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Mandy’s Tune

November 9, 2010 By longrun 2 Comments

“Now you know what it’s like to get f–ked for money.”

This, left on the answering machine. I guess she means the eighteen hundred bucks for rent and cable to start clean and stay clean. No such luck — she’s off the wagon now, tricking again, heading back to the outskirts of hell.

Strung Out

No one is spared, rich or poor, abused or shallow, broken hearted or holy. The party keeps going, there is always more.

You can hear the city whimper.  Another day breaks to a rollin’ steel rhythm, a last minor chord. One more morning with the “can’t get no more, answer the f–kin’ phone” blues.

My city is dying from the inside. The suburbs keep sending the brightest and the best to fill in the ranks. Nobody knows nobody or so they say. The smoke rises, the bodies break, the hometown football warriors, the homecoming queens become ghosts. The war on drugs is just about over. All that remains is the body count and  next week’s order.

“You ain’t no addict til you got no dough…”

Aloof, with their blond hair and empty eyes, they were hard muscled, lithe, gymnasts or dancers, before it all changed. Crack, strawberry licorice, cheap whiskey and salesmen from out of town become the daily protocol. The once hard bodies  are now host to cold eyes and colder hearts.

_______________

God appears to the broken and the worn and offers his only answer. Faith is what is needed. Faith? they say, You want faith? Just go down the stairs and give the dude on the corner a twenty. Come back up here and we’ll cook that shit. Do you know the dude? No, but I hear he’s got good stuff. These soldiers of god have been on the road to paradise since the day they quit tenth grade and took up residence on the sidewalks, in the doorways, in the cheap hotels, seeking out the holy rock, crack cocaine.

Innocence dies but the body carries on, crumbling to the unsteady beat of a broken heart. Dreams die hard out here. The dead are the lucky ones.

On the stroll the nightly litany begins, “Hey mister…”

One day they start showing the client the ropes and before the sun rises on the next day these beautiful and not yet broken dream queens find their fates. Suck it in slow, steady. Puff, twist the pipe, Pull, long, slow. Get it, hold it. Eyes closed. Lean back. Count to five, let it go. Blow it out, the rush begins.

It’s all high speed, everything moves in slow motion. The streams of blue smoke fill the room. Watch for the small smile, the uncurling, lengthening bodies ready to catch the light, feline, predatory, at the top of the stretch. Her eyes find yours. Relax, she says.

I don’t why I do it. I hate it…Pass me the pipe

The armies of the night take in a new angel of death. Before their twenty second birthdays they have the certain knowledge that the only heaven they will ever know is the kingdom of  the fallen children of a merciless god.

You never know when the phone will ring.

Hey, you busy?

No, but I don’t have any dough.

Got any product?

No.

I’ll see you in twenty minutes.

_______________

What do you give the man who has everything, they say. Give him a crack pipe for Christmas. Next year he will have nothing and he will want everything.

Look into their eyes, feel a graveyard wind. Behind ice cold gaze you see them kneeling down in desperate prayer, lost daughters, children, dreaming of proms and homecoming; wanting to go home despite the long worn out hope that one day they will be released.

Will you stop all this lying?

No.

You will be dead in three months if you keep hitting it this way.

I know that, she said.


Photo Credit

“Strung-out” AbigailGeiger @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.


Filed Under: Fiction, Writing

Damn, Sweetheart

October 29, 2010 By longrun 6 Comments

When the past is gone all that’s left is the story.

You called out of nowhere, asked me to come get you, asked to let you live at my place. I told you that the only rules are no tricking while you live here and all the sex and dope we can stand. After a time the sex becomes vital, inescapable. It’s almost as if there is no dope. It’s almost as if we’re in love.

Every sensation gets locked in. Made exquisite by the next toke, time freezes, there is no next day. Eventually it’s too much of everything; feeling, stupor, guilt, rage, dope, sex, then, inexorably, not enough of anything. In the end there is nothing left but drugs, waiting, violence.

A fight gets out of hand one night. There are police and social workers, restraining orders, resentment, rage and an unholy sense of having finally become one of them, the junkie nightmare right here on Sixth Avenue.

You come to my place every night. There is always something missing when you leave. When we fight about it you tell me it’s because I see other women, other hookers. What do you expect? I’m high and that’s what I do when I’m smoking shit. Damn it, Sweetheart, that’s how I met you.

One night you call Tio, one of your drugstore cowboy, movie guy losers to score. Turns out you get high with him using a forged check of mine to get the money to buy the dope. He calls me the next day because the check bounces and he’s pissed. He wants to call the police. I tell him why bother, it will just fuck up his sex life.

I wait up for you every night. And, you come over every night. You go out to score, come back hours later with stories and not very much dope. One time you don’t come back for days. When you do come back the story is fantastic, something about a Hell’s Angels’ tribunal with justice meted out to your enemies.

Every word is a lie.

I throw you out for the last time by putting all your garbage bag suitcases on the street, shutting down the house, selling all the furniture, leaving town, leaving the country.

You may be young and a stone junkie hooker but we both know that what has happened here was not so simple. You own a piece of my darkest, highest places, my deepest failures. For all that it wasn’t, it was a true thing.

In the hours before another fragile dawn I miss you.



Photo Credit

“The Effects of Rain”  mdpNY @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

Filed Under: Fiction, Writing

Love Poem 101

October 27, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

I figure we were going nowhere. You asked me, early on, if I was ever content in my life. Must have been asking yourself that question. I figure that the old solutions had become problems for you. That the sad, far off look of what once almost was is no way to live. I came into this with not much going on save yesterday’s box scores and tomorrow’s wanna be’s. I figure it’s not that way anymore.

Filed Under: Fiction, Writing

Loan Me a Dime

October 27, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

It began with a phone call. It usually does.

My name is Billy Prophet and these days my job is to find what’s been lost. People come to me when they tried everything else, including prayer.

I don’t do salvage work like some of my fellow sleuths say they do on account of I don’t believe in it. Once something’s been lost or broken it can’t be salvaged, not really. Hemingway once wrote that people heal stronger in the broken places. I ‘m not so sure about that. You can’t step in the same river twice or so I’ve heard. I figure the only way to find what’s been lost is to use what you know and then imagine the rest. Maybe that will allow you to start over with a clean slate. Sometimes it works for me and my clients. Sometimes not.

I should have died the way things were going. I came to that last time, on my knees, looking for  any kind of cocaine on the rancid floor of my bedroom. I remember asking a god I didn’t believe in and had been angry at for as long as I remember to please just let me go to sleep. After what seemed to me to be a long while I  asked him/her/it if it would be okay if I woke up.

The past simply stopped. What I know is that it was over. There was nothing left, nowhere to go. Death or starting over. There are still days when it is not an obvious choice.

I have tried to stop wondering how it is that I am still here. It doesn’t really matter, the why of it. I pretty much leave that to talk show hosts, Republicans, and TV evangelists. When I look back I see that I have left every place I’ve ever been with nearly everything left undone, smoke rising in the rearview mirror.  What I do know is that I have left before I have had to pay the true price of things.

I’ve lost damn near everything I’ve ever had and more to the point, pretty much everything I ever thought I was. I guess that’s why I look for lost things.

I’ve been doing it for a long time.

One of the things I learned right off is that you can lose something when it is right in front of you. I was thinking about that when the phone rang. She said her name was Linda Granger and she wanted to come see me. She had gotten my name from a friend of hers who knew me but she didn’t tell me who. I wasn’t surprised. People are embarrassed to come to me, to have other people know that they have come. In a society where ownership is status losing something or someone is a stigma, a sign of failure. I figure if you come to me you have nowhere else to go; that you think your laundry is so dirty that you just want it to go away before any more damage can be done.

I find lost things sometimes but more often than not I am simply trying to put things right, to help my clients start over. Guessing from the sound of her voice Linda Granger woke up everyday with something else that went wrong. She had nowhere else to go.

I had a bad feeling about this one.

to be continued…

Filed Under: Fiction, Writing Tagged With: death, loss, love

Moving Day

August 26, 2010 By longrun 4 Comments









One mountain bike

Two helmets

One pair of short-fingered bike gloves

Two bikes

Three pairs of gloves

Two Italian bowls

One stock pot

Forty CD’s

Two boxes of books

One striped suit

One “not that shirt” green flannel work shirt

Four pairs of running shoes

One pair of gray sweats

One sweat shirt

Ten tee shirts

One bike shirt

One ugly green hat

Two jackets

One pair of sandals

One double wedding hammock

One set of chain link

Four “s” hooks

One green robe

One computer and printer

One set of spare Ford keys

One house key


One fully packed backseat

One loaded trunk


One sunny day

One afternoon beach

One friend riding shotgun


Two ferry crossings

One island in the wake


A marriage.

Filed Under: Fiction, Writing

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