Frisson

I feel a smidge retarded up there, whirling upside down by the skin of my thighs. I like the outfit though. The leather feels good— it's a tactile thing. The chains on it feel cold and crisp when I snap it on. I feel like the Batman of sadomasochism.

In the mirror, that thick, black pupa on my lip still unnerves me. They told me to dye it, because black fits the suit better. I wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves, but there are a surprising amount of ripped, sex-obsessed, acrobats here, waiting to nab my job if I fuck up.

Vegas, baby.

I’m thirty now. I can’t afford to toss jobs like I did in my twenties. Gotta be working towards something— or staying in one place, at least for a little while. I need stability, I think. Maybe I’ll get a girlfriend. Maybe this girl here:

She thanks the pharmacy assistant, then clacks away in snub nose heels. The line moves up. I try not to look like I’m watching her, as she floats through the automatic doors in her sleek pantsuit, designer purse locked and loaded. She pulls down her sunglasses like a fighter pilot’s visor, and gets in a blue Porsche.

Damn, I think.

“Excuse me sir… Excuse me?” I hear.

I walk up. Irritation personified stands behind the counter.

“Good afternoon,” she says. Fuck you, she means.

Some time later, I’m looking at the little white bag she gave me, peeking out from the recycle bin. Its contents are on the bar, a translucent, orange cylinder with a safety use label, which might as well be cuneiform, the way I ignore it.

I’m lying on the loveseat. Black leather. (Wild, how dead cow skin, dried and treated with chemicals, can become someone’s fetish. Life is very fucked up, if you take even a second to think about it. I’ve known that since I was at least twelve. Hell, that girl with the Porsche probably works for some corporation that kills poor people in some indirect way— through pollution, or gentrification, or whatever.)

Girl with the Porsche,

killing all the poor.

I start to get a song and beat in my head. It could be another one for my band, ‘Day Boj’.

(We’re called Day Boj, because it's the reverse of a day job. It takes money to keep it going.)

I hop on the drum kit a couple feet away in my living room, take my shirt off, and start pounding. My muscles flare. My body’s an unholy temple. I roar like the sadistic fuck I am. Fuck my neighbors.

Fuck me, for being so inconsiderate.

Nah— I reassure myself. Fuck them.

And I’m back to pounding, roaring the lyrics I just came up with so gutturally you can’t understand them. For a while, I don’t see anything. When I’m pounding, it takes all my senses just to feel, and to listen.

I start to get sweaty. I want to put my leather outfit on. Pounding with the leather on would feel so incredible, I’m disappointed in myself for not thinking of it sooner. As I run past the kitchen counter to go and get it, I notice the orange cylinder staring at me.

I stop.

I try to remember if I already took some. My memory has reached geriatric levels at thirty. Good to know.

Let’s see, I think, Porsche lady… parking lot… drive home… Nope. It's a blur.

Against all sage advice, I take two more (or perhaps just two to begin with), then I go to put the outfit on. I look shredded as all hell in it, but I’m fickle about the leather constable’s hat. With or without? I weigh both options in the mirror, and realize my hair is thinning. Fuck.

Hat on, I return to the living room. It feels different now. Warmer. That nagging back pain I’ve always had is nowhere to be found.

Uh oh, I think. Either two pills are kicking in early, or two are kicking in late.

I hope for the former, and fall limp on the loveseat, trying to remember what I was doing just before I put the outfit on.

Girl with the Porsche,

killing the…

Shit.

I glare upward. The popcorn ceiling looks like a tempest. My eyes close to get away from all the shifting patterns. I remember now, how much I hate looking at it when the high kicks in.

Eyes closed, the Porsche lady enters my thoughts again. She walks to the car's side door, only this time she doesn’t get in it. She turns and faces me, big, ‘Real Houese Wives of Wherever-the-Fuck’ glasses, absorbing half her face. She chews her gum cockily, leaning forward, and says: “I’m what your mom wanted you to be,” in her thick, valley accent.

“What?” I ask her in surprise.

She laughs, and her Porsche begins to laugh too, revving amusedly as its front grill expands and contracts. I watch it extend its rear view mirror like a hand, and the Porsche lady high fives it. Then, suddenly, she dives through the driver’s side window, and the two of them skirt away, laughing as they roll backwards down the highway.

I open my eyes. The popcorn ceiling is certainly a better view than whatever that was.

I sit up, feeling my body lag behind whatever wiring is telling it to move. My mouth is dry, bitter with the taste of percocet. I say the word: per-co-ce-t. It's punchy, and percussive— feels like I could play it on my drum kit.

I mean to stand, go and get some water, but feel my head lulling backward again. I splash onto the leather cushions, eyes disobeying my commands to stay open.

For a moment, I just lie there, twirling dizzily, like in my pole act. Then my head starts to sing. I get a weird sensation of falling, and the two-dimensional dark behind my eyelids expands into something more substantial, something like a void. I feel as though I’m falling through something now, which is much scarier. I try to grasp at the walls of this void, and am reminded how wall-less most voids tend to be.

Now a light comes over me. It seems to be growing from some unknown place, perhaps from the bottom of the void. What happens when I reach it, I wonder. Do I die? What happens when I die? The light is accompanied by a high-pitched din. It sounds small at first, then grows, then shrinks. Then it grows again. It's an ambulance siren!

I intend to jolt up! (No luck, but my head lifts.)

My eyelids, like a finicky garage door, only raise a quarter, but it's enough to confirm the ambulance lights grating through my blinds.

It stops right outside.

I urge it to keep going, to not feed the paranoid notion that it's here for me. But it refutes, continues flashing its lights like the angel of death.

Am I going to die? I think. In my twenties I thought I might— there’s something metal about dying in your twenties; it means you lived so dangerously that life took you out quickly— but not in your thirties; dying in your thirties just means you took really bad care of yourself.

I try to settle my mind down, while my body couldn’t be more settled. I reach up to confirm this, groping for a heartbeat. On my leather-strapped chest I find multiple wet spots, and realize that I’m drooling all over myself. Fuck.

I worry: Was I having a seizure? Was I just spasming on the couch and blacked out from it? Maybe I was, and the neighbors heard and called 9-1-1! Fuck! I know how this ends. I’ll be dragged out of my apartment now, and a headline somewhere will read, ‘Local sex-freak dies of overdose’, and my mom will find it, and she’ll sob and shake her head, and ask my dad where they went wrong with me, while a picture of my dead, leathery bulge stares back at them from their phone screens, and they think about how much worse of a son I am than my little brother Sam. Fuck Sam. And fuck my neighbors. Wait— I shouldn’t think things like that. What if I’m at the pearly gates soon, answering to J-Man? Thoughts like that won’t look too great on the old postmortem CV.

I hear a thud from outside, perhaps the ambulance door shutting.

I sit and wait. What are they going to do when they get me in there? They’ll put an IV in me probably; maybe one of those things they stick in your nose, too. Maybe I’ll hear ‘clear!’ and get zapped back to life with a defribilla…defibural… one of those things.

I listen. How long has it been since I heard the door shut? Was it even the door? Wait… are my eyes still closed?

I open them— barely. The ambulence lights ceased. I don’t know if they turned the vehicle off, or left, or never existed in the first place. My phone is miles away, on the kitchen counter, but I feel like I should check it to see what time it is.

My digital clock is on the wall, but it's slow, or fast, or broken… or maybe I fixed it. Either way it reads 7:42 P.M. That means that in eighteen minutes, I’m supposed to be spinning upside down on a stage, drunk bachelorette’s howling at me with tubes of alcoholic slushies in hand.

Goddamnit.

Where’s my new start? Where’s my stability? Did the second round of pills kick in yet…