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Frankenstein In Central Square (Part Four)

Posted by Klaus


Frankenstein yearns for a shot of heroin. He wants to stop thinking just for a few hours. An eternity of thoughtlessness would be even better, he thinks, and he makes a croaking sound. This is the way he laughs.
A dwarf with an overly large head scurries past him and disappears into the coffeehouse. Sirens scream, the sound of engines is deafening, second-hand exhaust fouls his nostrils as the monster moves down the walk past the Pill Hardware store. He stands in front of the 1369.
He peers inside. There are four clocks on the wall but he is trapped in a box of space and time. The aisle between the tables is extremely narrow. As he opens the door the dwarf pushes past him on the way out. Ar Lain Ta stands in front of a cluttered bulletin board counting a handful of bills. He sees the creature and grins. The Asian has a small diamond embedded in each of his front teeth. They flash. His fingernails are so long they begin to curl.
“Ahhh,” one monster says to another as Ar Lain Ta counts the crumpled leaves of U.S. currency. Leaves in season.
A few people look up as the Frankenstein enters. Their eyes flick about then they turn back to their computers, their coffee & conversation, back to their innermost thoughts.
The Frankenstein says, “You better have enough for me.”
“There will never be enough for you,” replies Ar Lain Ta, and he throws his head back as his body shudders with laughter.
“You,” the creature snarls as he reaches out for the neck of the smaller oriental man.
Ar Lain Ta pulls back quickly, sparks shoot from his eye. “Just a joke big man.” is what he says.
“The only joke in my world,” says the Frankenstein, “is the reality of existence. I have enough money to buy all the heroin you have. Money means nothing. Dope will get me through times of no money better than money will get me through times of no dope.
“Ar Lain Ta, you one-eyed demon, you were right. There will never be enough heroin for me. When I first came to be, when I first sensed the world it was warm, the leaves rustled as music in my ears and the birds, the birds sang! This was everything to my resurrected senses. Had I known then what I have come to know, I should have screamed to all the impotent gods to kill me.
“I traveled to the North to seek my death in fire and ice. G-d itself would not have me. I have been driven by cursed existence to hide in the dimmest dirty streets amongst the homeless, people driven out of civilization by the lack of compassion, by the coldness of the human species. No Arctic fury can compare to a world which diminishes love.
“I, who can master any man, am the master of nothingness. Ugly, lonely and cold from lack of love alone. I seek the illusory balm of the opiates because even God turns me away from death. Like the homeless man, there are no doorways for me to enter.”
“Come to the back of the coffeehouse,” says Ar Lain Ta to the monster. “The Troll has a table reserved for us.”
As they shuffle down the narrow aisle, Ar Lain Ta passes Frankenstein a bundle of packets with a bat stamped upon each bag.

* * *

The Rogue races down Mass Avenue. She feels a sense of urgency, looks at all the people sitting at tables in front of the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. She knows none of them see anything, snaps her fingers and she is opening the door of the 1369 in Central Square.
She sees a giant figure dragging its left leg as it disappears by itself into the bathroom at the back of the coffeehouse. Ar Lain Ta spots her instantly and knows why she is there. Puffs of smoke fly from underneath his eye patch and his right eye burns like a star. He stands in the aisle to block her.
Fear crackles through her like the lines from a struck safety glass window. The Rogue sees the bathroom door closing behind the creature. She smiles at her terror, asks her Father for help, and then she snaps her fingers.

Frankenstein In Central Square (Part Three)

Posted by Klaus


(Rogue created by Don DiVecchio in “The Zen of Fingersnapping”)

She runs so fast. Her brown shimmering hair sprays its kinks out behind her in the wake of her own wind.
Rogue has never felt so late before. Time slips away. She thinks, it is almost too late. And then she breaks out in laughter and the bubbles of it tickle her cheeks as she runs into it.
All I have to do is snap my fingers, she thinks, and I will be there. Why am I running?
Sometimes she forgets who she is, what she can do. She always tries to forget what she was created to do. She just changed her mind. Who could fault her for that?

* * *

Ar Lain Ta sits with the Troll and Moshe Dean. His right eye is glowing, small wisps of smoke drift out from underneath the patch over the socket where his other eye was. He tells one of his many stories while Moshe Dean, with his eyes closed, sinks his thumb into his coffee. The Troll appears attentive, yet one never knows.
“The grasshoppers in Montana have arrived at an invincible strategy to employ against their predators,” says Ar Lain Ta. He grins. “They eat wafer-ash leaves and, when attacked by the anole lizards that would feed on them, they vomit all over themselves. When the anole lizard tastes their vile effluent, they spit the grasshoppers out whole.”
Ar Lain Ta laughs. “Isn’t that a novel self-defense? Military applications of this strategy hardly seem likely, eh? Unless the military were to take junkies and use them as — ah, ha ha, I don’t think so.
“Eh Troll, what do you think?”
“I don’t like to think. The substance of my mind is distressing,” replies the Troll.

“Moshe Dean, how about you? What do you think?”
Moshe Dean opens his eyes to bare slits, sees that his thumb is in his coffee. He pulls it out casually, looks around the cafe, takes a sip of his coffee and then closes his eyes again. His head sags down towards the table.
Ar Lain Ta laughs. “Watch this,” he says, pointing at Moshe Dean.
“Moshe, I have the new batch of dope. They call it Bacardi and it’s better than the Butter. Want a bag?”
Moshe’s head picks right up, his eyes pop open. The Troll and Ar Lain Ta burst out laughing.

* * *

The black man with multiple sclerosis eating his muscles at a faster and faster rate leans on his metal crutches and shakes his cup. Then he stops all movement when the creature limps by. Step, drag.
Their eyes lock.
Misery, isolation, hopelessness, the sickness pours from the monstrous being’s eyes. The crippled black man who is called Donald reaches a hand out slowly and places it on the creature’s arm. The Frankenstein stops.
“Is there anything I can do?” The beggar’s voice cuts into the hazardous waste of the soul of the beast. The Rorshach knots of pain on the Frankenstein’s face cease movement for the first time in decades.
“You,” a guttural growl spills out of the twisted throat, ” you do not recoil from the horror I am?”
“Your eyes. Your eyes are like the ones I see in the mirror when I care to look.” The black man speaks in a whisper, his throat torn by miles of tobacco smoke, his larynx as scarred as Frankenstein’s face.
Tears rise, blow out of the monster’s eyes as if driven by a hurricane wind, splatter on Donald’s face. The explosion of tears chases the knots of pain from the face of the creature.
“There is nothing anyone can do,” the creature replies. “Even G-d cannot touch me for I was built by a man, created in a dark laboratory on a black night.”
Donald looks directly into the monster’s tears. “Today is your day. She is coming just for you.”
“Who?” the Frankenstein asks. “What are you talking about?”
Donald turns away from the grotesque giant and begins shaking his cup rhythmically. He grins. Someone places a ten dollar bill in his cup, almost bumps into the Frankenstein, moves around him as if he were nothing but a tree standing in the center of the sidewalk.
The creature remains still for a junkie’s moment, then he moves away. He thinks he saw Ar Lain Ta enter the 1369 coffee shop a few moments ago. He looks back at the crippled beggar and knows something is wrong in the world when men who so obviously need help have to beg for it.

Frankenstein In Central Square (Part One & Two)

Posted by Klaus


They call me the Troll. I’m sitting here in the 1369 Coffee House on Mass Ave in Central Square. My guts feel a bit ropey. I ran out of junk a few hours ago and sent Moshe Dean out to find Ar Lain Ta. I’m so down that I’m contemplating rolling across the street and going into the Can Tab Lounge for a drink.

That’s real depression. I hate the alcohol buzz so much that when I think of drinking, what it really means is that I am suicidal. In the dark.

When the dark comes it can come so quick that it takes your breath away. Which is the whole objective around what comes next. When it comes like that I really want to get some good dope.

Very good dope. Maybe some junk that will kick in the dreaming dark.

Overdose. If I’m lucky, but how many junkies are really lucky, over the news there will be a warning, a public announcement of sorts. It will say “In South Boston today four heroin addicts were found dead, the needle still inserted in their arms. 19 other heroin addicts were treated at various local hospitals for overdose. Reports are still coming in. All addicts are warned not to buy or shoot the bag stamped with the name “Butter” due to the lethal nature of its contents. It is estimated to be close to 90% pure.”

Which translates — to any serious junkie (and what junkie isn’t) — go get it boys and girls, it’s the best shit in town.

And we do.

Like grease on a mission we slither out of the crashpads, the suburban candy-lands where we live with our denial-coated parents who sit glued to the tv (maybe they’re both at aerobics class), from the luxury apartments paid for by trust-funds or our dotty.com companies. Maybe we leave our wives(husbands) or boyfriends(girlfriends to sell the coke or weed that pays for our dope habits. We creep out of our SRO’s, those cockroach-laden hideaways made possible by twinkle-toothed slumlords, the wet and dry shelters, the Salvation Army (maybe we need a fix just to get through their God-awful religion classes that they jam down our bile-coated throats as the price of a cot and a hot), and all the other castle-keeps we stay in — and like a skulk of foxes we skitter into South Boston looking for the final fix.

The overdose. It can come gentle, just a greying around the edges of the picture frame of reality, a closing circle of grey just like the cheap fade-out of a grade D celluloid made for the loops in a handjob saloon disguised with the name — Smitty’s Adult Movies, Books, and Toys XXXX.

Maybe you press the plunger down on the overused disposable (designed for one use then throwaway) (instead we are the throwaways, the unwanted children, the homeless, PTSD-Schizo-Bipolar-ADD-Sad beyond depression-Can’t fit in anywhere-Can fit in but who wants to-you fit the category, we’ll fill it) we were pressing the plunger down — the barrel of the syringe is filled with the killer dope and you (we) feel the hoof of a powerful hors thump you (us) in the chest and then — the lights go out.

Maybe the scenario is like this: you (we) feel so good, the rush is coming on right now. We pull a cigarette out of the pack, put a flame to the end of it and think — as you suck the smoke in to your blackened lungs — wow. For a change I got a decent bag, maybe my luck (hard luck junkie) is changing, you say to yourself(no one else is listening anyway). You (I mean you) take a drag and as we (all together now) slip the belt off our arm, our knees begin to bend, then buckle and we fall to the floor like a boned bag of water. The cigarette is still burning. It is still between the fingers. If we were still conscious we (you) might feel it blistering the skin.

On the floor now. Shallow breathing, maybe our eyes are open (no lights on). A short time ago we scored a burger from McDonalds and now we aspirate it into our mouths, take another shallow breath and suck the burger (McDonald’s finest) into our windpipe.

Maybe things aren’t going this well for you. For a junkie there are always glitches. Like maybe someone called 911 and they are shooting you up with Narcane. Instant withdrawal. Ugh.

I don’t want to even think about that. Let’s chat about something pleasant. Oh, here comes Reverend Love. “Want a coffee?

Cream, no sugar, right?”

He sits down. I ask him, “What’s up?”

He says, “Get a camera.” Then he picks up his coffee, rises from the seat, and walks away with a smile on his face.

Suddenly the back door opens and Moshe Dean slips in. He hands me two packets stamped “Butter.” Then he says, “That’s all for now. Ar Lain Ta is coming here with the rest.”

I wonder why Ar Lain Ta is coming as I roll into the ladies room to shoot up. As I close the door I see Moshe Dean enter the men’s room. Little did I know that I was soon to meet one of the most misunderstood men of all time.

At the same moment the needle chased my fleeing vein to a showdown on the Erie railroad running down my forearm the monster was crossing the Charles River on a train.

Not a one of us, me, Moshe Dean, Ar Lain Ta, nor the monster knew what was in store for us on this fateful day. But the Rogue — ah, but we’ll get to that, won’t we?

Frankenstein stared out at the Charles River as the Red Line train headed toward Cambridge. With the exception of his left leg his entire body was wracked with pain. It was a sad fact of old age. Unfortunately, there would be no permanent relief brought about by death. God had no control over him. He was a built better product, made to last forever by a madman.

He knew Ar Lain Ta was heading towards the 1369 Coffee House in Central Square. Only the soothing balm of the opiates stilled the stabbing pains that circulated through his scarred body. Frankenstein scratched the scar looping around his neck in the area just below his Adam’s apple.

The old woman sitting across from him, the one clutching her tattered shopping bag stared openly at him. This was not unusual. He was 6′ 5″ on a good day. On the bad ones he was much shorter. Knots of pain whorled his face, appearing to move about, shifting from his cheek to his chin, down to his neck just above the jagged scar he scratched, then up again. At least three of these dark Rorschach blots moved across his facial area at any given time; usually there were as many as five.

At times, during the summer, Frankenstein would take off his shirt and make his way along the asphalt parkway by the Charles, dragging his left leg in an eerie shuffle. People would move away from him quickly, either averting their eyes or staring boorishly at the horrid movement taking place across his back and chest area.

Lines where he had been connected together crisscrossed his body. The tattoo of a demon with the horns of a bull, one eye located in the center of its forehead and a twisted mouth that leaked red droplets of blood with the body of what appeared to be a small headless dog in its hand was the final insult visually hurled at anyone who looked.

Needless to say, with all this to look at one might never notice the needlemarks above the veins on both his arms.

His grotesque body which, unfortunately for Frankenstein, housed a mind possessed of a unique romantic, an idealistic poet and philospher which could not help to realize how alienated and separate from the rest of the world he was had, from nine decades of constant opiate consumption worked itself up into a “jones” which, were it to leap from his body all of a sudden and take the shape of a monkey it could pluck King Kong from the side of the Empire State Building like that great ape was a toy. In other words, old Frankenstein was one strung-out dude.

The train halted and the computer voice, with a proper mid-western accent, announced, “Central Square.”

Frankenstein rose and lurched toward the open door, praying that the escalator was still working. He didn’t know if he could handle the stench of urine in the elevator. He pushed through the turnstile. At least, he thought, I don’t stand out in Central Square. There are so many monsters here that I am just one more freak in the show.

The hum of the escalator was music to his cauliflower ears.

The Troll sat at the table with one eye closed. He watched Moshe Dean’s head bob up and down like a flower in a gentle wind. The smell of a million opium poppies whacked his gnarled nose and he turned his head as Ar Lain Ta slipped in the front door of the coffee house. No one else was aware of his entrance except for two other junkies, a man and a woman who sat midway against the wall. Both of them, once devout Catholics, made the sign of the cross.

Ar Lain Ta nodded to the Troll. The Troll nodded back.

At this moment, outside on the street, the Frankenstein was dragging his left leg past the Spare Change vendor in front of the Fleet Bank. The vendor fell silent as the creature passed him. Their eyes met. Both of them simultaneously nodded to each other, a gesture of respect, acknowledging the fact they were both related. Two dark holes in close proximity to each other in the infinite night.

The Love of Nadia Chance

Posted by Klaus


It begins again. The voices of the women singing in the background as the morphine kicks in. I can feel the first wave now. The Troll is in the kitchen with Ron de Veux and there is a knock at the door of his subterranean apartment.

The evening has been particularly disturbing. I have been nursing the last few milligrams of the drug and have not been able to drown out the piercing cries of the tenants above me. In between the cries I hear the frantic fluttering of wings. Angels. The other junkies believe the Troll when he says they are angels. I’m not quite sure but the fluttering of the wings always gets to me. I can hear those wings even in the deepest junk nod.

I answer the door and it is Nadia Chance. She kisses me on the lips, her breath is musky and heavy reeking of promises kept and hearts broken. She holds up her hand and there is a vial in it.

Samuel, the pharmacist who is totally taken by her, is her supplier of morphine. The price of hot whispers and a burning mouth that makes him wake shuddering in the night is one-hundred tablets of 15mg morphine, three times a week. One day it will cost him his license and his frigid wife. Then Nadia’s mouth will cool, his store will close and his wife will sue him for what is left. Instead of sucking on Nadia’s open places he will place his double-shot .38 into his mouth and spray the bathroom wall with blood and brains. But this is yet to come.

One night, during yen sleep, before Nadia had even met Samuel, the Troll had one of his dreams. When he awoke he asked Nadia to go to the pharmacy on the corner of 88th Street and Broadway. She had asked why she was to do this and the Troll just smiled and said

“Hurry. Just go.”

And she did. Four hours later she returned with pinned eyes and a bottle of morphine tablets, enough to fix every junkie in the apartment. After we had all fixed the Troll spun the tale of Samuel and Nadia. At the close of the story, when Samuel lay dead in the blood spattered bathroom, the Troll admitted that it was only a dream.

After hearing the tale Nadia went out walking the streets of the city and did not return until the sun was rising. She immediately swallowed three tabs and shot two of them. Then she made coffee and stared at the basement window for a few hours. All the basement windows are curtained and beneath the curtains the glass has been painted black.

She has been seeing Samuel regularly for seven months.

My hand shakes with sickness as I try to fix and Nadia reaches over and gently takes the hypodermic from my hand. I hold the belt tight around my arm and she places the needle directly over the scab from my last shot and taps it in. Blood spot at the bottom. She nudges the plunger back and my red life flows into the barrel. Slowly she slips the plunger to the bottom of the syringe and I disappear into myself.

I look up at her as she kisses my forehead.

There is a knock at the door.

I function as the gatekeeper and open the door. Sunken eyes are the first thing I see, dark with night that seeps into my own and I feel the tears rush to the back of my eyewall. He has a forehead with cavernous furrows yet his cheeks are smooth and appear to have no hair at all on them. His lips are soft and inviting and look ever-so-kissed. Above his lip, just below his nose, the normal ridges of the upper lip are absent, just a smooth track from one side of his mouth to the other.

I recall a tale that my mother told me. It was an old fable about the child in the womb. She said that we, as unborn, contain all the knowledge of our past and future lives within us as we rock in the sea of salt, the ocean of time connecting us to all things inside our mother. Then, in the few moments before we are born, an angel visits us in the womb, whispers into our ears and then says, “sshhh” as it presses a finger of heat onto our upper lip below the nose. We forget everything with that touch but the impression of that finger never leaves us. That is why we all have the indentation on our upper lip. It is the fingerprint of an angel of mercy. We are born clear, more pure than freshly falling snow.

Never before in my life had I seen anyone without that indent on the lip.

“May I come in and sit? I just need to talk to someone.”

I hadn’t realized that Nadia was with me at the door. She reaches out and takes his hand. He almost smiles as she guides him in to a small table surrounded by chairs in one corner of the great room.

“Sit. All are welcome here. Can I offer you something to wash the weight from your spirit?”

“No thank you. I don’t believe that you have anything strong enough to do that here.”

Nadia sits down near him but does not respond. I sit in another chair by the table but move it back slightly into the shadow. A candle is burning on the table and the wax spills over onto the dark whorled wood. There are many cigarette burns on the table. There is also a ceramic ash tray with four small hands, one on each corner holding it up, and a map of the world intricately painted as if the world was flat in the center of it with the oceans spilling out onto the cigarette rests. It sits embedded in old wax.

The man is wearing a heavy dark raincoat made out of a cloth of some type and I notice that his back is slightly hunched beneath the coat. The illusion that this creates makes it seem as if his shoulders were rising above themselves.

As Nadia crosses her legs the skirt she is wearing slips open slightly. He does not seem to notice and begins speaking again.

“I am waiting for my father. He will come very soon and then I will be gone.”

“Has it been a long time since you’ve seen him?” asked Nadia.

He almost smiles again. “Yes, quite some time. If I did not know how this meeting would go, it would be better for me. My conversation with you was the only thing that was unclear. I knew that it would take place but the content of it was a mystery to me.”

I want to ask how he knew how the meeting with his father would go but it is as if my lips had a seal upon them and cannot open. I realize that I am only there to observe and record these events in my memory so they might be written at some future time.

At that moment Nadia chuckled and put her face very close to his. He did not move away and his nostrils flared out and he breathed in deeply.

“Your scent is startlingly pleasant. I remember it in my dreams when I can sleep.”

“You like the way I smell,” said Nadia and it was not a question.

Then she rises slowly and takes his hand. I watch them walk together to the back room and close the door. Alone again, I take out two tabs of morphine and fix. My hand does not shake this time. After rinsing the hype I let it rest in the glass of water and my eyelids drop over my eyes. The dreams come.

And go.

Someone taps my shoulder. Nadia.

“He is sleeping,” she says. And then she tells me his story.

I don’t know how long I listened, how long she spoke, but afterwards I felt very tired, as if I had been awake for days, and very sad, as if someone very close to me was about to die.

Then he, she called him Simon, walked back into the room, shrugging his coat over what looked like a pair of large grey wings.

Simon placed his hands on her shoulders and spoke.

“There is nothing I can do for Samuel. I will look after him when he comes to us. The child will not be his. It will be from us, from tonight. My father does not know everything for I did not know what was to take place here. You are a good woman. One day you will leave here and your name will be different. I cannot tell you when or how this will come to pass for it would change everything.”

Nadia cries and the tears run down her cheeks. He takes his finger and catches one of the tears and lifts it to his lips. Then he places his finger on the indentation above her lip and she closes her eyes. She sleeps.

Simon looks at me. Suddenly there is a great wind howling in my ears.

“My father is coming. I am out of time.”

Then he reaches out to touch my lip but I pull back. He pauses, then the furrows in his forehead deepen.

He says, “Memories are made of this.”

The next thing I know is that I am very sick, dope-sick like I was 48 hours without a fix and the wind is just outside the door. I hear the door open; I hear it close.

I reach for my stash. My hands are shaking. Nadia will not help me this time. I let her sleep.

A door opens behind me and the Troll and Ron de Veux come out of the kitchen. I am fixing. Ron scratches her crotch and the Troll wipes some spittle from his chin and asks,

“Did a storm pass this way?”

I nod.

“I thought so,” said the Troll.

The Vendor

Posted by Klaus


Upon reading “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” by James Agee, the thought struck me that you, the reader, have truly so little understanding of the people you purchase this paper, Spare Change News, from, standing outside in frigid weather, hot weather, rainy weather, stormy weather, dancing back and forth to keep our feet from freezing, and not even realizing when frost-bite has taken it’s toll on certain bodily extremities, including the nose.

I speak as one of those folks who came out to Central Square and stood on the corner of Tremont Street and Massachusetts Avenue, on Monday through Friday from 7am to 5:30pm, with only a brief bathroom break, eating my lunch as I sat on the stone ledge of the bank I sold the paper in front of, working as I ate.

From time to time, a person would look at me and say, “why don’t you get a job?” and I would politely reply, “if you do not think this is a job, why don’t you try standing out here for 8 or more hours a day selling a product?” On occasion, the person would stop and purchase a paper, some of them becoming regular customers.

These Vendors, and I include myself, go out each day and have no idea whether they will make $10 or $45 as a days pay but, as we are, we accept what we must do to make an honest living. We are driven by our desire to make money so we may eat, obtain clothing suitable to the job we work and, most importantly, put together enough American Greenbacks so we can find a place to live that, for the moment, we can call our own.

Remembering well some of the folks who have appreciated my writing and purchased the paper from me; still they contact me to ask what I have written and because I have stores of written word I can cobble together a book of prose and/or poetry that will titillate their consciousness and it pleases me that they recall this shattered man who stood on the corner on days so cold that, on one of them, my nose exploded from frost-bite.

This kind customer said, “Marc, whatever is wrong with your nose; it’s twice the size and has frozen blood all over it?” I stood astounded as she said this to me because I was so cold that I did not feel my nose on my face and when I reached up to touch it, my customer stopped my hand and said, “no, don’t hurt it more,” and took me into the 1369 Coffee Haus down the street, buying me coffee and telling me not to go back out in that frigid weather. Respecting her judgment and being utterly shocked when I peered into the bathroom mirror and did not recognize my face.

My brothers and sisters who are still out selling in the cold, and this winter has been particularly bitter; my heart goes out to them for I am them despite the fact that the woman, Mary Esther, who loves me so, makes it possible for me to earn money without standing in the cold.

But what brought me to this state of chronic homelessness in the past; what insidious affliction took me, a child of middle class means, who by all rights should have completed university study and become an associate professor of literature; how could this have happened. The Sickness, and I capitalize this on purpose, was brought about by the way I was walked into the world by those who claimed to love me, and possibly did, but were cursed by those who beat their world views into fractured prisms; it was their parents indeed, and even before them.

Taught to hate myself in my formative years, set up to failure and twisted my mentality where only drugs, in the shape of opiates could bring my Spirit peace; as I grew out of my teen-age years the Sickness wrapped its tight hands around the throat of my being and throttled me until I found that I no longer fit in the world as a human being; cast out by my own mind until the street corner was my home.

The street corner became my office where I held court with other broken beings but the paper I sold, Spare Change News, was the beginning of the cure that broke through my Illness and where I found true peace. Those of you who passed me money throughout the day and gave me kind words to take with me, I thank you and make this promise: I shall not return. When you see the men and women who sell this paper, who work hard under difficult times and weathers, give them more than money because they are searching for their own true God.

The Past, The Present, The Future of Prohibition

Posted by Klaus


I’m driving the red pickup truck through the snow. It swirls around and it is so cold that it just blows off the road like dust. Sooner or later I know it will start to stick but I don’t care. I’m sick. That’s an understatement. Tears spill from my eyes and my nose is running.

I don’t know if it is because I am crying or just afraid of everything. My wife Sascha and my fair-weather friend Richie are in the truck and we’re all in bad company. My stomach is cramping from the lack of heroin but that’s just the way things are.

No one in their right mind should be on the road in this storm. On the radio they are telling everyone to stay home and there are only fools, police & junkies on the road right now. We ride the back highways from New Hampshire heading for the Great Brook Valley Projects in Worcester. It takes an hour on a good day doing about 75 miles an hour but today it will take an hour and one-half.

I want to turn the truck around and just go home because I’m sick and scared. I lost my license to drive last year in November; just about the same time of year it is now. Thanksgiving is right around the corner but that doesn’t mean much to Sascha or me right now.

The storm rages, the radio is blasting, the truck holds the road well weighted down with sand bags in the back. No one speaks. There is nothing more miserable than a truck full of sick junkies.

We hit the main highway now, Interstate 290, and within twenty minutes we are coming down the exit ramp by Great Brook Valley. The road is slippery now and I’m trying to use caution, but God, I’m in such a hurry. I just want to get well and feel that heroin coursing through my veins.

It won’t be long now. I know the snow won’t keep the dealers in; their sickness drives them to work too. I’m thinking that on the way back Sascha will fix up my hit and bang my big vein while I drive. No sense stopping anywhere. The bathroom we used to use in the McDonalds is too dangerous and you can’t just sit still on a side road. It’s much too dangerous.

There are only two roads into the Great Brook Valley Projects. You’d think they could keep the dope out if they tried but that would put them out of work. Ever since Prohibition for alcohol ended the police switched jobs. This is the new prohibition and it’s 1987 and nothing has changed.

The roads in the Valley are snow-covered and I slow a little but not too much and then all of a sudden this dumb cat who wasn’t looking opens his car door right into my path and I try the brakes but I’m losing control and I take his door right off.

“Jesus”, Richie says, “we have to stop.” But I see the dope man just up the road and we’re holding needles and hypodermics so if we stop we’re screwed anyway. I say we go for it and pull right up to the guy with my hand out the window holding five fingers up with the money showing.

The dealer waves to a little kid and the kid comes running over and hands him the dope—he hands it to me and I give him the money and we take off in the big red pickup with a smashed right fender.

Sascha says, “Go, go, go” and I do, whipping out the other road to get free from the Projects. Two blocks away I see a shopping center and I don’t want to wait anymore. I pull in between two cars and we all get out our gear and pour water and there are three spoons cooking with Bic lighters filled with dope and a bit of a cigarette filter to draw up the stuff.

And then it happens. There are blue lights all around us and I whip up my sleeve to shoot before they can grab me because there’s nothing worse than going into the holding cell dope-sick.

But I’ve run out of time and they’re on us like blue pit bulls—Richie got his shot in and I drop mine still full and we have one extra bag that will be the coup de grace.

They pull me out of the truck and slam me against it while they use those nasty plastic handcuffs and crank them tight. My hands will be numb from blood loss and we’re all down for the count.

I can’t believe that guy opened his door right in front of me but that’s a whole different story and this is just a bad memory now. It’s November of 2013 and everything has changed.

I’m coming out of a meeting, and I’m talking to a friend of mine who works Worcester as a Probation Officer. Just for the heck of it I ask him about Great Brook Valley Projects. He says, “It’s still the same. People coming in and out to cop and now they are all young white kids. It’s hard to believe that nothing has changed but, for me, it’s just job security.” And I laugh. Because I can laugh now; the old days are just nightmares and stories to tell.

I’ve been abstinent a long time and instead of living on the streets, where I wound up after doing some time in prison, I’m happily married and I treat my illness with meetings, a social worker and an excellent psycho pharmacologist who prescribes Suboxone for me.

I’m a member of the Board of Directors of the Spare Change News, the paper I sold when I was on the streets—my first honest job that helped me straighten out my life. One of the other Board members, Bob Woodbury, sent me an article about Suboxone from the New York Times that focused on much of the negatives about the psychiatric medication and he had this to say, “Suboxone (like methadone) is a miracle drug for people who want to get off heroin or other opiates — and, like methadone, it’s subject to abuse by physicians looking for a buck and addicts looking for money or a high.

I think the [date] “New York Times” article takes the therapeutic benefits for granted (limited news value there), and focuses on the abuses. But I read the message not as “this therapy is bad” but “we should manage distribution of this potent drug better” — a concern I believe you’d agree with.”

I did agree, to a point, but I had this to say,” I think we should manage all potent drugs better–including alcohol.  I don’t know if you saw the movie Traffic, based on a European series called Traffik, but you see all these hotshots of the drug war drinking like crazy while their children do drugs.  And everything goes bad–except for one Mexican cop who sets up a deal with America behind the scenes–a great actor named Benicio Del Toro–and makes it work for his people.  The U.S. drug czar is Michael Douglas who always has a drink in his hand–while his daughter gets hooked on chasing the dragon(smoking heroin).  Great movie.

Prohibition is still with us–and it’s getting worse all the time. They are even selling drugs on the internet on sites like Ebay—one of them is called The Silk Road, which was shut down for a short time when one of it’s founders was arrested for conspiracy to murder. But that’s the rarity when it comes to the internet. Opiates, steroid, and other drugs are available and one one site goes down, others go up.

I’m just glad that I’m treating my illness and I don’t have to be afraid anymore.

Where The Highways End

Posted by Klaus


Way back, in the way back of the late late 1800’s, the first automobiles rolled down the dirt roads. The age of the combustion engine that took us places had been birthed. If we knew now what we didn’t know then, would we have proceeded to build the highways and byways of the rough beast?

At first there were just byways, and when people saw an automobile, they all gathered around in wonder. Some laughed. Some envied and wanted one for themselves. After all, the question of exhaust didn’t exist. Exhaust was likened to a horse farting after it dropped a load on the dirt roadway.

Little by little, more and more people, mostly the rich, bought the horseless carriage and the commoners did envy them; those that weren’t laughing. There was the old cartoon where the wagon drawn by the horse pulled up to the broken down automobile and said, “Get a horse.”

But the die was cast. Henry Ford, master of the production line, figured out a way to build cars so that even common working folk could buy them. Ford went forth and did this and soon, people were clamoring for roads that would be worthy for their horseless carriages, the beasts with the horses under the hood; the beast that never shit but farted into the atmosphere non-stop.

100 years might seem like a long time to the average human being, who lives less than that, unless they are lucky or kissed by genetic qualities that grant them longevity. But just one century later, our country was filled with roadways and everyone, but a few, had an automobile, or maybe two or three per family.

When I was in Livingston High School back in 1962, the school even had a student parking lot and everyone, barring a few, yearned to turn 17 years of age so they could get the magic ticket that would allow them to drive. I went from bicycles to hitchhiking rides, to owning my first car, which was a big eight-cylinder Plymouth Belvidere flip-top, with the unique gimmick of a push-button transmission.

That gimmick didn’t last too long. It was too easy to blow the tranny and many folks did. I wasn’t one of them though. What happened to me was, the linkage from the gas pedal to the carburetor got stuck, and down the road I raced, popping the neutral button when I wanted to slow down, and it was the engine that blew instead.

I used to call myself, when it came to cars, “a final owner”, because when I possessed it, I was the last one to have it before it went to the junkyard. Gasoline was 29 cents a gallon, not much more than the price of a pack of cigarettes from the smoke machine; put a quarter in and you get a pack of Lucky Strikes with two pennies taped to the pack for change. Life was different then.

We even went cruising for fun, down the highways and the byways. Of course, the byways were rapidly turning into four lane roads. In California, the roads were sometimes twelve lanes wide and filled with cars, from stem to stern. At rush hour, when people were going to work and back, the highways turned into giant parking lots because there were just too many cars.

Of course, humanity didn’t get the picture yet. If 100,000 horses let out an occasional fart before it dropped a load, it couldn’t compare to millions and millions of cars with exhaust pipes that never stopped pushing carbons. It’s not pleasant to stick your nose in an exhaust pipe and only a few dumb kids used to do it for kicks and then they would fall to the ground with a bunch of dead brain cells. Humans are like that.

Now I want to paint a picture for you. Look around at all the cars in your city. Let’s take Boston, because I live in the Boston area, and we have a lot of highways that turn into parking lots during rush hour. While the cars are sitting still, with their passengers listening to music or talk talk radio, the cars, trucks & buses never stop farting carbon exhaust into the air.

Imagine, if you will, if you could fuse all the exhaust pipes in the Boston area into one big pipe—how big would that pipe be? I’ll bet you’ll have trouble visualizing it, because, as smart as we think we have become, our minds have certain limitations. Now take that exhaust pipe, Boston’s pipe, and fuse it with all the exhaust pipes of all the cities in the world. That’s mind boggling, isn’t it? And they only stop farting when they’re shut down, and there are always cars, buses, & trucks that are running.

I don’t know how many combustion vehicles there are but it appears that there are enough running that our atmosphere is changing and the Earth is being altered. Ice caps are melting, storms are increasing in intensity, and the shorelines are being inundated with water. Why, even the subways of New York City, during a hurricane named Sandy, were flooded with water.

The New Jersey shoreline has retreated as the ocean is creeping up on us too. Who could have imagined that a few horseless carriages could have multiplied like rats in a city all over the world and changed our entire ecological structure? And it’s still coming folks.

There are those that say that Miami, Florida will be underwater by the year 2100 and, even if we changed our game plan, the ocean is already in motion and it’s too late to stop it. Most of Florida could be underwater all the way to Orlando. That would make Disneyland the beach—is that advantageous?

Half of Boston could be underwater by the year 2100, according to a whole bunch of climatologists. If that’s the case for Boston, how about New Orleans? It’d be like Venice, I guess.

But we like to drive, even though it’s not fun anymore. It’s just a way of getting from one place to another. In the house that I live in there are three cars in the driveway, one per person. But I’d rather ride my bicycle and I hope that, as I age into my late 60’s, I am able to continue doing that.

The one thing I don’t know, well among many things I don’t know really, is, in the near future, where will the highways end? Only the Duckboats can drive off the end of the highways into the water. Our children’s children will stand where the highways run into the ocean and they’ll wonder why we didn’t understand what we were doing. Then, they’ll get on their bicycles and ride back into what’s left.

Two Wheels Up

Posted by Klaus


I was late to Graduation, just like I was late for everything. Flying down the right hand lane on South Livingston Avenue, doing close to 90 miles an hour with my 1958 Plymouth Belvidere convertible top down when I heard a police car hit the wailers and saw the lights in my rear view mirror.

I pulled over and Henry Blocker, one of the few police I had respect for, strolled over to the car and he laughed when he saw me in the Graduation gown. It didn’t stop him from giving me a ticket. But, like my Diploma, I earned the ticket.

That was how my post-high school life began. I was already hooked on opiates and I hadn’t even smoked pot yet. Life has it’s twists and turns and takes us to many places we thought we’d never get to, but sooner or later, like a good friend of mine said to me, “Marc, if you keep heading in that direction you’re going to get where you’re going.” And I did.

Then I learned how to ride a motorcycle and all bets were off. I hung with a wild crowd, about 30 of us riding together. My first motorcycle was a BSA 441 one-lunger and the vibrations were so intense that about every few months my license plate would shatter. I was constantly tightening nuts and bolts and my kidneys, between the vibrations and the drugs, took a real beating.

My next bike was a 750cc Kawasaki, a 1979, back when they still had kick-starts. This was a real road bike and I was lucky to stay alive because I was always under the influence of opiates.

In between drug chaos I managed to father, not raise, two beautiful children, become a fugitive living in Portland, Oregon for two years. I always said, “I’m not leaving here. They’ll have to take me in chains.” The Worcestor Police took me back to Massachusetts in chains where I served two years, most of the time inside spent as the Librarian of the prison for the other inmates.

How low can one go? Well, every time I hit a bottom, I found that there was a trap door beneath that I opened and fell through. Obviously I’m skipping much of the story but after I got released from prison, I headed down that long stumble-bum, push an opium pellet around the world with your nose, heroin road.

After prison I met a beautiful woman, crazy like me, and we drank and danced the night away. But, as is always the case, I started using heroin again. Even though we both had fairly good paying jobs at state psychiatric hospitals as Mental Health Workers II, I couldn’t stop shooting and Sascha couldn’t stop drinking.

I burnt down a whole bunch of doctors for prescription drugs and we felt the heat closing in on us so we moved to South Carolina. By this time we were both shooting dope. When we first arrived I bought a beat up old motorcycle, in the trade they call them rat-bikes, and it broke down on a heroin run at 2am in the morning.

While I was trying to fix the clutch cable a drunk driver hit me and the guy I was going to buy dope with. He died; I lived but it took me over a year and a half to learn how to walk again. The good side of it was my wife and I collected a nice sum of money and we bought two new motorcycles and a new pick-up truck.

We still kept spending money like it would never end on heroin and, on occasion, cocaine. From $57,000, in eight months we only had $3000 left so we decided to move back to Massachusetts where the heroin was cheaper. We took the trip and rented a one room apartment and then we had no money left.

I knew the end had come when I took the two motorcycles to a shop and asked them how much they would give me for them. They advised me to wait and put and ad in the paper so I could get twice as much. But our addictions needed the money now and the motorcycles that we loved so dearly, went into our veins.

In March of 1993, I was selling a street paper called Spare Change News and headed toward sobriety, which I achieved, with the help of many people and Spirits, in March of 1994. In 1998 my wife died of an overdose and I put myself in a drug program where I lived for 3 years. You see, I had forgotten how to live.

I met my current wife, Mary Esther, in 1994, and we became fast friends but didn’t begin dating until May of 1999. It was real love for the first time in my life, love without any mind-altering substances. I went back to school again and became a drug counselor, writing poetry and short stories and getting published constantly.

Mary Esther and I were married in June of 2002 and have been living a reality life. Sometimes God saves the best for last. My young adults, Jasmine & Isaac have adopted her as their Grandmother and Mary Esther keeps me Spiritually awake. What can I say? When I graduated Livingston High School in 1963 I was a train-wreck. The good news is I lived through it and life has never been better.

Now I’m a regular columnist for Spare Change News and the Poetry Editor, besides being a widely published poet and a member of the Spare Change News Board of Directors. Life, like I said before, has never been better. Today I ride both a bicycle and a motorcycle.

The Canals of Lake Okeechobee

Posted by Klaus


There is no sense of time here. Have I been in the Troll’s basement for thirty days? Or has it been thirty years? The other junkies who dropped in here today tell me that it is raining outside. They say it has been raining for days now. It makes me desire to go out and walk. Maybe it will be a warm tropical rain. After all, the summer sits on us; the air swells like wood sucking tropical dew.

I watch Nadia move about the basement. She helps one trembling junkie fix, he moans with the contact of the hit, she presses her lips to his forehead as he reclines with eyes shut. For a moment the terror in his head has been stilled. She rinses his hype and lets it sit in a glass of water. Then she moves on to another junkie who has just entered the basement. His nose is running, liquid salt streams from his eyes, eyes filled with nightmare that only heroin can wash clean. She is our Florence Nightingale, the one who ministers to the cast-outs, the left-behinds, the unwanted, the unclaimed.

Casey sleeps. He is deep in the powder. The Troll sits in a corner. His good eye is closed. Ron de Veux lies at his feet. She twitches, then she wakes with a shudder and a sob. Nadia goes to her, lights a cigarette and places it in her mouth.

I love Nadia. It is clear to me why Simon, the sad angel, chose to sleep with her, chose to go to her for the healing touch, to fill her with the seed of angels. She is the nostalgia that aches within me as the junk wears off, she makes me dream of a time when a woman was important to me, when I believed that a woman had a place in my life. It has been a long time since I have loved.

I beckon to Nadia and she comes to me. I whisper in her ear. She kisses me and rolls up my sleeve. As she helps me fix I imagine that I hear the rain. It is a hot rain. Suddenly the dreams come. For a second there is the face of Ar Lain Ta laughing and then I am back in Pahokee, Florida with my wife. She stares at me with her giant eyes, the corners of her full lips are turned down, she is dark with the bite of the tropical sun as she leans against the pickup truck. She wears a light-coloured summer dress dappled with flowers, one strap falling off her shoulder with a shadow top of a small breast just beginning to show. Body covered with sweat; dress turning to liquid, so hot she could drip it right off. I have a plastic bag full of pieces of cut up salt pork in one hand, a spool of strong string in the other. Jeanie has placed a bundle of sticks on the hood of the pickup and she drains the last of her beer. We are ready to drive the dirt roads that travel along the edges of the canals and set the traps to catch turtles.

I miss the feel of my wedding ring. There is a splash of lightness around Jeanie’s finger where her ring once was.

There is no heroin to be found in this area. Before we moved here we had never smoked crack but, when the soul is fractured by pain and the balm of the opiates is nowhere to be found, fast nightmares take the place of slow dreams.

Two nights ago the rains smashed down and I was out with the two wedding rings looking for a rock to sharpen the edge that Jeanie and I had already cut ourselves on. There are almost no white people in blacktown in Pahokee. Sections of that town are filled with shattered buildings and people weave in and about the maze of them as they race to each new arrival to see if they can get a chip off the old rock or even a fresh ash.

Crack cocaine is fury unresolved, each hit owning you more than the last. Finally you are the pipe, the ashes in the pipe, cracked lips sucking the life out of your life. Would you trade your wedding rings for the next hit? Yes, yes, you would do that and drink dog’s urine and say that it was good if someone held out a pipe full of rock to you while you were in cocaine frenzy.

That night I duck down in the truck as the police rove the blacktown block. I know that my white face is like a red flag waving to a bull. Suddenly I see a man that I have bought the rock from before emerge from the tattered building on the corner. I look around frantically. No police in sight. Leap from the truck, the rain soaks me to the skin, I run to the man, hold out the two rings, beg for merciless bliss.

“Let me see them,” he says.

Not thinking, I drop one of them into his hand. Just like that, his hand closes faster than a mussel springing shut because of danger and he is gone, weaving into a doorway and vanishing like a wisp of smoke above a pipe into the maze of broken down buildings. I curse the storm, I curse the night, I curse myself for needing something so much that my mind has turned to stripped shit within my head. I know that to chase him is futile. There is a voice behind me. I spin. !He is small, one gold tooth glittering from his smile. He stands under the shelter of the broken doorway, a small vial in his hand.

“Is this what you want?” he asks.

I hand him the ring as he hands me the vial. He examines it for an eternity. Five seconds later he disappears into the night and I make a run for the truck, shielding the precious prize from the rain. My paranoid hyper sense picks up the sound of an engine and I know it is the police. I throw myself into the mud by a parked car and wriggle underneath it. My rock and my redeemer are clutched tightly in my hand; I am trying to guard it from all the elements as I lay in the mud. The Judas car cruises slowly by, spotlight flashing methodically about and I cringe into the muck, shivering with fear and cold, wet and dirty, inside and out.

The black and white disappears from sight and I roll out from underneath the parked car, tearing my jacket on a piece of rusted metal hanging from its underside. Into the truck, fumbling with the keys. It coughs once, starts, and then I race out of town, up five miles of country road. There are eyes watching me from the trees, I know there are eyes watching. I pull into the sprawling trailer park that Jeanie and I call home. She is watching for something from the windows. She sees me and opens the door.

“Did you get it?”

I pull the vial out and she rushes to get the pipe. Frantic. She is ready to smoke and I am still soaked but care nothing for anything else. Neither of us can take our eyes off the rock. In the pipe. Match lit, sucking and it melts a little but it will not burn.

I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Both wedding rings gone and all we have left to show for it is a rock of soap.

I begin to cry. Everything saleable has been stripped from the trailer. Our wedding rings were the last to go.

“We have to sell this trailer and move back north to a place where we can find heroin,” I tell Jeanie. “This crack cocaine is going to kill us.”

Jeanie nods her head as the tears spill down her cheeks. We huddle together on the mattress, both of us crying, until we fall asleep. We sleep for thirty hours.

When we wake up I go over to the office of the trailer park and they offer to buy the trailer back for much less than we paid for it. Out of desperation I agree. It will take a week for the deal to clear. Our checks are due on the same day they will pay us. Out of money, out of food, we decide to trap turtles one more time.

The sun is out and the tropical air is like steam. I hammer the stick into the mud by the bank of the canal while Jeanie baits the hook with a chunk of salt pork. She drops it into the water. Two other guys, Archie and Turk, come with us to set traps also. They are experienced and set traps much faster than us. They bring along a cooler of beer and a few joints, which they share. We will split the take tomorrow morning.

All of a sudden we see a Florida State Ranger truck bearing down on us. There are two of them in the truck, big and burley, and they have rifles and handguns. Their truck slows to a stop. They both get out, hands on their guns, and stroll toward us. Eyes like ferrets.

“What’s in the cooler?” one of them asks.

“Just beer,” I reply.

He walks over and opens the cooler, paws through it.

“Mind if I look through the rest of the truck,” he says, while the other ranger just stands there with his hand on his gun. We know that he is not asking for permission and we motion for him to go ahead.

“Any of you got any drugs?” he says.

“Nope,” I lie, “just beer.” Turk has two joints left in his shirt pocket.

They stand around for a few minutes looking for anything that will demand their attention, check the traps we are putting out, and then they get back in their truck and pull around ours.

“Leave the gators alone,” one of them says as they drive away. “We’ll be back around later.” We hear their laughter above the sound of their truck engine.

Turk, who has always lived around here, says, “You don’t fool around with those guys. We could all just disappear here and no one would know who or why, or care for that matter. Don’t think it hasn’t happened. The canals are spooky. People just vanish. God doesn’t want to know what lives in the canals because he had nothing to do with the making of them.”

The next day we pull our traps. Nine large turtles, two of them massive. One of the smaller turtles is dead. We throw it back into the canal. The fish stands don’t want them if they are dead. The first stand we stop at weighs them and makes us an offer for the batch. Turk whispers to me that it is the best offer we will get today. We take it. We buy two large bottles of Wild Irish Rose and three cases of beer. We have enough
left over for hot dogs on buns. Then we start to drink.

I never was much of a drinker. Jeanie, Turk and Archie start putting them away and two other guys join us with weed. By dark we are all staggered and we decide to go bridgewalking over the canals. There are cement walks about two feet wide that crisscross over the canals. We stumble over them, a beer in one hand, a joint in the other and finally we find ourselves on the shore of Lake Okeechobee.

When Jeanie and I first moved to Pahokee we had this naive notion that we could go swimming in that great lake. We found out different when the locals laughed at us. “Sure ya kin, jes’ you two, the gators, the big snappers, the water moccasins, not to mention the things we don’ even know what the hell they is that lives’ in them waters.” We weren’t tempted to try it out. We sit with our legs crossed, never dangling, on the cement walks crossing the canals and toss down one beer after another followed by the reefer. Giant bugs fly around us, sounds of birds that we don’t know the names of call out, sounds come from the canal. A chill runs up and down my spine and I shake it off. We all toss wild ideas out into the night and they come back to us bearing strange shapes.

We get up to travel to another area, maybe go back to the trailer park, no one knows where we are going really, no one. Then it happens. Jeanie vanishes just like that. One second she is there and then gone. There is a splash and she is calling to us. We hear her thrashing about in the dark water but cannot see her. Then we hear the sound of other things splashing into the water. The water ripples towards her and she screams. There is the sound of feet running away. There is the sound of Jeanie screaming. There is only me and Turk left, leaning over the cement walk, hair spilling into our sweaty faces, arms extended, yelling for Jeanie to take our hands.

Then her hand is in mine, her hand is in Turk’s, we are lifting her out of the water but something is on her, something is thrashing about on her, by her neck. We lift her out as her voice modulates wildly. On the cement walkway we see the shape of the thing with its mouth holding onto her neck. It is biting her throat.

It looks like a small man, or possibly a woman, with fins and scales, eyes flashing blood-red in the moonlight, webbed feet and hands, vampire-teeth withdrawing from her throat as it pirouettes into the air and vanishes beneath the water. Jeanie closes her eyes and goes limp. None of us could recall the frenzied walk back to the trailer park, how long it took, how we came to be back there, nothing. None of us could recall the first moment that we noticed that Jeanie’s brunette hair had turned white or that her pupils now filled her eyes with black eating up the blue of her eyes.

When the ambulance came for her Turk and I told them about the creature. The medics looked at each other and muttered something about cocaine psychosis. The doctors examined the bite marks on her neck, referred to them as the lacerations, whispered to the nurses when they saw the track marks on her arms. The hospital kept her under observation for two days, then gave her Stelazine and Klonopin and called me to pick her up. From that night on nothing was the same. The sale of the trailer went through and we packed our meagre belongings and moved up to Boston. We both knew where we could get heroin in that area.

Jeanie would vanish for days at a time and return with no explanation. She would go days without uttering a word. If I mentioned the creature from the canal she stared off into space. Sometimes she would turn to me and say, “You know he’s coming for you, don’t you?” When I asked her if she meant the creature she would shake her head, then turn away and cry. If I reached my arms out to her she would sit still like dead wood in my embrace.

Both of us continued to shoot heroin. Our habits reached phenomenal proportions. I began to dream of small villages in the orient where people were raising opium poppies. There was an old woman that was always on the edge of my dreams. At times, in the dreams, I would be wandering homeless through Harvard Square in Cambridge and there would be a man watching me, following me. When I asked him who he was he told me that he was the son of Nang Saeng Zoom and suddenly the old woman would be there, next to him, smiling at me.

One day I came home to our small apartment and Jeanie was gone. There was no note, no explanation. Every mirror in the apartment was shattered. To this day I have no idea what happened to her. I only know that before she left she was already gone. I wonder whether some day, some place, I will turn a corner and she will be there with her white hair and her pitch-black eyes swallowing me up into her night.

There is no sense of time here at the Troll’s basement. For me, it is better that way. There are only the stories of other junkies like myself that I am here to record. And there are angels on the upper floors. And then there is Ar Lain Ta. He is coming for me; he is coming for us all.

Tonight I know that I am in love with Nadia Chance. Here, in the Troll’s dark basement, the next shot of heroin and the unrequited love of Nadia Chance is all I have. For now, this will be enough.

Please Note: The Canals of Lake Okeechobee appeared in the Porter Gulch Review.