Junkie Jesus
On an excellently warm morning, as spring turned into summer, this man, of which I'm yet to think up a name for, woke up with a yawn. He rolled his arse to the side of the bed and planted his feet on his garment-carpeted bedroom floor. Or maybe he didn't get up. He could've easily, and in greater likelihood, grabbed a pillow to cuddle, mumbled, sighed and went back to sleep.
In this case, I'll go with the latter.
Five hours later, when he finally did get up, his first thought, after scratching his balls, of course, was to check the clock.
“Shit,” he said to himself and nodded and smiled. The joy of knowing for sure that one has nothing to do on that particular day. Pure ecstasy. This is how our man felt; or my man at least - depending on the level of attention my main character has attracted towards you. He was free to do anything that he wanted. He sat back down on his bed. 'I could go back to sleep right now if I wanted to', he thought. And then he thought, 'I do want to!', and smiled and nodded and went back to sleep.
No, not really. I know nobody wants to read about a character that just sleeps all the time. What everybody wants to read about is drunken, drug-fucked debauchery... Or at least I do, anyway.
So, let's say that he sat down on his bed. But instead of going back to sleep, he pulled out his pipe from underneath his bed and sucked a lungful of crystal meth down his throat. Now he was wide awake. He looks straight up at me, or you, and says, “You want some?”
“Nah man,” I said. 'I'd never touch this shit', I thought, and of course he heard me.
I wouldn't have a clue what you would say. Maybe you'd just chuckle. Or maybe you'd just sit there, deadpan, reading through this thing without any clue about what is actually happening. If that's the case then I suggest you just give up now.
The dude just smiled and nodded and had another suck on his crackpipe.
Another five hours later he was asleep, again, just in a different part of the apartment with a new pile of trash around him.
Two hour's after that he was still asleep, but then after only one hour, he was awake again. This time he had a new energy about him. He didn't seem like a junkie now, or in whatever way that you had imagined him from when I introduced him to you back at the start of this story – which hopefully was only a couple of minutes ago because if you're slower at reading than that, I'm sure that the idea behind this story will have some trouble penetrating into your not so efficient head. To you people with the mental capacity of a hammer, I say, again, you may as well just give up here. To tell you the truth I still havn't really got a fucking clue where this story is going at all, but so far I've found it interesting to write and think it may give some people a bit of a laugh, or extra toilet paper if they feel the need to wipe their bums with thin white A4 pages. I could only imagine the paper cuts.
I know it seems like I'm saying that you all should give up now, but I'm not, really. Regardless of whether you're sitting there like a stoned zombie reading this, or if it has taken you over an hour, the truth is, I really want you all to continue reading this. I promise I'll start making the story and my protagonist a lot more interesting, and I'll get to the actual story. I'll even get rid of this silly, post-modern, present-tense narration too. All for your sake, OK. You can never call me a selfish author.
Now, stick with me.
Junkie Jesus [excerpt]
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Well, I never really understood religions
Except it seems a good reason to kill
Everybody's got their own conceptions
And, you know, they always will
These days are needles under my skin
Jesus shooting heroin
-from 'Jesus Shooting Heroin' by The Flaming Lips
The room redefined squalor. Simply the smell was enough to make any average junkie vomit up whatever it is they eat for breakfast; easily vile enough to force any normal, non-drug addled person to keel over and die where they stood. The floor was a cesspool of drug paraphernalia, carpeted in old syringes, empty nitrous bulbs, dirty satchels, bong-bottles, cigarette-butts, spoons, lighters and other junkie junk. The stains that covered the walls were so gross and fetid that they looked like the napalm wounds of soldiers in the Vietnam war, all yellow and pussy, oozing with crap that God Himself would be stumped to explain the genesis of. A chemist would have a field day in this room, probably discover hundreds of new forms of bacteria and disease that's study could possibly save the planet, but he'd undoubtedly die from exposure to the noxious miasma that lived within these stains, and the world would be once again doomed to wallow in it's own filth.
The water-damage and rust on the roof had created a pattern so intricate that it looked like a masterpiece of fine-art. Swirls within swirls that fed into fine, wavy lines flurrying in every direction before somehow finding their way back to where they had begun, creating some sort of psychedelic flower-like design that looks like it belonged on Ken Kesey's bus. But, alas, the world of drugs had changed from the days of the Merry Pranksters and their substance-fueled bus ride. It had changed from a freedom that had influenced individual minds that altered and expanded, and eventually changed the world - a cultural revolution where people became free and saw life as it should be, to a world where people sat in rooms, smoking, injecting or snorting dope until they could not move or function anymore. It was now a world where people spent what little money they'd made from selling their ass on the street to go and cop some more off their dealer, who was
steadily getting wealthier at their demise. The Pranksters would feel as ill as any other person upon entering this place. It made Raoul Duke's famous Flamingo Las Vegas hotel room look like a funeral parlor.
The kitchen was a pile of mess that rose to the ceiling in the corner of the room. It had built up over the years he had been living here; if you could call it living. The pile was also mainly made up of drug paraphernalia, but also had the unique quality that is only possible when one leaves food stuffs out for prolonged periods of time. The bottom of the pile had composted into a thick, grey matter with the consistency of mangrove-mud. Above that was a layer of old boxes, mainly pizza boxes, but with a foundation made presumably of the cardboard boxes left over from when he had moved in, which over time had melded with the black gunk to form a paste that had hardened and stuck the old, foam mattress atop the pile in place. This is where we find him, sleeping on top of his pile, on top of his kitchen pile in the filthiest apartment known to man. This is where we find our man, our hero; the man who would save mankind from itself.
He laid there, cigarette smoke pouring from his mouth, staring up at the roof; his eyes transfixed on the grimy, floral pattern that he'd become so accustomed to. He flicked his cigarette into the wall and sighed. Thin slivers of light breached through the gaffer tape covered windows. They slid over his face and hair like a drop of condensation rolls down the side of a glass bottle. The light touched his eye and he's reminded of the world outside - the world which he was trying to escape.
He had been holed up inside his room for nearly nine months. An old Patagonian lady had died in there before he moved in, and being the first to find her, he thought it his right to remove her body and dwell in her apartment. There was just enough room for a mattress, a table and a couch with a bathroom and some sort of kitchen; although he never cooked or showered. The bathroom now was a toilet in itself, with no distinguishing between fecal matter that had built up in the actual toilet bowl and the shit that was all over the floor and walls. He never had to leave the room. He had his drug dealer as number two on his speed-dial, even though it was the only number he ever called, and a pile of take-out menu's next to the phone. The phone never rang. Nobody knew the number. He didn't even know it. It was only used for food and more gear. Deliveries only.
The column of light flicked over his pupil again.
'More gear!', he thought. 'That's exactly what I need'. He smiled and rolled over, reaching for the phone. He pressed the speed-dial button and then the number two.
No answer. Fuck!
He tried again, and yet again, no answer. FUCK!
He started to sweat. The thought of his dealer not answering sent an insane fear through his whole body that almost terrified him into the fetal position. He jumped onto his bed and grabbed a pillow, ripping it apart with his bony arms. He shoved some of the stuffing into his mouth, chewing on it as his eyes look ravenously around the room. His pupils covered the entire iris in both his eyes. He wore the look of a werewolf or a vampire in the midst of a human blood-lust frenzy. He stood and picked up the only chair in the room and hoisted it above his head - poised to hurl it through a window. Then the phone rang. It was his dealer with the best news he could've ever imagined. His face relaxed back to normal. The veins in his arms, neck and face retracted and his breathing slowed.
“Can you come over now?” he asked his dealer, then hung up with a wide grin creeping across his face. He was content now, and he lay back down on his pile of filth and smoked a
cigarette until the dopeman arrived with his supplies for the next week or so.
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TO BE CONTINUED
25TH OCTOBER 2010