Trigger Man

  So what did I do? Went straight for the hole. Many times that night a bottle passed my way and I’d be sure to drink at least a little, at first, just to keep from pissing anybody off. But then, sometime later, I stopped worrying about all that and drank just because I could feel it slipping me back to some soft, little place where I didn’t have to worry. Just some perfect little room with music wafting softly in the light that streamed in through the windows, just me and paradise as the world passed on its careless route somewhere far in the distance.

  But on the way back to our rat-hole this euphoria lost itself to nausea. My stomach got wet and hard and I found myself concentrating on small, little chunks of concrete to keep from losing what remained of my shaky equilibrium. Blinky gave me her shoulder and helped me back to the apartment even though I heard some of the other guys ribbing her for ‘fuckin with the kid.’ I was too busy trying to keep from puking my guts up to even much worry.

  We wound up at a row of two-story ramshackle student housing apartments that couldn’t have been much more ghetto if they’d been standing in a Harlem warren. There was still plenty of activity, but worse now because of the fair handful of older, more sinister-looking characters nosing around like weasels near a henhouse. The party was upstairs and went on for hours, obviously nobody really gave a fuck about curfews and loud music, and that night was the first time I ever smelled marijuana, and man, I smelled plenty of it. I ended up passing out in a corner and when I woke up Blinky was still there, watching over me like a mother to a child, and from that moment on we were inseparable until I finally pulled the cord and split.

  ***

  The beginning of the True Madness started soon afterward. This group of Blinky’s was so deemed the Gutter Rats and the name fit. Grandma’d been right, just like I figured. Nobody went to school and nobody worked. Legitimately, that is, because there was plenty we did. Call it the real beginning of my schooling, I guess, the postcard of the moment of my slide. Six months of intensive training for a future as a sociopath. Such sweet memories.

  The guy who ran the shitty apartment complex supposedly had parents who were loaded. Robert or William something, big hairy fuck with a suped-up Firebird. He called himself the Manager and I guess he did sort of run the complex; hell, most of the people who stayed there were either friends of his or friends of friends, and the reason we didn’t get more heat, I’m convinced, was because of the location: a mostly-deserted cul de sac, and his dad’s influence in local politics. Or so it goes. Regardless, we weren’t goin around killing people.

  But I swear, I still can’t figure how nobody fingered me. I mean, Jesus, I was the youngest one of the bunch by at least three years but no one ever got on my ass about school, vagrancy, anything. And as far as my grandmother, I never heard a word. Granted, the first couple of weeks were a haze of intoxication, and I guess if anything had been said it would’ve had to’ve been during that period. And I wasn’t much up on the news then. So, yeah, there’s that, but it didn’t feel true then, and it doesn‘t now. I don’t know how else to explain it other than to say it was really as if I simply ceased to exist in the real world after Grandma. I was not blind to patrolmen, and I figure they weren’t to me, even though I’d swear sometimes one would level his gaze my direction, stop in mid-turn as if fixin to site me in, and…nothing. They’d usually turn their heads and drive off as if nothing had been there at all.

  So I became a ghost.

  And in my invisibility I also became a thief, and over time, a good one. Better than Blinky could have ever been, though she taught me a lot of what I had to know, initially. For the most part we slept during the day and crept out at night like vampires from some moldy, earthen tomb, like the ones in the comic books we used to palm from the Circle K. And oh yeah, we took a few lessons from em too, because we hunted the streets, even though most of the time the Straights had no idea they were even being run. Picking drunk’s pockets and pulling shit on drug dealers and wanna-be’s is not necessarily all that hard. But it can be dangerous as all fuck. We picked em over in the night and when finally able to rouse ourselves sometime late the following afternoon, we’d blow everything on whatever was going to get us moving through the next night.

  I was like the friendly neighborhood dog as far as the other guys were concerned, and a man-child to be lavished by the girls. And, I’m almost sorry to say it, after the first coupla weeks it was hard to recall much of anything that had gone before. When I was awake I was drunk or stoned, and when I crashed it was to a death-like sleep. Dreamless, fathomless, endless, a small stretch of black death. I began picturing myself as a random piece of debris swirling endlessly around some gigantic drain, though hardly fearful of the inevitable. And this indifference made me bold. I remember many nights creeping through people’s houses (by their very beds where they lay, searching out the woman’s jewelry box, the man’s wallet in his slacks on the chair) while the rest of the gang waited in idling cars parked somewhere close by. Because by that time I’d sensed if I made myself important to them, a valuable asset even, they would not run me off, and since I had nothing to lose there was nothing I wouldn’t try. The 80s were not a productive time for burglar and car alarm salesmen. I was one of the reasons they became big business in the 90s.

  Looking back, on night’s like these with the clouds low over the river and the humidity a dripping ghost itself hanging on the very edge of the darkness, the shivers coursing my backbone are impossible to ignore. I remember the heavy breathing coming (many times) from the very room I rooted around in, and I also remember the infrequent times an animal came into play. That’s the weird part really. To me, that’s always been the eeriest part, the part that really refuses explanation of any kind because one or two of those dogs looked like they’d been trained especially for assholes like me. I remember one night walking face on from the shadows into a full-grown Doberman pincher. I was so close I could see its lip tremble, its ears laid back along the nape of its neck, but when I held out my hand it simply shied away, slinking back to hide in its spot by the cooling fireplace. Well, that’s one I didn’t finish. I left the house straight up, the ghost of my fate refusing to let up for days afterward. Completely mystifying. Or at least it was until now, it seems.

  At least Blinky was always nearby; when I pulled a job on a house or office she was never hiding with the rest of em while I did all the work. Although she didn’t often come inside (she was convinced she was bad luck with shit like that), she would wait patiently just around the corner until I managed to extricate myself from whatever it was I was intent upon robbing. My fearlessness brought me praise I’d never found in school. Brought me praise from people much older and (I thought) much wiser than I‘d ever expected possible.

  After the first month I was sleeping with Blinky and everybody knew it. Two weeks later not even the highest ranking motherfucker said a derogatory word to me. In the decade before gangsta rap and before anybody gave a shit about inner-city violence I was a white, careless, mothafuckin gangsta. I ate, drank, slept, smoked, fucked and robbed and that was about it.

  I found out she was doing heroin around February. In retrospect, I’m sure she’d been using before I joined up, but never right in front of me until the night she got so fucked up she fixed right there by the bathroom sink while I was taking a piss. I didn’t know what to say; there were others in the apartment doing the same thing. But not me. I remember watching her closely, a strong, biting jealousy ripping at my insides as I watched her go, the image of Gradma‘s shadowed body covered up in the bed on me like a nest of hornets. She ended up, way late, puking blood in a trash heap right around the corner of the dirty parking lot where we were stayin. I held her head as she did it.

  Next morning I didn’t say anything, but we didn’t sleep together for almost a week afterward. And it was really nothing said between us. She may have been sleeping with someone else then, but there’s a lot I’m not clear on. I was blown out of my mind most of the time, tryin
g vainly to distance myself from the ghostly admonitions from my grandmother, and the reality of the life I was living.

  Things went on about the same for the next little while. Even though Blinky was getting bad by then, I’d ceased to care. We robbed what we could, peddled drugs to worse-off motherfuckers than we were, and lived deep in the dark. But even as this went on I felt the person my grandmother raised rebelling. I began planning a way out. I knew two of the Rats, some chick named Tasha and a snaggle-toothed motherfucker they called Clay, who’d left early one morning and hadn’t been seen since. No word, nothing in the papers. Just as if they’d drifted off like smoke from a fire.

  But what finally got the thorn in my ass was a vision. We had piled into three cars one Friday night after Chimes Street closed down, and driven east from campus. There’s a huge park which borders a thread of Highland Road back there as it winds through the hills and skirts the swamp just east of LSU. Within and along the edges are vast open areas fringed with old-growth oaks and pines, some funneling back into substantial pockets of woodland. At one end, though, still a good piece from the road, sat the remains of a huge, warped-front barn. It was a haunted, dirty place, like a rotten trap left forgotten in the woods, and as a result most of the Straights steered clear. But more importantly, at least as far as we were concerned, were the police stayed clear too; you’d’ve had to fuckin murder a family of Mormons back there for the heat to show up in those days. Mattresses had been hauled in by God Knows Who, a coupla filthy ice chests pushed back against the walls, and it was one of the late night fuck-and-drug spots that wasn‘t that far out in the Boonies.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been, but that night was the last, at night anyway. I passed by again a few years back and parked the borrowed car I was in just off the highway in the overgrown driveway of a burnt-out shack. The barn had been bulldozed and the ground underneath might just as well have been sown with salt. Nothing was growing, just a big, mildewed bruise in the old outline. Here and there I could still make out the faint indentations where the foundation timbers had stood. No presence at all hovered nearby; the place was as vacant as an Egyptian tomb.

  Anyway, by the time we got there the acid had started to kick in. It was supposed to be low-grade kindergarten but I’d’ve been scared to see the high-school shit. As soon as I got out of the car I knew it was the Heavy. The ground rose up beneath my feet like a giant, creaking gourd threatening to collapse with every step, the sky suddenly jammed with stars, stuffed full, so many in fact they seemed to be dragging the sky down toward us. I kept catchin flashes of blue and green tracers just outside my line of vision. And I wasn’t the only one. Everybody was hunched over and duck-walking like we’d just got off a fuckin Huey in Vietnam.

  The first thing we did was head for the barn. Thank God nobody else was there, and with the initial edge slipping off in our relief, we settled in nicely. I smoked a joint while Blinky and a few of the others spiked up. Even to me, then, it seemed logical. Well…

  With hallucinogens, I’ve found, there’s usually a very acute period, a time when claustrophobia and sheer paranoia swoop in from all sides and beat ya like a pack of banana bats. Usually when it’s gone it’s gone. You feel better, or at least different, as if you’ve just stepped through a strange door into a far different, stranger place, and nothing back on the other side was ever gonna be quite the same again. But the pros and cons. If you don’t get through the Grind after ten or fifteen minutes (eons of vastless time if things are going really loopy) a bad trip is usually coming at’cha. And it doesn’t take many of these to…change you. It’s really as if you’ve lifted the veil on some tantalizing but disastrous secret left festering in the dark for untold ages, and its shadow will persist in your mind and soul for the remainder of your life.

  I’ve never forgotten the one that night.

  ***

  We hadn’t been on the crest of the hill long when it started. The star-pocked sky was huge, bloating above us like a celestial pincushion. A few random clouds wandered among them and the noise from the roadway was completely obscured by the buzz of insects. A nest of crickets over here, farther over a lone toad belching for a mate. Our particular hill held an audience of two, Blinky and me. She couldn’t talk by that time, and the only reason we’d stopped there was because we couldn’t keep up with the rest. They were headed for a more secluded spot opposite the next copse of trees, farther from the highway, but I’d been happy to break off from them myself.

  Her eye was uncontrollable. It tremored wildly and the other looked out in something not far from true terror. Between the acid and heroin she was not doing well, and I wasn’t in a helluva lot better shape either. But when somebody you’re with is tripping out, and you are not in fact doing the same, it tends to ground you somehow, screw your head tighter on your shoulders. I didn’t feel drunk, nor stoned either, for that matter. I had transcended all that mediocrity. I was off and I wasn’t sure the park would be a large enough place to contain me.

  I tried to whisper something in her ear but I have no recollection of what it was. Her hair, the sounds slipping out of her partially open mouth, the swirl in the blades of grass directly over her shoulder, these are the things that had me. I suddenly caught a wave of laughter that attacked from nowhere and everywhere at once, and I stared into her eyes, and brought her head to my breast. I could hardly breathe.

  And that is when Time stopped. It was much the same as the reoccurring dream, but this was much deeper. More forbidding. Her head at my breast, Blinky ceased to exist. I gazed mechanically down the slow slope of hill sliding away at the reach of my feet. The borders of the night-glowing soccer field were raggedly inked, but definite nonetheless. It was as if a huge chunk of forest had been ripped clean and then smoothed away into what looked like the bottom of a vast, empty pond.

  And then, from the depths at the farthest end, an inky blackness began to flow, disengaging itself from the lesser shadows of the tree line, eating up bits of the phantom lake bed like a slow ooze of sludge. By the time it covered half the distance between us it was an immense, malign, cloudy mass of plowing oblivion. My sane mind told me it was just a bank of fog reflecting the miasma of stars overhead, but the otherworldly voice of the hallucinogens wasn’t buying. It kept coming, revolving and screwing whatever mass it contained, stretching out every second into barbed-wire, crystal points. It didn’t move like water at all, or like a cloud. It poured more like honey on a cold afternoon. The weird mass convulsed along the gradual rise, filling the basin completely. I didn’t move a muscle as I sat there trying to convince myself of the sham of hallucinations. Perhaps, in retrospect, I couldn’t.

  When it washed over me in the next second I saw through it. My sight penetrated down, far into the murk covering the field. And I could see what I instinctively knew to be bodies hunched and dotted along the wide expanse of grassland. Hundreds, if not thousands, of these shapes. Some writhing momentarily as if in the throes of some devastating sickness. Others deathly still. There was no sound, and after the first glance there was no movement. The writhing bodies suddenly became rock-still, no more than lumps of coal scattered along the floor of a warehouse. My uncanny sight picked and pried at them and it was then that the revelation enveloped my brain. It destroyed my spirit, my sense of religion, that which I have only recently begun to retrieve (and hope to secure with what I will do tomorrow). I suddenly recognized all the scattered humanity before me as no more than slabs of unanimated flesh. Just meat heaped on bone. There was no essence to attend them in whatever mass suicide I was witness to, and the effect was mind-numbing. I felt myself becoming like them, all the dead limbs no more than storm debris washed upon some forbidding shore. And it was then I began to scream.

  I broke from the deep cloak of darkness with Blinky repeatedly slapping my face and screaming back at me incoherently. I have no recollection at all of the rest of that night.

  Chapter 9:The Body

  Blinky was the only on
e around when I woke up the next morning. Somehow we were back at the apartment, but instead of my familiar corner, someone had chunked me into a bed. My head was still screwy, the acid still dancing around in there like a red-hot wire of confusion. There have been many times when I wonder if it’s ever been right since. Maybe this whole goddamn thing is just some crazy scenario I’ve dreamed up in madness. And why not? It’s happened before; history’s full of such horseshit, people who see and hear visions. Nuts, crackpots, prophets. Only time tells.

  But the girl’s real. Thank God, the girl is still real.

  It was the only time I’d ever seen the apartment complex deserted, that much I got from a quick peek out of the window. Except for a couple of cats congregating around the dumpsters the place was a goddamn ghost town. And that was good because my head was a screaming wreak. Blinky, from the corner, aware of my wakefulness, whispered she didn’t know where the others were. The bizarre insight or vision from the night before still had my head reeling. And when I looked across the room to find her I saw true fear in Blinky’s eyes. She wasn’t sleeping in the bed with me, was instead curled up into a broken-legged recliner held upright by one bureau corner all the way across the room by the hall door.

  Nausea seized me full force and I jumped from the bed to make the bathroom. In so doing I banged my head against the toilet rim hard enough to see more of those fuckin stars, and as I retched and coughed into that disgusting toilet in that equally disgusting bathroom, I knew it was time to go. Solo. The vision had succeeded in screwing a sense of isolation into my head that I’ve never yet been able to escape.

  But if there is such a thing as redemption then just maybe, just maybe, I still have a chance.

  I didn’t even flush the mess down as I pushed away and huddled, shaking against the wall. When I was able I pulled myself upright next to the bathroom sink. I looked at the monster staring back from the depths of the smeared mirror. For a second I heard the blood pounding in my ears, got a quick wash of vision blown through my skull, and then I turned and left the stink behind. When I walked into the bedroom Blinky had just spiked up again and even though I saw no needle, the glassed-over eyes and drooling mouth told the story. Her huddled, shaking form brought me suddenly back to the field from the night before and all those still bodies bunched upon it.