Chapter 30

I fantasize about having those once in a generation out-of-the-fuck ideas that shifts society and my generation again.

I couldn’t think my way to genius. It was a choice on a completely different matter made in a totally random moment that brought me to this.

I want what everyone else wants. To work hard for a time then strike gold and never work again. The monotonous laborer is a passing fad that’s soon to die out.

That’s what all this is about. I want to retire early.

“Yeah, I know how you feel.” Marcus says. He’s not even looking at me. He’s holding an old orange pill bottle that’s had the label scraped off. He dumps its contents into a bar napkin then folds it onto itself and uses the bottle to crush it all up. Then he spits into the bottle and holds the napkin folded taco style over the opening.

Marcus shrugs. He says, “That’s basically what we’ve done.”

He sprinkles a little dust then mixes it with the butt of his pen then spits in it again. And repeats until the napkin’s empty.

He tosses the napkin and begins stirring the mixture. The saliva and powder start to form a dull grey muddle with consistency like whipped cream.

“Ah, dammit. Too much spit.” Marcus says. He looks up at the ceiling and searches the spare fifth pocket of his jeans. He hits a bump and pulls out the backup tablet of gum he keeps in there for emergencies and presents it in the A-OK hand gesture. He squeals, “Dinner, dinner chicken winner!”

He crushes it up and adds it to the pill bottle concoction. He leans over the bar grabs the simple syrup and adds one quick squirt stirring it up until it’s at the right thickness. If it’s got the viscosity of snot you know you’ve got it right.

Our bartender brings me us bar towels before I even ask for them.

Tonight’s band walks in the front door with their amps and cases.

Marcus is holding the bottle up to the light. Or what little light there is in this bar swishing it like a lab tech with a beaker. Then he asks me if I want to chew gum in his car or just go to the bathroom.

*

The band is about halfway through their set and I’m in the bathroom stall chewing gum with Marcus. We’re tying off our arms with wet bar rags. It gives you the worst rope burn of your life if you leave it dry.

I say, “We could just use our belts.”

Marcus says, “No. I’m thirty-seven. Twelve years older than you. If someone comes in and hears two belts jangling in the same stall they’ll think we were fucking.”

We’re not technically addicts we’re just killing time.

The plan is to have a tolerance built up so if someone tries to drug us and trick us into doing stuff on video we’re not so blitzed that we can’t fight back. It’s fighting fire with fire so we don’t have to worry about fires.

It’s infinite loop logic.

More exposure creates more tolerance. And on and on.

I invested in an old glass and brass syringe for the same reason a smoker does a fancy Zippo. The syringe’s hypodermic microscopic barrel pushes and depresses the faint blue ridge on my arm. It dips like standing on a trampoline until it pops through. The piston pushes all that milky greyish white solution. It’s thick and gooey with the viscosity of semen.

I can track its location on my bloodstream highway until it dissolves all over.

It blasts my cheeks with radiation. Like two wellsprings of heat and prickly needles that pour over the rest of my face. It heats up my neck and revs my engines.

I’ve noticed the high differs from person to person. Bloodshot or cloudy eyes. While Marcus always gets dreamy. I just want an excuse to obliterate somebody.

Pouring…pouring. It gains a rhythm that aligns with my ramping heartbeat. The sinusoidal rhythms about to converge. The band’s stifled music reverberates off the bathroom tiles.

Marcus’s eyes are lost and flat grey like old quarters. He’s clocked into a fugue state that’s taking his attention to a higher power. As if something in the fluorescent light bulb is revealing to him all the secrets of life. But really, Marcus is peaking.

I use my teeth to untie the knot around my bicep and the medicine jets to my head. I’m squatting, struggling to untie Marcus’s for him while he’s in his fluorescent heaven when the stall door shakes. Someone’s pounding on it.

I say, “Give us a minute.”

“Us?” A familiar voice says, “What, are you fucking?”

God dammit. I unlock the door and open it. Marcus is leaned into the back corner of the stall sliding down with a delusional smile. He rests his head on the tile wall.

I don’t see the face of the person my pupils are so dilated. All I see are the basic nearsighted features I can barely make out. The intruder is a burly bald punk who only has hair on his cheeks. And the worst teeth I have ever seen in my entire life. They’re brown and thin. Like he’d gargled sewer water. Most of the ones on the bottom row are turned sideways. He smells like rotten asshole. My vision transitions into hyperfocus and I see every flaw. He has a bolt through the bridge of his nose secured in the bone by a lugnut on either side.

When he sees our needles and towels he says, “What the hell?”

His piggish bottom lip goes out and you can see his gums. They’re pink and puffy from infection. They look like they’re rotting. With the gum taking hold the roots of his teeth are so thin that they look like roses with toothpicks for stems.

“You druggin’ him or something?”

“What?” I say, “No.”

I say, “He drugged himself.”

Marcus still has a dufus face and says, “I want to haunt people.”

“Nah man. Come on man. Let’s go.” Lugnut shows Marcus the back of his hand and waves to him with four fingers then leans down to grab him. He puts a hand on my chest as he does it.

I grab his arm and tell him to fuck off.

Marcus starts to come to a sustainable level and pushes himself up into a crab walk position to stand and says, “Yeah. Leave us alo—” Then rolls and pukes into the porcelain bowl.

“Fine.” He shrugs his shoulder and scowls. As he walks out the door he says, “Faggots.”

Marcus was always good for crazy ideas but tonight he’s outdone himself. Marcus’s head is in the bowl. When he talks his words echo through the glossy ceramic cave. Marcus is the spirit of this shitty club’s bathroom.

I’m reading some of the band stickers when he says, “Guys like that should be removed.” He spits then says, “Like, from Earth.”

He spits again and waves a finger near his nose. “How do they even get those things out?”

I immediately walk out of the bathroom. Like the idea was possessing me. That I was just a worthy and willing conduit for an idea that Marcus gave me. At a certain point I just let myself have an out-of-body experience and watch myself go primal. I hate how good this feels.

Breaking the corner I build up speed pushing through and shouldering people in the pit near the stage. The entire room is red light. I scout and like a hate magnet my eyes find Lugnut. He’s pointing towards the bathroom probably telling his friend the story about what he found in the stall. With his hand still pointing he turns his head back to talk to his friend.

I grab his extended arm and make our faces collide like a car crash. Over and over.

Pounding my forehead into the bolt through the bridge of his nose like tenderizing a sirloin steak. After a few hard cracks it started to sound like the muted fleshy thud of raw beef. That noise you hear inside your eardrums when you smack the back of your head on a smooth hard floor.

He started falling backwards and I went down with him like a lover into bed. Like we’re about to perform a ritual. My stomach felt loose like it could slip out of my mouth if I wasn’t careful (another one of the many side effects of gum).

I slam on top of him and I cough up like a baby. A quick squirt of whatever was in my stomach dropped on his face. It looked like milk on a split-open grapefruit.

The chaotic music thrashes into one massive noise. His friend is trying to pull me off him while someone else is trying to fight his friend off me. More of the same creates more of the same. Like fighting fire with fire to prevent fires. It’s infinite loop logic.

In this humid womb of bodies all the mucus and bile that could be excreted was. Blood and sweat and vomit mixed on the bridge of deviated septs broken noses and jawbones. I’d made the initial cracks with my own face to make it as easy for myself as possible.

The bartender wraps his arm over my shoulder and locks it under my armpit. I let him yank me back but before he does I hook and grip my middle and index fingers around the sides of the bolt in his nose.

It comes out like baby teeth.

 

James Jacob Hatfield is a displaced engineer, a painter, and many other contradictions. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Barely South Review, Chaleur Magazine, Havik, and others. His ekphrasis poem “torrents of lahar, No. 36” was anthologized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. He is a Sterling Fellow and a Weymouth Fellow. He is the creator and curator of the Gemini Sessions Substack. He lives in Durham, NC.

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