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Mike Boyle |
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Demons When I woke in the morning the blow-up mattress was flat. Linda had gone out to get it for me when she heard I was coming up for the weekend. It was a nice gesture, I could have just slept on the floor, it wouldn't have been the first time. I had a hard-on. I got up and pulled on my pants. I didn't zip, went to the bathroom. Pissed. I went back out into the little apartment. Just one big room with a kitchen and bathroom. Mike and Linda still asleep in their bed. It wasn't that much different from the studio apartment we had shared on Ave. A few years earlier. Back then, I had a bed in the kitchen and they had the loft we had built in the main room. And it worked. For a while. I put a little pot on the stove and boiled some water. They had went out and gotten instant coffee for me, another nice gesture, they didn't drink coffee. Buddy, their cat, came up and rubbed against my leg. Buddy was cool. Buddy liked me and missed me. I don't know what happened to the mattress. It just went flat. The night before I had played with Mike and this makeshift band he had assembled. I was the singer and guitar player, always was. We played for hours in this rented space on 10th St and did a cassette recording. It was all new songs that we threw together and beat into shape after a few dry runs. I liked working like that, doing something quick and raw. We were always good at that. The engineer loved us. I got my coffee and walked over to look down on Houston St. There were these paintings on the plywood fence that circled the construction site across the street. Graffiti type stuff that looked like people with horns coming out of their shoes, horns coming out of their heads. The day before I had showed up there in NYC after getting Mike to tell me he wasn't on dope anymore. "I can't be around that shit anymore," I told him. "Me and Linda are clean, man." Then he went on to tell me about these musicians he had lined up, that it was gonna be great this time. Better than ever. As soon as I got there, after taking the train and a cab with my backpack and guitar I was asked if I wanted anything. Yes, I told them. Being a junkie was easy, especially in New York. It was too easy. That's why I had left a year earlier. Some things were hard to get into and easy to get out of. The drug life was the opposite. We did shots and fell back in love with each other. For the longest time it was like this. We three. Triad. Trine. Trinity. A pyramid. The girls came and went through my kitchen but we were a bit of an army. I had my desk under their loft filled with band stuff; artwork for posters and singles. Addresses and phone numbers. Filled with contacts and negotiations before the band went sour. Before I had just given up and walked into the exploding night. They woke up and we went about our day. Mike went off to dispatch for the Rainbow Mafia, to take calls and route messengers to customers. I had once been a messenger. Linda had the day off and we hung out. She was a messenger now, selling pot to all the people that called. I thought about writing a book about it as we sat in Odessa having lunch. I had the BLT and fries. She had the cheeseburger special and asked me about my girlfriend back in PA. I told her she was an artist. Linda thought of herself as an artist as I thought of myself as a singer. You can meet all kinds of people who tell you they are this but make money doing that. Most fall flat on their faces. Some die honorable deaths for the cause. I didn't think it mattered in the long run. You find your bliss and live with it, maybe you make it, maybe you didn't. The next thing I knew, we were up on 14th St. Linda's idea. "Don't tell Michael," she told me. "No. I won't," I said. She bought valiums from some street dealer. I don't know why it shocked me, but it did. We had already had our wake-up shots from the bags we had saved from the night before and I was already worried about copping for that night. Dope was enough for me but Linda needed something else. We spent that afternoon walking around the city and drinking in some bars on St. Mark's. It was nice, we always were close. She asked me about life in PA and I told her more about Cleo, the job I had and being off dope. She looked at me like there was someone there. Someone she could see but I couldn't. "Michael fell apart after you left," she said suddenly. I just looked at her thinking, here it comes. The blame game. Everybody was good at it. "He just seemed to shut down," she continued, "it was so sad, he never went out anymore; just to work and back to the apartment. He wouldn't even go for food or smokes, I had to bring him everything." "I'm sorry," I said. "You didn't know, Tony. He would never tell you that. It's good you're back up here now; good to see you guys playing again." I lit a cig and called the bartender over. Ordered another round. A year earlier I knew all the bartenders at this place. Either this guy was new, or I was old. She got another Rolling Rock. I got another Beck's. "You ever tell him about us?" I asked her. She looked at me. "That was just one night, Tony." She hit me in the arm. Girl could hit hard. It hurt a bit. "So, you never told him?" "Actually, I forgot about it till now." "You didn't know how I pined for you?" "Yeah, right. Between all the other women you pined for me. Don't be a dick. I have a knife, you know." We went on about it and other things for a while. We laughed. It felt good. Later that afternoon we were walking down 1st Ave and she slipped her arm around mine. I pointed and talked more nonsense. She smiled and gave me that I know you and you don't look again. It was just a bit of a vacation for me. I wanted to lie to myself that I was going to make a run at being a rock god again but, that was Mike's thing. And that was the thing that tore our old band apart. Yes, the blame game. I thought of Cleo and my new life back in PA while we walked. It was hard. You want everything but can't have everything. It was impossible. You had to choose. That evening, after Mike got off work we went to cop dope again. I remember being in some apartment on 1st Avenue. I remember the guy that copped the stuff for us saying, this stuff is strong, be careful. I remember shooting half the bag and waiting.... Things started going black and I shot the rest in the sink. I didn't know what had happened to my friends; when I still lived up here I knew where to cop without any guides. I figured they were in some transition place where if they didn't know where the shit was, it would be harder to get. That they might quit, one of these days. Heh, yes. That night, I found myself singing and playing guitar at some party in Soho. There was a stage set up in the backyard and rich people I didn't know. It was the sax player's birthday. I wailed and Linda wailed in the backyard. She was yelling, "You sellout! You fucking loser! You fucked us over man!" Things like that. It hurt. She was right. She was wrong. People did what they had to in order to survive. She was right. The cops came and busted up the party, saying that we were too loud. I took Mike aside and told him to watch his wife, told him about the valium on top of the beer and dope, that I was afraid for her. She was still screaming in the backyard. He went to her. The cops came in. The sax player's sister came on to me. She looked good. I was junked out and blew her off. The cops hadn't come till I started singing. The Rasta band before us was tame. I had blown half a lung singing into the lower Manhattan night. I had looked over at Mike, playing bass. He smiled back. It had felt good for a while. The next morning I packed my bags to go back to PA. I had talked to my old boss on the phone, thanked him for firing me for being strung out. He didn't know what to say, thought I would have been dead by then. I just had to tell him. Linda sat there. They didn't know she was strung out, that she and Mike were. Didn't know that a few other's were also. I hung up the phone and looked at her. "I can't do this anymore," I told her. "I know, Tony." Mike was still asleep. Fucker could sleep through anything. That was OK, he didn't have to work that day. Linda did. "Mike, I'm leaving," I yelled. He woke up and said, "see ya, Tony," and I walked downstairs with Linda. She had her bike and pack ready for the day. "I'm not going to be back, Linda," I told her. "I know." "What's with the paintings across the street?" I asked her. "Demons, Tony. They're demons." |