The weather is seasonably brisk and affronting.  I wake up at 9, but it’s really 12:30.  I hate when that happens.  I am blessed with pleasurable dreams; a girlfriend has gotten a new hairdo and all her worldly cares appear repaired.  I am still depressed.

My general state of wellness seems to have a cyclical process.  I am becoming aware of it in gradual husks as these fruitless years trample over me.  One day I wake up, and the first thought in my head is a fantasy of a shotgun chainsaw obliterating my cerebral cortex.  Then I get up and perform the perfunctory duties of  a classy human being: scratching my ass, pissing, shitting, coughing, snorting, gazing disdainfully at a throw embroidered with the visage of Our Lord that is placed in mocking sanctity over the open doors of a wardrobe.  And the same magazines by the toilet.  I should really clean up.  

And then again, if it’s not a shotgun, it’s a syringe.  I was about to junk out last fall, I had the score all lined up, then I met her.  Marla.  ’“I don’t have a tumor, but if I did, I’d name it Marla.  That little cut on the roof of your mouth that would heal if you could just stop tonguing it, but you can’t.”‘  Now I’m left with the same old guilty wistful hope of abandon, and she’s pregnant with my seed and not only concealing an opiate addiction, but concealing it from some sorry fuck that doesn’t even know my name, and actually thinks it’s his.

But I digress.  Today, I’m going to spend several hours thinking about drinking, and then I’m going to spend money on drink.  I’m going to spend the money I should be handing over to my patrons for groceries, water, etc, I’m going to spend that money on drugs.  It’s a foregone foreclusion.   

After I score, legally, easily, cheaply, I’m aware that the guffaws and witty outbursts are a telltale sign to my patrons.  I suppose it’s about time I come to terms with the fact that: I AM withdrawn.  I AM reclusive.  I’m not really.  I tell Murph we really need to hook up with that acid.  I also ask him what he thought Lennon meant by “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

He laughs.  Yes, it is of the more transparent lyrical selections from Lennon’s career.  All that I can surmise is:  I’ve never made plans, therefore, all I’ve lived is pure unadulterated life.  And to be certain and dazzling:  when I did make plans, they led to unmitigated torture and woe–which so far as I can discern are truly some telltale signs of animation of the organism.

So I’m pretty drunk by the afternoon.  I call Nash.  He’s presumably been bed-ridden since being forced out of the ER yesterday.  He actually answers.  Yes, he says, I can get him tobacco and sandwiches.  When I get there, he’s so normal it’s alien.  He’s forlorn and not manic.  He’s in serious, serious detox.  He’s shaking all over once he gets up and moves about.  I understand now why he wanted someone to buy him cigs: 

He doesn’t want to hand the cash over for the shaking.

I almost tear up at one point.  I get my point across, though, I’m sure of it, and to be sure, he’s remorseful.  I tell him I’m not going to blame myself if he dies (I bring the whisky bottle out now, to my lips) and that I’m going to feel guilty if he dies.   I reiterate that I don’t understand his trip, that if it would kill me quicker, I would and could stop drinking.   Joux Joux had just the night before, in feathery tones, said to him: “You’re being a shitty friend, and a shitty person.”

When a fairy tells you something disparaging, it’s like a day-glo flamethrower emasculating you balls-up.  It’s like waking up feeling great and finding a meat hook in your brain, and after a second of confusion remembering what you’ve done to deserve such a violation.  

So I’m to go the grocer and get sandwich material.  And this is where things go horribly wrong for me.  You see, I"m a gourmet.  So is Nash.  We’ve both done our time under crank sous-chefs and downright manic-depressive Head Chefs.  And along the way, we learned and cultivated the craft of cuisine; being artists, we both have imbued ourselves with the tenants of tradition as well as the frivolities of personality.  I don’t like the way his apartment smells, and he thinks it’s crazy that I eat fries with tabasco, ketchup, and strawberry jam.

So I steal a flat of prosciutto (total fucking shit, as we found out, not worth sale) and buy a cantaloupe, loaf of bead, a tomato (curiously he’s tomato avoidant, fucking faggot poseur fuck!) and a red pepper, I’m thinking combined with whatever cheese laying around, we have ourselves some Flamingos.  A “Flamingo” is any grilled sandwich with cheddar, prosciutto, melon, and a mayo or aioli.  In this case, the mayo is raspberry preserves.  I am the rightful progenitor of the “Flamingo” and any copyright cases will be dealt with forthright, and with no mercy or regard for morality or ethics.

When I buy the red pepper, I doubt it.  I doubt that I’m making a savory choice. Not in a culinary disposition.  I search the aisles for a canned roasted red pepper, but I’m pretty toasted, and grocery stores are usually kind of retarded.  I buy a fresh one.  It gets sauteed with the melon and butter, sea salt and black pepper.  It get’s put on grilled wheat bread with prosciutto and cheddar.  A thin slice of tomato.  And that’s enough to make Nash vomit.  Vomit like a pro.

Well-placed vomit.

There’s a prep bowl on the table by the grill on the way to the kitchen.  He fills it 2/3 of the way.  Not a drop otherwise.  The kitchen is a little more messy.  He fills another bowl, gets sloppy on the way to the sink, and seemingly carefully fills a bowl in the sink.  Then he goes to the toilet to finish up.  The whole while, I’m apologizing for the acids, for the whole idea, patting him on the shoulder, letting him know he’s surely not disgusting me.  I clean up a lot of the mess.  I tell him stories of the things that really disgusted me in my life, namely working at a turkey farm in my teens.  I go into horrific graphic detail.  I totally digress from and never mention my point, my point being the last time something made me wretch it was sanding dried cat snot off of walls.  Instead I rail on about how turkey piss and shit dries at a fast comfortable rate, and I exalt about the experiences that Jeffrey Dahmer and I have in common.  I’m not even aware that I’m really happy to have an unflappable, understanding audience.  I’m really just hoping, as always, that I’m sufficiently entertaining.  

There were no outcries.  There were no sarcastic groans or pontifical grievances with my discourse.  No lauds, no belly laughs, no overly amused half-cocked grins or even drawn out chesty chuckles.  He just smiled at the appropriate times, sighed at the end, and watched and listened.  I actually got to see him near his natural state.   The librium, lorazepam, the steroids, it all barely touches him.  He couldn’t roll a cigarette right now.  He’s been RYO for over 15 years.   He couldn’t do it now.  I leave what’s left of my Camels.

Detox is a bitch.  I’m a few hours–if even!–removed from a pint of whiskey, and I’m jacked up, ready for more.  I’m about to run for more smokes and hope my plasma card can cover that and a 40 oz.  All around Nash, on the walls of his basement apartment, the matter of his Soul hangs in acquirements and repositories of art.  On cardboard, bits of wood and formica, in skulls and armadillos, in assortments of medical instruments, in abrogations of voodoo paraphernalia and of course in brushes, tints, sticks of colored oil, horned devils, part found reappropriation, part mutant prototype birthing of a freely deformed identity.  All over the walls, floors, on his face, in his style, it’s all beautiful, singularly ineffable ART.  

And there is no payment.  There is want. 

People like them need MORE people like us.  Until they too throw up, and feel guilty, not for one or a few mornings, but for a decade of woeful mornings.  Until they look at a Pollack in person, and feel nothing but hurt.  Nothing but pain, like they are watching a stillbirth, like watching a crone wither with self-hate, like they are watching a war crime.  That’s what the best of modern art seems to be made of; destruction.  

I have to go before the Blue Laws.