Junk-Pure - 2

By Forrest Armstrong

"How'd you die, kid?" the junky asks as I walk onto the catwalk. Satan told me to walk through my mirror when the sun set. At dusk I dipped my head into the glass – felt like stepping through dripping sheet of glue – and proceeded through a bright white hallway. When I came to a door at the end I turned a silver knob and stumbled back into the bleak emptiness of my city.

"What?"

"New face, I'm just wonderin' how you died. You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

"I OD'd," I lie. The junky doubles over laughing, slapping his thighs.

"Off my own shit too, I'm guessin'. Well ain't that ironic. Satan give you a boss?"

"A boss?"

"He tell you who you're workin' with?"

"Oh… no, he didn't."

"Then I'll take you, kid. Come with me."

I follow him across the catwalk, past junkies sitting on crates holding fishing rods. One's line vibrates and he pulls it up with a smile – "Got one!" – a twenty dollar bill hanging off the hook like a towel. We reach a house at the end of the clouds and he leads me inside.

As soon as I step through the door he turns and slugs me in the face. I collapse against a wall. He takes a gun out of his pocket and presses it against my forehead and I'm too far past paralyzed to do anything about it.

"Now listen, kid, I ain't workin' with just any punk Satan decides is fit for the game. It's bigger than that. If you're Satan's agent you better let me know right now because at no point will I have a problem spilling your fuckin' brains across the floor. Clear?"

"Perfectly—"

"You work for Satan, or you work for me?"

I swallow hard against the pressure. "I work for you, man."

"Good," he says, relaxing the gun. "Then I'm gonna tell you what we're all about. You ain't gonna be working up on the Bandage; I'm dispatching you and a couple others to the streets. Get ‘em hooked down there like you was just any other dealer. Don't give off that you're dead. Here's the deal: the money all goes into manufacturing H, using Satan's pure as base. Our costumers will be shootin' neurotransmitters in the bloodstream that collect life force like a cotton swab and through delicate radio signals zap it back to us. Why, you ask?"

I miss my cue at first. "Why?"

"We're all demons, kid, but with enough of this juice we get a second chance. And you know what? My second time around I plan on staying clean. So you gotta kill a few to build a few; Darwin in action."

I spent the night on angel dust with the junky, whose name I discovered was Florence. He seemed surprised by my explosive reaction to the substance – he handed me a poorly rolled, purple cigarette and I dragged it hard, aiming for nicotine. When the walls started rippling and crashing like waves overhead I bugged out, shut my eyes; saw astral projections of space-blue and decay-gold on the back of my eyelids, slipped between sleep and trip without ever knowing the difference.

Somewhere in there I must have fallen asleep for good because I wake up now with fresh senses in the middle of a field, surrounded by a crumbled prison. The walls are tinted purple. A hill runs behind me, speckled with thin, dead trees ready to incinerate at the first warm breath blown in their direction. I don't remember seeing anything like this in the city. With its rotten, archaic soil, its sky the detached shade of black common in dreams – empty, nothing beyond – I feel out of context and yet the faint murmur of explosions can be heard in the distance, the tallest buildings with their heads in the clouds can be seen poking over the hill behind me. I know I'm in the right place. I pat myself down and find a fat bag of junk in my pocket. I see people dotted in the distance like ornaments on a tree.

I approach them with my calculated junky-swagger. "What's good?" I call. One man wearing seventeenth-century-European attire looks up and says in a garbled dialect, "The sky as it radiates truth unto us."

"Now listen, man, I'm just here to sell some nice clean H. You game?" He stares unsure and I get the feeling I may be going about this the wrong way. "Never mind," I say, walking away.

I approach a younger crowd all wearing suits and top hats. Underneath the gentlemen polish they all look like addicts to me. I edge into their circle, feeling terribly out of place. "What's good?"

They stop talking and stare at me. "You aren't from around here, are you?"

"Just over that hill," I say, gesturing. "I'm a city boy myself. I was just hoping to talk to you guys for a few minutes, get to know you."

"Alright," one of them says. He invites me to a party they're attending at The Ray Bar. Soon we're sitting on a couch shaped like Mae West's lips and drinking absinthe by the pint. I feel very much at home with alcohol, the one substance I'm able to stomach.

"We usually don't let city cats hang around here," one tells me. "We say to them: ‘If you're going to blow your whole fucking home apart, do it on your own time and turf.' We found refuge in this dead place and breathed the life of reason into it."

"That ain't me," I say. "I'm just trying to get by like anyone else."

"What do you do?"

"Push junk."

A mischievous smile crosses their lips and they exchange knowing glances. "Junk?"

"Yeah, heroin?"

"Haven't had that stuff since I used to pass the Bandages at night. How much?"

I smile. "How ‘bout we all try some and you decide?"

They take me to a room above The Ray Bar and we start cooking up. One of them produces several syringes and within half an hour we're geared for incision.

"You first," says the one who invited me to the party. I slide the needle in my vein like a pro and release – my body goes numb – haha tongue flaps like warm dead fish – I realize in my absinthe absence I forgot just who's junk I was dealing – neurotransmitters float my bloodstream like electric minnows – the kids follow suit and soon all of our life forces are draining like a gas tank with a leak –

The kids sit dazed like blissed-out mannequins. We settle on a price and I leave. Walking up the hill I forget the price. Neither junk nor cash in my pockets.

In one hallucinatory ejaculation my flesh spits a visceral projection of me standing haloed in an astral glow… oceans shrivel up like tinfoil with an electric shimmer and drain into the earth's soil… the planet hangs soggy in space before sagging like a Dali clock and chipping away at the skin – infrastructure apparent like building when glass and metal slip off the frame – matter eats itself; all that's left in earth's place a thrashing black hole… my eyes pop out of my head and rush towards the vortex followed by a neon blue stream flowing out of the sockets… I sit outside myself, a bronzed skeleton with life force spilling from the skull, watching the last tendrils drop...

© Forrest Armstrong 2007

All photos except the line of gringos at a McDonald's in Tokyo, thanks to Katalin Marton. © Katalin Marton 2007

Stupid gringos lined up at Mickey D's in Tokyo, thanks to Sonia Ramos Rossi. © Sonia Ramos Rossi 2007

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