and a buzzing in his head.
The man recoiled. “Dude. You stink.”
Fuck you, Mr. F thought.
Their hands were quick, the transfer of cash and H fast as a blink, and with that, there was nothing else to be said. No thank-yous or goodbyes or see-you-laters. The junkie lay back down to enjoy what was left of his float on a sleeping bag that was not his own, and Mr. F walked off.
He’d gone about a hundred yards before he realized that he didn’t have his gear. He needed a spoon, a lighter, and a couple of drops of liquid. Rage rose up at the impediment to his high, but he calmed himself down quick. With his new, super-sharp eyes, he located a used syringe and a bent-up spoon by a turned-over drum that functioned as a communal table. Then he found a discarded Bic by someone’s grocery cart of clothes and personal effects. The last piece came together as he walked up on a bottle of Poland Spring that had an inch of mud-colored liquid in it.
The don’t-give-a-shit about sanitation or sterilization was as familiar as the landscape of homelessness. He should have cared about the needle being dirty and what the hell was in the bottom of the plastic bottle. He should have cared about the purity of the drug. He should have cared about himself.
But he didn’t. He was only focused on what was coming, the promise of sweet relief from the screaming fear and paranoia in his head all that mattered. Everything else that wasn’t as-good-as, as-safe-as, as-smart-as, was collateral damage. Background noise. Negotiable to the point of being unimportant.
Even if those compromises were the shit that would bite him in the ass later.
As with all junkies, however, he borrowed against the future, going into an existential debt that didn’t have a monthly payment obligation, but rather a balloon at the end of an unknown term that very few could meet. Which was why the repo’s happened with such frequency, all those corpses piling up, the OD count growing ever higher as people entered the funnel with that first, tantalizing taste, and then got stuck in the trap, only realizing they couldn’t get out when it was too late.
The doorstep Mr. F chose was a familiar one and it felt right to sit his ass down on its hard transom and stretch his legs out. He took a minute to enjoy the view—and by that, he wasn’t even seeing the sleeping bags and the clusters of mumblers that were now a ways off. No, he was focused on the promise of no longer feeling anything bad.
His hands shook with excitement as he put the brown nub in the belly of the dirty spoon, poured a little soup on it, and flicked the Bic under the basin. The resulting swill was quick to its birth, but the syringe’s draw wasn’t smooth, the dried, caked-on grit inside its belly making the plunger fight its retraction. He nearly spilled everything.
But he prevailed over the obstacles.
When the needle was all set, he turned to the crook of his arm, and realized, as he saw that he hadn’t taken his coat off first, that he was out of practice even though he’d done this just over twenty-four hours ago. Even though he’d done this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times in the last three years. Even though this wasn’t rocket science.
The first rule of injection efficiency was that you got your sleeve rolled. You didn’t load the needle and then have this kind of delay. But it was an easy fix. Ha-ha. He put the syringe between his teeth and shoved his sleeve up—except that didn’t work. He had been scrawny before, his body mass eaten away by priorities that didn’t include food. Now, though, he had muscles that he hadn’t noticed and that meant shoving what covered his arm up wasn’t as easy a move as it used to be.
Mr. F ripped the jacket off, popped a vein by pumping his fist a couple of times, and pushed the needle in.
The plunger went down fine, not that it would have mattered if he’d had to put all his newfound strength into it.
Mr. F exhaled in relief. Leaning his head back, he closed his eyes and opened his senses to what was going to come. He took a deep breath. And . . . another one.
Repositioning himself, shuffling back further against the door, he crossed his ankles. Uncrossed them. Recrossed them.
Anticipation curled