Wishing in the Wind.

I wish I was a young and handsome well hung black man.

Almuerzo Desnudo

The following entry was written on a piece of yellow notebook paper in the clinic during my withdrawal sickness. I found it in the back pocket of the jeans I was wearing at the time and about to wash them, I searched the pockets and found this. I have no recollection of scribbling these words, but it was definitely in my handwriting. The piece of paper was soiled, folded, spun, and mutilated. It is copied here, word verbatim. I found it quite surreal and thought I'd post it.
For posterity.
Made it five times with Carlos under the shower that day soapy bubbles of flesh seismic tremors split by fissure spurts of jissom...
I made the street, everything sharp and clear like after rain. See Salvador in a booth reading soccer scores his face yellow ivory in the sunlight. I handed him two nickels under the table. Pushing in a small way to keep up the habit: Invade. Damage. Occupy. Young face in the blue alcohol flame.
"And use that alcohol! You fucking can't wait hungry junkies all the time black up my spoons. That's all I need for Pen Indef the policia rumbles a black spoon in my trap." The old junky speil. Junk hooks falling.
"Shoot your way to freedom, kid."
Trace a line of goose pimples up the thin young arm. Slide the needle in and push the bulb watching the junk hit him all over. Move right in with the shit and suck junk all through hungry young cells.
There is a boy sitting like your body. I see he is a hook. I drape myself over him from the pool hall. Draped myself over his cafeteria and his shorts dissolve in a strata of Banos con Agua Caliente...and all house flesh...toward the booth...down opposite me...Yo tengo feria. "Me a good buy on H."
"You're quitting? Well I hope you make it, kid. You gotta friend in me. A real friend and if!" Old Pete you dumb shit.
"Say you're looking great kid. Now do your self a favor and stay off. I been getting some really good shit lately. remember that brown shit sorta yellow like snuff cooks up brown and clear..."
Junky in cantina mensroom...invisible and persistent dream body...in that gray smell of rectal mucus...night cafe's and junky room dawn smells. Three hours from Rosarito and made it five times...soapy flesh...
"These double papers, he claims."
"Well, I thought you were quitting..."
I can't make it."
"Impossible quitar eso."
Got up and fixed in the sick dawn bongos of Tito Puente.
"Tu tomas mas medicina. No me hago caso, cabrone."
Colonia house in the smell of dust and we fucked...empty morphine boxes stacked four feet along the walls...dead on the surplus blanket...boy screaming...vecinos rush in...
"What did he die of?"
"I don't know, he just died."
Old Pete in Tijuana City room with his douche bag and his stash of codeine pills powdered in a Coca-Cola can. "I'll just say I suffer from indigestion." Coffee and blood spilled all over the place. Cigarette holes in the pink blanket...
"He just sat down on the curb and die." Esperanza told me on Ave. Nino Perdido and we cash a morphine script, those Mexican narcotic scripts on special yellow banknote paper...like a thousand peso bill...and we fixed in the cubicle room you reach by climbing this ladder.
No good. No bueno.

Iron Wrack.

I was so fucked up in the head today. No money. No nothing. Gabriel came over with some Valium tablets. He told me over two Sol beers that if I would suck his cock he'd give me the tablets. Why not?, I mumbled lighting up a Lucky Strike. His penis was long and skinny like him, and uncut...like him. But it smelled like rotten shit and garbage and tasted even worse. And yet, I did it just the same. I'm such a fucking cockjunkie.

Desperate skeleton grin of chronic junk lack glazed over with codeine and goofballs...cigarette holes in his bathrobe...coffee stains on the floor...rusty orange flame...Wanna hit?

Nah. No more for me, Gabriel...

His head dropped to one side and his tongue fell out. The pesos dropped from his hand, one after the other, and lay crumpled on the red tile floor. A gust of hot wind blew dirty pink curtains into the room.

Washing the acrid taste out of my mouth with beer, I sat there downing the tablets, looking at Gabriel nodding off and thanking God in his wisdom I will not return there. Eyes flicker up his bony arms trace long bluish trails of addiction.

I think it is time to make tracks for other parts of the world.

The Photogragh that Exploded.

I admitted myself into a Mexican detox clinic and for eight days I suffered through my withdrawals. After a day of blood tests and urine samples, (Yay! Am not HIV poz! No bugs on this baby! Weak liver, though, Old Doc Benway sez I gotta lay offa the sauce. But, the vices, herr Doktor, the vices!) I was quickly admitted and given a cot in a windowless ward. It was a large foul-smelling room with about fifty cots. Phantoms moaned and shuffled about in hospital pajamas.

In forty-eight hours the backlog of heroin in my body ran out. I took some Nembutal and slept for several hours. When I woke up, my clothes were soaked with sweat. My eyes were watering and hurting. My whole body felt itchy and irritable. I twisted about the bed, arching my back and stretching my arms and legs. I drew up my knees, my hands clasped between my thighs. The pressure of my hand set off the hair triggering orgasm of junk sickness. I got up and changed my underwear.

The pain, the sweats, the paranoid hallucinations. A hefty price I paid. Believe me when I tell you it was a deterrent. Only if you ever had withdrawal symptoms could you fully understand the fear and loathing. Words cannot convey the pain, the searing pain on a cellular level, of withdrawal symptoms. Long nights lying on my cot screaming until my throat was coarse and raspy, and my body tensed as if tied in knots with the flames of devils. My clothes clung to my torso with sweat that soaked the thin mattress through. Horrid demons attack out of shadows from vivid hallucinations.

Real demons.

I have seen the face of pain and suffering, all under the stare of cold dead fish eyes of the night nurse. And nothing compares to a Mexican clinic for sheer poverty and filth. Fifty junk-sick idiots silent in a room with cockroaches and rats climbing over you. No use complaining. There is nothing anybody can do. Nobody can help nobody. Just sit and ride the terror out. I knew at that moment that I'd never travel that line again.

Though, I will never regret my experience with drugs.

I found the vaccine at the end of the junk line. I live in a one-room apartment in Colonia Centro in Tijuana, Mexico. Long been fired from my job. I had not taken a bath in days nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every half hour in the fibrous grey flesh of terminal addiction. I never cleaned the room. Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled to the ceiling. Light and water long turned off for nonpayment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at my shoe for eight hours. I was only roused to action when the hourglass of junk ran out. If a friend came to visit - and they rarely did since who or what was left to visit - I sat there not caring if he had entered my field of vision - a gray screen always blanker and fainter - and not caring if he walked out of it. If he had died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. Wouldn't you?

Thirty grains of heroin a day and it still was not enough. And the long waits in front of the farmacia. Delay is a rule in the drug culture. The Man is never on time. This is no accident. There are no accidents in the drug world. The addict is taught again and again exactly what will happen if he does not score for his junk ration. junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.

Junk is a cellular equation that teaches the user facts of general validity. I have learned a great deal from using junk: I have seen life measured out in eyedroppers of morphine solution. I experienced the agonizing deprivation of junk sickness and the pleasure of relief when junk-thirsty cells drank from the needle. I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increase enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.

And that is a life I will never repeat.

It was five in the afternoon when I left the clinic and took a cab to Juarez Ave. I went into a bar and drank four whisky sours and got pretty drunk. I was cured.

As I walked across the porch to my apartment and opened the door, I had the feeling of returning after a long absence. I was coming back to the point in time when I took that first "joy bang" with Gabriel.

After a junk cure is complete, you generally feel fine for a few days. You can drink, you can feel real hunger and pleasure in food, and your sex desire comes back to you. Everything looks different, sharper. Then you hit a sag. It is an effort to get dressed, get out of a taxi, to pick up a fork. You don't want to go anywhere or do anything. You don't even want junk. The junk craving is gone, but there isn't anything else. You have to sit this period out.

Gabriel came around as soon as he heard I was out. Did I want to "pick up"? Just one wouldn't hurt any. He could get a good price on ten or more. I said no. You don't need willpower to say no to junk when you are off. You don't want it.

An interesting experiment, to be sure. But, I will never do that again.

Gone Buffalo Huntin'.

I'm sorry, but Desolation Angel is not in right now. He will be out of the office for two weeks. If you would like to leave a message or schedule an appointment. Please do so at the beep.

*beep*

Heh. You're really wierd.

After securing my blog the best I could. I stomped across the border and went to calm myself the only way I knew how. I took in a movie. I saw "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". Very good. Man, was Johnny Depp wierd in this one. Oompa-Loompas? Fantastic! The music was great. Danny Elfman is a god among composers.

I took the bus up to Balboa Park and ate lunch sitting under a broad tree. Dr. Pepper and a pastrami sammich, fer those who are inquirin'. Watching the shiny happy people in the park, I got to thinking: This heroin thing was supposed to be just an experiment. Wanted to see how it was, you know? But it has gone too far. Tomorrow morning I will turn myself into a detox clinic and cure this withered corpse.

I am better than this.

Lord of the Fly.

Sitting here staring at my shoe for eight hours fucked up spinning like a dry leaf.

Fried Beans and Burning Meat.

Tried to seduce the kid around the block with whiskey and mota. Francisco was his name. Aztec hawk-like features and a body like a ballet dancer. Two hours pass...back at my trap, we both flying high, and me on my elbows and knees being screwed by this character. Mission accomplished.
 

Later that night, I have cocktails at The El Dorango with a Peruvian tailor cum pusher I know from Vinnies and he gives me a good buy on H. Also, there is old friend RJ and this 89-year-old American Trannie who calls herself "Norma Jean". Crooked Andy Warhol wig, blue Capri, and gaping black toothless hole. Black puffs of armpit hair jut out from dirty halter top. "Made myself an artificial booty!" She cooed and swings around showing the obvious padding. We all laugh.
The martinis were quite yummy.

Jerk Off Brutal.

The thick green velvet curtains of the cheap hotel room blocked all light coming from outside. A thin yellow ray of sun cut through the dankness like a knife. Dust swirled in eddies. I was naked, on my knees in a submissive crouch; hands on my knees. Towering above me was a Hispanic ex-con that just been released from the border patrol after being detained for two days. Or so he said.
Met him in the Plaza. Said he could get a good score on H. His torso was a mass of tattoos and scars. He was tall and beefy/muscular. Through my fucked up eyelids I saw him standing above me naked...no not quite...his khaki pants were dropped to his ankles and the sweaty wife beater was pulled up over his thick neck. A gold necklace of Guadalupe was the only color across the mass of brown chest. With his muscular left hand, he held me by my hair and it hurt, with his right hand he was masturbating wildly. My eyes were not focused on that thick brown penis, but I was more entranced at watching his huge testicles bouncing rapidly as he jerked off. I glanced up at that bulldog face. The grimace. The thick mustache. The slick back black hair.
"Don't you fucking look at me!" He snarls and whack! across my face with an open palm. I'm about to fall over, but he roughly grabs me by my hair again. I can feel a trickle of blood ooze out of my nostril across my lips. He tightens the grip on my hair. It really hurts.
He rises onto the tips of his toes and grunts like some kind of beast. I can feel the hot licks of his semen splashing across my face. He jabs his thick short penis into my mouth and rams it in deep, pushing the back of my head. I gag. I can't breathe.
"Take it, you fucking faggot!" He growls through silver-capped teeth.
He throws me down onto the cold dusty concrete floor. Wipes his penis with a ragged towel and tosses it onto my face. Dressing, he says walking out with his back to me, "Your shit's on the table, faggot."
Slam! He is gone and I am alone. I can taste semen and blood on my lips. I look up through a haze to see the junk he left is on the nightstand. Man, the things I do for this shit.