Opposing Similarities

Opposing Similarities

(1 of 2)

More cunning than a common house plant, crude, and smooth as a five o’ clock shadow, Lars Dawson is probably the closest thing to a nemesis I've got. For the first six months I knew the electric tanned, brick-headed bodybuilder, he kept himself concealed under a moist layer of sweat on the back of his black hooded sweatshirt. He was always faced the opposite direction, in the front seat of a car that I was always dopesick in the backseat of.

We had an automatic ritual we followed at seven a.m. without fail, every morning for six months straight. It involved waking up to a phone call at six o’clock and slopping a damp washcloth under my pits. It meant standing stiff with my arms wrapped around myself, pacing outside in the permanent shiver of withdrawal as I waited on a pair of much anticipated headlights to pull into my driveway. This wretchedness would be spent sick as dead dogs, sluggish in the mud of the morning. We’d call the dopeman’s pager from a select payphone that received callbacks; then we’d sit there and wait for the terrible thing to start ringing.

All that time I knew Lars, and I never got a bead on his features. A wiry black tufted beard hid the bottom half of a face whose top half was always hidden beneath his hood. It’s a perfect disguise for anyone willing to carry around a razor blade and a can of shaving cream. Without his beard, there would have been no way I could have picked him out of a lineup.

Those early morning minutes parked at payphones, tortured us, passing like kidney stones, bludgeoning the whole carload until the man called back to tell us which parking lot on the Eastside to sit in. From there, we’d wait with everyone else whose cars idled and whose eyes, like ours, were peeled for the dopeman’s inconspicuous black Blazer to whiz past. That only happened once enough junk hungry flunkies called the pusher’s pager to get sent to the same spot we’d been sent to.

The usually empty parking lot, now suspiciously crammed full of seven a.m. automatics in rundown jalopies, would empty in less than a minute, as a line of vehicles twenty deep would follow that black Blazer, snaking down side streets like the blind following the piper, until the man felt safe enough to conduct his business.

Somewhere in a gritty corner of some shitty neighborhood, the dopeman, leading the long trail of cars, would pull into the next lane and idle, letting his brother service the entire line, drive thru style, from his open passenger window. Each carload of misfits advancing alongside the Blazer, would cop their fixes in exchange for squared up twenty dollar bills.

The somber silhouettes in one window where drastically different from the ones behind it. The consequence of not having, that which we've taught ourselves to need to have, cuts straight through any class distinction, racial prejudice or social status. Girlfriends of thieves and average Joe’s, housewives with otherwise normal lives, robbers, roofers, construction and office workers - all of them trying to get right, before the shift starts, or the kid wakes, or the spouse notices their gone. We all do just fine, zombie walking the medicine line.

The whole operation would be over in minutes, sending a wave of slaves scattering to nearby parking lots and public bathroom stalls to kill their illnesses.

On those stoic morning drives to the dopehouse, Lars ritually kept silent until he got well. When he did speak, I found myself shaking my head, thinking how I had nothing to say to him. Our only common threads were our similar necessities, similar sicknesses, and similar taste in women. From those first few moments he started talking, I knew I despised him.

I finally got a good look at his face the day he lumbered into the same inpatient rehab that I had checked into one week prior, in an attempt to rid my life of such bad influences as Lars Dawson. His bristly black beard, now replaced with a gruff shadow of second-day stubble, was currently clogging the drain of his bathroom sink. Lars would not hide behind it anymore.

His new chin was a chiseled knuckle of bone on an angularly rigid jawline. It looked out of place, positioned underneath the only true familiarity I had of Lars, his eyes… which I’d seen on few rare occasions. Many times our sick morning visits to the medicine line took place before sunup, so it was dark, damp and always dismal in the car. There was no reason to turn around and make eye contact before getting well, and afterward, there was no real reason to acknowledge anyone even existed at all.

The day that Lars passed me on his way into the detox unit, I still could have counted those instances of real eye contact on one hand.
As we passed, I looked up at his face strictly in the shallow vein of data consumption, scanning my environment without interest. The thin tile hallway we were standing in… the Resident’s Assistant’s desk, just to my left… the bright beam of sunlight, screaming to me all the possibilities of an early spring, shining in through a window down the hall… I scanned it all on a vacant mindless shuffling outside to hover above a rusty coffee can and call it an ashtray.

Out the door I moved, without recognition enough to spur a double take. I only turned around when he said my name.

“Thomas,” he uttered from the penetrating depth of eternal loss that vibrates the marrow of all us sick and wounded veterans of the drug war: All those dead minutes waiting on payphones that never rang, and those shots lost on needles that clogged on frantic last hits - all of those bad handshakes that became bags of salt, and those times getting ripped off for the five dollars it took fifty blocks to spare change together… the hollow despair of disparity, and all of the decaying eternal junksick nights kicking in County, staring through jail cell windows like a man in a time deprivation experiment… all of those failures vibrated his larynx when he spoke. “I heard you were in here,” he groaned. “I guess it’s true.”

That sound in his voice, the one that feels like scores of souls dying in a chest vacuum; it soured my stomach with nauseating bile. Lars shrugged his shoulder to re-center the strap of the duffel bag digging into his neck. “Louis got busted,” he scowled. "They rolled up on him over off Forest Avenue. Blocked him in on both sides of the streets.”

He dropped a bag and straightened up to talk to me, letting the single brown door to the detox unit swing shut behind him. “Drove up over the lawns, through the back yards and over one block to the next…”

“What, are you checking in to detox now?” I accused. My disgust reflected in my expression.

“What does it look like I’m doing? I've got my bags, don’t I?”

He dropped a black nylon gym bag stuffed with shirts on the ground next to his green canvas army duffel. “They got Louis week ago. So everyone started going through Spider. But his shit is shit already, and he stepped on it again because everyone started calling him. And so now Spider got busted… that was two days ago. I haven’t had anything since.”

I didn't want to hear it. It meant there’d be more of them. People I knew from the outside, infiltrating my cocoon of anonymity. Unfortunate familiarity, with stories and street names and places we used to cop springing up on every idyll cigarette break. This was very bad for me. All of the reminders and the romancing of rushes could easily create an undertow of subconscious cravings that I wouldn't admit to knowing anything about until long after they've already hatched a month or so after getting out of rehab, and I’m looking back on I how I ended up with another habit already.

I pointed down a narrow hallway, to where a door led to the same inpatient unit I had just unpacked my bags into. “So you’re going to be coming in there once you’re finished kicking in here?” I moved my pointing finger to the detox unit he was laying a slime trail into.

“Yeah, that seems to be the situation now, doesn't it?” Lars picked his bags up and nudged open the door with his foot.

His nostrils flared in annoying breaths that splayed the corners of his mouth open. He shook his buzz cut potato head from side to side as if he was telling the whole world off. So that everyone who might have been watching us through the window now knew he was saying ‘no’ to me with an agitated body language... and that he didn't have time to fucking talk to me right now. “I’m on my second day already,” he snarled as if that gave him some sort of right. “I’m fucking sick.”

He jerked the door open with the side of his shoe and shouldered his bag and drug his legs into the unit.

The door closed behind him and left me standing alone in the hallway, whose only light came from the sunbeams of what would hopefully be a beautiful spring-like day. Those hopes were strangled as I stood there and watched a brutish grey cloud cover snuff them out. And similarly,as my hope of escape seemed to narrow in front of my face, another good intention was crushed by the angry boot of reality. I hadn't escaped anything. I tried to run from my sickness and it followed me inside.