Black Hole (16 page)

You're fucking up, Chuck. You have to make this right before you can't undo it. You need to get back to the beginning of your troubles, go back and straighten out your timeline the best you can, and quit fucking with it.

BACK TO THE BUS

I'M WALKING UP
to the party-bus rental place. I have to get back to that bus. The party bus. With Eirean and his techtard friends. Then I have to smoke out on it. That's the plan.

Something's wrong. Things don't look quite right. I'm still high from something. I can't pin it down, though. I'm really fucked up. I would wait for later, but I feel like I'm being pulled this way. How did I get here? Does it matter?

The receptionist hangs up when she sees me. Then she yells into the intercom.

Ron, we have a crazy homeless guy in here.

I look around, don't see anyone. She's talking about me.

No, I'm not homeless. Well, technically I am, but not in the spirit of the term.

She points mace at me. The guy that must be Ron runs in the room. Ron is a big guy, early fifties, but looks like he's seen some bad days. Like a guy that got huge in prison but has been out for a long time. His hair is white and gray, like Spider-Man's boss. He puts his open palms to me.

Take it easy, guy. Don't do anything dumb.

I want to rent a party bus.

Sure you do. Let's just go outside and talk about it.

Seriously, I have money.

I reach down for my wallet. I realize I'm not wearing a shirt. And I'm dirty, covered in something, I don't know what. The woman yells. Ron freaks out. Woman's on phone again. She's crying and screaming.

Hey hey hey!

Oh, I'm just reaching for my wallet . . .

I pat where the wallet should be. The twenty-five is there instead. Fuck.

Stay cool, bro!

I'm cool. We're all cool. I just need to rent a party bus
.

I'm waving the Raven around. I didn't mean to pull it out.

Siren. Fuck.

There's some kind of disconnect here, Ron. I know I look bad, but I really need to rent a bus.

Two cops run in. They keep a distance from me, but their Tasers are out. Taser prongs fly at me in slow motion. I hear the other cop talking in sixteen RPM.

We have another one. Covered in fecal matter.

The prongs hit me, bites like a snake. Flash of light. Toes-to-hair pain. Zero G. The floor is the sky, and I'm flying.

Ambulance. Looking at me, two guys, tattoos on their necks, shaved heads. Throat tight. Can't inhale.

Fuck, is he dead, bro?

Not sure. He's on a lot of shit.

He's got a lot of shit on him.

Ha. Yes. Fucking weird.

This is my first shit zombie. Have you seen one of these yet?

Yeah, got one on Sixth Street last week.

You hear we're getting hoses so we can just wash 'em on the spot?

Too little, too late. If the management fucks drove the wagons, they'd fucking have hoses already.

You got that Giants tickets hookup still?

Nah, I broke up with Amanda, and broke up with the hookup in the process.

Fuck. You couldn't wait till the season was over to dump her?

Ha, no. Brutal. Would be lying if I said it didn't cross my mind though. Oh shit.

What?

Check that. Seizure. Don't give him the normal shit though. It's been giving them heart attacks and killing them. Give him a shot of whiteout.

What's in this shit?

No idea. Management says to give 'em this stuff.

In a vein?

No. Do you ever pay attention in meetings? Like an EpiPen. Jam it in his heart. He's more or less OD'ing off whatever he took. Do it. NOW.

Fuck, okay, relax.

He brings what looks like a miniflashlight out, slings it over his head, and jams it into my chest. It's like a pot of boiling water in the face. My stomach swells; my ass fires like a cannon.

Whoa!

Oh god. Oh god.

What the fuck.

Open the back door.

I'm going to fucking hurl. Get an oxygen mask.

He's breathing okay.

For us, shit head, god.

HOSPITAL

WHITE. BRIGHT. FLUORESCENT
lights overhead. Like school. Ceiling tiles with tiny holes in a grid pattern.

Pain. All over. Pain. Headache that runs down my spine. Skin numb but pain on inside.

Can't move. Head moves. Arms don't. Legs don't.

Mouth filled with chalk and cigarette ash.

Fuck. I'm in the hospital. I'm strapped down.

Oh yes. Taser.

Is he awake?

I'm not sure. His eyes are open. Not responding completely. Did his results come back?

Yes. Cocaine, and a lot of other substances we can't identify. Experimental street garbage.

We really need to figure out what these guys are taking.

Fading. Numbness. Dry mouth. Ammonia. Sleep.

Wake. Aching. Constricted.

A blurry man comes into view.

Are you awake? Yes, but no. Still out of it, huh? Tasered, sedated, and coming down off whatever's in your system. Horrible combination. Look on the bright side: this is probably the worst you'll ever feel without being dead. Every day from now on, you'll feel better. Can't talk though? I'll come back later.

He leaves. Who was that? Nurse? Doctor? Cop?

Sinking. Lying in a bed of white mud. Sleep.

Moving. Rolling. Bed rolling.

Gut hurts. Feels like Tyson punched me twice. Fucking Taser.

Tongue thick. Open mouth. Air tastes like smoke. Close mouth. Tongue raw, swollen, sore. Teeth sharp.

Must ask where I'm going. Nothing comes out.

Easy there, son, you'll be okay.

Pinprick. Fire. Water. Ice cream. Sleep.

I'm in a cell of some kind. It's a simple room with a toilet and sink. Doesn't look like jail though. Something different.

I'm not strapped down anymore. Stiff. Hurts to move, compelled to not stay still.

Stand. Stumble. Catch myself against the wall. Feel tall.

Scream. Throat dry.

Get a drink from the sink. Cup the water to my hand. Good as drugs when you're this thirsty.

Hey, how you doin?

It's a raggedy voice. Harsh, gargling.

Who are you?

Janitor. We were all worried about you.

I see him, looking through the food slot. Yellow eyes with dark brown orbs in the center. Black guy.

Where am I?

SF General. Psych unit. Suicide watch.

I didn't try to kill myself.

I know. We all know. You was 5150 for sure. Smeared in shit and shirtless. 5150 for sure. Talking crazy that you wanted a party bus. 5150 for sure. Had a water gun on you filled with pee. 5150 for sure.

He laughs like I said something funny. Amuses himself, I guess. Water gun? What the fuck?

Stomach rumbles. Knife in the guts.

Detox is a bitch. The pain I can handle. It's the feeling of every bad piece of news you've ever heard coming to you at once. It's a sadness you soak in. It's lead-lined pajamas. It's a dull, heavy nothing matters. The worst is knowing it all goes away with the push of one button. More drugs, and this stops.

Okay, Death, come for me. I'm ready. From all the bullshit times I cheated you, I'm ready now. I won't fight. Just get me out of this mess and turn me off forever.

I wait. Twenty minutes. An hour? I can't tell the passage of time. Fuck. Bored. I'm here for days, or just a little while. I don't know anymore.

I wish it all would stop. This whole thing. The hustle of all this. It's like one of those Chinese finger trap things. The more I struggle to get out, the more I get stuck. I need to make not even the big score, just a good one and split. I have to get out of here. Start over. Go somewhere where no one knows me, some piece-of-shit small town where you can get by working at the gas station or the video store or whatever, some small town where they still have video stores, I guess.

I used to want to be something, something bigger than regular life. I thought I'd be a famous writer or a screenwriter or something. Not someone huge, you know, just cool. Like a B-list guy. I didn't even dream big. I just dreamed above average. Not a bestselling author but one with a dedicated following. Someone with name recognition.

I would travel to different cities and give readings, and it
wouldn't be packed but it would be full. In one of those places, a woman would be there who really understood me through the Rorschach tests that my books were. She'd really be able to see deep into me. Me. The real me.

Fuck. I was at least supposed to be good at something. I'm not. I'm good at taking care of MiniWhales, and there's no job for that anymore.

I was at least supposed to be cool. I think I was for a little while. I was a bit of a guy. A scenester. God help me, I was a fucking hipster, although I never would've admitted that at the time.

I was cool between the ages of about twenty-two and twenty-eight, and then it all slid into the shitslide of middle age, early. I got a job at a cool bar at twenty-two and suddenly I was cool. I got in free to cool shows. I met cool girls. I got to stay after hours at other cool bars. I lived in a cool party flat with cool roommates. Cool places with cool people doing cool things and fucking each other later in cool apartments. That's all being cool is—surrounding yourself with other people and having everyone agree that everything you're doing is fucking cool.

Six years of that shit. Being cool. That bar went out of business, and when I tried to get more work, everything was DJs and shit. No more rock clubs. No more being cool.

Young people didn't want bands anymore; they wanted a jackass with a box of fucking records. Not even good music. I went to an '80s night, thinking it would be the good tracks of punk and new wave and what used to be called college rock and then became alternative rock in the next decade.

Washed up at twenty-eight. Done. I kept trying, though. One bullshit gig after another, and every year I got further away from
cool. My thirties? Forget it. I hated what was cool. I stopped going to places other people liked. If it got too popular, fuck it.

My cool friends bailed out. They got married, had ironic weddings, and had kids and named them Damien or Exene, or they went with vintage names like Ezekiel and Malachi. Now every grade school is full of Zacks and no one is named John or Dave anymore and every PTA meeting is full of parents with full sleeve tattoos and retro haircuts. Funny, all those fuckers who played poor until it came time to buy a house, and then they had money from somewhere, they had a kid and bought a Subaru Outback, they bought a house in Bernal or Glen Park and talked about equity and interest rates like they used to talk about record labels.

Some died and some became homeless; others disappeared into the chaos, filling the state prisons and haunting the basements of their relatives' houses. They're the junkies on Capp Street and the dead-eyed bums in the Civic Center. They're the zombies on Jones Street and the creeping undead of San Pablo Avenue. They're annoyances and smells and things in the way of rich people walking down the sidewalk. They made poor neighborhoods interesting, so the wealthy moved in, and now they're the scourge of the same streets. They're John and Jane Does that are found in ditches and pulled out of lakes. They're the donated cadavers for medical students, cremated by the state, and the only club they'll ever be in is the potter's field.