Everyone gets to pay the gatekeeper. In the end we pay with the only currency that we own. The gatekeeper’s desires are simple. All he wants is all we’ve got.

They call me the Troll. I’m a gatekeeper of sorts and I have my own kingdom. Of course, I have to follow the rules, too. He’s always watching me. He watches me through the eyes of the junkies that live here. Who’s he? I’ll get to that.

That’s why I treat everyone the same here in the last dope house on the block. No one gets here without paying the high price. Every one of us has opted out of the world as most of us know it.

Have you ever woken up in the morning at first light, heard the birds chirping, and then cursed the sun for burning you out of slumber? Have you ever stumbled to the bathroom looking for the wake-up shot that you hoped was still there, knowing full well that at three in the morning you had used it because the dreams in your head had grown sharp yellow teeth that were ripping away the pieces of what was left of your soul? Have you ever come to in the dark alley between mortar and bricks, behind the dumpster, where you had hidden to protect yourself from the young boys out wilding?

No, maybe you wake up scratching the dead skin on your face cursing the job that you must go to every day where your essence spills out into the ether as you wait on customer after customer. “And what would you like in your coffee, sir? Who’s next? Just jerk the handle, I’m dying, sir. I could use a drink myself.”

Or maybe you sit in a cubicle, one of many in a giant row of them, staring into a computer screen tabulating figure after figure, maybe checking zip codes hour after hour, pressure building up in your bladder, but “oh my god, I can’t go yet, there’s still so much to do and they never stop coming in. I hope I pass that urinalysis, I didn’t know that they’d pick me today. I don’t want to lose this job and wind up homeless.”

Quite possibly you’re a beautiful woman waking up late in the afternoon. Your body aches from running from the tables to the bar in that costume that always makes you feel like a piece of ground round served up steaming in a hog trough. The bruises where you were pinched dot your upper legs, you still smell the drink that someone threw at you because you wouldn’t give them a kiss. “Better the drink than their breath,” you think as you make your way to the bathroom to clean yourself before you are fouled by life once more. You look in the mirror and see the worry lines starting at the corners of the mouth, sparrow-prints at the eyes that are suddenly very wet and you swallow hard and splash water into your face, sobbing deep in your chest.

Just maybe you are the President of the United States waking to the news that another woman claims to know about the tattoo on your penis and you wonder how George Washington, John F. Kennedy, or even J. Edgar Hoover would have fared in this terrible time when everything is grist for the cows at the public watering trough called television. You roll over to hug your wife. She is crying. An emptiness that is full hurts between your lungs. “Maybe a war is not a bad idea,” is the thought that crosses your mind.

Hey, maybe you’re a writer like the guy in the corner there who is between stories or poems. You haven’t written a word in over two weeks and the worry stomps your mind into its down hellish nether regions. We all have them in our heads. Your mind says, “Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’ll never write again. Maybe I’ll just shoot some dope; I know a place where I can go, downtown where all the lights are bright, downtown where I can die tonight, downtown, everything’s waiting for me.”

I could go on and on and on. That’s how life is. Sooner or later we all wind up knocking on the door of the gatekeeper.

I’m a gatekeeper. My kingdom is a subterranean basement where junkies come to dream about what might have been. What should have been. What could happen if only, if only, if only. Sometimes I tell the stories and he writes them down. I’m not the only one here who tells the stories. Everyone who comes here has a story, maybe more than one. The guy in the corner — the Troll points to a bearded junkie sitting at a typewriter, he writes them down. He never tells the stories but he’s always listening and writing or typing. All it takes to shake him out of a deep nod is for someone to say, “Oh yeah, let me tell you a story about what happened to me.”

There are times, in the middle of a story, that he will stop to fix; maybe his hand has started to shake, maybe he just wants to hold off the cold and the cramps until the tale is over. His memory takes over and he’ll play catch-up while he’s listening. He may get to hear the same story a few times but each time it is a little different, depending on who’s doing the telling. It could be different even with the same teller.

He writes the stories but he always laughs and says, “I don’t really guarantee their accuracy, you know. But I don’t have to, see. No one believes a junkie.”

Call him Seth. Last name Morgan. The writer. I’m the teller but he’ll record it. He promised not to lie or change the facts and to write it just like I tell it. Junkies always make promises.

Let me tell you about another gatekeeper. The one who watches me. The one who might very well have his eyes on you. Some people call him the Dustman. Others say he is the king of the dreams that live between waking and sleep. Still others say that he is just a man who has chosen a path of crime and that he is nothing more than a druglord. I choose not to argue with anyone’s story when it is about him. The confusion clarifies my beliefs. My beliefs? I’ll tell you this story and let you form your own.

I’ll tell you this story about his beginnings. It was told to me by a Harvard professor who comes here now and then for a bit of a rest. Forget about it. I’m not going to reveal my source. You would probably recognize the name.

In the beginning the Dustman’s only name was Ar Lain Ta.

From other news sources — “Human-caused stresses, including global warming and over fishing, are encouraging jellyfish surpluses in many tourist destinations and productive fisheries”—-National Science Foundation.

Some problem areas are off the coasts of Australia, the Gulf of Mexico, Hawaii, the Black Sea, Namibia, Britain, the Mediterranean, the Sea of Japan, and the Yangtze estuary.

Jellyfish thrive in areas that are compromised by pollution, but not in the increasing number of Dead Zones where nothing can live, and are dramatically increasing in number.

Dead Zones are waters that are so depleted of oxygen that they cannot support life and there are over 400 of them, that we know of, and they are increasing in size.

The world’s largest Dead Zone is in the Baltic Sea and it loses 1.3 million metric tons of food a year.

It sounds as if our oceans are becoming close relations to our currently disintegrating stock market. Many of the Dead Zones are caused by global run-off of agricultural fertilizers from our giant agri-farms and also, believe it or not, from polluted air. Everything is connected.

The Earth was not ready for our throw-away human way of life. It is imperative that the new leaders of all countries make themselves aware of what needs to be done to save the Earth from our dysfunctional ways of life.

War, fossil fuel misuse, over-population, greed. Our species feels entitled to whatever it can take from the Earth and disregards the cost to other species, the oceans, the air, and the fresh water ways that are being degraded by the garbage we pour into it.

When a civilization collapses, it isn’t pretty. Stock market crashes are just the tip of the iceberg. It takes more than one man leading a country to solve the problems we face.

If the United States were to elect Barack Obama, and it would be in our best interests to do so, we must lead him to a better way of life. Unfortunately, I believe that John McCain is more concerned with the art of war than in making our world a better place to live. Sarah Palin is just unaware. Period.

Our civilization is facing a crisis that is totally unique. When Rome was falling, another place was rising. When Greece was falling, another place was rising. In today’s times, all of our civilizations are linked together and what we are facing is a global collapse of our civilization.

If we let this happen, the survivors will live in a savage land ruled by the least of us. The barbarians will have won. The sounds of whips and chains will resound around the world for the humans that remain.

Right now, there is much more at stake than a stock market bail-out. So much more. We must rise from our complacency or pay the unimaginable price.

The Four Horsemen, Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death are riding our way. I will close with a poem that was written by an unknown author, unknown to me, in 1764, courtesy of Jose Gouvieaa of The Highway Poets –

English Folk Poem

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the Common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the Common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the Lords and Ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man and woman
who steals the goose from off the Common,
And geese will still a Common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

Turn off your TV! Sit back. Take a few deep breaths. Relax. Getting frightened doesn’t change anything. Look around you. Is everything okay where you live.

If it isn’t, then you have to deal with it. If everything in your humble abode is okay, then be there.

This too shall pass. Forget the media. For them, this is payday.

I’m going to vote. I’m going to follow what I believe. You can do the same. Follow the path to the truth. I’m not going to tell you what that path is. Inside yourself, you know it.

Pay attention.

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 30 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 we do. 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 bridge-walking over the canals. There are cement walks about two feet wide that criss-cross 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.

It is not by chance there are many of us.
It is not by chance we sing to each other.
It is not by chance the Gods let us touch.
It is not by chance, like plug and socket, we fit together.

from A Room of Bone — a poem in Relationships by Marc D. Goldfinger, edited by Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville, MA

George W. Bush has left the stage of the world. It is Barack Obama’s time. Yet as Barack Obama knows well, it is not only his time, but it is also our time. Obama is our president and we are the people. In his speech many of his reflections called upon us to do our part, for he knows that alone and isolated, a president who works against the will of the people cannot work. We have just witnessed eight years of decline, eight years of waning hope, eight years of spending the birthright of our future, eight years of hopelessness, death without purpose, eight years of the heart of a nation breaking into tears of sorrow.

The glory of Barack Obama is that he is truly the heart of the United States, yet he realizes the heart is only a source of inspiration if all the other organs work well. Barack Obama knows that a leader is only as strong as his ideals; that if he doesn’t lead well, the people will not follow.

Barack Obama does not take his new trust lightly. He knows that the world is at a pivotal point as far as the human species is concerned. He is aware that the path we take from this point is crucial, and it takes us all to task. It is our responsibility to work with our new president, to help him achieve his goals and also to speak out to him when we feel that he is going off the path. Because Barack Obama is a president who knows that he has much to learn from those around him. Obama is a president who is humble, who will keep his ears to the ground, his eyes to the sky, his hands on the plow, and he knows that he must not only say what is necessary — he must follow through with his actions.

Sixty years ago, men and women of colour were relegated to the back of the bus; men and women of colour could not drink at the same water fountains as white people; men and women of colour were not free in the United States.

Barack Obama knows that, in just sixty years, there has been a paradigm shift in our country. That is what makes it great. It is not that everyone has changed in sixty years, but enough of us have changed to make this new world possible.

Barack Obama raises the hopes of the people of the United States. But it is not only the people of the United States who have their eyes on this man with “The Audacity of Hope”, it is the people of the world who have their eyes on him because he raises their hopes too. The world is watching him; the world is watching us; the world is waiting and hoping that Obama is what he says he is, and what he has shown us he is to become the president of our land.

I am a cynical man, but I have hope for humanity. It has been a long time since I have been inspired by a leader, and Barack Obama has won my heart. And not only my heart, but the hearts of many, people in the United States and people all over the world.

There was a time, a long while ago, when humanity was given hope. There was a president who said, after Russia launched Sputnick, the first satellite, that we would be the first nation to reach the moon. And God knows, if there is a God and I believe there is one, that we joined together, each in our own way, and in 1969 humanity walked on the moon.

Barack Obama offers us a new challenge. He does not say that we will be the first to walk the moon; Obama says that we will lead the world with fierce love; that we will “offer our hand if you will unclench your fist.” Obama says that “this is the time to put aside childish things.”. I believe he knows that war is the enemy of us all, and those who choose war over life are the ones who delay the new rebirth of the Human Nation.

It is not just the United States that must grow; it is all the nations of the world who must unclench their fists, just as we must join them. Those of us here in the United States with clenched fists must stop, think and open their hands so they can work with us. Barack Obama knows that this is a world where, if anyone is left behind, whether black, yellow, white, poor, rich, red or just average, if anyone is left behind, we will all be left behind.

This is not a time where we must fight and claw to be the first to walk the surface of the moon. This is a time when we must join hands and work together to walk and ride and sail across a clean, peaceful Earth. There is only one way to do this.

Again, I repeat Obama’s words, which he took from the Bible, and those words are that “we must put aside childish things.” This I know to be true — war is one of those childish things we must put aside. As Obama said, “When it was time for us to face the future, we faced it and did not falter.”

Barack Obama is more than the heart of a nation. He can be the heart of the world. Instead of strapping bombs to ourselves and destroying the future, we must strap tool belts around our waists, whatever tools we use to build, and work to turn our backs on the errors of the past.

There was a president who took us to the moon. Let Barack Obama be the president who takes us all home, and let him be the president that inspires us to work so that all people, all over the world, can be safe in a home of their own and walk the world in peace.

Published in Spare Change News, Jan. 29 — Feb. 11th, 2009.

I’m not saying that there is no such thing as a solid reality. Really, what I mean by that statement is that all we get to go on is a construct of reality filtered through to us by our nerve systems that have been altered, muddled, and distorted by others since the day we were born.

Which brings me to Cowboy. The man had his own reality but fate cast him into another stranger, more alien reality than he ever dreamed existed. He never travelled farther west than Olean, New York. The only use he had for cows was gathering mushrooms from their pasture pies. As for riding a horse, it was his opinion that the only thing with brains that was born to be ridden was a woman.

Cowboy was born into a drinking family. Motorcycles, alcohol, drugs, and fast women. Riding the iron horse was his life. Everything else came second. His bikes were fast and powerful. When he was drinking he didn’t like to stop for traffic lights because usually he was so loaded that, when the natural balance of the moving motorcycle ceased, he fell down.

When he was young he learned from the men in his family. His sexual practices were Neanderthal in nature to say the least. At the age of nineteen Cowboy thought that foreplay was letting three of his friends have her first while he finished his case of beer.

And that was how Cowboy came to be at the Worcester County House of Correction on maxi-tier. There’s more to the story but that’s enough for now.

William Bulger grew up in a time when values were quite different than they are today. Loyalty was highly regarded in most circles. William is guilty. He is guilty of loyalty to his brother Whitey.

Both brothers grew up in poverty in a South Boston housing project. Other than that, their paths were extremely diverse. Whitey succumbed to the pressures of the streets while William overcame them.
In today’s world, loyalty is a dying virtue and it is refreshing to watch a man risk all he has honestly worked for to protect his brother. In these trying times snitchery and turncoating to save one’s own skin has become an art.

The corporate raiders who savaged the retirement funds of the workers of Enron had no sense of loyalty toward those whom they were positioned to protect. What a difference, also, between the spilling of the Bill Clinton story and the tale of John F. Kennedy and his intern.

While everyone today is willing to fill in all the sordid details for personal gain, the other side of that story is the respectable silence, the honorable discretion of Kennedy’s lover as opposed to the story of Monica Lewinsky who just can’t keep her mouth shut.

In the new millennium, betrayal is the code word. No more are loyal workers respected by their employers. Lovers can’t wait to kiss and tell. It is expected that all men are willing to turn their brothers over to the system; family ties are meaningless.

William Bulger has committed himself to a lifetime of service for the people of Massachusetts. Has he received the financial benefits for his years of service? Of course he has. These remunerations are not excessive and are well-deserved.

He is a tough man who rose to his current position by dint of hard work and sacrifice. His heart aches for the plight and mistakes of his brother Whitey Bulger. If he could have done something to change the course of Whitey’s life, he certainly would have. He tried. But we are all powerless over the actions of other people. All we can do is the next right thing ourselves, in accordance to our own values.

Mitt Romney, one of William’s detractors, never had to struggle out of poverty. Neither did former Attorney General Thomas Reilly. Are these two men who would turn in their brothers? What does loyalty mean to a corporate raider who spent his entire life working for his own gain?

The tale of William and Whitey Bulger, two brothers from the projects of South Boston, is a modern tragedy. The sins of one brother threaten to discredit the accomplishments of the other. William was the hard-working President of the University of Massachusetts; Whitey was a mobster on the run. William Bulger’s only crime is that he loves his brother and has a sense of honor that our current society does not share.

In Massachusetts, we are fortunate to have benefitted from the public service of William Bulger in all the positions of State he has held. Let us hope he receives the respect he is due and is not witch-hunted out of his accomplishments for his brother’s misdeeds.

“I do have an honest loyalty to my brother, and I care about him, and I know that’s not welcome news, but . . .it’s my hope that I’m never helpful to anyone against him,” William Bulger testified.

Whitey Bulger is caught now, in steel and stone and chains in the world of the snitch, and yet he is still not crushed.

Two brothers, William and Whitey, both accomplished and hardened in their own individual ways. Let God stand judgement on the two; no human in today’s world can do it.

Please Note: Part of this appeared in the Boston Metro on June 10, 2003. It has been altered to meet the current times.

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 lays 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 hypersense 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 is 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.”

from: Tales of the Troll like The Accident at Road Scribes