into the toilet and others(previously posted)
He was pissing, his right hand flat against the wall, arm extended helping him keep balance. The heroin in his body dragged his weight down to the floor and he reached out to hold himself up by holding on to the toilet seat lid. He pisses a few squirts with a wincing face and more effort than a man at his age should. His right hand lets go of the wall and he solely supports the dead weight of his body with the toilet seat lid. Eyes rolling into the back of his skull, a groan slowly escapes his lips as he pisses a steady stream. In the ecstasy and rapture of such sublime excrement, his knees begin to buckle. And now only the inevitable happens, as it should.
Swiftly and without a sound, he begins to fall, left arm still clutching the toilet seat. His limp dick lands itself on the toilet rim like a guillotine victim waiting for its end. The toilet seat thereafter, comes down and cuts himself from his self. A single piece of flesh plops into the toilet bowl with a splash, turning the water an orange-ish tint of piss and blood. All the nerves in his system shut off as he goes into shock and falls there on the floor, hitting his head with a violent crash. His legs now convulse and his heart beats a terrible rhythm inside his chest. Eyes rolling back, further into the back of his mind, he breathes until the blood in his body exits through the stump of a dick between his legs.
And forever, he holds his peace.
now everything’s changed.
he’s running in the complete opposite direction, wearing someone else’s shoes upon the soles of dyslexic feet. His footsteps hit the pavement, keeping time with the rain. Each of these steps had a number on them somewhere in the back of his head. But now his footsteps ring loud with the sound of virtue.
“this is me breathing,” flakes off his dry tongue, beneath the whisper of his breath.
when people talk about the legend of Pheidippides, they’ll say how supposedly this man managed to run from Marathon to Athens to tell everyone that the Persians had lost the Battle of Marathon and then croaked right on the spot. what they won’t tell you is how it feels like to run yourself to death. They’ll fail to mention how you slowly give yourself a heart attack as you drain your veins of any water it retained. Marathon runners call this “running death”.
The muscles in his legs stretch now, with every inch of movement. He looks down at his legs and begs for them to keep moving.
"Not, now. Not fucking now,” his voice dry like fingernails on sandpaper. “Just a few more blocks…please.”
His Adam’s apple swollen in his throat, chokes him as if to cry.
But that emotional-well has run dry as every inch of his body is chilled in sweat.
His tunnel vision blurs now, as the once clear but remote scope in front of him loses itself to the sweat in his eyes.
That’s when he notices his feet getting heavy.
Not the heavy you get from running 20 miles non-stop, but the feeling you get when you’re dragging something along.
Some sort of parasite. Something beyond himself.
His thighs burn now.
The bones in his feet crack as if to break with every broken step he takes.
His nose catches an all too familiar smell.
The smell of traffic slowing down.
The smell of construction crews creating causeways for the masses.
The smell of melting tar.
As his feet thump the ground, theres the sound of fists pounding Jell-O, pudding, tapioca.
He looks down and to his horror, he sees the unimaginable.
His shoes have gone black with tar. His blue jeans now dotted with black up to his knees. The fabric of his pants now spackled black with the essence of the asphalt beneath his feet.
“What the fuck is going on?” whispers out past dry lips.
His feet still running beneath him increase in effort to keep his body afloat.
His lungs… “Oh, God. Am I still breathing?” he asks himself.
Himself unable to reply.
His chest heaves one last gulp of air and his arms flail out behind him. His legs, two tall towers of timber, topple over.
Everything that he is, swiftly swan dives into the street with a splash.
Rushing into his mouth, is an ocean of tar, finding its way into every orifice in his head as his body begins to sink deeper and deeper into this ebony abyss. His nose now fills with this thick black mess, choking him, smothering the life inside of him.
The human will to survive snaps him from his coma and now he fights with everything he has left.
He thrashes about wildly, swinging his fists, reaching, grabbing, pulling, all in vain. His feet kick wildly, trying to find some sort of solid ground to push off of, but only help to drag his body further down.
Eyes caked over with asphalt, body consumed in black, his mind now reaches out for anything to pull him out.
“Your friend, pinche inutil, he’s dead.” Raul says.
Some things go missing between couch cushions like sand between your fingers. But to completely misplace a friend’s existence is a different monster altogether. Martirio, his eyes go whiter than the transit bus hacking and heaving its way down the street behind him.
“Showed up two days ago, looking like a fucking ghost. Eyes like the dead, como un muerto, el guey. The way he looked at me, I almost told him to fuck off. But he shoved a fifty in my hand and told me to hook him up with the black. Tacito said money from a dying junkie is still money and your friend he used our bathroom to fix. His shaky hands…well, he shot an air bubble up into his veins and died so very ugly. The worst I’ve ever seen. Tacito hit him over the head with a pan to make him stop. Even then, he still kept shaking.”
Martirio watched a glimpse of his friend dying inside his head. Body trying desperately to rid itself of the fatal bubble traveling through his veins. He’d curl up into a ball on the floor, bringing his body appendages close to his chest, his heart. His tongue would find its way into the back of his mouth and slide down the back of his throat restricting his airway. All the while his heart would go Hiroshima inside his chest and blood would flow freely through the canals and trenches of his inner-workings. His pupils looked back into its skull, trying to look and find a way out of this death, trying to find refuge in it’s own mind. But no such luck as his body let go and he became the stench of death itself. The stench in Tacito’s bathroom. The stench Raul bagged up in cheap black plastic bags and left alone to sit in the alleyway.
His hand still in his wallet, his heart out decomposing in a coffin of black and twisty-tied shut, he buys a hit and exits through the rod-iron gate.
The eyes in the mirror speak volumes for yourself when you’re ready to listen. However, there’s only so much a mirror can show you. It takes something beyond your skin, beyond the mask of yourself, for you to finally see everything.
On that day, Martirio knew he felt it. It was deeper than the brown skin covering his bones. It was something hidden behind his blood-shot green eyes.
Shoving his face into a sink full of murky water, he screamed until he was short of drowning. Black hair floating just at the surface of water a thesaurus would tell you is caliginous. His hair fans out and occupies the entirety of the sink, looking the way you’d think a corpse’s scalp would.
And to be quite honest, the boy had begun to look like death itself.
Track marks flooded his feet, his veins receded under his paper-thin skin. Tiny purple/black dots on the opposites of his elbows, the places where he couldn’t shoot up anymore for lack of fresh veins. His eyes kept a piss-yellow tint and everything about him looked dirty.
Here and now, face deep in Juarez’s finest tap water, he’s cursing every God in the sky for where he is. Here in this room once painted sky blue with a million black holes from where the paint stopped caring enough to stick to any wall. Picture a closet with a sink and toilet, and you’ve got this shit-hole shit-can pegged. The toilet behind him had long given up on being anything but a place for addicts to vomit in and piss inside of. Black and covered with rings of decay, something like the split inside of a tree with the tell-tale circles of seasons. An oval mirror with a gold border hangs at an awkward angle waiting for the right door slam so it can end itself inside the sink. Tiny lines cut across it from the boys with nose candy fetishes, cutting up lines and snorting them straight inside their heads.
Above the toilet hangs a crucifix with Jesus himself keeping a watchful vigil. Some days addicts would walk in and turn him to face the wall. They kept his eyes on the sky-blue backdrop and away from their vices. As if they actually believed that a God so omnipotent couldn’t watch as they got their fix. Never was it taken down, only turned away. Jesus would sleep in his stay as the junkies did their best to keep themselves alive.
Doing his best to do the opposite, Martirio keeps his back to the crucifix. Drowning out all his fear with his voice bubbling out every emotion inside his body, he can see everything. His soul pans back, zooming further outside of himself, revealing the tiny world he calls home. A border town lost between two worlds. A line in the ground separating the life he lives now and the life of every soul that lived and died to get him here. Here with his eyes open, underwater and screaming.
He watches himself walk across the bridge from the United States into Mexico. Black shoes beat upon black streets, as he spies himself crossing the concrete connection between two different nations.
From the top of the bridge looking down into the man-made canals below, there is a view of abundant graffiti artistry. Depictions of Che Guevara, John Lennon, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, and assorted revolutionaries stare straight back into his eyes every time he crosses over. Descending the bridge, he moves his way from the comfort of fast-food, gas-guzzling, television addicted America into the poverty stricken dimension of the second-world country of Mexico. The streets reek of sewage and open septic tanks exhaling waste into the air. The air down there was something you tried snorting out of your nose but could never successfully do. Every square of concrete on the sidewalk was cracked from being trampled over by poverty stricken feet.
Martirio, still underwater screaming at the tip-top of his lungs, he watches himself pass the Border Guards dressed in military green suits. Intimidating eyes rest inside their skulls staring back at him. Intimidating eyes, which can be bought off with dollar bills, dressed in America’s finest green. He passes them without looking up, he knows better now than to catch a glance from these men.
La Drogeria.
His excuse for crossing into this town was always La Drogeria, the Mexican pharmacy where the only prescriptions anyone needed were green pieces of paper signed off by the U.S. Secretary of Treasury. He always made his trips into Mexico to help his grandmother. First the drugs for his grandmother and then the drugs for himself.
His grandmother, she breathed handheld shots of albuterol and walked with the aid of penny-priced painkillers which were easily bought and sold in these pharmacies in Juarez. Two blocks down off the strip, almost immediately after crossing the bridge, past the shanty-clubs and whorehouses. All your medical needs within eyes reach of all your lustful wants.
There was no waiting room in which to sit, no crying children wheezing their asthmatic lungs as you waited your turn to be visited by Dr. So and So. Single syringes sold for only a dollar, pain killers, under the counter drugs and anything you needed all had a price.
La Drogeria was white and the size of a hole in the wall fast-food joint. Their service was just as fast and the prices were just as reasonable. It rested smack-dab in between a nightclub called Whiskeyshits and a concrete convenience store sized appendage with a neon light sign above a window reading “Currency Exchange”. All the other stores down the block of the strip looked exactly the same, all dressed in drab paints of gray, brown, and white. Beer signs on the majority of windows beckoning boys and girls from America to come try what’s inside and club manager’s doing their best to sell you on their drink prices.
Martirio shoves ten dollars into the pharmacy window and asks for albuterol and the little amber bottles containing his grandmother’s only recourse from the pain in her legs. In Spanish, the man behind the counter says, “It’s good to see you again, God bless.”
His eyes close now as his world begins to blur under the surface of the sink water. His memory fades in and out while he watches himself fast-forward to the hell-hole he resides in now.
La Casa de Pecado.
The House of Sin.
Everyone knew about it. The cops, the federales, the neighbors, even the children playing soccer in the streets.
They all knew.
Ask any child living on that block if he knew where to get “la negra”, the black tar heroin, and they’d point you in the right direction. They all knew where to find it and any other drug you could name. Nobody ever did anything about it. Nobody ever called the cops, because the cops got their cut. Nobody ever stood up to them because they had guns and the people of that town barely even had food. It was enough to drive a clean person mad. But to a junkie, it was a wet dream.
Now as the oxygen in his body begins to deplete, Martirio begins to lose consciousness. Tiny black dots in front of his open eyes begin to grow larger, like black holes consuming everything in front of him. His memory plays like a DVD having been teeth-fucked by a chihuahua. Words fall out of scene and movements become erratic.
He watches himself standing before Raul. He sits in a wheel chair, both legs propped up and looking as if though ready for a check-up from the OBGYN. Two white casts cover both legs from his dirty toes to his crotch. He wears two pairs of dirty black boxers and has convinced himself that despite of his handicap, he is still the man he used to be.
“…fuck your friends. They did this to me.” Raul spits from his lips. His dirty mustache catching saliva as he speaks. He struggles to get out of his seat and points a sawed off shotgun at Martirio’s head.
His head still in the sink, and losing his mind, his memory rewinds back.
“What the fuck happened to you?” Martirio asks.
“Oh, let’s play this game, why don’t we?” Raul mutters in Spanish. His face is bruised and swollen, an addition to an already cursed face. He wears a once white guayabera stained brown from dried something or other. His eyes are small and brown like cold coffee. He speaks with the bottom of his throat and emphasizes his S’s.
“Let’s pretend you don’t know what the fuck happened to me,” he continues.
“Raul, I have no Goddamn clue what you’re talking about.” Martririo steps closer to Raul, inspecting him from head to toe.
“Listen to me, Mar. I’m going to give you a chance to tell me what the fuck you know and maybe let you walk out of here. If you play by my rules, I might let you keep your life.”
Skipping ahead, memory speeds him through moments later.
Screaming in a mixture of a mouthful of English and Spanish, Raul cocks the sawed off with his hands.
Our friend Martirio goes ghost in the face, his green eyes go wide like traffic lights. He throws himself to the ground as buckshot kisses the wall behind him, cutting a hole the size of his head.
His memory rewinds, he hallucinates with a face full of dirty tap water.
This is your brain on little to no oxygen.
Any Questions?
“Your friends did this to me! They came in here with bats and crow bars and knifes. I was by myself and those faggots did this to me! It was just one of them at first, and I buzzed him in. He left the door open behind and him and I should have shot him there. Then the rest of your friends ran in and they…fucking did this to me!” His screams distort his words and pools of saliva collect on the corners of his mouth. He’s an angry, rabid dog waiting to sink his teeth into anyone’s neck.
“THEY BROKE MY LEGS! They kept hitting them over and over after they were broken. I wasn’t going to tell them where anything was. They can fucking go to hell for all I care. But then, they took my finger.” He raises his right hand wrapped in bandages turned beige from sweat and blood. Staring at the hand, one would get that feeling deep inside their head when something seems terribly out of place. Psychologists would call this “Cognitive Dissonance” but we’ll call it a hand with a vacancy. Four little piggies stand at attention with the littlest of all of them having gone wee wee wee, all the way into some trash can.