Yoga Cocaine (eBook)

7

Since my night with Oliver, I’ve been ignoring April’s calls and letting her texts go unanswered. On the bright side, since my almost-night with Patrick, I’ve made sure to fuck all the men I meet before saying goodbye. It’s not long before whatever shreds of self-esteem I’d amassed from my brief stint of sobriety are eviscerated. The days and nights accumulate. At first, I manage to make it through my shifts sober before going out and getting shitfaced, but that doesn’t last. After a trip to the intersection of Fifth Street and Carpenter to see Markus and fortify my supplies, I’m doing coke in the Free Café bathroom and smoking weed in my car whenever I can get away for a fifteen-minute break.

I tell myself this time won’t be like all the others. I’m still showing up to work—almost on time—and I’m not completely miserable.

Last night, April 27th, exactly two weeks after Patrick opted to get high instead of having sex with me, I met someone. Rocko and I locked eyes in an alley while doing lines of coke off the lid of a garbage can, and, despite the differences in our upbringings and experiences, there was an unmistakable resonance between us.

Rocko is a heavily-tattooed South Philly Italian with a goatee and a small scar on his lower lip that he got during a barroom brawl. His lip-scar is my favorite thing about him.

“Must’ve been a bad fight,” I tell him as I trace the raised white flesh with my tongue.

Rocko smiles, the scar stretching into a long, menacing gash. “Not for me. The other guy’s in a wheelchair now.”

He mashes his mutilated mouth against my unmarred one and something about the intensity of his kiss assures me that he craves the high I can provide even more than the drugs laid out on the table in front of us.

The last guy who made me feel this wanted was Dwight. And I screwed it up.

A few days before my eighteenth birthday, I videotaped my stepdad and myself doing it—doggy style, so both our faces were staring directly at the hidden nanny cam. I was starting college, and, even though I’d only enrolled part-time at a school that was less than twenty miles away, I wanted to live closer to the Temple campus. To get away from the suburbs and the person I’d been in high school.

And that meant leaving Dwight behind—with Chloe.

So, I made several copies of the tape and gave one to him on the way out the door.

“If you touch her,” I warned, “I’ll have you arrested for molesting me.”

“I didn’t molest you! You wanted it!”

My stepdad was right. But teenage pussy was teenage pussy and, I felt sure, he’d acquired a taste.

Chloe was a good girl. Not like me. I didn’t want him corrupting her.

“Just keep your dick in your pants.”

He called me a whore.

Burning the bridge of our relationship created an inferno that singed all the way down to my soul, but I owed it to Chloe to do one thing right as a sister. Still, I wanted him to tell me I was crazy—that he could never want Chloe because I was the girl of his dreams. Instead, he let me go and our love went up in flames.

I have the sneaking suspicion that, whenever I’ve called to ask him for money, or to bail me out of jail, or to pick me up after an angry ex has left me outside, stranded, it’s been fear, rather than affection, that’s compelled Dwight to come to my rescue.

Rocko’s apartment is a dingy, windowless shithole, so, when he finds out I’m about to be evicted for not paying rent, he invites himself to move in with me. “It’s a problem with a self-evident solution.”

I accept his offer and wad of crumpled cash. I’m not about to call Mom, or April, or even Dwight, for help.

“I’m glad you came to me with this and we could conversate about the issue from a goal-oriented outlook. I know what we have is new, Jess, but fiscal comingling is an essential component of any successful romantic partnership, and, if I’m being entirely honest, I was looking for an excuse to vacate my current domicile anyway.”

That’s the thing about Rocko. He uses words like vacate and conversate and domicile, and phrases such as fiscal comingling. When we went to the Men’s Warehouse to buy him a suit for his former cellmate’s wedding, he stumped all the retail salesmen by referring to the discount clothing store as a “haberdashery.” Then, in the same conversation, his grammar slips to a third-grade level and he starts talking about bitches and hoes and how he “ain’t got no use” for his “boy down the block no more” because “that motherfucker owes me some cheddar.” Plus, I’ve never seen him read anything more complex than an Arby’s menu.

I peer at my new live-in boyfriend over a Raisin Bran cereal box. “Rocko, you are a dichotomy.”

“What’s that? Some sort of slang for asshole? So, I forgot to take out the fucking trash. Babe, you’ve got to reprioritize. Life is a ferocious and tempestuous animal, unwilling to be tamed. Grab me a Corona, will ya?”

My neighbors, who have never approved of me anyway, look askance at Rocko and me whenever we enter or exit the building. Not that we go out much.

I go to work sometimes, but I’m not sure how Rocko earns his income. One afternoon, I come home to the smell of burning plastic. He hands me a pipe.

I start to say no, but Rocko informs me we’re all out of dope. “All we have is crack and H.”

I’m terrified of needles. I could go out and pick something else up, but this is free, and I barely have enough cash for groceries. The box of Frosted Flakes and container of milk I bought last week are down to crumbs and an inch of frothy after-swill. It’s another three days until I get paid, and my work attendance has been spotty.

I take a hit—something I swore I’d never do. Memories of Patrick and the crack he offered and telling myself, if I said yes, I’d be a lost soul surface. I take another. They recede.

Besides, I don’t feel lost. I feel found.

The next two weeks are swallowed up in getting stoned and having sex (when Rocko isn’t too high to get it up). Occasionally, I go to work. Mostly, I call out sick.

“How come smoking makes me lazy?” I wonder. “And snorting gives me so much energy?”

Rocko rouses himself long enough to reply. “Different conduits alter the nature of the same chemical compound.” His own laziness makes sense. He’s on H, and, possibly, something else. He was in the bathroom for a long time, and, when he came out, he looked like someone had taken a cheese grater to his ambition.

I tell my boss I have mono. “I’m so tired. Getting myself to work feels impossible.”

He’s empathetic. His daughter had mono in high school. “Just rest,” he advises. “That’s all you can do. And, Jess…”

“Yeah?”

“We’re here when you’re ready.”

Rocko’s friends become permanent fixtures in my—well, now, our—apartment. One sports a series of teardrop tattoos. Another’s face is a labyrinth of jagged lacerations. The last one has a glass eye. He takes it out to show me, revealing a hollow, cavernous socket.

I throw up on the living room floor.

These men traipse in and out of my apartment, but I don’t mind. I like being surrounded by people who are too fucked up to judge me.

* * *

It’s Tuesday, June 12th—nine days before the official start of summer. Even though we haven’t talked in two months, April still calls almost every day. Her messages clutter my voicemail.

A snore.

Rocko is passed out on the couch.

Tank, his friend with the three, delicate teardrops below his left eye, grins. “Motherfucker can’t hold his liquor.”

I take a sip and pass the bottle.

Tank doesn’t drink. Instead, he looks me over, his sly smile reaching all the way to his crying eyes, and says, “How about you and me go into the bedroom?”

I glance at Rocko. His head is hanging off the side of the sofa, a puddle of drool beside him. My live-in crack connection isn’t waking up any time soon. And, even if he does, it’s not like we’ve had the exclusivity conversation.

I take a hit. Pass the pipe. This time, Tank partakes.

“Okay. What the hell?”

Tank is everything his nickname suggests. I ride him like a mechanical bull at a county fair—for fun and to prove my prowess. When it’s over, he hoists me in the air with one hand and plonks me down on the bed beside him.

Happy teardrops and a scarless smile. “That was good. Rocko’s right. You’re something special.”

Shit. I forgot about Rocko.

“We better get out there before he wakes up.” I smooth out the wrinkles in my shirt.

My hard-bodied accomplice isn’t worried. He saunters into his jeans.

“Shhh…” I put a finger to my lips, but, when I emerge from our shared bedroom, my “boyfriend” is standing by the door, all signs of drool and drunkenness gone. I expect him to rage—to hit me,...