Be Safe Page 3

  In what can best be described as a pro forma process, Rogarth, after affixing his signature to the essential documents that sealed his fate and served as the roughage that propelled his journey through the bowels of the legal system with unobstructed speed, was surrendered to a representative of the previously mentioned Cri-Life Recovery House, the price for which was paid with a minimum of time spent incarcerated behind bars. It was, according to just about everybody in the State, one more time, a win-win proposition.

  CHAPTER THREE

  To say that Bert should have known that choosing to sell meth was probably not the soundest strategy to traverse middle age is easy to say when you’re separated by a certain distance from deed or consequence: He should have known better. Or saying that Korn should have known that buying and moving into a house in this almost exclusively Jewish neighborhood twenty-two months ago would have upset a certain balance – actually stirred up ancient fears and all manner of potent forces. How could he have known that just showing up here would have amounted to a mindless clipping of the DNA strands that caused his new neighbors to, however unconsciously – as if any Jew could forget, if even for a moment, the hatred, or the fear, or the hatred, whichever shore you’re planting your flag on – to overlook the basis of Jewish identity as made manifest by either Golgotha or the Shoah, when a non-Jew appears, closes escrow and moves in across the street from the Cohens and the Glicks, between the Silversteins and the Coopers. How could he have known that the dogwood tree adorning the front yard of Rabbi Perlmutter, who lives just next door to Chayim Silverstein, was a rabid expression of revenge: You thought it hurt the first time? Just wait! It’s unrealistic. So even if many of the longtime residents on Kenmore Avenue had been able to rely on civility and manners instead of allowing a certain view of history – one more time – to shape their reaction to the introduction of a Gentile into their mostly well-tended, upper class neighborhood of single-family dwellings with front yards and clean unobstructed sidewalks, the fact that Korn and almost all his friends were gay, were infected with HIV/AIDS, and rarely slept because their appetites for methamphetamine – both using and selling – found them tending gardens, washing cars, and converting the gray, monolithic slab of concrete driveway into a melismatic mosaic of broken glass and gum drops that was brilliant in both its fractal detail and lack of planning, at three in the morning, sealed their fate.

  On the other hand, maybe the Jewish residents should have known that Korn and friends posed no threat to them at all. But how could they have known? How could they have known that gay meth freaks don’t consider much of anything except the following:

  1. This would be pretty here.

  2. Why isn’t my dick hard?

  3. That guy’s hot.

  4. When does Home Depot close?

  5. Who’re they and why are they watching me?

  6. Why isn’t my dick hard?

  So it’s little wonder that Korn, caught up in his preoccupation with what rests between his legs along with the ephemera literally centimeters before him, came to a convenient understanding that his neighbors’ seeming lack of curiosity about him and his household was proof that he was invisible and not capable of eliciting a neighborly “hello” now and then from the Silversteins or the Glicks, was as short-sighted and incorrect as the decision to include a well-intentioned but impossibly vague guarantee of the pursuit of happiness in this country’s founding documents. It’s only with the gift of hindsight that it becomes apparent that one would endow victimhood with the status of legitimate political class, and the other would lend tacit approval to a household of felons. This pantomime of indifference was, in reality, the only mechanism, short of murder, available for the good people of South Kenmore Avenue to symbolically band together, along with every conceivable municipal entity willing to listen, and prepare to perform the surgery necessary to rid this neighborhood of its newest arrivals, even though, given the attitudes toward gay people in the best of circumstances, murder was probably the favored solution, especially since the traditions shaping the beliefs of the Kenmore Avenue Jews grew from that wellspring of progressive ideals known as The Bronze Age. As recently as 1976, it was illegal in The Golden State to butt fuck somebody – but in California’s defense, the anti-sodomy laws here never singled out homosexuals, but instead enjoined all its residents from cavorting down any anal canal at all. But gay dope dealers was another story.

  Mere weeks after Korn moved in, his neighbors were communicating with narcotics officers of the LAPD about the unsavory people and illegal activities taking place near their precious children.

  And it’s not like Korn, or any of the half dozen or so permanent residents or myriad visitors here would have offered much resistance to even a stern lecture delivered by the Pharisees of Kenmore Avenue either, and much less to a straight-up shakedown by the uniformed black-and-whites of some Narcotics Division. They’re as substantial as a bouquet of crystalline dandelions with virtual hardons – “virtual” because one thing about meth freaks: they might be wasting away from a diet of AIDS medications and Gatorade, but they’re horny as fuck and engorged with unflagging enthusiasm, which is a pretty poor substitute for the malingering blood cells who’re finding it a bit of a challenge to congregate inside a penis – to finally clasp hands and perform a river dance, for which the most accurate adjective to describe the product of their work might be “malleable.” It’s called meth-dick, a workaday frustration that we’ve all learned to live with. Actually, there seems to be another opinion about this condition, whether it might be more accurate to name it “psychology dick” rather than meth dick. The correlation between meth use and soft penises, some might say, doesn’t amount to a straight-up cause-and-effect, but rather is the product of endless complication, mentally speaking, which is itself a product of meth use and the failure or inability to compartmentalize: This isn’t a sex club, it’s merely a trip to Safeway to buy kibble for Fluffy; this isn’t a meticulously planned fifth column street force preparing to attack your front door, it’s merely the neighbors arriving home from Ralphs; that guy isn’t a horny straggler from that uniform/leather bar down on Hyperion, he’s just the mailman – and about one thousand other similar examples of misplaced horniness or paranoia, one of the minor effects of which results in the constricted capillaries that will wilt even the highest octane hardons. Meth use, as opposed to say the exponentially more essential and delimiting qualities of heroin, which, when all is said and done, weaves its crucial fictions around the simple binaries of life/death, awake/asleep, ecstasy/pain, and locates sexual activity on the same stratum as tying one’s shoes, seems to lie in a much more easily acceptable form that rests on the bedrock of capability: even though you’ve done nothing but masturbate in front of the TV for the past three days, usually settling out of laziness on the Discovery Channel, the meth high transforms the perception of the greasy mundane into the much more lofty heights of accomplishment. Just as nearly 100 percent of spiders (and probably tons of various birds as well), which are constantly in the process of either spinning their webs or building their nests, meth heads are likewise constructing their own constantly changing contexts into which to fit new and different versions of themselves. It’s a trick – an ingenious trick born of biology, pharmacology and more than a few survival tricks spanning millennia – that affords the meth user the ability to construct for himself a new and plausible life story at exactly the same time that he’s escaping from a previous one – and can, and often does, occur multiple times within a twenty-four-hour period, which is a condition that makes you wonder why meth use isn’t immediately excised from various Penal Codes around the country and having it placed into the pantheon of behaviors that have earned a perch into the rarified category of civic virtue, because it’s pretty obvious that meth users create perfect consumers: profligate spenders who are known to dump mountains of cash – whether it
’s earned through legitimate methods or, what’s more than likely the case, theft of property or selling dope – on stuff they don’t even need – because shopping, after all is said and done, is definitely an activity – and, objectively speaking, is more closely related to masturbation than say carburetor repair, which isn’t exactly brain surgery, but is still far outside most dope fiends’ wheelhouse of expertise. Meth use is popular in the United States of America precisely because of the Puritan work ethic upon which the union was formed. It offers the illusion of getting things done. It’s impossible to imagine a scenario where meth use would ever gain a foothold in Greece or Spain or France, where enjoyment of the midday nap and the appreciation of a sweet afternoon breeze are paramount.

  The diabolical (and wonderful) qualities of drug use, though, (both opiates and amphetamines) are that it begins with the unassailable truth that obstacles of both the imagination and the spirit are rendered mere details easily vanquished by the drug. The housewife can do more with less; the artist can see further; the impoverished can easily accept that nirvana is just around the corner. Even though he probably never used meth, Plato understood the paradox of addiction: meth is the medicine that makes life bearable, and is, at the same time, the poison that destroys it.

  The reality is that no one has partied here for about a year. The magic furnished so generously at the beginning of drug use had long since turned the corner toward the drudgery of routine. Korn’s place has eroded into a household of errand-runners, scoring meth, doing chores and beginning projects. Lots to do! Gotta run! The washing machine and drier are constantly churning out towels and more towels, more like a hospital than a home. It’s as if the trousseaux accompanying the five or so permanent residents here at Korn’s house consist not of jeweled tiaras or oversized broaches from this or that grandmother (who had a hunch that little Andy either takes it up the butt now or presently will be), but stack upon stack of terrycloth towels dragged from one temporary domicile fixe to another – stuffed into trash bags, the de rigueur default luggage of convenience for an entire social class consisting of those (mostly) gay men who contracted HIV/AIDS at a time when it was a death sentence, and a social class that both fueled and benefited from the metastatic growth, both medically and politically, of the epidemic. Even if Korn and company had wanted to jump off the AIDS bandwagon, they were stuck – along for the twenty-five-year HIV hayride that at first defined them as pathetic victims with weeks of breath left inside their lungs, then brave survivors, and finally what the fuck ever, you’re probably gonna live to be a hundred if you eat right, take your meds, exercise, vote and perform most of the mountain of activities used to define a virtuous citizenry. So welcome to life, motherfucker! Either get with the program, get to work, and live loud; or wither and die. It’s no wonder that Korn and his buddies chose something else.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I really like hearing these three words: Be safe, Bert. I mean, really. Be safe. It’s us against them. At three in the afternoon or three in the morning, standing in the doorway, getting ready to leave with a lengthy jail sentence locked tight in a leather case or tucked casually in a front pocket or camouflaged like a half-eaten hamburger inside a grease-stained paper sack, I always wait to hear those reassuring words: Travel safe; be safe. Resist the urge to stay here. It’s not safe. This house has been glowing, undulating with its fecund taunt for months now: We’re here and we’re ready to be shaken down and harvested like so much illegal fruit. The delay can make you crazy. What are the police waiting for? It’ll be dark soon. Be safe out there. And I realize that whoever tells me this might actually believe that I have the wherewithal to stay ahead of the law – to be safe. The words make me feel good – well, better anyway, as I subscribe to the fiction that I’ve fooled somebody into believing that making it home uncaught has anything to do with circumstances beyond pure chance, as I gauzily view myself as formidable – as a guy with a plan who can actually drive the fourteen miles home holding a half-ounce of crystal meth somewhere on my person without a hitch. So I wait for Korn to say the words, but instead this is what I hear: “Hang out for a minute.” The invitation is impossible to turn down, and I know isn’t made lightly. It almost always means that the stores of meth are dry for the moment, and that the “minute” referred to could mean an hour or a week.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Inertia: a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.

  The part of this definition that describes the dope fiend – gay or straight – better than the approximately hundred trillion pages of well-intended method by which addicts or alcoholics can veer away from their destinations of doom are the words straight line. Just turn a little bit. Take a day off…five minutes, for Christ’s sake.

  Bending the straight line requires either novelty and imagination, or the brute force that’s embodied by a set of handcuffs and a night stick. Shame, to the uninitiated, might seem like just the ticket to cause a dope fiend to change course. But that’s a load of shit. Just ask Janice, whose kids, for years were served breakfast bowls of corn flakes swimming in tap water instead of milk because money reserved for milk was diverted to the dope fund – and kids being their own adorable, needy selves, what are they going to do about it anyway, besides cry? Or Richard, who would have lost his arm abscessed from shooting impure dope into muscle instead of a vein, to gangrene had it not been for the colony of ants who, sensing a generous store of nourishment festering nearby, marched in columns up his arm and down again as he lightly snored for several blissful hours under a nod of smack, and outside to feed their winter colony disgusting albeit delicious meals of pus.

  An argument could be made that dope fiends are ultimately motivated by a need for chaos. That sounds pretty good, and seems like it would have quite a lot of support. But it’s not chaotic. Chaos is just the first step in a process that quite quickly erodes into the tiniest, narrowest crevice where every exit is blocked by craving and fear of being outdoors, just you and your habit. There’s an exquisite vulnerability to this state of being. Burroughs described it really well. But it’s not chaotic and it’s not noble. It’s just selfish. And not the kind of selfish where kids are stingy about sharing their popsicles or their toys or their affection. It’s selfish with capital hyphenated letters – the kind of selfish that flies into the sun because you don’t have the wherewithal to see that any current circumstances will even slightly satisfy your tremendous appetites, so you just keep going, doing the same thing over and over again. Given enough time around dope fiends, though, people begin to see patterns emerging: The chaos of unrestrained appetite evolves (dissolves) into order, but it’s usually an imposed order courtesy of the State. And over time this pattern repeats, and repeats again until enough time passes that the state loses interest because the dope fiend, just like everybody else on earth, is dead.

  What motivates dope fiends is fear…or something.

  CHAPTER SIX