a knife, opening the capsules onto a mirror and trying to separate the brown from the green. By the end of the run—you’d have a pile of green and a pile of white.

Your little brother’s story is that he could not remember which was which. And the day of his Bar Exam, he took the wrong color. He was ready to go. He knew everything. He’d been up for a week but he was fresh. Then he snorted the green instead of the white. Or the other way around. Either way, he went down. “You might have had a lawyer for a brother,” he always said when he saw you, “except you thought it would be cool to teach me how to take pills apart. You thought it would be cool to get little broke out on crystal. Thanks, bro. Appreciate that. It really fucking worked out.”

He blamed you for getting him hooked on speed. He blamed speed for fucking up his life.

“Look on the bright side,” you tried to tell your Tweaker Brother, your “TB,” as you came to call him. “Look on the bright side, TB, this way you got to fail at a profession you never had to waste any time actually doing. Wouldn’t it have been worse to pass the fucking bar, then be a lawyer for twelve years, and then blow it out of your ass? Now you’ve established yourself as a total failure, you can relax. There’s nowhere to go but up. A lot of people would envy you, you lucky bastard! You’ve got your whole life to find other things to fail at. The options are endless.” “Look at you,” said your little brother, “I used to admire you, until you got all sober and stopped doing the cool shit you were doing and became a douchebag. You may be sober but, dude, douche is douche. What’s so great about being a sober douchebag?”