Day 5: Lust for Life

This is my cop-out.

Because today I have to spend memorizing lines, then attending a season launch for Ugly Rhino, workshopping some material at The Shelter, and then celebrating a friend's birthday.

This is my cop-out.

Lust For Life

Mary Harrison, twenty-eight, born in Peoria, IL on January the Eleventh, 1983, sat at the card table in her boyfriend's apartment. The card table had stains on its vinyl surface. Mary looked at the stains for the two hundred and forty-third time. Then she turned her attention to the powder dissolving in the spoon in her hand. She flicked the lighter: once, twice, and the third magical time. The powder melted into the tiny puddle of saltwater as it all began to bubble. She set down the lighter, and dropped a fresh cotton pellet into the spoon, and drew the liquid through the pellet into the syringe. She got the syringe and the pellets this very morning from the St. Lucy's needle exchange. The syringe grew warm in her hand. She set it on the table.

As she waited for the syringe to cool, she looked around.

She looked at the bed. Her boyfriend, Tommy, slept with the covers pulled over his head. The fingers of his right hand showed above the covers. She could see the scabs on his knuckles and a few of the black hairs on his fingers. She could smell his third-day sweat. She could hear his snores.

She looked at the windows. Steel frames, twenty-four rectangular panes painted black. Slivers of brightness were the scratches in the paint, showing that the sun continued to rise and set without any help from Tommy or Mary.

She looked at the card table and what was on it. The Bag. Fresh cotton pellets. A pile of fresh syringes. A bottle of normal saline. Her shot, cooling. The gun. The stains on the vinyl.

She looked as she waited for the shot to cool.

Which will it be? The syringe, or the gun?

Tommy's pistol. A snub-nosed .38, dark metal. None of this flashy chrome bullshit, Tommy said. Our provider, he said. Which made them all the money that they made right now. Mostly taken from trembling Yemenites who ran midnight groceries. Money which kept them going, money which fed her veins.

Money from Tommy's gun. His gun, which he said never to touch.

As she waited for the syringe to cool, she listened to the sounds outside the window. The trucks rumbling by, the guy who spent twenty minutes yelling at his girl on the phone, the other guy who lied and lied about how he was in the car and he was almost there, crossing Flatbush and Vanderbilt and Washington and Bedford, and he was almost there Baby, I promise.

She thought about Peoria: the river, and her downtown friends there, like Cat, the boy who like to suck dicks on the hoods of cars, he never talked about the men attached to them; he just talked about sucking dicks like it was a competition, a race to see who could travel the furthest in miles measured out by inches. Or Sheila, the girl who gave Mary her very first taste, something Mary never tried again until she got to the City and met Tommy and got sad. Or Shad and Mikey, the rock'n'roll promoters with their tiny, tiny basement concerts, the concerts with bad poetry for an opening act, the basements with mildew and broken rakes in the corner.

As she waited for the syringe to cool, she thought about the third choice. What if she didn't shoot anything at all? She asked herself that every time. What if she didn't shoot anything at all?

Right.

What will it be? The syringe, or the gun?

This time, she chose the syringe.

© 2011 Michael Bernstein