Oxymoron
In memory of Q-Tip
1.
Quarter moons and half-moons were broken like porcelain shards, vacuumed with currency in monotone.
FCNI (pronounced “Fettuccini”) and me walking to Yumi’s place, where White Jay had the foil ready for us. We passed the Oxy round and round and talked about how we would quit tomorrow.
Spring came and I was still writing psalms.
White blossoms shocked the city streets like a lucid dream.
Facebook open, an ocean of souls we’ll never know, and if we should ever meet these angels, they’d see our limp, drug-addled…
V met me for coffee and told me she was going to a Christian college. I knew then that I’d lost her to Jesus.
I went running in the sunshine with a fentanyl patch on my arm.
Withdrawal with my salvific tears as I drove on the highway; the sunset was fiery pink and red.
I blew 2000 mg. a week with an hourglass pouring over my head.
Autumn leaves fluttered around me as I lay on my bed and pretended to be in the place I always wanted to be, the place I’d left before.
The rise of MAGA entered our conversations at the same time as the dog.
FCNI showed me a picture on his phone. It was a Japanese Spitz. He looked exactly like Sparkle, the dog I’d raised back in New Jersey.
“Her eyes were so clouded she couldn’t even see,” I explained to FCNI as we stumbled across neon-splattered squares like dance, dance revolution.
We passed the bottle back and forth and took swigs on the street.
We walked amid the ambling laughter of people. If only we could be outside of ourselves and inside one another.
The dog had big eyes which made him seem discerning and almost human. We named him Q-Tip.
Q was broadcasting thoughts and feelings with an articulation that I couldn’t deny.
I took selfies with Q so I could upload them on my Instagram, thinking V would see the dog and shake her head.
I knew she probably wouldn’t DM me, but perhaps she’d say something like, “What’s he up to now?”
Poor V. Poor me.
On a rectangle of aluminum foil, the materials dance and melt as vapor is released from this alchemy.
I could never perfectly trace those G patterns like a snail’s trail on the foil. S-Man had great foil control. So did White Jay. Maybe great foil control was a prerequisite to being a dealer.
Maybe I just don’t write the kind of things that people like to read, I was saying about my nonexistent career.
No one was listening. Shark Tank was on.
Love is a Losing Game by Amy Winehouse played on repeat on the way home.
80 mg.
Oxy is a way to survive.
Projectile vomit shoots out of your skeleton.
You take a sip of water and breathe in more smoke.
Sisyphus pushes the stone.
“Wasted effort,” Kawabata wrote in Snow Country.
Follow the map.
Orwell
Camus
The Bible
Ask V to marry me.
“I shan’t,” she writes back.
Search for a photo that disappeared
Pet Q-Tip
Do lines
Get hard but can’t come.
Fall asleep with pants down, hand on soft dick.
Can not achieve a logical conclusion. An oxymoron is the loss of logical conclusions.
80 mg.
I’ve been cooking up a storm, experimenting with a new chili recipe.
Raekwon would be proud, FCNI texted me after I sent him a photo of my latest batch.
Fiends yelling 2 for 5, I wrote back.
80 mg.
V: I said it a long time ago and I meant it. I meant it then and I mean it now.
ME: Marry me.
V: Please. Just stop.
ME: I pray for us.
V: Do you need counseling?
80 mg.
They’re just numbers. One day, two days, a year. Anything counts to pass the time.
40 + 40 = 80
80/2 = 40/2 = 20/2= 10
10 x 8 = 80
Time and pills, slipping through my fingers.
80 mg.
Desperation when you don’t have enough. Disgust when you have as much as you want.
80 mg.
Do you think V is seeing someone? I asked FCNI.
If she is, I bet all his pens are functional, FCNI replied.
80 mg.
I read Confessions by Saint Augustine.
Why did you create this world to be a trap?! I screamed at the wall and threw the book across the room.
80 mg.
I listened to I Think of You by Rodriguez on repeat. The latest to enter my “☹ Songs” playlist.
When will this sadness end? Van Gogh asked.
FCNI has been wearing his fentanyl patch for a month now. It’s scotch-taped to his arm.
A binary matrix of having vs. having not.
80 mg.
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
I met S-Man in my second year as an addict. White Jay was trying to get clean in Florida, going to a program. With White Jay, you felt like you were friends hanging out. S-Man was strictly business. I was just as happy to tell the deepest, darkest longings of my heart to S-Man. He didn’t give a shit either way.
S-Man did Oxy deliveries in his white Mercedes. He wore glasses and I never saw him without a baseball cap. He kept his leather interior immaculate. After the envelope of money was in his hand, he would give me a brown paper bag filled with pills.
Seasons pass. FCNI and I discuss which season is the best time to quit.
Summer is a time of celebration, FCNI points out. Think about all the girls.
Can’t quit in autumn though, I pointed out. That romance under the leaves just makes you want to get high.
Going through withdrawal during the winter will be brutal. Too harsh on the body, FCNI said. You might die.
Springtime it is. The weather will be the most forgiving.
A time to revive. A time of new life, FCNI agreed.
The weather will be perfect. The flowers will be in bloom. Perfect time to quit Oxy.
Flu-like symptoms, cold sweats, and diarrhea. Restless legs, a sense of hopeless desperation.
Relapse.
Set yourself back another week. The timer over your head.
Yumi watches a lot of television.
These days we watch “Modern Family”. I can’t tell you any of the characters’ names. I only know them as “Al Bundy”, Sofia Vergara, the gay one, and the other gay one. Some kids no one cares about. None of them seem married. Weird fucking show.
Yumi does Oxy and pretends Jay is there. We sort of enjoy each other’s company. Beneath the bed is a missing crumb of Oxy Yumi swore disappeared the last time I was there. Yumi makes me search for it. We smoke things that resemble the drug.
On my knees, searching for white crumbs. How does one worship God?
Washed with the blood of Jesus.
Dostoevsky House of the Dead
We’ll never get back together, will we? I asked.
Does that make you sad? V replied.
My turd was so hard it felt like I was giving birth. It took an hour of sweating through what something like child labor when a round stone exited my asshole. I hadn’t had a bowel movement in weeks.
My goal was to write a perfect novel from front to cover with no mistakes, a complete mystery until the end.
I made chili.
I listened to a Timothy Keller about the reason for God. I won’t explain it here, mostly because I can’t remember it, but it was convincing.
I decided to pray for the end. I will be a follower for His divine intervention. A way out of Egypt. Into the desert where men eat gorge themselves on pheasants until they explode.
Cooked quail and cold-turkey, you slip back into a demented rationale. I believe that one day, He will save me.
The devil roams the earth. “I just need a couple more days. I’ll wean off this week and then…”
The week goes by. Nothing has changed. The Lord God alone can atone for your sins and allow you to live in freedom today. I am the wind. I was lost for a long time, and before her, I had always been alone. So, I’m asking you to bring her back to me. I’ll be waiting for your reply.
An oxymoron in love and then crushed. It won’t take much time.
God loves you. That is why you are free to do as you like. Trapped in endless cycles. Is this not what you desired?
Come to me then, and I’ll make your burden light. Lord God, you created me to show me that I can do whatever, be whatever I want. And I thank you so much, for truly I’m fucked. Please show me the way. You made me in your image, to grovel and show me my sin. To make me destroy myself so I can repair myself with your healing. Thank you for showing me how universally you control everything. How you made me to have intercourse with the devil and produce the seed that will ravage the earth. Thank you for loving me and showing me that without you I am nothing. Thank you for making me your tool, your toy, your slave. I am free in Satan. A sick, terrible freedom. I am yours to be had, to be saved, once I give you my life. You gave your life for me first. It’s the only way I can repay you. I don’t have to do a damned thing. A refund on my quest for existential knowledge. Please make me an idiot. Thank you, God.
Q-Tip doesn’t mind that I’m an addict. He does a triple-lutz whenever FCNI and I return from the streets. What hunt have we been on? He must wonder about our purpose. That we bring nothing back except the mysterious substance that makes that curious vaporish haze is not new to him. He loves us all the same.
A dog loves like no one else. Why did God create man and not dogs for His divine purpose? It seems he really wanted us to be pets. Dog is God spelled backwards. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Q-Tip nuzzles my hand. Great, now I’m God. What do I do with this responsibility? Sniff. Okay, time to watch the same movies on repeat for a few months. Blade Runner gets heavy play. The Grand Budapest Hotel. Scent of a Woman. I am a blind Al Pacino, listening to Evangeline halfway in the bag.
Even after the substance takes over your life, there’s still the fun of getting clean. These are just more things to do, ways to pass the time.
It takes me a year or two to get off the drugs. I relapse, over and over. The special little moments when you try to get clean and face that abyss. You’ll remember these moments well. They’ll give you a sense of gratitude and remind you that you’re alive. In a strange way, you were more alive back then than you are now, sitting in your comfortable suburban home. Remember times when you were sifting through garbage. I miss those days somehow.
“Revaluate your values,” Nietzsche said.
Something needs to be stripped away.
When your life begins to fall into the depths of despair, use hope as a stubborn resistance against mediocrity and search for signs of meaning.
Your utterances are the tethers of a rope, reflected in your prayers, so no matter what words your lips form, you need to be sure that someone on the other side can hold on.
You were lost in the squall.
You thought about letting it take over you like a virus, simplifying your existence to the algebra of need.
What makes it possible to be alive? Why, and for what purpose, could any of us be so insignificant, yet worth saving, loving, and dying for in this wide universe?
Freedom of choice is an illusion, set into being by a matrix of which you have no control.
Google is a metaphor.
Enduring hope, everlasting strength, Lord God.
Running becomes transcendental, meditational; your perception becomes lighter, faster, higher. I repeated my mantra to myself and looked around at the peace and quiet. Why isn’t it good enough that ducks paddle with their webbed feet and sit on the floating logs?
Perfection is that moment of faith, of trust. I know it’s stupid, but I tear the patch off. Without the fentanyl patch, my cells will soon recognize the lack of opiates feeding their poisoned bodies, and one by one they will begin dying off. New baby cells will give rise to a starved generation, born into need and desolation.
I choose to live again by volunteering to die. The patch flung into a garbage can as I run past, and in sudden fear. I look upon that little piece of chemical opiated plastic like a piece of dead skin, curling up in its uselessness, death to the world, pathetic little piece of nothing. Somehow, this is Christ.
I’m liberated by my wild hope and belief that everything will be okay. Maybe not this time, but eventually. One of these days… air entering and exiting my lungs in swift staccato bursts.
The days which ensue are gory and horrible. I stop eating. The temperature is impossible to get right. I’m either burning or freezing. The yawning never ending, and during the day I curl up and lay in bed as Q-Tip lays beside me. He feels my pain, but he’s trained himself to piss outside. I have no choice but to walk him, and in this way, he rehabilitates me and makes me part of the world again.
I remember when we almost lost him. FCNI and I searched the city for hours. We ran across the city calling his name. “Q!” When we came back to my building, there he was, waiting outside, that panting smile, those eyes asking us where we’d been.
Things are crawling out of me. Some restless energy pulsing through my arm, twisting me until I snap. Do the math. Trade darkness for light rightly owed. Smiling grimly into the cold barren sun, follow me like a dead horse into the land of Nod.
The music plays forever. We have the night. We have each other. We stare with bloodshot eyes towards morning as we impart one another with dreams.
All is vanity.
I saw my altar with open eyes. Piles of shit, steaming vermin, worm-filled and craven existence. Worship me. This is my life. This is my freedom. This is my choice. To die, to decompose, to become nothing. I lived. I was forgotten. I fell apart. I became lost.
There was nothing. There should have always been nothing. I will spend eternity in regret, wondering why there was anything at all.
I submerge dreamlike into water. The calm of the blue world, the silence beneath the waves.
Insomnia leads to a worship song from the minaret singing. Music fills the sunset as I read my last line. The song of Allah and the transcendental dawn.
Winter lasts forever. FCNI and I walking to Yumi’s, saying how we’ll quit the same day we find true love.
Being good has no place in the hands of desperate men. The stairwells to hell and darkness are just places to hide and pray. Spring came with its usual forest of flowers, ranting at us in a lucid dream.
So beautifully does the spirit pine for evergreen love. I will have to get V back. I will have to get clean. I will be okay.
Jesus, you know it’s all a set up. In a Hegelian sense, you were made to worship. Hell is your only other option.
I walk Q-Tip until our feet get sore. One day, FCNI and Oxy are gone. Q lives with FCNI now, the man who found him in those neon-splattered streets, groomed immaculately, abandoned and lost.
When I give Q back to FCNI, I cry more than I’ve ever cried before. More than the day my woman left me. More than the day I thought of death. To lose this animal that loves me so much feels worse than dying. I can’t explain why that is.
But I have to get clean and so fly to an island to swim into crumbling oases, following the leader beneath the waves. The horizontal ascent where seas meet sky, a thin line that separates dreams from reality. The sun that shines, the tranquility slipping into night storms that roar each night as I pace the room like a caged tiger, the walls padded, desperate for a crumb. Sipping hot tea, trying to find a vision of the sea.
Paradise becomes a prison. A book in my hand, poems in my head, salt water on my skin, sand on my feet. I will be free. Weekdays. Weekends. Stories, paragraphs, sentences. I will do my time.
Months pass and the apartment feels empty. His leash is there. His bed, too. I have no friends. Only people who call me. People who do not need me. People who poop on their own.
Thank you, God, for showing me the way. Thank you, Lord, for bringing us out of Egypt.
Alright, that’s it. I’m not on drugs. Life goes on, but I needed to be saved. It’s not our faith that saves us. It is simply grace. Yet we must believe in something. We must get on our knees and pray. Like the woman who could not stop the flow of her blood, I reached out to touch the cloth of Jesus. If only I touch his cloth, then I shall be healed.
Good woman, your faith has healed you. Go, and be well.