“Oh, good God, let me use your bathroom, Buttercup,” I gulped, standing up fast and awkwardly, side-stepping the rickety folding side table where the glassware tinkled and drugs wobbled, my stomach rumbling like a volcano as I began to voice a leonine roar, humming a deep peristaltic mmm sound, starting at the bottom note deep in my core, raising my hand to my mouth. I was nauseous, had hit the stem hard; reliably, predictably, two and a half minutes later I erupted. I lunged toward Reese’s bathroom as my stomach exploded the Wendy’s Spicy Chicken sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and mayo I’d eaten an hour earlier and washed down with lemonade, out of my mouth in all directions, bits and drops hitting walls and shower curtain, the window, the mirror, and a mop and bucket in front of the shower, a light-green scrap of lettuce on the dark little throw rug in Reese’s tiny bathroom, worse than a mobile home, one or two small chunks hit over the sink and then, finally I hurled the small remaining stream of vomit into the low, narrow avocado colored toilet, got a little on the back of the seat there. I used a couple of squares of toilet paper and cleaned up as best I could, this gastric event like all of them a temporary inconvenience. I already felt better, was quite high, and that was the reason I was at Reese’s after all. I am, in fact, a malignantly bad guest for Reese, but when I visit, I’m carrying, cocaine or cash, which are virtually identical in this situation, so was welcomed by default. And Reese wasn’t a great hostess for that matter. We were each others’ bitchez, but pals. She asked me to buy a box of baking soda one night on my way in. I couldn’t find any in the 7-11 I had stopped at. I had to take my dessert home to cook it.
Last year Reese had somewhat out-of-the-blue moved to Old Orchard Beach. She was able to get herself a Section 8 certificate which got her a one bedroom year-round apartment in a beach town for functionally free. She was a reliable stop off for me, even though (or maybe because) her apartment felt for all the world like a trailer, badly lit, sketchy pillows, drafty windows, spoons all bent and burnt. The bathroom showed evidence of vomit. It was a second story place, had an outside staircase, up to a tiny landing where Reese stowed her snow shovels inside a mop bucket.
I loved this thing about Reese, that we could barf in front of one another. A couple years and more earlier, when times were fat, I had sat beside her on the side of my bed, both of us barely dressed, as we passed the generous stainless steel wastebasket back and forth between us to empty our tortured stomachs, barely interrupting our ongoing, bright and cheerful conversation. I believe we may have summoned the wherewithal to engage in some physical, even fellatic activities soon thereafter. We were hard to deter. There was a shower in the next room. Reese loved dick, she made many gestures to prove it.
Nowadays, our times together are perhaps a bit more twisted up, compressed and tweaky. No sexual services at all and don’t even ask. Months go by between the times we’re together. I basically only use cocaine these times I see Reese. My connections from when I lived in the area a year ago are long gone. This is why I barf when we smoke crack together, because my tolerance is very low. I try to buy from her, or to share if I have some from elsewhere. Whenever I buy through Reese, something invariably happens to the last bag; my expectations, already low, are invariably dashed further to pieces. Leaving the drug on the table to go barf in the bathroom was a risk. Reese tries to keep our expectations realistic. She has had a dealer there a couple times, those are the times I feel less welcome to linger and bask in her presence, but the supply is more reliable. I once got a great deal, and another time an all-right deal, from Reese’s guy. These arrangements are quite unreliable for Reese as well. She runs for him. She shoots heroin every day. He smokes blunts. We all get by.
I wonder at how, over time Reese and I have become such close friends, and at the same time, such alienated strangers. I can’t help remembering the near past, when Reese and I wanted to become friends, and circled one another like cats.
I met Reese in the early Spring, and by the summer, we had become easy companions. One exceptionally hot day I waited outside McDonald’s for a Raspberry Smoothie, and Reese flounced by in a light blue spaghetti strap sun dress, cocked her head into the passenger side window, and then got in. She was tall, thin, and beautiful, with long straight light-brown hair. The bright sunshine revealed how her skin was covered in places with an incredibly fine down of golden hair. The heat had also brought on a thin, salty sour layer of sweat, like a sweet pickle. We went back to my air-conditioned bedroom, smoked a vivacious amount of cocaine, and after I paid her a hundo, Reese supplied a lovely, relaxed, affectionate, luxuriously extended blowjob. I licked the sweat from her shoulder and neck like a condiment. She was always relaxed company. She liked to laugh, though her liquid alto laughter could be dark. No, her laugh was genuine and song-like, it was her sense of humor that was dark. Her summer sleeveless fashions showed off her neo-jailhouse half-sleeve of tattoos, which proved to be conversation starters. I suggested she get the flowers and leaves filled in with colors. Reese had to wait for her artist to get out of jail, so she could pay him for the last ones, the black and white outlines, before more art would florally ensue. It was Reese who taught me, at 63 years old, that tattoos were not necessarily sexy on a chick. I had always thought otherwise, and I value that esoteric lesson from Reese, one of many lessons I learned from her over time.
For whatever reason, Reese had a reputation as a snitch. Her name was on a CI (confidential informant) affidavit (hers was one of more than 20) that put one local (and apparently now much missed and beloved, which seems like bullshit to me) heroin dealer away for 7-12 years, and I would often be reluctantly enlisted as an ally by someone on one side or another of a conversation on this topic, and I always felt cheated out of my Reese-time because we had to fucking discuss the whole thing again and again. Sometimes, even when Reese wasn’t there, I’d find myself arguing with my girlfriend Janessa, about Reese’s current rat status. I guess the fact one of Jan’s dealers was the brother of the dealer she helped put away, kept the pseudo-issue a neo-current event. It was all bullshit; we just wasted each other’s time because we had so much of it.
Reese could turn into a kind of humanist. She’d occasionally break out of her cold shell to do something neo-nurturing. She gave me a Narcan kit– the old school setup, with a vial of the antidote and a syringe to suck it up into, and an intimidating, inch long needle to administer to the opiate overdose victim intra-muscularly, and she even thoughtfully supplied a couple pairs of blue vinyl gloves like EMT’s use (lifted, no doubt, from her doctor’s office or from the methadone clinic or the back of a paddy wagon), and packets of sterile wipes. My house had temporarily gotten risky viz a viz overdosing on opiates; having Narcan was the den-mother level of good-hearted realism. This was as earth-mother as Reese ever acted. Narcan now comes in a quick applicator one simply squirts into the patient’s nose. No needles. But needles aren’t a problem for Reese, she had always used needles, felt no discomfort or aversion to that method to deliver relief. She shot me up a few times, sometimes with up and sometimes down, shot up Janessa several times (those times they weren’t avoiding one another), and Reese easily made up in confidence and calm what she missed in deep knowledge, and overall she did a creditable job as a nurse. She didn’t injure anyone, which they surely would have done done to themselves had Reese not done the job. Heroin was Reese’s signature injection.
I had a kind of peak sexy macabre experience sitting on my bed, watching her through the mirror in the bathroom as she shot herself up in a vein in her neck, topless with her droopy junkie tits (back a few years ago, before they grew back larger, bouncier, and better in every way than before), the only time I got to see Reese’s tits back in those days. She shot drugs into her neck! The whole exercise looked and felt ghoulish. At least shooting up into her neck worked when Reese shot herself up. Years later a different friend posted a selfie on Facebook from the ER of the local hospital, with an apparently bizarrely infected wound from shooting heroin into a vein in her neck, all laid open and cleaned out, and it looks like the face of death, good God, a coroner photo from Law & Order: SVU. So, Reese was cool and ghoulish and slightly warm when our activities were agreeable to her motivations. Reese was thoughtful and quiet; I didn’t say scheming.
Reese was just then turning into a middle aged lady– she turned 40 while we were hanging out. I was in my early sixties, and I loved wasting with her these last few scraps of her collapsed and desecrated youth. I loved how Reese could be such a hard bitch, and could get herself into such far out situations. One night we took acid together. That was a mistake, LOL, or I mean LSD. Once, years ago, she got in an accident driving someone’s car, but rather than waiting around to get caught, Reese attempted to get away, and drove the car through a fence and into a swimming pool and got into enormous trouble. When she was fucked up on smack she could get into unbelievable situations. She told me she stopped drinking Allen’s Coffee Brandy because every time she drank it, she woke up in jail. Every time! She stole my phone once, then threw it out the window when it started counting down to erasing itself. I believed it had been stolen and I used Where’s My iPhone to erase and lock it. It apparently made sounds the assembled freaks in the car with her didn’t trust, so they hurled the bleeping phone out. Or that was the story I was told. I had bought her a gram and a half of heroin, from her guy, that day when she called me for an engagement, and she was wasted. I got a replacement for the phone a couple days later, an upgrade actually, since they didn’t make iPhone 6’s anymore and I had to settle for a 7. I still don’t know whether the story was true. It was a thousand dollar phone. I had insurance but it just paid the $250 I still owed on the phone. I upgraded the regular way, because I was already qualified for a new one.
Trying to promote her earth-mother character to me, Reese told me how she wrote letters to her friend in jail. She had been in jail herself, and knew what to talk about in a letter, knew what a comfort a letter could be to someone incarcerated. The jail friend she wrote to was loyal to her, even though he could be a bit of a dick. He was in the car the night my phone was lost. He’s the type of guy who knows how to fence a stolen iPhone. When he was out of jail for awhile last fall, he helped Reese clean out her drug dealer roommate’s safe with her complete stash and all her money, a haul of about $25K or so. They took the whole fucking safe! Reese vehemently denied any knowledge if it, but then quickly moved out of town, to Old Orchard Beach and never went back to get her stuff from the roommate’s apartment.
Well, the last time I saw Reese, a week ago, she told me she had to step out of a wake she was attending with her caseworker, to meet me. I was parked in the Hannaford parking lot she’d directed me to. She had to be there at the wake, because she had to get into this treatment plan (I believe it’s a sober house) or she’ll be homeless, which might mean, if she’s not lying, that she’s lost the trailer-like barf palace apartment she had in Old Orchard Beach, and seems to have slithered back to Westbrook.
I would be wishing her well on all her new endeavors, except I had originally driven to see her to buy two eight-balls of cocaine from her guy for three hundred each, purchasing mostly for other people, but Reese bolted right after slipping those six new hundred dollar bills into her bra, under the form fitting black and white tunic she had worn for the benefit of the dead person I guess. She’d be right back, her guy was in Hannaford’s.
I could feel it, something was wrong. I called her twice, then texted a few more times. She had ripped me off, and I knew it the second she got out of the car. By the evening, I had sent her a Messenger message saying I hoped she OD’s and dies alone, and recommending she block me on Facebook, but she had already done that and my message never made it to her. I outed her by name on my Facebook feed for “robbing people,” and my posting got several concerned likes from actual friends, which felt mortifying. Reese stole $600 from me, and from my point of view, she might as well be dead. The supplier her former roommate used is interested in Reese’s whereabouts. I suggest they watch Westbrook. Try that bitch Shona’s trap house, down there off Riverside. And check out the local residential treatment facilities, because Reese might just be in one. It’s hard to wish her well. She’ll be an old lady before I see her again. Perhaps she’ll show signs of a broken nose.
Bitchez 