blurring_the_edges_20_the_kick birdmad Christmas is surprisimgly pleasant, all things considered. Elena flies back to San Jose again to spend it with her parents, you spend a couple of days before she leaves just hanging out together, raising a little hell wherever you go. You are starting to lose more weight than you planned. Downside to opiate prolonged opiate use, there, Alex. Remember, it hapened to your dad when the doctors put him on that steady morphine drip. You don't want to eat, not because you aren't hungry, but because you ccan't take a decent crap anymore. Glamourous, ain't it. The junk serves a threefold purpose now, spoth your jangled nerves, dull the hunger pangs, and assuage the constant knotting sensation that has been in your guts since halloween. It's only for the little bits of food and vitamin supplements you've been tking that you aren't starting to show any signs of wasting. You've got Zoe and Tricia following your lead on the matter and they are still looking quite well also, well, maybe not Tricia, she is starting to look a little tired and spent, but then she is using proportionately more junk than you, so it stands to reason. Needless to say, it astounds you when Tricia disappears for a week into the new year and when you finally see her again, she looks decidedly uneasy and a little beat-up and tells you that she had a med-student friend fo hers from down ni Tucson over at U of A Medical babysit her while she decided to dry out. "Dry out?" you ask her, curious to know more. "I'm off the smack, Alex. We can't hide it anymore, sooner or later people would figure out what a dope fiend i was and i couldn't risk that. I figured i was gonna have to do it for mysel, no fuckin' way i was going to go twelve-stepping it. I'm not one for church-goers and all of those programs always seem to want you to pray. Not me. I'm not doin' it." "What about Methadone?" Zoe asks. "Too slow," Tricia deadpanned, "this was the only way for me. It hurts, but it's quicker. I still crave it like a motherfucker, and i probably always will run the risk of having a major jones every now and then for pretty much the rest of my life, but that was gonna happen no matter which route i went with." After a few beits of negotiation and planning, you bribe the landlord to overlook any complaints from the nighbor down below and you bribe the neighbor not to complain about the noise he's going to have to put up with for the next three or four days. The apartment that had been your safe-house and place to stash your dope was cleaned out just enough to move the dope over to Greg's guest house. Tricia's friend came along and the two of them took turns watching you. Zoe was still not interested in kicking and said she wouldn't even think about it unless you did it first, so here you are. The most important other bribe you made was to a pharmacist up in Paradise Valley with an appetite for coke that even the mountain on Al Pacino's desk in "Scarface" wouldn't have likely satisfied. From the crooked drugist, the good doctor procured a few doses of compazine to render you docile and relieve as much of the cramps as he could. Earlier, you went to the hole by the palo verde tree back by the house and burned the last of your cigarettes and flushed the contents of the little plastic bag down the toilet. To avoid as much of the unpleasantry as you can, you have fasted for the last three days leading up to this. By the time you make the drive up to the apartment, the first twitches of the jones are on you, you feel shaky and sweaty and your stomach is starting to flutter. Tricia smiles at you and asks you for your kit, which you promised to bring so that Rich could dispose of it when he got back down to the med center. You surrender it and watch, almost in a subconscious state of horror as he takes a pair of needle nose pliers and twists the tip of your needle into a curlicue that reminds you of a pig's tail. he breaks the glass portion of it into a wastebasket, sjhaking his head. "That was a real shame, they don't make too may more of those kinds of needles anymore, now it's all disposable. If it hadn't been abused that way, that syringe could have gone in a medical museum." You've concocted a story for your family that you are going to go camping up around Prezcott and won't be back until Tuesday. It is friday night and your trial has begun. By the time the sun comes up on Saturday morning, you are wracked by a throbbing ache that seems to encompass more of you than actually exists in the real world, almost as if you tried to swallow some cataclysmic earthquake and managed to succeed. Tne spasms start just in time for the first cartoons and Tricia wakes up Rich to administer the first dose of the compazine. You stil feel the pain from the spsams you have already begun to have, but you have no more for now. You are still aware of pain and it as if your soul was a sheet of paper being cut into dolls by a deranged schoolgirl. Tricia keeps a cool towel on your forehead as you sit and shake with fever. It dawns on you by the advent of ofternoon that you stink. Your sweat reeks and you wonder how either Tricia or the Doc can stand the smell of you. By the time twenty-four houss have elapsed, you are silently prayimg for death, figuring that it will be the only way to be free of the aches that are rippling through your body. The doc makes you drink more water than you care to just to that your body will have some liquid to throw up when the next wave of uncontrolled nausea hits you. "Dry heaves," he warns, "can damage both your stomach and your esophagus if we're not careful." The doctor, you learn, was a junkie himself a couple of years ago, with a taste for medical grade morphine. His approach to your care is very no-nonsense and you feel almost wounded by his brusque tone, but you realize that at keast he knows what the fuck he is talking about. Reality itself is a complete blur for the next twelve hours. You hallucinate wildly, fever dreams of yur father, of the ghosts you saw that time you tried to hang yourself in the abandoned orchard down on Baseline road. Farm machinery, a dead man-o-war jellyfish lying next to a tar-ball on a beach just near Galveston bay in Texas. It is only with some quickness that the doc helps you get to the toilet before you shit yourself. The last of the unpassed crap hanging about in your system from the last few months of opiates in your blood. The sensation of leaving you is such a relief that even though it hurt, you feel this nearly orgasmic sense of relief and even though you still don't imagine doing it yourself, you can now understand a little bit of the appeal behind the sensation of anal sex. The feeling of pleasured relief is short-lived though, because immediately following it, a spasm that could shake down Camelback Mountain rips through your guts and leaves you crying again. At 48 hours into the drama, sunday night, the pain is beginning to subside, but is still severe, not just the aching in your guts, but every joint in your body, even down to the small bones of your ear. To keep you aware and alert, Doctor Richard never gives you enough compazine to completely prevent the spasms, just enough to minimize them and make you less liable to hurt them or yourself. By monday morning, the worst of the jones is off of you, but still palpable, by monday night you feel a weird hollow feeling as the fever breaks and the aches begin to subside. You still want the dope, but with a little concentration and a good distance from the temptation of it, you think you can avoid falling back into it. Now, you have to spend the net few days trying to get and keep your shit together and trying to convince Zoe that as much as the experience sucks, it just might be a good thing in the long run. 030422 ... birdmad The first couple of days go by after you have beaten the physical aspect of the hook that the junk laid into you. The next couple of days, though, your mind is not on anything in particular. You devote yourself to mindlessly mechanical pursuits to recondition yourself to having to concentrate on shit other than the hunger. You are exceptionally fond of mashed potatoes lately. More so than usually. It almost seems as if you are having to recondition yourself to holding down solid food and amounts of any substance. Christmas and thanksgiving sucked, because you had to find convenient times and places to do your best impersonation of a bulimic to avoid getting your body weighted down with more food than you could adequeately digest and eliminate. You explain away your fucked-up appearance to your family by saying that you and a couple of the guys got a major case of food poisoning while you were up in the woods. If you were feeling really bold you would have made up a lie about having met some guys from the Apache reservation and trying peyote, but you know htat would go over about as well as admitting that you just went through a cold-turkey detox from eleven months of heroin abuse. Finally after a couple of days of sorting it all out in your head, and trying to get yourself psyched up, you call Zoe and tell her that if she was waiting for you to do it, than she couldn't wait any longer because you are clean now. "Holy shit, no way, Alex!" she actually sounds happy about it. "Will you do it, then?" you ask her, seriously, earnestly. "Yeah," she shighs, the apprehension clear in her voice. After planning the event, you call Tricia and ask her if Rich is available to help out in the next couple of days, unfortunately, he is not, and you are all out of compazine. You love her, she may not love you, but, you think to yourself, you will be damned a million times over if you could bear to see her feeling the same kind of pain you felt. You call Tony's friend the attroney who shows up now and again with his most recent girlfriend, a somewhat attractive, but ridiculously adventurous pharmacy technician who works over at Phoenix General on 19th Avenue and Indian School. Claire. The same eye for detail that makes you useful to your partners is about to come in very handy right about now. It pops into your mind as you are fishing for solutions from that great cross-referenced catalog of data and trivia you keep in your head that Claire works in the main dispensary and handles the inventory control for the place. She knows her way around enough of the more poorly enforced sections of the DEA control systems for monitoring access to controlled substances. You haven't done too many jobs lately and zs such your operating reservas are rather low, you are down to $750 in extra cash and figure that between Claire and your other bribes, you are going to have to get creative. You bribe the landlord with another two-hundred-and-fifty and buy the neighbor a round trip ticket and voucher for a cheap hotel reservation near Disneyland. You breath a big sigh of relief that one of your best customers is a travel agent with a taste for amphetamines and the occasional indulgence in blotter acid. After some discussion with Claire, she negotiates with you a solution for repaying her for the supplies. She's been talking to Dana and has heard that you are amenable to most things two or more people can do in bed. Shit. Now is not a good time to be going in that direction. You've been avoiding play with Zoe and Tricia to try and focus on Elena, even if you suspect she's been banging Orlando on the side. You've only indulged your appetites with them when Elena has pulled some spectacularly confusing emotional stunt or other which means that you've seen them maybe three or four times outside of doing jobs with them in the last five months. You've been astonishingly well behaved compared to where you were when you first started hanging about with Eric and his clan of junkies. To your chagrin, you are unable to persuade her to accept a deferred payment of cash for the pharmaceuticals. To make matters stranger, sne tells you that Platte wants to sit and watch while you do your thing. "He says he wants to se me fucking from a different perspective," she says, seeming to not believe it herself, "you wouldn't believe how easy it was to talk him into it, but now he's all excited about being a voyeur." Amazing. Knowing that you'd rather be plagued by your conscience over an act of prostitution than have Zoe be wracked and bent with the agony of withdrawal pains, you relent and agree to the exchange. Claire informs you that the Compazine is in short supply and can spare none but can get you some Flexeril which is a fairly relaiable muscle relaxer in it's own right. You argue that the pills with take too long to enter the system and that there is the chance that Zoe will just puke them back up. "Give her some weed, it will ease the nausea." Claire shows up a few minutes after Zoe. She drops off a prescription bottle full of little octagonal white tablets that look as small as lentils. "To be on the safe side, i brought this as well." Claire reaches into her purse and procures a joint the size of your pinkie-finger. Tricia couldn't make it and Claire can't stay. Alex, you and Zoe are on your own. Zoe takes your advice and spends a half-hour in the bathroom, when she comes out, you discover that in addition to any last minute purges, she has also showered. It is the firzt time you can think of where the sight of her walking around naked did not turn your mind to the thought of sex, leading her to the bedroom, you tuck her in and turn on the radio. Giving her a tab of the Flexeril, you tell her to take a nap and you will stay right here beside her. In an oddly vulnerable moment, she asks you to lie next to her. You do, but try your best to barely manage to stay awake. When the first spasms hit her, you wonder if one tab was enoughm becasue for all of her toughness, she is in tears, clenching her fists so hard that her nails break the skin of her palms in little bloody red crescents. At one point, while trying to keep her covered and keep a coo towel over her head when the fever kicks in, it dawns on you that maybe she has gone longer without a decent meal than you have. The joint helps the nausea and she is able to avoid the issue of the dry heaves, but for a span of about six hours you have to keep her liing in the bathtub with the shower running to avoid her wetting herself. Without a dosage instruction, you have given her a slight overdose, and while she will recover as soon as it starts to wear off, she is as limp as an overcooked noodle. She is less plagued by the spasms than you were, but the hungry, trembling ache and pain of it is still there, you can see it in her eyes and it kills you to see her hurting like this. You feel a slight twinge of bitter underneath it all, knowing that she chose to be out and chase the dragon while you were going through it. You squash it down, swallowing that moment of pettiness. You never mention it to her that you felt this way, you don't assume you had the right to. When the third day and the worst is over, even though neither of you has slept, as you are cleaning up and changing clothes, Zoe steps out of the shower again, looking tired and hurt, but insterad of getting back into her clothes she strolls up to you and drapes her arms over your shoulders. "I want you," she says, her voice a tired whisper. You don't argue. Throwing the sweat-stale sheets off of the bed, you clumsily remove your clothes and make love to her, slowly, languidly - but more gingerly than tenderly- since both of your bodies are still too sore from the departing wake of the opiates. Neither of you comes, the drive to fuck in this instance having more to do with mutual need than the usual physical, overheated -Want-. You spend another hour lying naked in each other's arms. No words are spoken and other than the occasional shifting sound of your bodies on the fabric of the matress and the frame of the bed, there is no other sound you are aware of except her breathing and yours. 030423 ... whitechocolatewalrus that must have been tough. my sincere compliments to your success, birdmad. 031218 ... realistic optimist wow. stark. bleakly beautiful. 040114 ... white wavezzz oops should have read this one first. my question was answered. 040329 ... birdmad so far i have 50 chapters completed I'm going to take this, once i've finished it, and the other manuscript i'm working on (and have been dicking about with sporadically since senior year in highschool) run them through for continuity checks (again) and see if i can't shop them out for publishing, though i'll need to appoint someone well-removed from where i am to be my cover... a living pseudonym, if you will... I think the Mermaid is my best bet in that department 040330 ... the birdmad and the damage done in reality it was the weekend immediately after thanksgiving so this weekend, give or take a couple of days, makes 13 years and every now and then, my blood still pines for it, singing little ballads of slow poison in the back of my mind. 051125 ... im your pusherman that and it was two solid years of junk use, but for the sake of artistic license "Alex" was only strung out for just under a year. 051125 what's it to you? who go blather from