Being Jesus and Other Tales of Failure
Dope
Corvin Thomas
I couldn't stay awake but I couldn't stop puking, one good and the other bad. I walked, stopped, dropped. Every corner trashcan had my name on it, every block. The rats didn't run. They just got out of the way. The gutters glistened with my little river of bile. It was peaceful there, the street sound turned way down, the nightlights rolling red roses. This wasn't like booze. It was heavier, like a stack of warm flapjacks on my shoulders. I could taste the butterballs dripping through each nostril, dropping on each cement syrup shoe. There wasn't much to say. I couldn't say much anyway, just nod. People passing understood. They didn't stop. If they did, I didn't notice, dead man walking.
I love New York.
My buddy turned me on to it, thought it would calm me down. I always made an ass out of myself when I visited, got too drunk, danced around. And I always hurt myself. One night I kicked a cone in a crosswalk at Lafayette and Houston. I fell in the manhole it covered. Gravel embedded my lips and my right leg limped with deep red abrasions. My balls went unscathed but a man in a deli sprayed me down with his vegetable hose, tossed on a bottle of iodine and only charged half price for the bagel.
The smack settled that until the near overdose. We didn't shoot. We snorted. I dealt mine like blow, a line or two too many. And it's too late to find out which line's the killer when you're out on the floor in seconds flat. My friend's ex found us, slapped the blue out of us and dropped me on a barstool.
I wasn't dancing anymore. But I had a new partner when I got back to Atlanta.
I wasn't a junkie but I had junkie friends. They taught me the needle, introduced the plunge and pull and explained bleach safety. They thought it was funny, turning on the late news, seeing me sell murder or numbskull politics. It seemed subversive. They thought so. So I waved a hand a certain way, pulled an ear, signaled the drug club.
Work was a bore. It was as empty as my heart. I abused and disrespected it. I was getting paid to pantomime objectivity under the guise of selling soap, cars, crap. At least that was my excuse. I knew I was biting the hand that fed me whenever I scored. But it worked if I paced and spaced the services with Jesus' son. I was the invisible crucified, the little heroin hack to a pack of lowlifes who laughed around a television set because I was one of them. Only I had a job to lose, making me the dumbest shit of them all.
Everyone has something to hide. Not everyone has to hide it from a television audience. I guess reporters are like the priesthood in that respect. They don't want to get caught with their robes down. So they hide their secrets on the absolving side of the confessional box and pray no one peaks through the screen of hypocrisy. Yeah.
One long timer I know stumbled into television after a shot at teaching. He enjoyed his drink. He went to a costume party in full cowboy gear, woke up in a gutter and rushed to class. The kids laughed and pointed. He was still wearing the chaps and spurs. His kerchief and red-checkered shirt were still puke sodden. One of the kids told him he smelled of alcohol. He walked out, hit the first bar and figured reporting might be a safer subterfuge for the booze.
It's just an example. There's more.
A reporter with two kids and one on the way was humping an editor when his wife went into labor.
A reporter told his wife he was going on a weeklong shoot. The wife didn't believe him, catching the reporter and his producer in flagrant delicto.
A reporter did his research in gay bars, in drag.
A reporter's wife left him to pursue lesbian interests.
A reporter's husband went on a crack rage and beat her black and blue.
All of this is true.
A boss hired reporters for sex.
A reporter was three times in the nut house.
An anchor had a cocaine problem, playing off his absenteeism as chronic asthma.
And I liked to do a little heroin to supplement my dipsomania.
There's more. But the point is we're all scumbags or we used to be. And no one cares.
The watcher, the television viewer, gets a reflection, a subliminal mirror of their own secrets, their own lies, applying denial with their dose of evening news. They don't want to know about the messenger's messy maneuvers. They've run their own crappy course, committed their own sins. The watchers want the confession, clean and simple, straight catharsis. That's the conspiracy of the cathode rays. The image doesn't matter. It's prestidigitation, slight of sight, forgiven as long as someone's saying something juicy about someone else.
Combed, caked with cosmetics, the talking head talks and plots a producer's flow of emotion. Outrage precedes endearing before endearing segues to weather. The reporter's a puppet, spineless. One looks slightly different from the next. But they're all saying the same thing, mouthing what the boss ventriloquist wants them to mouth. Some dummies are put together better, less cracks in the paint. But they're all made of wood, stiff with a hand in the back. No one cares what they do when they're in their private box, how they deteriorate. As long as they're on stage for their two-minute bit, ready with a punch line.
So I got high.
That was the off screen insider's joke. I liked to poke, skin pop and drop, a headlining mainliner at the backroom parties. I was on the secret nod, the land of 0z where fake dreams are a dime a bag. Nobody knew but the monkeys who flew. And I was flying in the eye of the twister, waking with a fever but well enough to work, minus courage, brain and heart.
Watching me was like watching an old play, fuzzy but predictable. My buddies knew I wouldn't blow it. But there was the shot of a turn, a twist in the plot that could land me in jail. Or dead. So I studied my lines before the lines studied me, before the reporter became the report and cracked the medium's mirror. I performed as though I had nothing to hide, as though my stomach wasn't sick with the desire for more lies. And my guilt was no greater than the rest of the supporting cast whose past played just as bad. It's a repertory ruse, suppressing surprise endings with a big smile and a little gossip about anyone else but themselves.
I didn't hide behind the hypocrisy. I wore it like a long sleeved shirt. It covered my tracks with style, duplicitously.
I woke up in a pool of drool one night, surrounded by cue balls. It was a keg party when I passed out. The skinheads took over sometime after that. It was the eve of Rodney King, round two. The skins weren't celebrating. They were plotting a negative reprise. The brothers bashed and crashed when the cops walked the year before. Now the feds were acquiescing, reversing, sending the cops to jail and the skins didn't like it. They wanted to break things. I just happened to be within boot range of the morning's verdict.
I dodged the Doc Marten mambo and tapped the keg. It was Colson's house, Colson's party. He was hoping for chicks. He got meatheads instead. I came to score but never made it out the door. Colson fixed that. An hour later, I'm a neo-nazi cause celebre, the knuckleheads saluting my honor, my guilt by association. Racism was never so mistaken. I was high, a smack jack. But the baldies consigned status just for my being there. They didn't care. I couldn't move. They lifted me up, up onto their shoulders, my back in their hands. And they chanted, chanted and cheered my name, sang nursery rhymes that ended in dark and dirty death beneath swinging trees.
And I never said a word. They saw what they wanted to see. Just like the watchers of TV. And it's just as wrong.
The skins put me down. I puked before crawling to my corner of conceit.
"Nice party," I mumbled to Colson.
Colson shrugged and lit the spoon.
I was still high when I faced the politician at the next morning's press conference for peace. I met his son at a dealer's shack a year back, both of us on the buy. We said hello and blew. I wondered if his daddy knew.
A man walked by with a sign.
"Don't believe the hype."
I never did.
And don't you.