Jack Hall
December 6, 1992
Nina Goes to Town
Nina felt at home, gargling away at her host's dwindling mouthwash supply (her foremost rule of thumb being that all available resources must be exhausted before she would touch anything that she had actually bought). The Nasty one had a nagging sore throat that had lasted for a few days and had resisted all of her efforts at healing. She looked in the smeared mirror and almost puked in shock at the gray-green fuzz that was growing on the bruised rear wall of her much-abused oral cavity. "Aw shit! Not again!" she thought as she frantically eviscerated the medicine cabinet in search of powerful antibiotics.
Jolly Saint Basan had been shocked and outraged when Nina exhibited the physical evidence of her latest infection. Although the Patron of Wayward Children suspected that the source of the Nasty one's ailment was probably a perversely warped sexual encounter, she still "lent" seventy-five dollars to the moldy little strawberry so that a small portion of the world's suffering could be eased. Internally giggling at what she perceived to be gullibility, Nina was on her way.
Nasty Nina smiled to herself as she contemplated the new syringes she could buy with a small portion of the money she had scammed from the Jolly Saint. She had been reduced to stabbing the point of her last rig through her dirty shirt just to get the barbs off and rolling the rubber tip of the plunger around in her ear so that the damn thing would slide easier. To feel the painless sting of a brand-new, micro-fine tyrant's claw in her mangled veins would be sheer ecstasy.... The thought brought her back to the reality of her next score: she needed dope and she needed it fast.
She wanted some speed, but that made her horny, and since Scumboy had pissed in her mouth in front of God and everybody, she couldn't get anyone to fuck her. She debated the high and low points of cocaine and heroin, but finally decided on the least expensive of the three: speed. She figured that she could pick up a new lover in the produce section when she bought the rigs.
Later, back at "home", Nina cursed the asshole pharmacist who didn't accept her pallid complexion and her grandmother's medic-alert bracelet as sufficient validation for her claim of being severely diabetic and desperately in need of three hundred Becton-Dickson U-100's. She broke out her old, reliable friend and began sharpening its tip with the cleanest item in her "slightly-used" laundry pile: a pair of almost-white panties. She chuckled softly as she recited the age-old adage in her mind: "Yellow in front, brown in back."
She mixed the yellowish-white powder with water in a bottle cap and carefully placed a tiny wad of cigarette filter into the concoction. She sucked the cloudy fluid through the cotton into her only truly faithful companion and searched for a suitable injection site. Although the likelihood of finding such a spot on her bony left arm was significantly increased by her thoughtful placement of a tourniquet several minutes earlier, Nina had to painfully probe with her dull prick for several self-tortured moments before she was finally rewarded with the most anticipated event in any junkie's life: that little geyser of blood in the syringe which signaled the proper placement of the needle in the highway to the heart. God's real gift to Man pumped her lifeblood in and out a few times; then, she emptied her dispenser of absolution and released the tourniquet.
***RUSH***
Her breathing becomes rapid and shallow; her heart is once again shocked into abnormal movement and races to compensate for this latest unreasonable demand on an already-overtaxed system. Sweat pours from her wet places and her hair feels electric. She feels the old, familiar ***RUSH*** of almost-magical energy; it's a bizarre mixture of the unbridled exuberance of youth and the restless, irritable, nameless anxiety of total boredom; the drug gives her an all-powerful illusion of limitless ability; her eyes snap open and she views her new world with crystal clarity; her PURPOSE is obvious.... She holds her self close to her sharpened gaze and begins obsessively plucking at the hundreds of tiny scabs that infest her infrequently-bathed skin. Hours pass...
When all of her most-frequent injuries have become miniature bleeding wounds, she turns her full attention to cleaning "her" room at its roots: she methodically scrapes the dirt from the stamped lines in the vinyl-asbestos floor tile with an old utility knife and blows the dust gently across her borrowed sanctuary. Day turns to night...
...Night turns to day; she sits in the middle of a six-by-six section of glowing-white, deeply scratched floor and shoots the last hit of cheap, bathtub crank; she stares fixedly at her Herculean attempt at better housekeeping and marvels at the previously-hidden patterns now etched more deeply into her surroundings. Her speed had been jazzed up with some old, crushed microdots; the LSD has decayed a half-life or so, but its strychnine cut is as powerful as ever. She waves her hands in front of her face and watches the tracers slide gracefully through the air. She murmurs, "Am I high yet? Am I high yet?" and giggles hysterically.