Excerpt from darkness

Allyssa Bujdoso

1

Excerpt from “Darkness” The black outs of space and time are the most terrifying to me. Sometimes when I am back home I might drive around some, trying to shake back memories for the sake of knowing.

There have been several occasions when I was living back in Northern Kentucky four years after rehab, when I was trying to find the bar that I was to perform at for a comedy show. I couldn’t shake the feeling of déjà vu and after the show drove around for a few blocks. Cincinnati is becoming more and more heavily gentrified and has been on that path for the past five or so years. I went from one block with high-end boutiques filled with local designers’ clothing to a slummy block with familiar looking apartment complexes. I drove around that block a few times and the familiar route came back to me. Left turn here, and up the hidden drive with a hard left a short distance after. My dealer had claimed he lived in that apartment building in 2007. I found the drive and parked in the back, sitting, observing, and waiting for more memory to come back.

His name was Little Man, and he almost always answered his phone. He mostly met me in parking garages, or the parking lots of his apartment or his friend’s apartments. He had several children and when I didn’t have cash, he would let me buy clothing for his kids to trade for dope.

I would purchase said clothing via credit cards to Target and Macy’s. My credit was quickly ruined. As many years as it’s been, and as high as I constantly was, I suspect I couldn’t pick this man out of a line up if my life depended on it, unless some divine bolt of epiphany struck. It’s not because black men are interchangeable, it’s because with a gram a day or more habit and if friends were sharing baggies, I was almost constantly faded out or coming to with friends throwing water in my face, or sobering up in a car I don’t remember getting in to. Or having no recollection of where all my dope went or what conversation had previously transpired and finding myself in the middle of a screaming match with family or friends who did not use. The

Allyssa Bujdoso

2

memories I do have are mere paint splotches that somehow seem to pull together to form the larger misshapen, lopsided, abstract that make up my life for two years.

Little Man and I did have a main meet up spot near University of Cincinnati and the Hopple Street Exit, an apartment that couldn’t have been where he actually lived. He always dressed so nicely, leather jackets, brand new sneakers, and lovely thick chains that were without a doubt real gold, yet our usual pickup spot was a shit hole, fit for only those with the most dire of needs that called as early as 7am. I kept my mouth shut, didn’t ask questions, and was always happy to grab a bag in any environment. I felt the most comfortable in divvy places that seemed to reflect all of the ugliness I felt inside. I was happy as a pig in shit.

I remember the white, cheap square tiles on the counter, I remember the various debris of trash on the floor, and clothing in large hefty bags — a cockroach crawled up from behind a muted gray Formica frame from around the sink. I vaguely remember jumping back and making big deal about it because at the time I thought I was disgusted… but really on a deeper level I was fascinated, the good girl, the marching band girl virgin, had never in a million years imagined she would be immersed in such need that a cockroach infested apartment barely registered, the sheer rawness of it, the need for a hit the only drive I could surmise entertaining. I remember he killed it, chivalrously stepping between the bug and me, swiftly smashing it with a rolled up newspaper, so quick it seemed like it might not have even happened. Over and done with before I’d barely registered it. Not seeing any other cockroaches I pushed out of my mind the old saying, for every one cockroach you see, there’s ten more hiding elsewhere. I didn’t want to wait to do a bump of heroin in my car, instead I asked, “Hey, is it cool if I do a quick line here before I go?” Little man shrugged and said, “Do you girl.” I grabbed a cd case out of my purse, plopped it down on the counter after he brushed the dead cockroach on to the floor and lined up a small

Allyssa Bujdoso

line to blow on the cd case. I’d stick a dirty dollar bill up my nose next to the guts of a terminated, but out-of-sight out-of-mind cockroach, but had to use the cd case on the kitchen counter to protect my heroin from cockroach remains. Levels of insanity.

3