“we suspected our warm buzz to actually be the beginnings of a fever... What horrible plague had we contracted by shooting the feces of vermin directly into our bodies?” goo was harder than I thought, I hit it with the butt of my knife and it cracked apart like toffee. Jimmy and I both picked up a little wedge and held it up to the light for examination. It looked like dope, it almost smelled like dope, but there were little black spots in it, crumbs or food particles. “What is that shit?” asked Jimmy. “Eh, that’s what filters are for,” was the best answer I could come up with. We sat down and dropped the wedges into our spoons. The stuff melted quickly, except for the black crumbs that were left behind. We weren’t fools; we knew that we didn’t know what we were doing. We used extra water and extra big bits of cigarette filter to suck it through. “I’m too sick to try to find a vein,” I said, plunging the needle straight through my jeans into my thigh. “What the fuck,” Jimmy agreed and stood up, dropped his pants, and jabbed in his share. We lit cigarettes and sat back waiting for the slow moving muscle shots to hit. Soon, that familiar warm glow began to both relax and invigorate us. “Goddamn. That shit’s pretty good.” Jimmy smiled as he got up to stretch. We were both surprised. It was the best high we’d had in a long time. I felt good, instead of just better. I wanted to get out and get things done. I felt energetic, positive. Jimmy started to move about his tiny apartment, picking up empty cigarette packs, dirty clothes. He opened up the blinds; the sunlight came streaming in.
“You never pick up your shit, man. Look at my fuckin’ coffee table, there’s black shit all over it,” he said pointing to the smudges from my spoon. The daylight had transposed the whole room. The dust coating everything was visible and the air was thick and grey with smoke. Jimmy picked up the spoons and walked toward the kitchen. He stopped suddenly. “This is shit!” “Yeah,” I replied. “Good shit.” “No, really, this is shit.” He threw the spoon onto the table. The black spots clung tightly to the cotton. His face was repulsed with horror. I picked up the spoon and looked closely. Clustered around the cotton filter were at least six tiny mouse shits. In the daylight, there was no question; there was mouse shit in my spoon. Immediately we suspected our warm buzz to actually be the beginnings of a fever. That familiar fuzzy feeling was now coiled disease. What horrible plague had we contracted by shooting the feces of vermin directly into our bodies? I squeezed my eyes together to see if I had a headache, if my vision had blurred. How long would it take, I wondered, till my muscles ached and I began to foam at the mouth? We sat, smoking in silence, waiting for our deaths. An hour passed, Jimmy had fallen quietly asleep. Comatose, but, like me, still quite alive. I got up from the couch and crept into the kitchen. I decided to break off another piece of the dope that, in the afternoon light, looked just like peanut-brittle. It wasn’t peanut-brittle. It was better.
JANUARY 2012
131