The Speed Chronicles (6 page)

OBLIVION HAS NO NARRATIVE. Just because there's no plot does not mean the story can't get worse.

After questionable man and boy left, Carmine (Britt), who must have been triple-jointed, brazenly lifted a bare dirt-crusted foot up to her nose
unassisted
. She sniffed a filthy toe—as if, you thought, to see if you were a dirty-toe man—then hissed at you. “
Don't give me that look. Dewey happens to be Dewey Junior's daddy! And don't think I don't know what you are, neither. God made a lower place in hell for lowlife drug thieves than kiddie diddlers
.”

Is it normal to keep remembering horrible things? It's not your fault they keep happening. Remember? That tweaked-out voice low as the hell pit he was describing. “It's in the Bible.” Did you dream the evangelist? Or is he in the walls? This is a question you didn't used to ask yourself. “
Ladies and gentlemen, I want you all to look in your heart, ask yourself this question. Is your life nothing more than a history of saying yes to the wrong things?
” Can zombies be sad?

THE ESKIMO WITH HOOKS FOR HANDS LOOKED UNFAMILIAR, BUT HE SAID HE WAS A VET. He was shooting up Penny, who you couldn't remember meeting, in the neck. While you watched, her jugular wriggled like a worm in cookie dough, cracking the makeup she used to cover up vein-puff. “It's important,” she said, while the shooter dabbed her off, “I'm a nurse. People can see our necks.” The story doesn't track. But speed stories never track. They only make sense if you're on speed. (This is a test.) At what point did the Inuit show up with the vial of liquid meth? “What you staring at?” The big-faced musher was eyeballing you, clicking his hooks. You screamed, “
Get the fuck out of here
!” and he backed away. Was he laughing? Maybe he didn't leave. Impossible to tell what was going on; everything three-day-up echoey. Maybe the Eskimo just went in the bathroom. Maybe they were married. Maybe she brought him white assholes to kill after she fucked them in front of him. Maybe she killed them after
he
fucked them. Shit. Why does all your energy go into panic? Except for everything you knew about her, Penny seemed almost normal. Like a cheerleader who slept outside.

NOT EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU CAN BLACK OUT ON SPEED. You can be unconscious and chatty at the same time. Flip back from a clammy sense-memory of Mommy-flesh to an IHOP booth beside a plus-size ironic shemale busy not eating her Belgian waffles. Miss Waffle is still talking when you rematerialize, when your star falls from the night sky over Methlehem. To reenter the earth's BO. Boring Orbit. “
What was that movie
? They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
Well, screw the ponies! I shoot the same go-fast that made Hitler, Sartre, Lucille Ball, and Philip K. Dick complete geniuses!
” Plus-size Tranny-pants cannot stop talking. Mouth moving in a face dead as the papier-mâché Belgian waffles in the IHOP display case. “
Listen up, 'kay? I don't mind payin' for the party, but you gotta at least look interested! My husband had a thing where he'd drop Black Beauties and touch himself. He wouldn't eat dinner. That was the tell. I'd peep him cracking open ten black capsules on rice puddin' and gulpin' it down. Then he'd put his hands on me, rough, all over, like he wanted to pull out my organs and dunk them in coffee. Ooooooooooooh! It was goddamn heaven
.” You stay fake-interested. Long enough to burn through what's left of a crappy eight ball wedged between the honey bear and the teapot. Nobody at IHOP gives a shit. It's IHOP. It's five after fucked-up o'clock in the morning. Just as you get up, Miss Waffles blurts,
“You can't hide, I can read your mind in nine languages
.”

You are eye level with a case of textbook meth-lips. So dry each syllable launches a tiny bursting pillow of speed feathers, which drift down to the Bondo-like untouched whipped cream below. “
Know why sexual relations on speed are so twisted
?” She makes a here-comes-the-funny face. “
Sexual relations! Listen to me! I stay up for a day and a half and suddenly I'm NPR!
” She lets out a pained giggle. (It's a meth tic—the pain giggle. All emotions are a shade of suffering, once you're beyond the ecstatic.)

When there's nothing else, you can love people just from knowing they suffer too. It hits right and you feel that vast, inchoate empathy.
How would you describe yourself at such “peak” moments. “Crippled and happy about it.” But there you go, bragging!

It's different when you do it with somebody else
. Like when your hefty transgender friend says, “I think I hear a lump in my breast. Is that possible?” You nod with Real Concern, edging slowly backward away from the booth. Stimulants stimulate everybody: even the people near you. Beehived IHOP waiters just know, and they stay out of the way. (It's IHOP.) When she yells, you feel the eyes of family diners. “Thief!” Waffles warbles. “Thief. There he goes!
Thief!
” You keep your head down. The screams follow you. “You think if you keep moving backward, you can make your life unhappen? Smell yourself!”

(The shit helps you feel nothing. But not nothing enough.)

IN THE OLD DAYS, YOU HAD A SPONGE TEST. When the floor got spongy, you knew. You'd gone too far. Time to come back! Swallow a Valium. Swallow nine. Drink some mouthwash. You need
something
. By the time you hit Sponge Mode, reality feels fraught and menacing. (Could be two days up, could be twelve.) Regardless. Your life is reduced to walking the yard in a maximum-security bouncy house. Your heart hurts. You catch yourself talking out loud, explaining deranged sensations to strangers in the street. “My motel room hates me.”

CAJANK!
There is a girl in your room who won't stop screaming. Candy? Kembra? Cathy? Caroline? …
Crickle?
When you walk in she stops screaming and gets solicitous. Which is scarier than screaming. She could be twenty-three or forty. “Are you shivering, mister, or is that a convulsion?”

Kimberly!
That was her name. The one with the diapers. You didn't dream this. You were geezing this evil-smelling grit you bought from a plumber in Bakersfield. Bathtub crank with a Drano after-drip. Kimberly says she bought special diapers with holes in them. Fuck-me diapers. Remember? Oooh, I wore my Sex Depends. Just for you!

This, you realized later, was
another
lie. Kimberly! Speedfreaks always lie. The diapers weren't REALLY called Sex Depends. She slit the crotch with a razor. Then she used felt-tip pens, magic markers to color faces on the diapers. Fifty-three tiny faces. (Look, there's Ringo! There's Abraham Lincoln. There's Helen Keller! There's you!) It took her days. Gink-work. That's how she made them. She had lots of razors 'cause she was also a cutter. Of course. Little Girl Cutters grow up to be Big Girl Speedfreaks.

Right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Doctors gave her Adderall for the cutting. Why wouldn't they? Adderall helped her focus on the H she was slicing in her forehead. H?
Stands for HELL, douche-lame!
And, right in front of you, she starts cutting her thighs. Sees you looking. Then explains. Amped-up and serene. “Cutting's better than picking. Last Christmas I picked a hole in my cheek you could put your finger through!”

God, she is screaming right in your face. Can bad breath give you cancer?

“In New Orleans,” she tells you huskily, “you put the crystal in your eye. They call it Les Yeux-Yeux. Cajuns call it Cajank.” She also said her mother used to eat her father's ball-hair. Every morning, after he shaved, Papa would snip at his scrotum beard. And when he was done, her mother would make her come into the bathroom and help her gather up the tiny hairs. She'd put them in a glass of water, swirl it a little, then drink up. Clarence Thomas style. “Mama say no woman will want Daddy when she's got his pubes in her belly. Mama knew things.” Now it sounds weird. But then—with the light on the white walls shimmering the blood sloshing off the top of your skull, it made tremendous sense. It made you sob. (You had to keep reminding yourself to breathe; every moment felt either really right or really wrong.) Miss New Orleans told you the only reason she did speed was that her mother made her take “zese leetle capsools” so she could see better when they searched for Daddy-hair. Mama gave the little girl Dexedrine, just like little Judy Garland got. She'd spend the day studying every square inch of bathroom floor instead of going to school. When she found a curl she'd yelp and Mommy would give her a smooch. She covered her eyes as she told the story. She hugged her knees. Then the tears would come and she'd need something. What are mommies for?

STOP THINKING ABOUT DISEASE
. That's how you get one. It's so fucking hard to breathe. Speedfreaks get sick. Not you. You're not one of them. You're different. You're never going to get a disease. Even though you've been up for … a while. You're not one of them. You're different. You still brush your teeth. (Manually now, since you took your Waterpik apart.) You floss. You even urinated. Maybe two days ago.

Your heartbeat could set off car alarms. How many days? What do insects feel when they fuck? Max Jacobson gave injections to Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Eddie Fisher, Mother Teresa, and JFK, who was so reliant on Dr. Max—a.k.a. Feelgood—he flew him to summits, like the B1 in Austria. With Khrushchev. Jack wanted to stay sharp.

Dr. J had amphetamine getaways for VIPs in his splash-pad on East 53rd. He made tapes. Wouldn't you? After three days, everybody's a pervaloid. There's Tennessee, wearing Mother Teresa's surprisingly plush, high-rise undergarments. “If I wore these, they'd call
me
mother!”

YOUR GRANDFATHER HAD A SCANDAL INVOLVING INHALERS. He got caught soaking Benzedrine cotton inhalers in coffee and drinking it with the other degenerates in Times Square. Before he moved back to Cleveland, missing his teeth, Gramps had his pocket picked by Herbert Huncke, also high on Bennies. Each time you share this, which you forget that you made up, you bust your buttons. But all your stories are from long ago. Even the true ones.

You are normal. It's the speed that made you a freak.

JERRY STAHL
is the author of six books, including the memoir
Permanent Midnight
(made into a movie with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) and the novels
I, Fatty
and
Pain Killers
. Formerly “culture” columnist for
Details
, Stahl's fiction and journalism has appeared in
Esquire
, the
New York Times
, and
The Believer
, among other places. Most recently, he wrote
Hemingway & Gellhorn
, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, for HBO. Currently, he is completing a novel,
Jumping from the H
, and working on a remake of
The Thin Man
with Johnny Depp.

labiodental fricative

by scott phillips

torie

S
o you want to know something weird about Jerry?” I ask. Glen stops licking for a second and I immediately regret it. “Huh?”

“Get your face back down there, big boy.” He starts up again, not the best head I've ever had but better than Jerry anyway. Better than none. “He has a tooth fetish.”

He stops licking again and starts laughing.

“Get back to it,” I tell him, “I'm just about ready.” We're in the backseat of Glen's Lexus, which is pretty fucking sweet, even if he is living in it. When he first told me he was driving one I thought he was full of shit, because he looked like a guy who lived in a dumpster or maybe just a grove of trees down by the river. Or beneath an underpass or in a refrigerator box.

And while I can hardly believe I'm letting him go down on me like this, I also can't believe he's doing it so enthusiastically, because to be perfectly honest, I left Jerry's in kind of a rush this morning and I don't know exactly what it's like down there, but I'm experiencing that not-so-fresh feeling, if you know what I mean. I get the feeling he just wants to fuck me so bad he's willing to go through a lot for it, which is kind of romantic when you think of it, and he knows perfectly well why I'm doing it: because I know he's holding and right now Jerry isn't and inside Glen was hinting that he had a lead on a whole bunch of it and that was why he was trying to sell Jerry that penis back at the bar.