I am the Blue Center Light by Jason Hardung
My nervous system was power lines malfunctioning. Short, sharp blasts of electricity made my arms and legs twitch. My bed felt like a park bench, my sheets drenched in sweat. I couldn't get comfortable as my temperature fluctuated from icy chills to waves of unbearable heat. My heart was a caged hummingbird and the regrets and worries ripped through me like shards of glass in my bloodstream. I hadn't slept all night due to hallucinations of death and dismemberment. Anxiety was rising from my past. Thoughts of my lying, cheating, and stealing catching up to me and I wasn't going to make it to work today.
I had a 50 to 100 dollar a day heroin habit, and out of money and resources to score more. It had been ten years living this slight existence. “I give up. I can't go another day like this,” I said to myself. I was alone. As a last resort I tried prayer. It hurt too bad to get down on my knees, so I rolled over on my stomach. As I lay in the wrecked bed, I asked God, or whoever was up there to help me. “Either kill me or show me the way.” A thought flashed through my head like a firefly during a mid-western dusk. “Call your dad and tell him everything. He will help.” I'd thought about telling him before, but I was ashamed. A man always wants his father to be proud.
Shaking, I picked up the phone to make the call, but it was shut off due to non-payment. Getting out of bed, every muscle in my body was in knots. I decided to walk two blocks to hop on a bus, ride to my brother's house and use his phone. I could barely pull my rotten and torn jeans onto my twig like legs. I was a baby deer on ice. Walking was painful. A cold sweat caught a cold breeze, and I was freezing, even though it was mid May. Each step was a tragedy. Halfway to the station, I noticed part of the road closed off by police cars. Men in uniform were pointing upwards, cupping their eyes from the sun and yelling. Paramedics and firefighters held a round trampoline below a tall building. I looked up, and saw a man standing on the edge of a four story building, crying and threatening to jump. He must be having a bad day too.
As I stood there staring at somebody else's tragedy, the gears and the cogs began to click. That was me up there. I'd been standing on the edge for the past ten years. Why didn't I ever jump? How did life slip through my hands?
My parents got divorced when I was six. I remember a big fight, a yelling match, and doors slamming. The day was creeping through the arched windows on the front door, spotlighting my mother's face. Her eyes were hot and red, her brow crumpled. Her hand, something I held in grocery stores and large crowds, was now clenching the tarnished brass door knob. “Are you gonna come back?” I asked through shaggy blonde hair and uncontrollable tears.
“I'll be back. I promise,” she said as she walked out, a fading silhouette in the sun. She never came back.
My father was awarded custody of me and my younger brother. He cut apart derailed trains for the Union Pacific Railroad, and was always out on the road, far from anything but wind and sky. We were pawned off on relatives for awhile, and then gradually we started staying home by ourselves. We were the poorest family in the new middle class neighborhood, and neighbors warned their kids to stay away from us. The cupboards in our house were bare, and I was growing, I was hungry. I would crawl through windows when neighbors left for work, looting food from cabinets. Another hustle I had was charging neighborhood kids to take a good look at my dad's Penthouse and Hustler magazines. I'd take the loot to Mini Mart and buy nachos for dinner and Hostess cupcakes for dessert.
One day me and some neighborhood kids were digging holes in the backyard. Our house was the place to be with no authority figures to tell us what we couldn't do. We were going to make an underground clubhouse. My dad had two Doberman Pinschers, a red male and a black female. We had the male chained up because the female was in heat, and if they got together the only way to separate them was with the hose. It was summer, hot and dry. Our backyard was dust and anthills. Ours, the only house on the block without grass. I was ten, my brother eight. We were digging in the hot sun, digging for a way out. My friend Larry Hinker decided to tease the chained Doberman. A scream pierced the ping of shovels breaking soil. It was Larry, and his face was pouring blood. A thick chunk of flesh hung out of his chin. My dog bit him in the face. 'Where's your father?” they asked. Angry faces were verbally lynching my dad. “He is irresponsible. He deserves to have his kids taken away!”
Larry's face was falling off in that sun. I started balling and running. I just ran. Hysterical. Hyperventilating. I didn't know what to do. So I ran, hoping to out run the embarrassment, hoping to out run the bad words about my dad, hoping to out run Larry's blood.
I came back a couple hours later when everybody had left. Larry ended up getting forty stitches. I started digging around the blood in the soil. I wanted to live underground away from people. Away from the mother who betrayed me. Away from the neighbors that looked down on us. Away from the father that wasn't there. Later, I figured out how to do it.
In high school I tried percocet. The warmth rushed from my head to my toes. I was a larvae in a cocoon and nothing could touch me in there. I was diving into books by the Beats, and watching movies like Basketball Diaries and Drugstore Cowboy. Junkies were a romantic notion to me. They seemed like wise men walking cold streets with their collars up reciting poetry the way most of us breathe. I saw it as a noble thing to burn out young. As Kerouac said, “...the only people for me are the mad ones...the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes, 'Awwww!'” I wanted to be the blue center light. Deep down I wanted my parents and everybody else to watch my fireworks explode.
A few years later I discovered oxycontin, a powerful painkiller nicknamed “hillbilly heroin”. It was just put out on the market and more potent than anything I had tried before. I'd purchase them from terminally ill people like Nancy. Nancy shook from some sort of nerve damage. Her teeth chattered half sentences while her obsidian eyes were just dark holes in her skull. Her voice was years of whiskey and cigarettes; deep as a coal mine. Her trailer was the nicest one in the whole park. A ceramic bird bath adorned the tiny yard and deepest patriotism was displayed on faux wood paneled walls. American flags, eagles, Harley Davidson and a Kill Em All Let God Sort Em Out posters looked down on me like a weird conscience. I talked to her like a good son, “I'll mow your yard, do your dishes, fix that hole in your fence.” She'd nod off. Face falling, eye lids fluttering, while her Lucky Strike dropped to the carpet.
“Just help me out one more time,” I would beg. “I'll get you back Friday.”
“You are the only person I trust,” she would say while digging through her purse for the pills. “You remind me of my son. I miss him.”
Pay checks came and went. I held down a job at a custom cabinet shop, just to hold down my habit. I began to notice it was getting harder to get out of bed unless I had opiates in my system. The only way you could get the drugs I was doing was if you had Aids or cancer and it was a hassle trying to find someone everyday who was about to die. I had to find an easier way.
The first time I banged heroin was in Portland. Heroin had long been my goal. I wanted to be Kurt Cobain, William Burroughs, and Jim Carrol. It was May of 2001 and I was sent by Thrasher magazine to cover the biggest skateboard contest of the year in Vancouver, British Columbia. We
drove hard Northwest from Cheyenne pushing the wind; the countryside rolling in light green waves out the window; the sun shifting into place like soldiers hitting the front lines; twenty four hours straight to the Canadian border that hung above the head of Seattle. Me and my two companions were waved over to customs entering the country. Our faces were sunburned, dusted by dirt and shaggy beards; half moons of unrest lay under our eyes. We smelled like a Grateful Dead show. “Have you ever been arrested?”, the thick woman behind the official counter asked.
I had a gun charge from seven years earlier so I wasn't allowed to cross the imaginary line into Canada. I figured they were proud of their low crime rate and viewed me as an infection to the system.
My friend drove me South to Portland and dropped me off at an old friend's apartment.
The only furniture in Sara's apartment was a bare mattress tossed on the pissy hardwood floor. The old steam heater hissed as the sun crawled through broken blinds, highlighting Sara's paleness. She was a ghost in a black and white movie. Her boyfriend lived there too. He was looking out the window.
“You ever do smack?” He asked.
“Not yet, but I want to.”
He drew the blinds and the sun stopped shining inside. I shot heroin for four days, until my friend picked me back up on his way back from Canada.
When I got back to Wyoming I learned where to buy dope in Denver. Three blocks from Coor's Field. Baby-faced Hondurans, smelling of soap, appeared from doorways and bus stops, while the shadows of tall buildings covered us from the sun. I drove down there everyday. I'd buy six black and two white. Six ten dollar pieces of Heroin and two of cocaine so I could stay awake on the long drive home. Walking by the window of a chic eatery on Champa, I caught my reflection. I looked like the junkies that roamed the streets in bland shades - zombies, black slits instead of eyes, gaunt, pale and vacuum sealed cheeks.
One day in April the cabinet shop I worked at gave me two free Colorado Rockies tickets. Me and my friend Chris were supposed to go. I went by his house at nine in the morning and his girl decided that he couldn't go unless she came along. I couldn't argue. The day was already warm, perfect for baseball, but when we finally arrived in downtown Denver our agenda had changed. We scored a few dime pieces and walked back to the car. Me and Chris cooked up front, while his girl sat in back waiting for him to help her. She wasn't comfortable putting a needle in her own arm. He did his shot and it made him heave. It was good shit. I did mine and was once again in the opiate womb, warm and safe. Everything was perfect at that moment. “Be careful,” I warned them. “It hit me pretty hard, and I'm good at drugs.”
Chris was already nodded out and barely able to drop the tar into the spoon. He added water and held the lighter under it until it was a boiling thick, brown liquid. His girl laid her dainty arm across the back of the front seat. Chris held the tip of the needle in the sun, one eye closed, tongue peeking through teeth, inspected it like a surgeon, and flicked it with his forefinger twice. “You ready baby?”
He turned and found a vein in her tiny arm, and slowly pushed his values into her blood stream. Everything seemed fine. “Let's get out of the car,” I said. “I don't want to look suspicious.”
As we walked, a mid-day rush of suits taking lunch breaks strolled by. The crowd's whistles could be heard coming from Coor's Field. The streets were arteries pushing life through the city. I pictured Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac and how they wandered these same streets in search of themselves. I was one of them now. Or so I thought.
I was walking in front and heard a THUD. Turning around, I saw the girl on the ground convulsing, eyes rolled back in her head, her face grayish-blue. My heart fell into my stomach. I pounded her back. “Wake up! Wake the fuck up please!”
Chris didn't know CPR, but he tried his best. His eyes were white with fear. A crowd was forming. She finally woke up and didn't even know what had happened. I was relieved. The crowd lingered with all their gawking eyes and slowly began to disperse. We started walking, again, THUD! I turned around and this time she was totally blue and not breathing. Her blonde hair swept the sidewalk. Someone called 911. The cops would be on their way. I stashed all my syringes in a nearby trash can, and ran to 7-11 to get a bottle of water to throw on her face. It worked in the movies. I really didn't want to be there, so I used water as an excuse to run away. It was my friend's girl. He'd put it in her arm. I didn't want her to come anyway. Jogging back with the water, hoping time would change this bad dream, a firetruck, an ambulance, and a cop blew past me, rushing to the girl on the sidewalk. How could this happen to her? She was a cheerleader in high school. Her dad was mayor at one time. She got straight A's in college. This was supposed to happen to homeless men with imaginary friends and two different shoes. This wasn't supposed to happen to someone I knew. When I got back to the scene, her and Chris were gone. Everybody was looking for them.
I walked to the 16th Street Mall. I figured I could blend in with the crowd. My eyes wouldn't stay open. I heard my name called, I turned around and it was them, hiding in the doorway of a clothing store. She had come to, and he carried her away. She still didn't know she died, she didn't know anything. I really didn't like anybody coming with me to score after that. By myself, I'm the only one that could die, and it wouldn't be on my conscience for the rest of my life.
Fall was here, 2003. It was creeping through uninsulated windows and doors. Car headlights shaped shadows on walls like bums around barrel fires. The constant whisper of I-80 was the only noise I heard as I lay in bed at night. Echoes of people rolling through Cheyenne in the dark, never stopping. This place usually wasn't a destination, just a crossroads of two major highways. It was home to people that broke down. Broken down people.
I had been living in this house, which I owned, but was about to lose, because I hadn't paid the mortgage for the past nine months. I'd lived without water and electricity for the past five. The mortgage money went to: cocaine, meth, heroin, oxycontin, weed, fentanayl, morphine, dialaudid, percocet, crack, methadone, whatever I could get to pull my tired bones through one more day. I took showers at the gym, shit in the back yard in boxes, cooked dope by candlelight. These were the good days. The bad days were when I didn't have any drugs.
I moved to Fort Collins to start over, and I did. I started over closer to Denver; deeper inside the belly of the beast.
One night, dope sick, I borrowed my dad's car. He lived in Fort Collins too, and I drove it to Cheyenne to see if I could beg some oxycontin off an old dealer. A biker, who always kept a loaded nine millimeter on his lap, and his pills in a hip sack by his feet. The night floated inches above the Wyoming plains, cold and wet. Wind blew through my ears like a drill. I knocked on his trailer door. A woman with no teeth answered. Twitching and gumming her top lip, “Steve isn't here,” she snapped hiding halfway behind the door. Her eyes were high beams, large and round. She was on meth and wasn't thinking clear.
“Can I at least use the bathroom? I drove all the way from Fort Collins.”
“Steve said not to let anybody in.”
“Come on, I've known him for years. It's cool,” I lied.
“Ok. Make it fast.”
As I walked in and made small talk she said, “Oh damn, Steve left all of his pills here. He never goes anywhere without them.”
My spine shivered crazy loud and my skin grew flush as I stared at the bag from the edge of my eyes. “How could I get her away from it?” My mind raced.
“I'm gonna go grab a cigarette,” she said, walking towards the back of the trailer. “You need one? They're menthols.”
“Beggars can't be choosers,” I smiled.
This was my chance. I snatched the bag off the buffalo hide carpet, in two steps I was out the door, onto I-25 south, back into the night. I took everything he was prescribed for pain, but I believed my pain was worse. It was a whole month's prescription of oxycontin, valium and fentanayl patches. I veered hastily into the Holiday Inn parking lot next to the highway and parked under a streetlight. I licked the yellow coating off the pills, crushed them, dropped the powder in the spoon, added a half CC of water and heated the bottom of the spoon in circles with my lighter until it boiled. The ritual of shooting up got me off as much as when that chrome spike ripped flesh and veins and ultimately ended with the warm rush. My whole existence came down to what could be fit into a spoon. The pills ran out in a few days and the withdrawals crept in on tiger's feet. I hadn't slept in a week.
So there I was, watching the man on the building threatening to end his life. He never jumped that day. I felt every bump on the bus ride to my brother's house. I was rattled, shaken, stirred. I banged on my brother's door for what seemed like hours before he answered disheveled. He was dope sick too, and didn't want to get out of bed.
“I need to call dad. I'm done. I'm gonna tell him everything,” I said.
“Just hurry up,” he said.
I told my dad I really needed to talk to him about something, and asked if he'd come pick me up. He knew something was wrong. He pulled up and I hopped in. Tears picking up steam down my cheeks, I told him everything.
After realizing how much pain I was in, physically, emotionally, spiritually, he calmed down and stopped yelling. “Let's go pay your cellphone bill and talk.”
My legs kicked the floorboard of the car. Spasms and chills beat me like a hail storm. Minutes after we paid the bill and got my phone turned back on, my phone rang. It was my friend Lazaro. It had been a few months since I last talked to him. Before I could explain what was going on, he raged about how he quit drugs and started this rehab program with a retired cardiologist in Cheyenne. I felt God on my side for once. I called the doctor and the next day I was in rehab.
I drove to Cheyenne every night for three hour group sessions and intense one on ones with the doctor. I did this for seven months. I would visit my mother everyday, before and after my sessions. We became mother and son again. I'd sit down and eat dinner with her, something I hadn't done since I was a child. I learned about her and where she came from, and what had happened that day when she walked out the door. I forgave her.
The last time I had been sober was when I was seventeen years old. I never got to grow up. Everyday I'm learning how to be an adult, how to be myself, how to deal with problems, when before I only knew how to cover them up with chemicals. I faced them head on. I'm a steel locomotive in a blizzard. When a girl smiles at me now, I don't look away. The bird's chirps ring louder now. I talk to God. The radio sings songs about me. I can cry now. I like waking up. There is dark, but there is also light. The breeze caresses my face, and the fingers of trees point me towards my future. When people touch me, I don't coil like an injured dog. I can breathe again. My mom and I hug. I am the blue center light.
I had a 50 to 100 dollar a day heroin habit, and out of money and resources to score more. It had been ten years living this slight existence. “I give up. I can't go another day like this,” I said to myself. I was alone. As a last resort I tried prayer. It hurt too bad to get down on my knees, so I rolled over on my stomach. As I lay in the wrecked bed, I asked God, or whoever was up there to help me. “Either kill me or show me the way.” A thought flashed through my head like a firefly during a mid-western dusk. “Call your dad and tell him everything. He will help.” I'd thought about telling him before, but I was ashamed. A man always wants his father to be proud.
Shaking, I picked up the phone to make the call, but it was shut off due to non-payment. Getting out of bed, every muscle in my body was in knots. I decided to walk two blocks to hop on a bus, ride to my brother's house and use his phone. I could barely pull my rotten and torn jeans onto my twig like legs. I was a baby deer on ice. Walking was painful. A cold sweat caught a cold breeze, and I was freezing, even though it was mid May. Each step was a tragedy. Halfway to the station, I noticed part of the road closed off by police cars. Men in uniform were pointing upwards, cupping their eyes from the sun and yelling. Paramedics and firefighters held a round trampoline below a tall building. I looked up, and saw a man standing on the edge of a four story building, crying and threatening to jump. He must be having a bad day too.
As I stood there staring at somebody else's tragedy, the gears and the cogs began to click. That was me up there. I'd been standing on the edge for the past ten years. Why didn't I ever jump? How did life slip through my hands?
My parents got divorced when I was six. I remember a big fight, a yelling match, and doors slamming. The day was creeping through the arched windows on the front door, spotlighting my mother's face. Her eyes were hot and red, her brow crumpled. Her hand, something I held in grocery stores and large crowds, was now clenching the tarnished brass door knob. “Are you gonna come back?” I asked through shaggy blonde hair and uncontrollable tears.
“I'll be back. I promise,” she said as she walked out, a fading silhouette in the sun. She never came back.
My father was awarded custody of me and my younger brother. He cut apart derailed trains for the Union Pacific Railroad, and was always out on the road, far from anything but wind and sky. We were pawned off on relatives for awhile, and then gradually we started staying home by ourselves. We were the poorest family in the new middle class neighborhood, and neighbors warned their kids to stay away from us. The cupboards in our house were bare, and I was growing, I was hungry. I would crawl through windows when neighbors left for work, looting food from cabinets. Another hustle I had was charging neighborhood kids to take a good look at my dad's Penthouse and Hustler magazines. I'd take the loot to Mini Mart and buy nachos for dinner and Hostess cupcakes for dessert.
One day me and some neighborhood kids were digging holes in the backyard. Our house was the place to be with no authority figures to tell us what we couldn't do. We were going to make an underground clubhouse. My dad had two Doberman Pinschers, a red male and a black female. We had the male chained up because the female was in heat, and if they got together the only way to separate them was with the hose. It was summer, hot and dry. Our backyard was dust and anthills. Ours, the only house on the block without grass. I was ten, my brother eight. We were digging in the hot sun, digging for a way out. My friend Larry Hinker decided to tease the chained Doberman. A scream pierced the ping of shovels breaking soil. It was Larry, and his face was pouring blood. A thick chunk of flesh hung out of his chin. My dog bit him in the face. 'Where's your father?” they asked. Angry faces were verbally lynching my dad. “He is irresponsible. He deserves to have his kids taken away!”
Larry's face was falling off in that sun. I started balling and running. I just ran. Hysterical. Hyperventilating. I didn't know what to do. So I ran, hoping to out run the embarrassment, hoping to out run the bad words about my dad, hoping to out run Larry's blood.
I came back a couple hours later when everybody had left. Larry ended up getting forty stitches. I started digging around the blood in the soil. I wanted to live underground away from people. Away from the mother who betrayed me. Away from the neighbors that looked down on us. Away from the father that wasn't there. Later, I figured out how to do it.
In high school I tried percocet. The warmth rushed from my head to my toes. I was a larvae in a cocoon and nothing could touch me in there. I was diving into books by the Beats, and watching movies like Basketball Diaries and Drugstore Cowboy. Junkies were a romantic notion to me. They seemed like wise men walking cold streets with their collars up reciting poetry the way most of us breathe. I saw it as a noble thing to burn out young. As Kerouac said, “...the only people for me are the mad ones...the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes, 'Awwww!'” I wanted to be the blue center light. Deep down I wanted my parents and everybody else to watch my fireworks explode.
A few years later I discovered oxycontin, a powerful painkiller nicknamed “hillbilly heroin”. It was just put out on the market and more potent than anything I had tried before. I'd purchase them from terminally ill people like Nancy. Nancy shook from some sort of nerve damage. Her teeth chattered half sentences while her obsidian eyes were just dark holes in her skull. Her voice was years of whiskey and cigarettes; deep as a coal mine. Her trailer was the nicest one in the whole park. A ceramic bird bath adorned the tiny yard and deepest patriotism was displayed on faux wood paneled walls. American flags, eagles, Harley Davidson and a Kill Em All Let God Sort Em Out posters looked down on me like a weird conscience. I talked to her like a good son, “I'll mow your yard, do your dishes, fix that hole in your fence.” She'd nod off. Face falling, eye lids fluttering, while her Lucky Strike dropped to the carpet.
“Just help me out one more time,” I would beg. “I'll get you back Friday.”
“You are the only person I trust,” she would say while digging through her purse for the pills. “You remind me of my son. I miss him.”
Pay checks came and went. I held down a job at a custom cabinet shop, just to hold down my habit. I began to notice it was getting harder to get out of bed unless I had opiates in my system. The only way you could get the drugs I was doing was if you had Aids or cancer and it was a hassle trying to find someone everyday who was about to die. I had to find an easier way.
The first time I banged heroin was in Portland. Heroin had long been my goal. I wanted to be Kurt Cobain, William Burroughs, and Jim Carrol. It was May of 2001 and I was sent by Thrasher magazine to cover the biggest skateboard contest of the year in Vancouver, British Columbia. We
drove hard Northwest from Cheyenne pushing the wind; the countryside rolling in light green waves out the window; the sun shifting into place like soldiers hitting the front lines; twenty four hours straight to the Canadian border that hung above the head of Seattle. Me and my two companions were waved over to customs entering the country. Our faces were sunburned, dusted by dirt and shaggy beards; half moons of unrest lay under our eyes. We smelled like a Grateful Dead show. “Have you ever been arrested?”, the thick woman behind the official counter asked.
I had a gun charge from seven years earlier so I wasn't allowed to cross the imaginary line into Canada. I figured they were proud of their low crime rate and viewed me as an infection to the system.
My friend drove me South to Portland and dropped me off at an old friend's apartment.
The only furniture in Sara's apartment was a bare mattress tossed on the pissy hardwood floor. The old steam heater hissed as the sun crawled through broken blinds, highlighting Sara's paleness. She was a ghost in a black and white movie. Her boyfriend lived there too. He was looking out the window.
“You ever do smack?” He asked.
“Not yet, but I want to.”
He drew the blinds and the sun stopped shining inside. I shot heroin for four days, until my friend picked me back up on his way back from Canada.
When I got back to Wyoming I learned where to buy dope in Denver. Three blocks from Coor's Field. Baby-faced Hondurans, smelling of soap, appeared from doorways and bus stops, while the shadows of tall buildings covered us from the sun. I drove down there everyday. I'd buy six black and two white. Six ten dollar pieces of Heroin and two of cocaine so I could stay awake on the long drive home. Walking by the window of a chic eatery on Champa, I caught my reflection. I looked like the junkies that roamed the streets in bland shades - zombies, black slits instead of eyes, gaunt, pale and vacuum sealed cheeks.
One day in April the cabinet shop I worked at gave me two free Colorado Rockies tickets. Me and my friend Chris were supposed to go. I went by his house at nine in the morning and his girl decided that he couldn't go unless she came along. I couldn't argue. The day was already warm, perfect for baseball, but when we finally arrived in downtown Denver our agenda had changed. We scored a few dime pieces and walked back to the car. Me and Chris cooked up front, while his girl sat in back waiting for him to help her. She wasn't comfortable putting a needle in her own arm. He did his shot and it made him heave. It was good shit. I did mine and was once again in the opiate womb, warm and safe. Everything was perfect at that moment. “Be careful,” I warned them. “It hit me pretty hard, and I'm good at drugs.”
Chris was already nodded out and barely able to drop the tar into the spoon. He added water and held the lighter under it until it was a boiling thick, brown liquid. His girl laid her dainty arm across the back of the front seat. Chris held the tip of the needle in the sun, one eye closed, tongue peeking through teeth, inspected it like a surgeon, and flicked it with his forefinger twice. “You ready baby?”
He turned and found a vein in her tiny arm, and slowly pushed his values into her blood stream. Everything seemed fine. “Let's get out of the car,” I said. “I don't want to look suspicious.”
As we walked, a mid-day rush of suits taking lunch breaks strolled by. The crowd's whistles could be heard coming from Coor's Field. The streets were arteries pushing life through the city. I pictured Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac and how they wandered these same streets in search of themselves. I was one of them now. Or so I thought.
I was walking in front and heard a THUD. Turning around, I saw the girl on the ground convulsing, eyes rolled back in her head, her face grayish-blue. My heart fell into my stomach. I pounded her back. “Wake up! Wake the fuck up please!”
Chris didn't know CPR, but he tried his best. His eyes were white with fear. A crowd was forming. She finally woke up and didn't even know what had happened. I was relieved. The crowd lingered with all their gawking eyes and slowly began to disperse. We started walking, again, THUD! I turned around and this time she was totally blue and not breathing. Her blonde hair swept the sidewalk. Someone called 911. The cops would be on their way. I stashed all my syringes in a nearby trash can, and ran to 7-11 to get a bottle of water to throw on her face. It worked in the movies. I really didn't want to be there, so I used water as an excuse to run away. It was my friend's girl. He'd put it in her arm. I didn't want her to come anyway. Jogging back with the water, hoping time would change this bad dream, a firetruck, an ambulance, and a cop blew past me, rushing to the girl on the sidewalk. How could this happen to her? She was a cheerleader in high school. Her dad was mayor at one time. She got straight A's in college. This was supposed to happen to homeless men with imaginary friends and two different shoes. This wasn't supposed to happen to someone I knew. When I got back to the scene, her and Chris were gone. Everybody was looking for them.
I walked to the 16th Street Mall. I figured I could blend in with the crowd. My eyes wouldn't stay open. I heard my name called, I turned around and it was them, hiding in the doorway of a clothing store. She had come to, and he carried her away. She still didn't know she died, she didn't know anything. I really didn't like anybody coming with me to score after that. By myself, I'm the only one that could die, and it wouldn't be on my conscience for the rest of my life.
Fall was here, 2003. It was creeping through uninsulated windows and doors. Car headlights shaped shadows on walls like bums around barrel fires. The constant whisper of I-80 was the only noise I heard as I lay in bed at night. Echoes of people rolling through Cheyenne in the dark, never stopping. This place usually wasn't a destination, just a crossroads of two major highways. It was home to people that broke down. Broken down people.
I had been living in this house, which I owned, but was about to lose, because I hadn't paid the mortgage for the past nine months. I'd lived without water and electricity for the past five. The mortgage money went to: cocaine, meth, heroin, oxycontin, weed, fentanayl, morphine, dialaudid, percocet, crack, methadone, whatever I could get to pull my tired bones through one more day. I took showers at the gym, shit in the back yard in boxes, cooked dope by candlelight. These were the good days. The bad days were when I didn't have any drugs.
I moved to Fort Collins to start over, and I did. I started over closer to Denver; deeper inside the belly of the beast.
One night, dope sick, I borrowed my dad's car. He lived in Fort Collins too, and I drove it to Cheyenne to see if I could beg some oxycontin off an old dealer. A biker, who always kept a loaded nine millimeter on his lap, and his pills in a hip sack by his feet. The night floated inches above the Wyoming plains, cold and wet. Wind blew through my ears like a drill. I knocked on his trailer door. A woman with no teeth answered. Twitching and gumming her top lip, “Steve isn't here,” she snapped hiding halfway behind the door. Her eyes were high beams, large and round. She was on meth and wasn't thinking clear.
“Can I at least use the bathroom? I drove all the way from Fort Collins.”
“Steve said not to let anybody in.”
“Come on, I've known him for years. It's cool,” I lied.
“Ok. Make it fast.”
As I walked in and made small talk she said, “Oh damn, Steve left all of his pills here. He never goes anywhere without them.”
My spine shivered crazy loud and my skin grew flush as I stared at the bag from the edge of my eyes. “How could I get her away from it?” My mind raced.
“I'm gonna go grab a cigarette,” she said, walking towards the back of the trailer. “You need one? They're menthols.”
“Beggars can't be choosers,” I smiled.
This was my chance. I snatched the bag off the buffalo hide carpet, in two steps I was out the door, onto I-25 south, back into the night. I took everything he was prescribed for pain, but I believed my pain was worse. It was a whole month's prescription of oxycontin, valium and fentanayl patches. I veered hastily into the Holiday Inn parking lot next to the highway and parked under a streetlight. I licked the yellow coating off the pills, crushed them, dropped the powder in the spoon, added a half CC of water and heated the bottom of the spoon in circles with my lighter until it boiled. The ritual of shooting up got me off as much as when that chrome spike ripped flesh and veins and ultimately ended with the warm rush. My whole existence came down to what could be fit into a spoon. The pills ran out in a few days and the withdrawals crept in on tiger's feet. I hadn't slept in a week.
So there I was, watching the man on the building threatening to end his life. He never jumped that day. I felt every bump on the bus ride to my brother's house. I was rattled, shaken, stirred. I banged on my brother's door for what seemed like hours before he answered disheveled. He was dope sick too, and didn't want to get out of bed.
“I need to call dad. I'm done. I'm gonna tell him everything,” I said.
“Just hurry up,” he said.
I told my dad I really needed to talk to him about something, and asked if he'd come pick me up. He knew something was wrong. He pulled up and I hopped in. Tears picking up steam down my cheeks, I told him everything.
After realizing how much pain I was in, physically, emotionally, spiritually, he calmed down and stopped yelling. “Let's go pay your cellphone bill and talk.”
My legs kicked the floorboard of the car. Spasms and chills beat me like a hail storm. Minutes after we paid the bill and got my phone turned back on, my phone rang. It was my friend Lazaro. It had been a few months since I last talked to him. Before I could explain what was going on, he raged about how he quit drugs and started this rehab program with a retired cardiologist in Cheyenne. I felt God on my side for once. I called the doctor and the next day I was in rehab.
I drove to Cheyenne every night for three hour group sessions and intense one on ones with the doctor. I did this for seven months. I would visit my mother everyday, before and after my sessions. We became mother and son again. I'd sit down and eat dinner with her, something I hadn't done since I was a child. I learned about her and where she came from, and what had happened that day when she walked out the door. I forgave her.
The last time I had been sober was when I was seventeen years old. I never got to grow up. Everyday I'm learning how to be an adult, how to be myself, how to deal with problems, when before I only knew how to cover them up with chemicals. I faced them head on. I'm a steel locomotive in a blizzard. When a girl smiles at me now, I don't look away. The bird's chirps ring louder now. I talk to God. The radio sings songs about me. I can cry now. I like waking up. There is dark, but there is also light. The breeze caresses my face, and the fingers of trees point me towards my future. When people touch me, I don't coil like an injured dog. I can breathe again. My mom and I hug. I am the blue center light.
Jason Hardung's work has appeared in or forthcoming in THRASHER, DRIFT, LANGUAGE&CULTURE.NET, RED PULP UNDERGROUND. He is a co-editor of the FRONT RANGE REVIEW and MATTER and also the managing editor of GER. He will be reading at the Connecticut Beat Poetry Festival and has been a featured guest on the Moe Green Poetry Hour.
