One day Crate came into work with his head shaved, bearing a disturbing resemblance to Charles Manson. He was very sensitive about his new 'do, or the lack thereof, so whenever the new wave girls joked that they were going to carve an X on his forehead when he wasn't looking, Crate would explode into snarling, slobbering, screaming fits, and begin hurling copies of Indoor Bud Master, Growing Dope by the Moon Cycle, and Choosing Your Hallucinogens.
On break one day, one of those innocent young new wave girls with dyed red hair and black eyeshadow named Pagan asked me how to deal with Crate's violent outbursts.
“It's real simple,” I said. “Get an extension chord. Plug it into a wall socket. Cut off the other end with a scissors, and take those flayed wires and touch 'em to that metal plate in Crate's head. Snaps him right back into shape every time.”
Pagan lived in a neighborhood so bad it reminded me of that Dan Rather documentary Forty-Eight Hours on Crack Street. Outside her bedroom window an open air drug market swarmed constantly. Junkies and rockheads melted and exploded on her doorstep. One night Pagan saw a woman on all fours let a dealer piss in her face for a rock of crack. Of course her living environment affected her job performance drastically because she was kept awake until four or five a.m. every night of the week. The boss constantly yelled at Pagan for being late or inattentive at her computer monitor.
In order to help cheer her up, Pagan's mom bought her one of those musical toilet-paper rolls. They're some new gimmicky knickknack, a relative of the mood ring. Every time you pull off a square of toilet paper it bursts into song. Pagan's played a tinny version of “Love Me Tender” by Elvis. The notes were little electronic beeps like those made by a digital watch. For awhile it was nice to hear the sweet melody against the sonic backdrop of the crack dealers threatening to kill each other. But Pagan soon got sick of hearing “Love Me Tender” every time she used the bathroom. After only two weeks she had already heard that computerized ditty dozens of times. It began to drive her crazy. And if that wasn't bad enough, the musical toilet-paper roll began singing on its own. In the middle of the night, when they were all eating dinner, while Pagan was having sex, when she least expected it, the ghostly strains of Elvis would drift from the bathroom. The toilet roll minstrel seemed to have a mind of its own. Then it went even further and just began to play its little computer ballad all the time. “Love Me Tender” beeped over and over constantly until Pagan could stand it no longer and threw the roll out the window. But even out there it kept playing, the battery seemed to never run dry. For days afterward when Pagan heard the sad song, she would look out her window at the plaintive toilet-paper roll lying unwanted in the gutter among the discarded hypodermic needles, old condoms and broken crack pipes.
Night time. Nothing but Cops on every station… Finally I get to a station that has something different. Only I am instantly consumed by horror and paranoia when I see that this station is broadcasting a continuous live satellite feed of me watching television in the hotel room I am hiding out in. I look around. There must be a hidden surveillance camera somewhere in the room, but I have no idea where it is. Finally, based on a close inspection of the perspective being broadcast on the television, I figure out that the camera must be hidden in the front door to the room, somewhere around the keyhole. I search the door thoroughly but can't find any camera. Then on a lark I bend down and look through the keyhole. I see an eye staring through at me from the other side of the door.
The alarm went off. I woke up and it was time to go to work again.
5
For years my dealer was the Sultan of Stone. He had connections for just about anything: Thorazine, experimental meds, designer shit. Sultan stocked the usual hard drugs like crank and heroin as well. But best of all, the Sultan was a never-ending fountain of weed. He had it when no one else did.
“My supply's so steady because the guy I get it from sometimes buys it from the government,” he once said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The CIA or the FBI,” he answered. “This stuff we're smoking is pot they confiscated from somebody else, then resold on the street. That's why it seems a little stale.”
I knew Sultan from Last Laugh when he worked there packing boxes in the shipping department, so at first he was convenient. Sultan liked to sample what he sold, so the guy was kept in a steady cold steel buzz just on a taste of the latest batch of whatever he scored. And the Sultan of Stone was a nonspecific drug fiend, sampling his way across an entire spectrum of intoxicants. Eventually these tiny growths appeared on his back, little monkeys swelling like tumors in his poisoned flesh. Soon he was using too much to even keep his job at Last Laugh. Thor had no choice but to fire him.
After that, Sultan's only form of employment was dealing. He went into high gear. It was a 24-hour-a-day profession. But the Sultan was eating and smoking his profits faster than he made them, crushed in the middle by all the different drugs he was incessantly scoring for numerous parties. Pretty soon Sultan fell into a dim nocturnal economy, a world outside of taxes. It was a place where Sultan increasingly found himself being paid in extra drugs instead of cash. He would barter weed for speed and trade that for acid. Sometimes these deals would go on for days without there ever being any actual cash involved. As a result, there were days where he found himself with a big bag of speed but no money or food.
“I don't care, just so long as I can keep myself in buds and Wonderbread,” Sultan used to say. That was about all he ate: white bread and an occasional soda, never any vegetables or fruit. Most of what he ate wouldn't even be considered food by most people: Slim Jims, Cheetos and Lifesavers picked up in corner stores on his way to score more, ever more, drugs.
Even as he walked around, Sultan seemed to be going through a process of decay. His skin looked bad. Though once he had been a beefy dude, a bodybuilder, Sultan had dropped about sixty pounds and was beginning to look thin. There were certain afternoons when a bunch of us were sitting around the gloom of his apartment that I could have sworn the dealer's body was turning transparent. Sultan hadn't changed his bedsheets in a year. The mattress and blankets were a dingy brown that stank like a lost athletic sock in the boys' locker room. Sultan's clothes looked like layers of grime on his gaunt body. He seldom bathed.
And yet Sultan still got laid quite frequently and by some good-looking women (as well as drug whores and coke hags). Some women even fucked him in his own filthy, greasy bed. Add to that the room and probably the mattress itself were swarming with roaches, and you wonder what women saw in the experience.
“I can't understand it,” T2000 lamented one night. “I have a good job and adequate hygiene but I can't even get a woman to give me directions. Sultan smells like a public urinal during intermission at an AC/DC concert and he has babes lining up to spread their legs in a trash heap bed so filthy I wouldn't even stand in it with combat boots on at high noon.”
But Sultan kept fading. He was becoming ever more transparent. All his circadian rhythms were gone. When he ate or slept was determined by the ebb and flow of drugs. The concept of a night's sleep no longer existed. Sultan would stay awake for four days at a time and then crash for fourteen hours. Or maybe he'd be bingeing out on some opium or heroin and the whole day would be a series of nods, a constant drifting out of and back into naps. In a life so phantasmagoric, time was meaningless, until it was time to score. Sultan had a reputation for always being a few minutes early for a buy. But these incidents of coherence and punctuality only took up an hour here and there. Most of the dealer's days were spent in a great drifting of clockless stupor.
Food fell way down on Sultan's list of priorities. There were four drug habits he had to attend to first: pot, alcohol, speed, and heroin. The last two took up most of his energy. He was always either up or down. Sultan began to forget things, get confused in his mind. Long term malnutrition was beginning to do permanent brain damage. He would smoke pot and do crank until the hunger pains went away. Viruses caught onto him like