You are eye-level with a case of textbook meth-lips. So dry each syllable launches a tiny bursting pillow of speed feathers, which drift down to the Bondo-like untouched whipped cream below. “Know why sexual relations on speed are so twisted?” She makes a here-comes-the-funny face. “Sexual relations! Listen to me! I stay up for a day and a half and suddenly I’m NPR!” She lets out a pained giggle. (It’s a meth tic—the pain giggle. All emotions are a shade of suffering, once you’re beyond the ecstatic.)

When there’s nothing else, you can love people just from knowing they suffer, too. It hits right and you feel that vast, inchoate empathy. How would you describe yourself at such “peak” moments? “Crippled and happy about it.” But there you go bragging!

It’s different when you do it with somebody else. Like when your hefty trans-gender friend says, “I think I hear a lump in my breast. Is that possible?” You nod with real concern, edging slowly backwards away from the booth. Stimulants stimulate everybody: even the people near you. Bee-hived IHOP waiters just know, and they stay out of the way. (It’s IHOP.) When she yells, you feel the eyes of family diners. “Thief!” Waffles warbles. “Thief. There he goes! Thief!” You keep your head down. The screams follow you. “You think if you keep moving backwards, you can make your life un-happen? Smell yourself?”

(The shit helps you feel nothing. But not nothing enough.)

IN THE OLD DAYS, YOU HAD A SPONGE TEST. When the floor got spongy, you knew. You’d gone too far. Time to come back! Swallow a valium. Swallow nine. Drink some mouthwash. You need something. By the time you hit Sponge Mode, reality feels fraught and menacing. (Could be two days up, could be twelve.) Regardless. Your life is reduced to walking the Yard in a Maximum Security Bouncy House. Your heart hurts. You catch yourself talking out loud, explaining deranged sensations to strangers in the street. “My motel room hates me.”

CAJANK!

There is a girl in your room who won’t stop screaming. Candy? Kembra? Cathy? Caroline?...Crickle? When you walk in she stops screaming and gets solicitous. Which is scarier than screaming. She could be twenty-three or forty. “Are you shivering, Mister, or is that a convulsion?”

Kimberly! That was her name. The one with the diapers. You didn’t dream this. You were geezing this evil-smelling grit you bought from a plumber in Bakersfield. Bathtub crank with a Drano after-drip. Kimberly says she bought special diapers with holes in them. Fuck-me diapers. Remember? Oooh, I wore my Sex Depends. Just for you!

This, you realized later, was another lie. Kimberly! Speedfreaks always lie. The diapers weren’t REALLY called Sex Depends. She slit the crotch with a razor. Then she used felt tip pens, magic markers to color faces on the diapers. Fifty-three tiny faces. (Look, there’s Ringo! There’s Abraham Lincoln. There’s Helen Keller! There’s you!) It took her days. Gink-work. That’s how she made them. She had lots of razors cause she was also a cutter. Of course. Little girl cutters grow up to be big girl Speedfreaks.