Black Hole (2 page)

The only real problem is coming down. Time slows when you're detoxing. You can get so slow it feels like endless pause. You can be stuck wherever you are, alone with your thoughts, and god fucking help you if you're in pain at the moment or staring at the sun. What looks like just a second to everyone else can feel like weeks or months. The boredom will drive you insane. People's minds pop on this shit. There's even rumors of total pause, where you're perceptively stuck forever. It's a paradox that makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.

Sidewalk is ankle-deep wet mud. Moving in slow motion. Tenderloin, heading up Jones Street, and I don't know why. Don't remember how I got here or what I was doing.

A centipede of Vietnamese ladies runs for the bus down the hill, opposite my direction. I'm a drugsick rock in the middle of a stream. I'm losing ground, being pushed backward. These women with their pink plastic bags mean business.

A refrigerator-sized skinhead sees me from across the street. His eyes widen. This isn't paranoia; this isn't the coke crash talking, drug psychosis; this is the real shit. He's real, and he's coming for me, wading through a sea of old women.

His head is a peppermint of knuckle-white and sunburnt-red. Black button eyes sewn into his face. Cable-cover veins run up the side of his neck and spread across his temple. Smoke coming out of his collar, swirling off the top of his head.

My hand in my pocket. A .25-caliber Raven. Yes, my little popgun. When did I get this? Have I always had it? He's getting all six: five in the clip, one from the chamber. That's if it's loaded at all.

Fearsweat and sickness. Slog up Jones Street, but it's slower as it goes.

He gets closer in quick jumps, like a movie with missing frames. He's a slideshow of impending doom. He's going to stomp me out, kick me with steel-toed boots, grind me between heel and sidewalk. I don't want my teeth crushed. Everything else heals. Teeth are fucked forever.

Wait until he's close enough to read the tats on his neck. Grab him and jam this ridiculously small gun in one of the few soft spots he has—right underneath the sternum and between the top two ab muscles, these tiny lead pieces will take the fight right out of him. I'll take my chances with the law but not with this hulking monster. You can still smoke a motherfucker in the TL.

The uphill sidewalk steepens. It looks like a fucking wall covered in cigarette butts and blacked circles of old gum. I can't move. Too sick. Guts clench; I'm falling to the ground.

A hand constricts on my arm, tightens with a grip like a blood pressure machine. Bicep about to blow out. I can't move the arm. Can't reach the Raven with the other. I'm fucked.

CHUCK
, he says. He knows me. I look in his face. I know this guy from somewhere. He's sweating from the top of his head.
His veins pulse like an equalizer light with a Godsmack song on. Big Mike. It's fucking Big Mike. Isn't it?

Big Mike?
I ask.

Yeah, bro, who else would it be? What's up with you? You okay?

Sick. Jonesing. Hurting bad.

That's why they call it JONES STREET, bro! Come back with me, I'll get you right.

Back in the day, Big Mike and I dated dancers that worked at the same club. He was a Cal lineman back then, but he lost his scholarship for a buffet of reasons. Academic failure. Legal trouble. General scariness. Gridiron mayhem. Too violent for football, you know, spearing and shit. Using his helmet as a weapon. Going for the injury instead of the tackle. He was a goon, someone coaches only wanted to have in order to injure other specific players. He had the mean streak and the strength, but with none of the subtlety; Big Mike was as flamboyant about hurting someone on purpose as a pro wrestler.

We were two losers with stripper girlfriends, getting high and killing time while they were at work. He was out of a scholarship, and I couldn't hold a job. Behind every stripper is a man wasting her money. They make it from men and take it from men, but usually they spend it on some other fucked-up man, a man who is well more fucked up than anyone they're getting money from.

Big Mike talks the whole way to his place, but I can't follow it. The sickness turns his voice into sad trombone music. I'm fading fast.

At the bottom of the stairs, he tries to talk to me, but it's no good. He alters his speech to make something listenable, but there's no hope. Garbled shit, I can't understand a thing.

He picks me up like a sack of laundry and carries me up the stairs. People walk by us in the hallway, but it's that kind of building in that kind of neighborhood, where if you're carrying a body to your place, no one will say shit.

He lays me down on a mattress. I watch a fly above me. It pauses midair. I'm so fucked. Even if he comes back for me, I could be stuck like this, staring at a fly forever. Five minutes go by; the fly moves again.

Big Mike returns with various drugs, holding them in my line of vision. Crack, no. Heroin, no. Speed, no. Remote, yes. Please. Fuck. Please. I try to speak, but nothing comes out. Something registers though; he saw the look in my eye.

He dips an eyedropper into the vial and holds it out over my eye. I see the drop form on the tip, and it pauses there. Fuck. Not now. Not here. Don't make me wait. I can't get stuck like this. I stay like this for seven, eight minutes, staring at that drop before it finally falls from the dropper.

Everything comes back.

We're in a studio apartment that smells like cat food and burnt plastic. My eyes sting. He's hotboxing crack in here.

You feeling it?
he says, leaning over me.

Yes.

This shit is hella scary, bro.

You don't have to tell me.

I mean, it's great, until you get a habit.

Really, you don't have to tell me. The sickness is worse than anything. You just freeze wherever you are, stuck in time. In reality it's not happening, but it feels like you can be stuck somewhere for days. Maddening.

I look around. Mirrors are haphazardly placed around on all the walls, like whatever he found thrown out he hung up. They're dirty, chipped, and cracked, and they don't all reflect the same image. The only furniture in the place is the mattress I'm on and a squat rack with a bench. Weight plates lean against every wall. There's a garbage bag full of empty tuna cans.

Haven't seen you around the clubs,
he says.

Nah, got a straight job. Takes up too much time.

You? Straight job? What are you doing?

MiniWhale.

What the fuck is that?

We make dwarf whales for rich fucks.

Shut up.

No, really, every rich fucker wants his own whale right now. All those startup guys and software nerds have one. And the Russian gangsters are crazy for them. They're like an Italian supercar, you know, something most guys buy just because someone else they know got one and they can't have it.

How much do those cost?

Hundred grand to get started.

People buy those?

Bro, there's a waiting list.

So what are you doing drugsick in the TL if you have such a good hustle?

I'm just cleaning the tanks; I'm not getting a cut.

You got a lady?

No.

You got money?

Fuck no.

You want to put in some work for me?

Is it legal?

Big Mike busts up laughing.
Bro,
he says,
you are fucking hilarious.

THE TRUTH ABOUT MINIWHALES

EVERY YUPPIE AND
techie wants his own Moby Dick whale. And why wouldn't they? There's no cooler whale; until we get the killer whales or narwhals, it won't even be close. Blue whales come in a distant second. Way far in the back of the pod is the non-albino sperm whale.

But all these fuckwads have to have one. And if you want one, we're the only game in town. You can get them from us, or you can settle for last year's dwarf goats with their inner-ear problems and their shit-spraying assholes. You can get the dwarfed bison with their rage flare-ups and their bad pelvises.

If you want a MiniWhale, you have to come to us. We trademarked this shit. Sure, someone else will make a tiny swordfish or some shit, but if you want to be a whale, you have to own a whale.

If you're going to be taken seriously, you need a condo south of Market with a Tesla in the garage and a MiniWhale tank in the living room. You don't know what a thread count really is, but your sheets have the best thread count possible. Your bathroom has heated floors, and your kitchen has more stainless steel than RoboCop. There's no evidence that you were a scrawny nerd in high school, and you prominently display your CrossFit medals and your Tough Mudder participation trophies.

The whale tanks are as common as giant Macs and ugly furniture. You have to have a sixty-inch TV, some kind of unusual coffee maker, and a whale tank. Pets are the new accessories. They're the killer app; they're the brand-new status-power cocktail; they're
the newest electric car. Accessories, all of them. No one wants things because they want them; they want things to show the world what they can afford. If you spent the hundred grand that a Roadster cost in 2010 on Tesla stock, it would be worth over a million bucks now, but no one would be able to see you drive your stock portfolio down Market Street.

Here is the dirty secret: the Moby Dicks are clones. Here's the problem with that: the more we clone them, the crazier they get. Like insane crazy. Like serial-killer crazy. It's like making a copy of a copy or something. We're cloning off an original sample, but there's still some kind of mental deterioration.

We sell them as unique dwarf breeds straight from the ocean. Each one is supposed to be different, but they're all the same. Not exactly the same, as they're technically a little worse each time. I don't get it; I'm not the fucking whale scientist.

Eirean, my boss, is the one who got rich off this. I won't. There's always stories you hear about someone who was an original Yahoo employee or some shit, not even one of the engineers, just a receptionist or something, who is now worth a shitload of money. It was the big chase of the first dot-com wave and is happening again in the tech age of San Francisco. No one's getting rich except a few lucky dickheads.

I clean the tanks. I feed the whales. I transfer the whales to the van. I deliver the whales to rich fucks in the mirror-walled condos that rise like giant glass dicks south of Market. I build their tanks and balance their water and remove the dead whales when the rich fucks are too dumb or stupid to feed the poor whales right or they piss in the tank during a party or something.

I'm a grunt. I'm working at the bottom of a high-end company. I can't afford to take home what I work with all day. I can't afford
one of these whales. I know them better than anyone, and I'll never own one.

If it weren't for rent control, I wouldn't be able to live in San Francisco anymore. It's all software guys and biotech people, app developers, and big pharma. It's weird how big it's gotten here. The dot-com bust was supposed to end all this shit, and it's bigger now than it ever was then. And unfortunately, it's also a lot more stable. These companies have actual revenue streams. Some of them will go away, but a few of them never will. They'll turn into AT&T or Pepsi or whatever of whatever it is they do. In the end, all these app companies will be owned by two big companies, and no one will remember when there were thousands of little ones like these.

Someday, these will be the shit jobs with the glut of employees that are overqualified and underpaid. Until then, though, if you have a software engineering degree and a beard, you're a rich motherfucker sitting in the techbird seat.

Of course, without these rich fucks, no one would be able to afford these whales, which would mean I would be out of a job. I'd be back to living off girlfriends and sleeping on couches. Honestly though, I might have been better off back then, as far as general well-being goes. Those were happy times, even though I was depressed through most of it. I only enjoy that era in retrospect. Should've been the best time of my life.