MARCH 20-21, 2010, and the Oxy-fiends begat my decision. On the road out from Orlando en route to Miami with the tolls snatching up the last of our change, appearing as junctures for the rest of time and as we move further from the city buildings disappear and the highway straightens. Light poles pass, dimming until the road’s almost black if not for occasional headlights. A few calls out from the stop and I’m pissing into a soda cup, splashing out the contents as we hit an open ATM and these blotches of urine are our revenge on the soaring interest rates. With the money in-hand we meet Fiend #1 and he seems normal enough, beyond his parents’ broken window lighting the front yard in the well-to-do neighborhood, all single-story houses and not a working lady in sight. He makes a few more calls and Fiend #2 arrives, a stick, blazed. His slur is so long, it’s almost pointless to address him, better to ask #1, even if it’s a matter you’d expect #2 to know best. After leaving our devices in the car, just in case, we head inside for the deal. We watch them as they smoke Oxy off aluminum foil, coughing fanatically within seconds, wondering how it could be. Ever hear of a pipe or a bong, we ask. They slow and the room starts to smell of stale pharmaceuticals. It’s the tinge, the scent, mostly the blackened aluminum littered with singe-spots and all that pretty, white residue.
I’m angry to be here, especially after the next short trip to the gas station where we pick up a pack of cigarettes and faces turn. These fucks. As we walk, they ask what I do and my friend spots for me: Roids. Only roids. Don’t ask him if he wants anything else. I’m over a month out before I even start and I do anabolic steroids we say. It’s the system, you see - to get along with folks like these, you’ve gotta be doing something illegal too, otherwise there’s no connection, no relation, you might was well be at a family reunion. They ask G about what drugs he’s done, what’s the worst combo he’d ever set off and as they continue to snort and smoke their income, he gives them the list: 250mL of Sustanon and 250mL of Winstrol for the week, freshly injected that morning followed by forty milligrams of Oxy in liquid form, two-one milliliter shots to be exact, about a third of a gram of MDMA, three grams of weed and half a gram of hash. #1 and #2 look up from the haze, stale smoke in the air, cigarettes ablaze and Oxy residue on their noses and in unison, as G describes the blackness before heading out to Las Vegas, his mother having found him foaming at the mouth on his kitchen floor, they iterate: “Damn, you shouldn’t do shit like that.” Their eyes go back down and that’s that.
They turn and look at me, take it all right and nod, they did a bunch of them too, steroids – even sold to most of the athletes and general gym rats in the area. #1 does some Clen to lean out but can’t stop eating anyway so it does no good once he’s off. #2, he lost everything that soccer and weights did for him once he stopped eating because of the Oxy. It’s so good, he says, he does at least twenty pills per go and I know he doesn’t know because he’s barely getting started just now, nineteen pills in, his slur even worse and he’s falling asleep in his seat while he watches computer videos; to wake up to do more, to go back to sleep from sleep. I’m not even joining in and I lose count before the end of the night, or morning because it’s the 21st as of now. Just before we head out for the long ride back we watch #2 get his dick sucked by some rich, white broad for a couple of pills that cost the two of them nothing beyond co-pay and monthly insurance. “Oh, Doc, I got so much back pain this week.” Imagine dragging that line out to at least a minute before the last syllable starts and that’s about right, he talks like he probably snorts, itching to make it last just a little longer, the syllables – like the individual granules, so sweet with their toxicity and as it ends he can’t help but go slow because he’s gotten to where he can’t even affect the choices anymore. I’m hoarse with loud smiles cause he doesn’t even come in the video because after at least twenty pills it just aint happening and the girl didn’t want to do it and didn’t want #1 watching but really wanted the pills. They knew this, his inability to finish, so they agreed on a time rather than a number of times and so there was no talk of whether or not she’d swallow.
The dealers, worldwide, they laugh at their clients for paying what they pay but not everyone can grow, not everyone can manufacture or in their case, go through the steps to get ten-grand in pills every other week, all stored in a little suburban venue where the house is mostly glass – and just think, there’s already holes in the front from the neighbors’ games in the streets during the day. That’s this neighborhood – children at play and a home pharmacy unit across the street, small gas station just around the corner. Crooked doctors are the key to their stock, they say, showing us pictures of their stashes from throughout the years. In one #1’s dad’s asleep in his chair with two jumbo bags of MJ in his lap, zip-locked and so ripe. His mouth lay open like #2’s as he drifts in and out, between smokes and slurs.
We return to the Orlando hotel in a haze and the whole while it’s a dream, #1’s talk of his mafia ties and the time they took him out to a lonesome cabin and waited and when he didn’t run they let him out, he passed the test, chronic liar, and then onto his brother’s arrest for all the computer hacking he does, it’s funny, since #1, the self-proclaimed “tight-lips” ended up getting busted and ratted on #2 so he fled the country and #1 can still be seen on various online chats, passed out in front of his computer camera, live streaming entertainment in the life of a dealer and while he was detained people would try to contact him but receive no response. It seems the feds are on the other end waiting for someone to spill, like a door to the unknown at the end of a hall, as you’re on the way to the bathroom to shoot up or looking to scope out the cars in the garage in the event that you need to get out, fast, and suddenly you’re in Heaven or probably Hell and your dead relatives are talking to you and telling you they’ve seen every last dirty thing you’d ever done to yourself and all those whores and they’re just disgusted, even if they’re the ones spending all that time watching you. At night I’d pray that #2 or some disgruntled white broad or her brother or boyfriend will appear and as he drools for the camera, his head explodes from the back forward and then everyone knows what they’ll be.
It’s a marvel, these two, holding so much over little white disks, their Holy Grails, the sensation turning schoolgirls into whores and rough men into pencil-necks - sorry desk-jockeys just making it through the day. Maybe roids aren’t such a bad preventative to all this, to these sorts, like an attempt to even-out the universe with regard to all this. I dropped the line and found a source within two weeks of getting home and a few weeks later the drugs for myself and G were set along with our post-cycle therapy equipment so that we wouldn’t have to worry about bitch-tits or becoming females, jump starting testosterone production like you would a car battery once the winter’s hit and it’s freezing outside and of all days for the damn thing to bitch out, this is the one, the acid’s molecules broken down into tiny atomic structures but they’re no longer jumping in a fast-track of entropy and not even threatening to an infant’s touch. There’s only this anymore and it’s all carnival tricks anyway.