3.06 Topping Off

Jean called to say he was heading out the door “right now”. The party, according to the flier my friend had given me a week earlier, was supposed to start at eight, and at nine-thirty, my friend Jean could no longer be considered fashionably late.

“No problem,” I said.

“I’ll call when I’m in your neighborhood.”

“Gotcha.”

Hanging up the phone, I settled back down at the dining room table where I prepared a fresh foil, sprinkled some crystals on it, and lit up. If I were a betting man, I would have wagered that my friend was, like me, still in his apartment, “topping off”, if you will. See: getting high on methamphetamines is never as hard as staying high: it’s like trying to stay afloat on a leaky inner tube that constantly needs a puff of air here, a puff of air there, that is, some topping off.

“Good thing the wife’s out with friends,” I said to myself after blowing a thick cloud of white smoke out the window. I would have been sitting on the toilet or a step in the stairwell, otherwise, sneaking one more hit in before I left, just one more for the road, just one more the bump in the road.

Before long my cell phone was ringing again. Jean was now a block away from my place.

So he really was heading out the door. Good thing I’m not a gambling man.

I took one final, gluttonously long hit, and held it, and held it, and held it until my lungs felt like they were going burst, then exhaled out the window.

Folding the foil up nice and neatly, I slipped it, and two others, just in case, into a stainless steel business card holder between an assortment of business cards, none of which were mine. This was yet another precaution Jean had chastised me into taking:

“Man, what are you thinking?” he had said. “One of the first places the cops look is in your wallet.”

I hid the bag of meth with the rest of my stash, balled up in a pair of socks in my sock drawer, and then, went back to the dining room and double checked that I hadn’t left any clues to my illicit habit for my wife to pick up on. Yuko and I already had enough troubles as is to add nascent drug addiction to the volatile chemistry between us.

"How are you doing?" Jean asked when I got into his car.

“Not bad. Not bad at all.”

Not bad indeed! If I had topped off again, that inner tube I was now soaring on might have very well popped.

Jean gave me a small vial of honey oil, saying that he had a shipment of bongs coming in from Amsterdam and didn’t want to leave anything in his apartment in case the cops decided to snoop around.

“Thank you, kind sir!”

Honey oil was nature’s answer to Valium: the perfect thing to ease you to bed after you’ve been awake for several days. Dip a needle into the oil and add a little dollop of it on a cigarette then smoke it like you would your Marlboros. Only with honey oil, Marlboro Country comes to you.

“Let’s hope you can repay the kindness,” Jean said. “You carrying?”

“I am indeed.”

“Yosh!” Jean was in a good mood now. "I’m already out, if you can believe it. That Chinese bitch just can't get enough of the shit. I wouldn't be surprised if she were still at my place smoking foil."

It was “the Chinese Bitch” who had introduced Jean to speed, had taught him how to smoke it and who now was supplying his and indirectly my own habit in a kind of perverse trickle-down effect.

"You left her there?" I asked.

"Yeah, sure. If I don't find anything to fuck at the party, I can always screw her again."

"R-i-g-h-t."

Only in the World According the Jean-Baptiste Marcel could something like that be pulled off. In my own world, if you ran after two hares, you caught neither.

"So, you doing anything for Golden Week?" Jean said, as we were approaching the Dome. The party was being held at a “live house” just next to it.

"No."

Golden Week. It was a week-long string of holidays that began on the 29^th of April. What with final exams bearing down on me, I hadn’t given it much thought.

"Let's go somewhere!"

"Like Okinawa or something?"

"Okinawa? No, I can't stand that miserable place! I mean a proper trip . . . somewhere abroad. There are some great parties on Cyprus. Or we can go to Goa."

Personally, I rather liked Okinawa, the laid-back mood of the island, the music, the coral beaches, even the food. It was far from miserable, but I could understand Jean’s desire to get away.

"Yeah, sure,” I said. “I haven't made my schedule yet, but I'm sure I can take off about two weeks. I'll need a vacation after the exams and all."

The best part of all was that my wife, due to leave for Canada in early April, would be out of the country by then. I would be free to go wherever and do whatever I liked.

“Well, let’s not just talk about it,” Jean said, thumping the steering wheel. “Let’s do it.”

“Alright!”

I was certain it was the speed talking: when you’re high you’re inundated with great ideas. What’s more, you have the conviction, the perseverance, and the boundless energy to carry them out, all of them, and not just someday, but some today.

Every time I smoked, I could barely keep up as I filled page after page with story ideas, witty dialogues. I made lists of projects I just had do straightaway, and found new ways to tweak my business to squeeze out a few more drops of blood from the turnip.

Each time I got high on meth, it was as I were lowering a bucket into a wellspring of creative genius. That was the attraction of the drug, at least, and looking back it’s easy to understand why I developed such a powerful liking to it.

Meth-inspired babble or not, it still came as a surprise that Jean would suggest taking a vacation together. The man seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in finding fault in me. You name it: the way I sentimentalized the women in my life, the stupid futility of my marriage, even the clothes I wore--he was in one of his two-thousand dollar custom-made Skinn leather pants, his “pussy-catchers”; I was in something with a considerably smaller price tag--he would always find something snide to say. Be that is it may, no one, not even my wife, was spending as much time in my company than Jean.

I still couldn’t get my head around that. Did it mean that despite the playful vitriol Jean sensed substance in my wafer thin existence, or did he merely need someone to get high with? Again, that aversion to drinking alone, I mentioned before. After four year’s of conjugal acrimony, I had developed a rather thick skin. My pride wasn’t so easily bruised that I cared; nor did I want to devote that much time brooding over the riddle of Jean and my friendship. It was just one more pedestrian curiosity as I walked through life.

*

Later at the party, as we clawed our way through the crowd to get to the bar where crap drinks were being sold for outrageous prices, a woman caught Jean’s eye.

"Did you see that?" he asked. "She looked right at me and smiled."

"Who did?"

"The tall one."

"The one with the long brown hair over there," I said pointing to a tall, slender woman in black leather pants.

"You and your goddamn finger! You've always got to point, haven't you?"

I pointed again, only more deliberately.

"You are so uncool, man,” Jean blustered. “Do that one more time, and you walk home!"

The woman was gorgeous, an Amazon easily a hundred and seventy-five centimeters tall. With the stiletto heels she was wearing, she towered above all the other women in the room, and a good many of the men.

And boy was she ever flirtatious! Every now and again, she’d turn around, give Jean the eye then laugh playfully.

"I'm going to take her home tonight," Jean said with such confidence that I assumed they had already met. I asked him so.

"Nah, never seen her before," he said staring directly at her and smiling in that devilish way of his.

Jean was one of those unique characters you run across in life who seem to get exactly what they wanted. Compromise didn’t figure.

He'd say it was because he didn't give up, that he was disciplined, that he acted on his ideas.

"Anyone can have dreams," he once told me. "Anyone can tell you that they want to do this or that, but only a few people will actually do it."

I had dreams; had plenty of them, but the overwhelming force of the current rushing against me was keeping me downstream. By no means defeated, I was struggling desperately all the same. And at thirty-five, I was beginning to fear that I'd be washed away forever by that current, washed away and forgotten. And it was this fear of never coming to anything, of failing, that I no longer even bothered to tell others what it was that I wanted to do with my life, not my friends in Japan, not even my wife Yuko, nor my lover.

With mineral water in our hands, the two of us entered the main hall into which the target of Jean’s desire had disappeared. The darkened hall was even more crowded than the reception room. On stage a band was playing some Latin shit. The music did nothing for me, but all the women gyrating their hips to the salsa beat was enough to make me act like I was a big fan.

“And you didn’t want to come,” said Jean. “Think about what a smorgasbord of pussy you would have been missing!”

He was right. He was always right. And I was finding it easier and easier to just go with the flow, to follow the prophet’s lead out of the desert to the water than dowse for it myself.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The complete version of No. 6 is now available for a variety of devices at Amazon's Kindle store.