Daniel Powers

English 294

Dr. Alison Goeller

“mick’s chemistry”

 

 

Incense hung heavy in the air, drifting slowly about the room, rippled by our slightest movements. A quiver just below a smoky ribbon sent the stuff twisting into spiral impressions of itself.

My eyes stood halfway open, and I slowly turned my head from left to right and back to left again. I was in the middle of a jumble of bodies, all intertwined and laced around each other. In my supernormal stupor I imagined all of us with a singular heartbeat, and for a second I swore I heard it's weak murmur. It thumped musically and methodically, strange at first but slowly reassuring (like living next to a train track) in the span of seconds. If lenses caught this awkward time, they'd see sweaty girl arms wrapped around this neck and that, legs woven together, not only in pairs but entire crowds, some faces turned up to the ceiling, breathing in the morose tinge of another wasted night. Others you'd swear were dead. So many of us, and there my lowly presence drifted in the sea of great beauty. How shallow I still felt.

It was because of me that all of them were around, not their so-called free will. For that I felt I had somehow cheated ritual, tradition: the frail act of pursuit, the acquisition of trust, the bondage of love. My version of these things was an artifice. I sometimes wondered if my biggest fear was falling in love and actually staying the duration. It would definitely explain why I recycled girls, kept them flowing through my hazy room. I needed them, but not for long. It was best that way. I gave them a relationship in which there was nothing to be afraid of: no rejection or disloyalty or battery or sex. And in return they gave me unquestioning, informal companionship that never grew tired or cumbersome.

 My security was the knowledge that in a week or two the girls would all be gone and replaced with new ones.

            When I got up the room was a deep, sleepy orange. I walked carefully and gently toward the door and I could feel painted eyes following my movement. At the door I turned around, and a couple in the far corner were sitting up and looking at me. They were the two I’d found in the Galilee Spread, across the river. I knew they wanted to come with me but I was in no mood for company. I wanted fresh fluorescent tube lighting and water so cold that it hurt my teeth. And I wanted to find it myself.

I opened, passed through, and closed the door. 

            Minutes later I had my shoes on, had a good, full wallet from the wallet box in my pocket and was stepping out the door. I was grateful for the crisp air, the kind you can only get from sticking your head in a freezer and taking a deep breath. You feel like you can inhale forever.

Around the corner, the street lamps were coloring the streets orange, not unlike that of the sleepy girl ridden room I had just left. I turned downhill and lit a cigarette. There were night people dotting the street; all of them were smoking cigarettes and leaning against brick walls.

 I was on my way to Mick Forrester’s, hoping against the wind that he would still be awake at that hour of the night. Thinking about how late it was gave me a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the kind of feeling that I had gotten when I was younger and late for work, or about to get into a fight, or about to kiss a girl for the first time. Only not as pleasant as any of those. When you’re on speed, the hours of the night are the only ones that seem real. When the morning comes it’s as if reality found a way to seep under your door, and all the consequences that came with it flow over your sickened stomach and make you remember how painfully alive you are. I wasn’t ever on speed anymore, but I had that dying-night feeling every day. It was one of my several reasons for the windows to be painted over.

I watched my feet and walked deliberately. When it was so late, it was important that you looked like you knew where you were going, lest you be picked off by crazies or cops, who were sometimes the same people. My heavy steps, products of walking downhill, helped in my façade. Not once did I get stopped that night. A rarity.

I got to Forrester’s five and three quarter minutes later. His kitchen light was on, and I walked around back, passed the overturned trash bins and the cats partaking of the edible garbage. One was a coy looking tabby who eyed me crossly.  He was wondering if I was going to kick him as I walked by.

I found Forrester through the blue, heavy door. He was leaning against the kitchen counter with a beer in one hand, talking to a blonde I knew I had seen somewhere before.

“Mick,” I said, and he nodded to me. He smiled at the blonde, telling her to wait right where she was; he would get her a fresh beer from the cellar.

We both crossed the bright expanse of the kitchen, tiled all over. I let the blonde follow my path, only looking at her and smiling as I passed through the archway leading to the hall. Forrester led me through the dim, hardwood hallway, where he opened a door to the left with a heavy brass handle. I followed him down the steps to the cellar’s dampness.

“Who’s the girl?” I asked as we descended.

“Alex,” he replied with a deep sigh. I already knew she was one of mine. Forrester hadn’t a hope in the world of scoring with a girl half as attractive. “I actually lined her up for you, man. If you’re interested, that is.” I expected as much.

Mick was somewhat of a chemist. His basement, lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, was strewn with bottles and flasks of all shapes and sizes, some being heated from underneath by flickering bunson burners, others with rubber stoppers on them, labeled and shelved. There was a table standing in the center of the room, upon which sat a rack with several viles of purple liquid. I leaned on this table with my forearms turned outward, another cigarette hanging between my sticky lips, and Forrester went to the mini-fridge in the corner of the room. He extracted a Bud Light from its innards and joined me at the table.

“How’s Lynn?” he asked. He was referring to one of the girls I had found in the Spread. She had been easy to coax to the north end for a drink, very outgoing, eagerly intrigued by my offer of cocaine. Mick took a flask of the purple liquid, identified to me a year earlier as Sodium Somethingorother, and popped the rubber cork off. It fizzed like a soda at first, then died down to a timid bubble. He replaced it on the rack, and twisted the top off of the beer.

“She’s fine. I think she might snap out of it soon. I better let her go, before someone starts looking for her.”

“Or before she remembers you!” Mick snorted. I smirked, completely unamused, and walked to the fridge where I pulled out a beer of my own. 

It had been only five days since I encountered Lynn, dressed up and jumpy, as if she was late for a party. It was a relatively short amount of time for me to be thinking of turning her loose again, but I had taken a liking to her. I felt sorry for her and for whoever might be missing her. She had the loveliest brown eyes.

In a day or two I would give her a glass of lemonade spiked with Carbonate Whatnot, hated second cousin of Sodium Somethingorother, and within twenty minutes she’d obediently step out of an inconspicuous brown Chevy and into the Galilee Spread, dimly wondering what had happened to her wallet and the previous seven days.

Forrester poured a sip of beer down the drain in the floor and placed the flask up to the lip of the bottle. “Tell me something,” Mick said. “When they’re knocked out, do you ever… You know?..”

I knew.

I knew what Mick Forrester would do if he were the one keeping the girls. He’d let his machismo tell him that he was the one seducing them, and not the chemistry, and he’d let his own stupid mind validate raping them. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to pin his head to the bare cement with my knee. I wanted to lean my weight until the integrity of his skull gave way and I ruined my favorite jeans with his brains.

But I knew Mick Forrester would never drug the girls and keep them for himself. He didn’t have the balls.

“No.”

“I would,” he replied quickly. “I mean, what’s the point if you’re not going to fu-“

“Just mix the fucking drink, Mick.”

He held his breath as he always did when he poured his Sodium Whatever into the bottle until it seemed full again. I had seen this operation almost too many times. Almost.

Alex was waiting for us in the kitchen when we got back. She had taken a seat atop a counter and her legs swung forth and back, like a schoolgirl whose feet didn’t quite reach the ground. Her arms were straight and stiff at the elbows, and her hands were clamped to the counter’s edge, pushing her shoulders up to her chin level. She looked adorable.

“Here you are,” Mick said, handing her the beer. He had a big shiteater's grin on his face. Alex and I sipped our beers in momentary silence and Forrester kept looking at me, almost triumphantly, signaling that she had fallen for his trick. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the fat bastard had winked and given me a thumbs-up. If it weren’t for the sake of wonderful Alex, I would have screamed at him: “They all fall for it, you dumb sonofabitch! Every single fucking one!”

If it weren’t for his ongoing service, the result of being hopelessly, pathetically indebted to me, I would have killed him months ago.

 “So,” I rushed to find a follower, some sense of small talk, “where are you from?” Brilliant.

“Galilee Spread, across the river.” Her voice was tender and cracked ever so slightly when she talked, the kind of voice that faithfully practicing choir girls grow up to have if they take up smoking. “But I spend most of my time here in North Town. There’s no one in the Spread who stays up after midnight.”

That was true. When I came across Lynn it had been ten after two in the morning, and I was surprised to have come upon anyone at all. Of course, Lynn was looking for coke, and there was no safer time to do so than two a m. “I’ve got some coke at a friend’s house in North Town,” I remember saying to her. “He might even toss us a couple of beers… Get in.”

I’m not sure how Forrester managed to entice these young women to his house. From each angle the man was a pig. He was as ugly as his gut was big, and if he weren’t so afraid of me, I wouldn’t have trusted him as far as I could spit. Yet as much as I disliked the guy, I was never one to intimidate. Even if I thought of someone as I might think of a rodent, or an insect, a lowly piece, a waste of a conception, my courtesy has always overthrown my urge to relay to them what slime they really are. My courtesy to Mick Forrester was tolerable, only because I hated him so much.

In contrast, I could always yell and curse up a bloody storm towards someone I really cared about. If I felt even slightly insulted by a personal acquaintance I would, without a second thought, throw a knuckle across their jaw and belittle their virtue until they were in tears.

I was doing a favor to the female population by avoiding long-term involvement. If I were to honestly, wholeheartedly love someone who knows what I’d do to them.

 

 

“Whoa…” Alex said, staggering along the sidewalk. Her arm was around my shoulder, and her feet played with the pavement underneath her. But for all intents I was carrying her dead weight. “I didn’t think…I’d drinken… ..drunken…that much..”

Walking the girls home from Forrester’s were the most strenuous times. I had nothing to fear from the police; they were suckers for a sober boyfriend carrying his drunk girlfriend home to bed. They were not the problem. The problem began when they started to sing. I came to find out Alex was rather fond of Julie Andrews.

When Alex suddenly burst into song, she gave me such a start that I nearly dropped her. She got through one verse of My Favourite Things, while I shushed her, and put a forefinger across her lips. 

“Shhh…Alex…Shhh.” I pulled her in front of me to look her straight on. Her head was bobbing and swaying like a buoy. Her smile lit up the cold space between us. “We have to be quiet.. It’s the middle of the night, and we don’t want to…” 

We don’t want to what, smart guy? 

“We don’t want to wake these poor people up in the middle of the night.”

Alex dropped her beer bottle and it shattered at our feet. The splintery sound of breaking glass resonated down the morning street. She giggled remarkably and I couldn’t help but smile at her.

“Alex…Alex, honey, we gotta be quiet now. Okay?” Across the street a man with a cigarette walked by. His footfalls were heavy and downhill.

“You…called me honey,” Alex said. Her eyes fluttered briefly and she passed out in my arms.

Brown paper packages tied up with strings, I thought as I drug Alex to her new home. Her feet were turned inward and the toes of her Adidas scraped along the ground. These are a few of my favourite things.