Wasted / 113
Besides, sex always made me hungry. So did smoking pot. I avoided both. Lora and I lay in our side-by-side beds in the night. Winter light is bright and blue, and cast the room in eerie shadows. The pipes banged. She was an insomniac, more so than me. We lay there speaking intermittently, of poetry and stories and writers and words, heated, blurred flurries of words about words. As the hours grew small, our voices slowed and faded. We spoke of where we would go. What we would write. Rarely did we speak of the lives we'd left. As the clock crept toward dawn, we rambled nonsensically. She called me Max. As winter went on, longer than long, we both freaked out. My mania grew to insane proportions. I sat in the study room at night, wildly typing out Dali-esque short stories. I sat at my desk in our room, drinking tea, flying on speed. She'd bang into the room in a fury. Or, she'd bang into the room, laughing like a maniac. Or, she'd bang into the room and sit under the desk eating Nutter-Butters. She was a sugar freak. She'd pour packets of sugar down her throat, or long Pixie-Stix. She was in constant motion. At first I wondered if she too had some food issues, subsisting mostly on sugar and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread, but my concern (as she pointed out) was “total transference, seriously, Max. Maybe you're just hungry.” Some Saturdays, we'd go to town together, buy bags and bags of candies, Tootsie Rolls (we both liked vanilla best; she always smelled delicious and wore straight vanilla extract as perfume, which made me hungry), and gummy worms and facetwisting sour things and butterscotch. We'd lie on our backs on the beds, listening to The Who and Queen, bellowing, “I AM THE CHAMPION, YES I AM THE CHAMPION” through mouths full of sticky stuff, or we'd swing from the pipes over the bed and fall shrieking to the floor. People have this idea that eating-disordered people just don't eat. Wrong. They have rules about what they eat, and eat “safe foods,” as we'll call them in the hospital in a few months. Sugar was an obvious choice: fat free and it makes you hyper to boot and just think how much work you can get done when you're wired to the gills on cocaine, caffeine, and sugar! A steady stream of strange short stories spilled from my typewriter, weirder and weirder, more and more breathless and abstract.