mascara raze josh and adam weren't friends. they weren't enemies. they were some unstable in_between thing built on mutual contempt and occasional grudging acceptance. they took turns acting civil and then doing something to disrupt the uneasy alliance that never really grew up between them. it wasn't love-hate. it was hate-tolerate. one time adam was hanging out at the town house josh shared with gord. he got into an argument with josh about the doors and the beatles. adam said you couldn't be a fan of both. he said the beatles sucked. josh said it was the doors that sucked. adam thought josh was a tasteless asshole. josh thought adam was a fucking idiot. adam ended up passed out on the floor from drinking too much vodka straight out of the bottle after a screaming match with some girl he was maybe fucking or maybe too drunk to fuck. none of us had ever seen her before. none of us ever saw her again. all i remember about her is blonde hair and a face i thought was pretty. my memory has bent her features into something that looks like the face of a girl i went to high school with. she probably didn't look like that at all. but that's what i see when i try to bring her back. josh laughed at adam. he passed out later, in private, in a more dignified way. i don't know how, but adam talked josh into helping him move. when they were done with the heavy lifting, adam celebrated by drinking all of josh's beer. he passed out again. josh didn't laugh. i got a call from adam on a saturday night. he invited me over to his new place. he gave me the address. he was excited to have an address to give. adam wasn't one of my favourite people, but i liked him okay, i guess. i didn't have anything else to do. i scribbled the directions he gave me on the back of a post-it note and told him i'd be over to see him in a bit. i called a cab after i got off the phone with him. he was smiling when he opened the door. i had no idea what kind of work he was doing to bring in a regular paycheque. i took a good look around and decided he wasn't paying much in rent. the place was a dump. the kitchen was what threw me. there was something wrong with it. everything looked shoved-in, like it never settled the way it was supposed to. it was all put together backwards somehow. it wasn't even that it was a mess. it was just wrong. it was a room ripped from a paranoid dream. the bathroom was like that too. the living room looked like my grandmother's living room. the furniture and the tv were decades out of date. they looked like sad hand-me-downs. at least the room looked like what it was supposed to be. that was something. we walked to the beer store. adam bought a mini keg of moosehead. he told me his landlord was a sleaze bag who was leeching off of his elderly mother. he was living with her and waiting for her to die so he could get her house and suck up whatever money she was going to leave him. he was renting out this other house she owned in the meantime so he wouldn't have to do anything but go on waiting. i'm not sure if adam told me then or if gord told me later, but whoever was living in adam's place before he moved in died of something awful, and they died at home. cancer, maybe. josh and adam found dozens of vials of pills around the house. a lot of them were empty. josh found one that wasn't. it was expired morphine. he stuck it in his pocket and called it payback for all the beer adam drank. even back then, saturday night television was about fifty channels of lukewarm shit. it didn't help that adam didn't have cable. sometimes you got lucky, though. on one channel they were showing a tom_waits concert from the late 1970s. adam wasn't into it, but he could tell i was, so he messed with the rabbit ears to get the clearest picture he could, and he let tom sing his sweet and sour songs about pianos with drinking problems and heartbroken hookers. adam told me josh showed up earlier in the day. he stopped by to make an asshole of himself in front of the sleaze bag landlord before i came over. adam said josh was out of his head. the morphine didn't slow him down. it sped him up. he tried to say hello, but it came out as a scream, and the scream was a scrambled run-on sentence no one could understand. josh came by for another visit. almost like he could hear us talking about him from across town. he seemed to be in better shape than the shape he was in before i saw him. he was still pretty fucked up after crushing expired pills and snorting them all day. adam kept needling him about how he embarrassed him. he said he made him look bad in front of his landlord. he didn't tell josh we had beer. the keg sat in the fridge getting cold, dreaming of better life, wishing it could roll away and find a different class of people to be consumed by. josh took his shirt off and started grinding down more pills on the coffee table. that was another thing about the house. there was no air conditioning. i'm pretty sure there wasn't even a ceiling fan. summers in windsor weren't as hot then as they are now, but they were still hot enough to make you sweat. i asked josh what the morphine was like. "you want a pill?" he asked. "john's gonna get as many pills as he wants," adam answered for me. there was an edge in his voice. for once he was sober, and josh was geeked, and he could feel big about that. i got one pill. i put it in my pocket. i went to take a piss. before i flushed the toilet, i heard what sounded like a heavy bookshelf falling over. it was josh. all those pills caught up with him. he nodded off, slid out of his chair, and hit the floor hard. adam thought it was funny. he grabbed josh by the arms and dragged him into the other room. i guess you could call it the dining room. he found some mascara in the bathroom. a relic left behind by the last tenant. he laughed. when he was done doing whatever the fuck he was doing, he told me to come take a look. there was josh on his back. his gut hanging out. an awful, pained look on his face. eyes closed. not seeing or hearing or thinking anything. there were two words written in big block letters on his forehead: RIM JOB. it was one of the sadder things i've seen. adam's landlord came over a little later. he had grey hair and a moustache. he looked like a strong wind might knock him over and whip him around the block. he gave passed-out josh a dirty look, stepped around him, and sat down long enough to have a beer with us. he was either already drunk to the point of slurring his words, or he was so pickled he talked that way even when he was straight. it was hard to tell. i couldn't understand much of what he said, but there was something in there about what a fuck-up josh was and how he didn't want that kind of person hanging around the house. "you should be spending time with people like this," he said. "this guy seems like he's got a good head on his shoulders." he was talking about me. if he only knew. he left when his glass was empty. maybe i shook his hand. maybe he gave me a dead fish. i don't remember. i had a few glasses of beer, but i didn't get a buzz. the moosehead had no balls. i slept on adam's couch, without blankets or a pillow, in heat so thick it almost felt like i could wrap my arms around it and pretend it was someone who loved me. in the morning there was no sign of josh. i asked adam what happened. he shrugged and said he was gone when he woke up. i had a bad feeling adam found him turning blue in the middle of the night and threw him in a dumpster somewhere. adam wanted to finish what was left of the keg. he poured one last glass of beer for each of us. it was flat. i drank it anyway. we said our goodbyes. i walked to the townhouse to see if josh was still alive. i knocked. i waited. the door opened. he still hadn't put a shirt on. the mascara was gone. he looked like shit. i asked him if he was okay. he said he was fine. he looked at me like he didn't know how to process the idea that i would care enough to walk all this way so i could ask him a question like that. he looked like a confused child. i walked part of the way home and called a cab to make up the difference. i caught part of "airheads" on tv. i watched brendan fraser, adam sandler, and steve buscemi act like idiots and listened to paul westerberg howl about how unsatisfied he was. i ate some potato salad and puked it back up again. it was the only time i ever got beer sick without drinking enough to get even halfway drunk. i never drank moosehead again, because fuck that shit. i didn't think about it much at the time. later on, i thought about it a lot. josh must have come out of his morphine coma and walked home while adam and i were sleeping. he must have looked in the bathroom mirror before he went to bed. he must have seen what was written on his forehead. what did he feel when he saw that? what was in his head? i tried to put myself in his place. i tried to dig around inside a bad facsimile of his heart. i kept thinking about the look on his face before adam defiled it. he looked like his guts had been torn out and he'd slept through the pain somehow, and his body was telling a story his mind didn't know yet. a week or two later, i got another saturday night phone call when i was home alone. adam told me he and roger got their hands on a gram of coke. they wanted to share. i wasn't going to turn that down. i said i was in. they came to get me in roger's car. gord had a name for people who just hung around to suck what they could out of you. he called them birds. i still don't know if roger was a bird. he was nice enough to me, but i never trusted him. he ripped me off once when i bought some pot from him. he gave me a lot less than what i paid for. he made it right when i called him on it, but he always looked like someone who was pecking around for crumbs. i watched adam chop up the coke on his dining room table with a credit card. a few years later a friend would teach me the easiest way to snort anything is to cut a piece about half a finger long off a fast_food soft drink straw. i didn't know that yet. and adam wanted to pretend he was a badass with a rolled-up five-dollar bill. i only did one line. i didn't want to be greedy. we were listening to a classic rock station on the radio. "whipping post" by the allman brothers band started playing. when the coke hit and the drip started in the back of my throat and greg allman's hammond started singing, what i felt was something like comfort and clarity curled up together. there was nothing jittery about the high. i told adam it felt like all the cobwebs in my brain had been cleared away. i could see the appeal. adam and roger talked about maybe calling up this prostitute they knew who gave blowjobs with ice cubes in her mouth. it didn't happen. probably because they didn't have the money to pay her to freeze the heads off of their cocks. i didn't say anything about it. i wasn't going to pay for that shit. we drove around listening to david_bowie sing "young americans" on that same classic rock station. adam told me to knuckle the nostril i hadn't snorted with, force it closed, and breathe in hard through the other one, because that would shake out any stray coke that might be hanging out in there and i might get high again. i did what he said. i snorted nothing, halfway hoping it was something, thinking i should have done another line or half a line when i had the chance. i wondered if someone in one of those other cars could see what i was doing. i wondered if they knew what it meant. i sang along to "with or without you" under my breath, feeling a little less comforted and a little less clear. at least the radio was giving me good songs to work with. by the time i got home, the high was gone. all i could think about was how much i wanted it back. i asked josh about coke once. i asked him if it left you feeling strung out. he said it just made you feel like doing more coke. he was right. i listened to a rough mix of a song i was working on before i went to bed. i heard sadness in it i couldn't hear before. it wasn't like listening to one of my songs after smoking pot. it felt empty. the emptiness didn't come from the song. it came from the act of listening. there was nothing to hold onto. i slept it off. i woke up feeling okay the next day. i didn't think much about coke again until i got to know the girl who taught me about the hidden usefulness of fast_food straws. she got me a few grams before she sent her dealer straight to hell with a beer bottle to the head and twelve stab wounds. but that's another story. 150220 what's it to you? who go blather from