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backdrifter“I don’t fucking believe it,” someone was saying overhead, and he immediately awoke, senses blazing. It was still dark out, and though he felt alert, his eyesight was still bleary and he couldn’t quite perceive who was standing over him. He sat up, never taking his eyes off the stranger, for all the good it did him.
“Who’s there?”
“What do you mean, who’s there?” the person said, sounding offended, and as his eyes focused, he saw that the stranger was a woman. A short woman, with big curly brown hair that fell past her shoulders, who dressed in men’s cargo pants and several hoodies layered upon each other. She straightened, and light hit her face; she was weak-jawed, with a blade-like nose and big hazel eyes.
“Tanya!” he cried.
“Respa,” she returned, her face split by a sudden grin. “I’ve missed you, baby boy!” She knelt to embrace him, and he hugged her hard and long, as if he might die at the end of it. It was so good to see a familiar face, an older face, even if it was only by a few years. Tanya had three years on him, and had been the one to deflower him the summer he’d discovered drugs, sex, and the ancient profession of prostitution all at once. Not soon afterward, a party they’d been at had been raided, and Tanya got picked up by the cops for possession while he cowered behind a nearby dumpster.
“You piece of shit,” she said, but she was still smiling as she said it. “I thought I’d never see you again.” She surveyed his situation, as though she hadn’t gotten a good enough look when he’d been asleep. “What happened to you, kiddo?”
“I’ve got no place to go,” he said, grimacing. “Bad times all around.” He didn’t want to tell her about the attack. It would be too depressing if she knew how degraded he’d felt, and still felt.
“Well, that’s fine,” Tanya said, nodding. “I’m here now. Come on, I’ll fix you up.” She pulled him to his feet, and he stuffed the polyester blanket that had once been Terrence’s into his duffel bag. “Come on.”
She took him onto the W train and into Brooklyn, and he didn’t even pay attention to which stop they got off at, though the ride wasn’t too long. “Welcome to Dumbo,” she said, grinning. “Home, now, to all of the stupidest artsiest fartsiest kids in the city, driving all the good folks out.”
“Like this is a new development,” he muttered as she pulled him along.
She took him, eventually, to a small studio apartment that was in a heavy state of disarray. A circle of people in their twenties (it seemed like) were gathered around something that he couldn’t quite see, looking anxious. There were open containers of half-finished junk food all around them, and there was a smell in the air he couldn’t quite identify that mixed with the overbearing smell of Big Macs.
“What’s going on?” he whispered, but Tanya was not a whisperer.
“Guys, this is an old friend of mine,” she said, breaking the silence. “I want you guys to meet Respa.” She pulled him to her side by the elbow, almost possessively.
“Hi Respa,” they said, not quite in unison, and only one of them actually turned her head to look at him. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he greeted back, feeling jittery, now. “What’s going on?”
“Shh,” someone shushed him, but they scooted across the creaking floor to make room for Tanya and him.
What was going on, he found out, was that someone was carefully cooking up, old-school. He kept fudging his grip on the lighter, which made him curse, and try again, until someone snapped at him to pass it to someone who could competently keep a flame going longer than a nanosecond.
“Is that heroin?” Respa asked, purposely obnoxious. After the shit he’d been through, drugs were the last thing he wanted in his life. He contorted his face as he looked.
“Where did you find this guy, Tan?” someone snapped. “He’s not a cop, is he?”
“I’m not a cop,” he said loudly, but the someone who’d spoken glared at him anyway.
“So what, you’ve never gotten a look at heroin before? Shut up.”
“I’ve seen it before,” he muttered, but he quieted down. Tanya let go of his arm to slip down next to the glaring person, and gestured at each person in the circle.
“This is Eric, Laila, Harriet, Bianca, and Marcos,” she said, but the names flew in one ear and out the other. They all looked haggard, only gender and varied skin colors separating them visually. One of the girls looked like she was losing her hair, although the way she pulled at it constantly hinted at why. “Make room for Rez, guys.”
They did, rather begrudgingly. “Ever shot up?” the one he thought was named Marcos asked, rather nastily.
“I have,” Respa replied, returning his tone. “Not heroin, though.” He wrinkled his nose as the girl currently handling the spoon drew the liquid up into a needle. “This shit looks so nasty.”
“Prude,” one of the girls muttered, though her face was hidden behind someone else’s shoulder.
Tanya rolled her eyes and laughed. She’d been drinking a bit, he’d already noticed. “This boy,” she giggled, “used to be the biggest angel dust fiend I’d ever seen. Are you still, babe?”
“I’m clean, now,” he said, and she snorted, giving him a push in the shoulder that was stronger than she knew. He fell back onto the palms of his hands.
“What an asshole,” she said, laughing still. “Do you still talk to Monica?”
“Not in months.” He didn’t specify why.
“I still do. She misses you.” She leaned back with him.
“I bet she does,” he said, blank faced. She missed his business, not him. Monica had never been buddy buddy with him.
One of the people in the circle fell back, breathed heavily, and cracking a big smile across her face like an egg in a frying pan. “This is some good shit,” she panted, stretching her arms up over her head. Someone else picked up the spoon, but Tanya wrestled it out of her hands, spilling a little bit of the powdery water. The girl under her shrieked, pushing herself up to her knees as Tanya sat back to actually lick the heroin off the filthy floor. One of the guys cringed and laughed at her, calling her a junkie, but the girl didn’t seem to care.
Someone tossed Tanya the lighter, as if it didn’t matter that she’d “skipped” them all, and she held it deftly under the spoon, which he noticed now looked crusty and unwashed. He shivered. “I’m so nice,” she murmured into the skin of his arm, her breath hot and wet, “that I’m going to let you hit before me.”
“I don’t want to,” he said, finding himself whispering and unsure why.
“Yes you do.” The heroin water bubbled, and she clicked the lighter off, blowing the spoon lightly, as if it were a spoonful of chicken soup instead. She handed him the spoon, which he held nervously, as she crawled languidly into the center of the human circle. She rejected a needle someone handed her, spitting something nasty about their sexual habits, and plucked a needle out of a a cardboard box, which looked as though it’d been stolen from a doctor’s office. And then she gripped the plastic between her teeth, flipped herself onto her back, and crab-walked back to him.
“You’re gonna love this,” she said, her tank top riding up as she caressed her stomach to show him just how much he was going to love it. She pulled the spoon’s contents up into the needle, slowly, and then whipped a rubber tourniquet out of her giant cargo pocket. “Take off your jacket.”
“No.” Their conversation was for their own ears only, whispered now directly into the shells of ears, intimate.
“Do it,” she whispered back, and she nipped his earlobe, which elicited a shudder from him, but he didn’t move away. She threw a leg over him and began to un-do his layers.
“If you take them off, I’ll drop your spoon,” he said, hoping it would deter her, but she only knocked the empty spoon out of his hand, sending it spinning across the floor.
“Take them off, or I’ll jam the needle in your face,” she said, and the sudden manic gleam in her eye told him she would, too. And then wouldn’t he be sorry. He peeled off first his hoodie, then his stolen twill jacket; the t-shirt beneath was the same one he’d been wearing for months now, the same ultra-faded Exploited t-shirt Olga had brought him on his day of release from the hospital.
“Do you even listen to the Exploited?” she asked with a low chuckle, and he shook his head as she put the needle between her teeth again, and looped the tourniquet around the back of his arm. “Hold still.”
“Don’t,” he protested again, but she wasn’t listening to him anymore, and there was little force behind his words. “Tanya…”
And then she was pulling the tourniquet tight, the rubber pulling at the hairs on his arm in an uncomfortable way, and she smacked the skin below it to summon the veins beneath. “Come on,” she mumbled to herself. “Come on.”
And then she was pushing the needle in, and not soon after a feeling of comfort washed over him, feelings of okay and alright and mmm following it in quick succession and whirling around in him in a pleasant way.
“You like it, I can tell,” she was saying, and then he was waking up in another corner of the room.
It was daylight, harsh noontime sunlight streaming in through the one window in the room. The walls were a dirty white stucco, he could properly see now, and beside him in the bed was Tanya, her hair haloing her head on her pillow. It was a tight fit in the twin bed; he found his own head was flat against the mattress.
“Wake up,” he croaked, but she only shifted, mming in her sleep. “Wake up, Tanya.”
When she did nothing more, he threw the covers off and found himself thankfully fully clothed, but the frigidity of the place made him throw them back on. The cold woke him up fully, and he realized he wasn’t on a bed so much as he was on a mattress on the floor. Tanya’s various roommates had made similar nests around the room, with two of them paired up on a double mattress in the farthest corner.
Tanya woke up as he was psyching himself to brave the cold, an hour later, and completely punked him by flinging the covers off herself and walking straight out, wearing nothing but her pants and a tank top.
“Aren’t you freezing?” he half-hissed, digging himself deeper into the covers now that her warmth was gone.
“I’m used to it,” she said, and put her hands on her hips. “Pussy. Come on out, and maybe I can find you some breakfast.”
He wouldn’t turn down free food, despite the roaches that scattered when she cracked open the cupboards. She threw miniature boxes of cereal at him, and he cracked one open like a regular box, pouring the cereal down his throat before she could open the fridge for milk.
“You always did have nasty table manners,” she commented as she broke the perforated lines on her box correctly. She pulled the milk out of the fridge and gave it an experimental sniff before pouring it.
“There’s no table to have manners at,” he pointed out. He cracked another one, having already finished the first.
“I guess,” she sighed, leaning against the counter with her cereal box held near her mouth. “Listen, do you want to stay with us?”
“Your roommates don’t seem to like me a lot,” he said, glancing at their sleeping bodies.
“Oh, fuck ‘em,” she snorted, digging her spoon into the box and taking a bite. “Ummf. This milk is not as fresh as I thought…”
Anything was better than the street, though, so he eventually agreed to stay. Her roommates were at least grateful that he only had the two bags with him, though they eyed him distrustfully whenever he was home. And although he told Tanya he was having no more of “that heroin shit,” every so often she would straddle him again, needle between her teeth, and her soft words would push him to the floor, would trap him as she pulled the tourniquet tight, would shush him that it was okay as she pushed the needle—his needle, now—into a bulging vein, and then he wouldn’t need the words anymore to relax. There were still many nights, most nights, though, that he sat back and folded his arms, and glared at the wall as Tanya and her friends shot up, and then fell back, lolling on the floorboards.
What Tanya liked to do best, other than heroin, was to go to parties. She liked to go to parties in tiny apartments where there was no room for personal space, and she liked big house parties where she could pour beer into pools and watch the host freak out about what their parents would think. She liked to go to parties in clubs, she liked to go to parties on the train, when they happened. In fact, as Respa recalled, he’d met her at a party out on Staten Island, the other place house parties tended to happen.
And of course, she liked to pull him along to these parties, all of them piling into Eric’s crappy car and driving across whatever bridge that he didn’t quite remember the name of, and then she would sniff a quick hit of heroin in the car and go wild at the party. On top of that, she would drink herself into a stupor, staggering around and knocking nice things off of nice surfaces, and screaming obscenities and anyone who tried to pull her in any direction. Respa was usually the one to do it, though he’d get nearly as shitfaced. He didn’t know where Tanya put it all, really.
Respa would be the one to bring her out to the car when she got too drunk to move, but half the time he got so drunk himself that he would wake up back in Tanya’s bed, feeling like someone had turned his face inside out while he slept, and not remember a thing from the previous night. Eric was, dubiously, the moral one who appointed himself designated driver, and on mornings like these he would purposely stomp around the room, making all the hungover people writhing in bed groan in agony for him to stop.
Money came into the household by way of Tanya cutting some of the heroin with artificial sweetener and selling overpriced shots of it to stupid teenagers with something to prove. What it bought, generally, was more heroin, but sometimes one of them (usually Eric) would drag themselves out to the grocery store and pick up things like cereal, milk and beer.
He spotted Terrence and Jonas, one day, sitting in a café together, of all places. He’d been living two weeks with Tanya and her roommates. Although their weak excuse for a shower had helped his hygiene and overall appearance somewhat, he still looked unkempt, and he had no real way of washing his clothes besides giving them the occasional hand scrub in the sink. Tanya had taken him to another party last night, and the effects were still visible on his face.
Unfortunately, they spotted him before he could get away around the corner, and they motioned him over. He contemplated taking off, but he figured that would only look worse. He came into the café feeling intensely self-conscious about his odor and appearance; this was a classy establishment, at least by his standards. Yuppies that he hated lounged on patterned couches, working one-handedly on their slick silver tone laptops with a latte or something in the other hand, held aloft. A few of them looked up as he came in and looked severely put off.
“Hey, guys,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as he bounced up onto the balls of his feet. “Uh, how’re things?”
“You look awful,” Terrence said in a small voice.
“I’m alright,” he said, trying to look nonchalant about it. He considered pulling up a chair, but then they’d be right in the middle of his imagined cloud of stank, and then they’d know for sure that he wasn’t cutting it nearly as well as they were. Not that they couldn’t figure it out already. Really, he just didn’t want to embarrass himself by being the rotten-smelling hobo in the room. He stayed standing.
“You smell like booze,” Jonas said quietly. “Are you doing okay, Respa?”
“I’m fine,” he repeated, gritting his teeth. “I have some roommates, in a studio in Dumbo.”
“Dumbo! That sounds nice,” Jonas said, trying to smile sincerely, and looking worried instead.
“Look at his nostrils,” Terrence whispered to Jonas, but Respa could hear him. The night before, Tanya had shoved her fist with some shots of coke along her thumb under his nose, and used her mysterious wiles to make him snort it. He wasn’t sure anymore if she was a witch, or if he just half-wanted to go along with her ideas of fun. He’d never tried coke, and it left the edges of his nostrils red and irritated.
“Let’s talk about this outside,” Jonas said hurriedly. They’d both finished their coffee concoctions and pastries a long time ago, it seemed, and they were free to swing their coats on and walk outside with him.
“So tell me about you guys,” Respa said, trying to pretend the cold wasn’t biting him everywhere as he plastered a smile on his face. “What’s going on now?”
“We’re actually going out,” Terrence said, his smile sincere and huge. “I couldn’t be happier, honestly.”
Jonas put on his own bashful smile. “Yeah, I came to my senses, I guess. It’s funny, because you were really pushing the issue. I understand now that you weren’t actually trying to be helpful,” and the smile vanished for a moment, “but I guess in this case the ends justifies the means. We’re pretty happy together.”
“That’s good.” He turned a shiver into another big, empty grin.
“Seriously, though, I’m worried about you,” Jonas said. “Are you sure you don’t want to come back to my apartment? No time limits, I just want you to be okay.”
He wanted more than anything in the world to take Jonas up on his offer. Real food, heat, and cleanliness sounded so good right now. He bit his lip. Tanya’s druggy spells on him scared him, to be honest, though he’d never admit it to her, or anyone. He thought back to the hospital, when he’d gutted Doctor Chenault for daring to offer him a chance at middle class life, and although he still considered the doctor an overbearing prick, he regretted turning him down so much right now. Middle class life made him nervous, but at least it was a comfortable lifestyle, freer of so many of the worries that plagued his class of people. Street-bound, dirty junkies, so to speak.
“I can’t,” he said simply, quietly. “Thanks, though.” He stared at the sidewalk as they walked.
“Can’t? Or won’t?” Jonas asked, leaning down to look up into Respa’s face. Terrence was smart enough to keep quiet.
“Can’t,” he said, turning his head away from Jonas even as he kept his head down.
Jonas swung in front of him and put his hands on Respa’s shoulders, tipping his chin up. “Respa. I’m not saying this to be an asshole. You look half dead.” He picked at Respa’s jeans. “You look like you haven’t eaten in weeks, you look drugged, and you smell like you haven’t been able to wash your clothes in ages.” It was scary how close to right he was.
“I’m okay,” he repeated, and he wasn’t sure if he was shaking because of the cold anymore. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not okay. Come on back to my place, and take a shower, and you can use my washing machine…”
He bit his lip until the skin there broke, and he wanted so badly to say yes, to run away from Tanya and her roommates from hell and to get totally clean, to get a job like Olga, to wear nice clothes that fit and didn’t smell, to browse Jonas’s DVD collection and agree with him that Steve Carrell was the funniest, he wanted so badly—
“I have to go,” he whispered. He moved Jonas’s hands from his shoulders gently, and he walked away from them, hands shoved deep in his pockets and head down between his shoulders. That had been his last chance, and might as well have punted it over a fence.>
“Who’s there?”
“What do you mean, who’s there?” the person said, sounding offended, and as his eyes focused, he saw that the stranger was a woman. A short woman, with big curly brown hair that fell past her shoulders, who dressed in men’s cargo pants and several hoodies layered upon each other. She straightened, and light hit her face; she was weak-jawed, with a blade-like nose and big hazel eyes.
“Tanya!” he cried.
“Respa,” she returned, her face split by a sudden grin. “I’ve missed you, baby boy!” She knelt to embrace him, and he hugged her hard and long, as if he might die at the end of it. It was so good to see a familiar face, an older face, even if it was only by a few years. Tanya had three years on him, and had been the one to deflower him the summer he’d discovered drugs, sex, and the ancient profession of prostitution all at once. Not soon afterward, a party they’d been at had been raided, and Tanya got picked up by the cops for possession while he cowered behind a nearby dumpster.
“You piece of shit,” she said, but she was still smiling as she said it. “I thought I’d never see you again.” She surveyed his situation, as though she hadn’t gotten a good enough look when he’d been asleep. “What happened to you, kiddo?”
“I’ve got no place to go,” he said, grimacing. “Bad times all around.” He didn’t want to tell her about the attack. It would be too depressing if she knew how degraded he’d felt, and still felt.
“Well, that’s fine,” Tanya said, nodding. “I’m here now. Come on, I’ll fix you up.” She pulled him to his feet, and he stuffed the polyester blanket that had once been Terrence’s into his duffel bag. “Come on.”
She took him onto the W train and into Brooklyn, and he didn’t even pay attention to which stop they got off at, though the ride wasn’t too long. “Welcome to Dumbo,” she said, grinning. “Home, now, to all of the stupidest artsiest fartsiest kids in the city, driving all the good folks out.”
“Like this is a new development,” he muttered as she pulled him along.
She took him, eventually, to a small studio apartment that was in a heavy state of disarray. A circle of people in their twenties (it seemed like) were gathered around something that he couldn’t quite see, looking anxious. There were open containers of half-finished junk food all around them, and there was a smell in the air he couldn’t quite identify that mixed with the overbearing smell of Big Macs.
“What’s going on?” he whispered, but Tanya was not a whisperer.
“Guys, this is an old friend of mine,” she said, breaking the silence. “I want you guys to meet Respa.” She pulled him to her side by the elbow, almost possessively.
“Hi Respa,” they said, not quite in unison, and only one of them actually turned her head to look at him. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he greeted back, feeling jittery, now. “What’s going on?”
“Shh,” someone shushed him, but they scooted across the creaking floor to make room for Tanya and him.
What was going on, he found out, was that someone was carefully cooking up, old-school. He kept fudging his grip on the lighter, which made him curse, and try again, until someone snapped at him to pass it to someone who could competently keep a flame going longer than a nanosecond.
“Is that heroin?” Respa asked, purposely obnoxious. After the shit he’d been through, drugs were the last thing he wanted in his life. He contorted his face as he looked.
“Where did you find this guy, Tan?” someone snapped. “He’s not a cop, is he?”
“I’m not a cop,” he said loudly, but the someone who’d spoken glared at him anyway.
“So what, you’ve never gotten a look at heroin before? Shut up.”
“I’ve seen it before,” he muttered, but he quieted down. Tanya let go of his arm to slip down next to the glaring person, and gestured at each person in the circle.
“This is Eric, Laila, Harriet, Bianca, and Marcos,” she said, but the names flew in one ear and out the other. They all looked haggard, only gender and varied skin colors separating them visually. One of the girls looked like she was losing her hair, although the way she pulled at it constantly hinted at why. “Make room for Rez, guys.”
They did, rather begrudgingly. “Ever shot up?” the one he thought was named Marcos asked, rather nastily.
“I have,” Respa replied, returning his tone. “Not heroin, though.” He wrinkled his nose as the girl currently handling the spoon drew the liquid up into a needle. “This shit looks so nasty.”
“Prude,” one of the girls muttered, though her face was hidden behind someone else’s shoulder.
Tanya rolled her eyes and laughed. She’d been drinking a bit, he’d already noticed. “This boy,” she giggled, “used to be the biggest angel dust fiend I’d ever seen. Are you still, babe?”
“I’m clean, now,” he said, and she snorted, giving him a push in the shoulder that was stronger than she knew. He fell back onto the palms of his hands.
“What an asshole,” she said, laughing still. “Do you still talk to Monica?”
“Not in months.” He didn’t specify why.
“I still do. She misses you.” She leaned back with him.
“I bet she does,” he said, blank faced. She missed his business, not him. Monica had never been buddy buddy with him.
One of the people in the circle fell back, breathed heavily, and cracking a big smile across her face like an egg in a frying pan. “This is some good shit,” she panted, stretching her arms up over her head. Someone else picked up the spoon, but Tanya wrestled it out of her hands, spilling a little bit of the powdery water. The girl under her shrieked, pushing herself up to her knees as Tanya sat back to actually lick the heroin off the filthy floor. One of the guys cringed and laughed at her, calling her a junkie, but the girl didn’t seem to care.
Someone tossed Tanya the lighter, as if it didn’t matter that she’d “skipped” them all, and she held it deftly under the spoon, which he noticed now looked crusty and unwashed. He shivered. “I’m so nice,” she murmured into the skin of his arm, her breath hot and wet, “that I’m going to let you hit before me.”
“I don’t want to,” he said, finding himself whispering and unsure why.
“Yes you do.” The heroin water bubbled, and she clicked the lighter off, blowing the spoon lightly, as if it were a spoonful of chicken soup instead. She handed him the spoon, which he held nervously, as she crawled languidly into the center of the human circle. She rejected a needle someone handed her, spitting something nasty about their sexual habits, and plucked a needle out of a a cardboard box, which looked as though it’d been stolen from a doctor’s office. And then she gripped the plastic between her teeth, flipped herself onto her back, and crab-walked back to him.
“You’re gonna love this,” she said, her tank top riding up as she caressed her stomach to show him just how much he was going to love it. She pulled the spoon’s contents up into the needle, slowly, and then whipped a rubber tourniquet out of her giant cargo pocket. “Take off your jacket.”
“No.” Their conversation was for their own ears only, whispered now directly into the shells of ears, intimate.
“Do it,” she whispered back, and she nipped his earlobe, which elicited a shudder from him, but he didn’t move away. She threw a leg over him and began to un-do his layers.
“If you take them off, I’ll drop your spoon,” he said, hoping it would deter her, but she only knocked the empty spoon out of his hand, sending it spinning across the floor.
“Take them off, or I’ll jam the needle in your face,” she said, and the sudden manic gleam in her eye told him she would, too. And then wouldn’t he be sorry. He peeled off first his hoodie, then his stolen twill jacket; the t-shirt beneath was the same one he’d been wearing for months now, the same ultra-faded Exploited t-shirt Olga had brought him on his day of release from the hospital.
“Do you even listen to the Exploited?” she asked with a low chuckle, and he shook his head as she put the needle between her teeth again, and looped the tourniquet around the back of his arm. “Hold still.”
“Don’t,” he protested again, but she wasn’t listening to him anymore, and there was little force behind his words. “Tanya…”
And then she was pulling the tourniquet tight, the rubber pulling at the hairs on his arm in an uncomfortable way, and she smacked the skin below it to summon the veins beneath. “Come on,” she mumbled to herself. “Come on.”
And then she was pushing the needle in, and not soon after a feeling of comfort washed over him, feelings of okay and alright and mmm following it in quick succession and whirling around in him in a pleasant way.
“You like it, I can tell,” she was saying, and then he was waking up in another corner of the room.
It was daylight, harsh noontime sunlight streaming in through the one window in the room. The walls were a dirty white stucco, he could properly see now, and beside him in the bed was Tanya, her hair haloing her head on her pillow. It was a tight fit in the twin bed; he found his own head was flat against the mattress.
“Wake up,” he croaked, but she only shifted, mming in her sleep. “Wake up, Tanya.”
When she did nothing more, he threw the covers off and found himself thankfully fully clothed, but the frigidity of the place made him throw them back on. The cold woke him up fully, and he realized he wasn’t on a bed so much as he was on a mattress on the floor. Tanya’s various roommates had made similar nests around the room, with two of them paired up on a double mattress in the farthest corner.
Tanya woke up as he was psyching himself to brave the cold, an hour later, and completely punked him by flinging the covers off herself and walking straight out, wearing nothing but her pants and a tank top.
“Aren’t you freezing?” he half-hissed, digging himself deeper into the covers now that her warmth was gone.
“I’m used to it,” she said, and put her hands on her hips. “Pussy. Come on out, and maybe I can find you some breakfast.”
He wouldn’t turn down free food, despite the roaches that scattered when she cracked open the cupboards. She threw miniature boxes of cereal at him, and he cracked one open like a regular box, pouring the cereal down his throat before she could open the fridge for milk.
“You always did have nasty table manners,” she commented as she broke the perforated lines on her box correctly. She pulled the milk out of the fridge and gave it an experimental sniff before pouring it.
“There’s no table to have manners at,” he pointed out. He cracked another one, having already finished the first.
“I guess,” she sighed, leaning against the counter with her cereal box held near her mouth. “Listen, do you want to stay with us?”
“Your roommates don’t seem to like me a lot,” he said, glancing at their sleeping bodies.
“Oh, fuck ‘em,” she snorted, digging her spoon into the box and taking a bite. “Ummf. This milk is not as fresh as I thought…”
Anything was better than the street, though, so he eventually agreed to stay. Her roommates were at least grateful that he only had the two bags with him, though they eyed him distrustfully whenever he was home. And although he told Tanya he was having no more of “that heroin shit,” every so often she would straddle him again, needle between her teeth, and her soft words would push him to the floor, would trap him as she pulled the tourniquet tight, would shush him that it was okay as she pushed the needle—his needle, now—into a bulging vein, and then he wouldn’t need the words anymore to relax. There were still many nights, most nights, though, that he sat back and folded his arms, and glared at the wall as Tanya and her friends shot up, and then fell back, lolling on the floorboards.
What Tanya liked to do best, other than heroin, was to go to parties. She liked to go to parties in tiny apartments where there was no room for personal space, and she liked big house parties where she could pour beer into pools and watch the host freak out about what their parents would think. She liked to go to parties in clubs, she liked to go to parties on the train, when they happened. In fact, as Respa recalled, he’d met her at a party out on Staten Island, the other place house parties tended to happen.
And of course, she liked to pull him along to these parties, all of them piling into Eric’s crappy car and driving across whatever bridge that he didn’t quite remember the name of, and then she would sniff a quick hit of heroin in the car and go wild at the party. On top of that, she would drink herself into a stupor, staggering around and knocking nice things off of nice surfaces, and screaming obscenities and anyone who tried to pull her in any direction. Respa was usually the one to do it, though he’d get nearly as shitfaced. He didn’t know where Tanya put it all, really.
Respa would be the one to bring her out to the car when she got too drunk to move, but half the time he got so drunk himself that he would wake up back in Tanya’s bed, feeling like someone had turned his face inside out while he slept, and not remember a thing from the previous night. Eric was, dubiously, the moral one who appointed himself designated driver, and on mornings like these he would purposely stomp around the room, making all the hungover people writhing in bed groan in agony for him to stop.
Money came into the household by way of Tanya cutting some of the heroin with artificial sweetener and selling overpriced shots of it to stupid teenagers with something to prove. What it bought, generally, was more heroin, but sometimes one of them (usually Eric) would drag themselves out to the grocery store and pick up things like cereal, milk and beer.
He spotted Terrence and Jonas, one day, sitting in a café together, of all places. He’d been living two weeks with Tanya and her roommates. Although their weak excuse for a shower had helped his hygiene and overall appearance somewhat, he still looked unkempt, and he had no real way of washing his clothes besides giving them the occasional hand scrub in the sink. Tanya had taken him to another party last night, and the effects were still visible on his face.
Unfortunately, they spotted him before he could get away around the corner, and they motioned him over. He contemplated taking off, but he figured that would only look worse. He came into the café feeling intensely self-conscious about his odor and appearance; this was a classy establishment, at least by his standards. Yuppies that he hated lounged on patterned couches, working one-handedly on their slick silver tone laptops with a latte or something in the other hand, held aloft. A few of them looked up as he came in and looked severely put off.
“Hey, guys,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as he bounced up onto the balls of his feet. “Uh, how’re things?”
“You look awful,” Terrence said in a small voice.
“I’m alright,” he said, trying to look nonchalant about it. He considered pulling up a chair, but then they’d be right in the middle of his imagined cloud of stank, and then they’d know for sure that he wasn’t cutting it nearly as well as they were. Not that they couldn’t figure it out already. Really, he just didn’t want to embarrass himself by being the rotten-smelling hobo in the room. He stayed standing.
“You smell like booze,” Jonas said quietly. “Are you doing okay, Respa?”
“I’m fine,” he repeated, gritting his teeth. “I have some roommates, in a studio in Dumbo.”
“Dumbo! That sounds nice,” Jonas said, trying to smile sincerely, and looking worried instead.
“Look at his nostrils,” Terrence whispered to Jonas, but Respa could hear him. The night before, Tanya had shoved her fist with some shots of coke along her thumb under his nose, and used her mysterious wiles to make him snort it. He wasn’t sure anymore if she was a witch, or if he just half-wanted to go along with her ideas of fun. He’d never tried coke, and it left the edges of his nostrils red and irritated.
“Let’s talk about this outside,” Jonas said hurriedly. They’d both finished their coffee concoctions and pastries a long time ago, it seemed, and they were free to swing their coats on and walk outside with him.
“So tell me about you guys,” Respa said, trying to pretend the cold wasn’t biting him everywhere as he plastered a smile on his face. “What’s going on now?”
“We’re actually going out,” Terrence said, his smile sincere and huge. “I couldn’t be happier, honestly.”
Jonas put on his own bashful smile. “Yeah, I came to my senses, I guess. It’s funny, because you were really pushing the issue. I understand now that you weren’t actually trying to be helpful,” and the smile vanished for a moment, “but I guess in this case the ends justifies the means. We’re pretty happy together.”
“That’s good.” He turned a shiver into another big, empty grin.
“Seriously, though, I’m worried about you,” Jonas said. “Are you sure you don’t want to come back to my apartment? No time limits, I just want you to be okay.”
He wanted more than anything in the world to take Jonas up on his offer. Real food, heat, and cleanliness sounded so good right now. He bit his lip. Tanya’s druggy spells on him scared him, to be honest, though he’d never admit it to her, or anyone. He thought back to the hospital, when he’d gutted Doctor Chenault for daring to offer him a chance at middle class life, and although he still considered the doctor an overbearing prick, he regretted turning him down so much right now. Middle class life made him nervous, but at least it was a comfortable lifestyle, freer of so many of the worries that plagued his class of people. Street-bound, dirty junkies, so to speak.
“I can’t,” he said simply, quietly. “Thanks, though.” He stared at the sidewalk as they walked.
“Can’t? Or won’t?” Jonas asked, leaning down to look up into Respa’s face. Terrence was smart enough to keep quiet.
“Can’t,” he said, turning his head away from Jonas even as he kept his head down.
Jonas swung in front of him and put his hands on Respa’s shoulders, tipping his chin up. “Respa. I’m not saying this to be an asshole. You look half dead.” He picked at Respa’s jeans. “You look like you haven’t eaten in weeks, you look drugged, and you smell like you haven’t been able to wash your clothes in ages.” It was scary how close to right he was.
“I’m okay,” he repeated, and he wasn’t sure if he was shaking because of the cold anymore. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not okay. Come on back to my place, and take a shower, and you can use my washing machine…”
He bit his lip until the skin there broke, and he wanted so badly to say yes, to run away from Tanya and her roommates from hell and to get totally clean, to get a job like Olga, to wear nice clothes that fit and didn’t smell, to browse Jonas’s DVD collection and agree with him that Steve Carrell was the funniest, he wanted so badly—
“I have to go,” he whispered. He moved Jonas’s hands from his shoulders gently, and he walked away from them, hands shoved deep in his pockets and head down between his shoulders. That had been his last chance, and might as well have punted it over a fence.>