The Blue Pain

           I was still in love with in when I felt the angel wings growing from my shoulder blades.  I was ferociously in love with him when I hid his wallet under the pile of trash on the bathroom floor.  The water stains on the wall made no shapes worth remembering.  I could barely look at the brown stained toilet or the sink coated in the grime of weeks of shaving and spitting, so I hid a four hundred and fifty dollars under a pile of empty toilet paper rolls. 

            I thought I should remember everything about this night, the frosted window with the rusted iron bars, the spider legs of mold in the shower, the cheap light blue shower curtain, the bright mirror on the wall the only clear space where I could see myself, all little and shaky and begging to whatever god would listen that he wouldn’t buy anymore.  I wanted to hold on to these images, so I would know where I didn’t want to go back to as I tiptoed into the living room with the sagging flea infested green couch, the kind that lovers had fucked on and children had pissed on and drunks had sweated the D.T.’s out on.  His dog lay there shedding and thumping his tail. 

            Then there was the desk drawer filled with empty corners of plastic bags and pebble hard balls of steel wool and crack pipes busted into the lost pieces of him.

            I was losing him in increments so small I almost couldn’t catch them, but there were still those nights when he’d stop shaking long enough to move his hands slowly like he only did then, jacked up some time before dawn when he’d kiss me so slowly until we made love as if dying.  If it went any faster, we would die, our hearts speeding like twin jackhammers bursting holes in our chests.  When he didn’t pull out it was because we were fucking in a perfect world.  There had still been nights when I would hold my shaking mess of a guy- the 125 pounds of him- until he’d stop twitching enough, and I’d love him needing me like that child I was never going to have.

            This wasn’t one of those nights when we shared the same pain, white blue or green; tonight was a pain that was dirty yellow and rotted your teeth, unlike the blue pain of a Lortab that was soft enough to live with and didn’t take the soul away like you’d been paying rent on your life and forgotten about it.

            This is not a love story.  For I long time, I thought if I could really find his pain, I could take some of it and make it less somehow.  I was what he always thought he couldn’t have he said as I felt the first twinge of angel wings sprouting like pieces of bone or crushed glass. 

            I had stopped wanting cocaine in little sealed bags or the day when he’d come over wet from the rain at dawn and I’d taken him back for the first time then, lines of white pain glistening through us.  I stopped wanting anything but to hold John Carlo until I loved him enough that the shaking would go away.  This was after the start of it all, the cold days when he’d call and ask me if my heat was working and when he’d pick me up and spin me around.  That was before his pain had changed from clean glistening white to a dirty yellow that showed itself in his eyes and on his teeth.  I don’t know how to step into that hell to bring him back.  Believe me, I’ve tried, but I don’t know the songs that will let me pass; even if I did, I’m not convinced he would follow me up, or if I’d turn too early for one last look at him before the pain of being without him was all I had left.  I imagine that pain is black.

            The night I hid the money began as one of those New Orleans Fridays when the sky looked like it had been painted there, that huge southern brush stroke of blue without the anvil of sun making it too hard to live in this world.  Our dealer L.T. was on the phone with John Carlo, wanting to know what color Loris we wanted.  “Blue,” I whispered because they made me cry less when I woke up and couldn’t say I love you without it hitting the air like dead weight.  The whole damn day was blue, one of those rare summer afternoons when the humidity had left and maybe this life was enough.

            John Carlo had just gotten paid which usually scared the hell out of me.  His  Catahoula tugged at the leash as we walked our dogs on the way to meet L.T.  The puppy was brand new and didn’t know a thing about this world.  It made me feel like we’d had a child together, and it made John Carlo touch me more, drape his arm around me and let his hand trace the length of my hair down to where it stopped above the wings that were more like the wings of a bug then, transparent and covered lightly in the summer dust.

            We wandered over to the café.  Somebody had painted a trombone player on what was left of the Spain Street house that wasn’t being rebuilt since the storm. Only the front wall stood, the weeds tall enough that we could see them through the windows.  The top of the wall had begun to curl over like the moist corner of a piece of paper; the television satellite was about to fall.  A rainbow of cracked glass covered the sidewalk.  John Carlo stopped for a moment, and I knew enough to stay quiet then so I wouldn’t ruin the whole moment for him. “Wow,” he finally said. 

            On a telephone line, birds perched in perfectly spaced symmetry.  The train was passing.  It stopped, backed up and moved forward again.  Then it moved back again as if yesterday might as well be tomorrow. 

            Chuck was there, leaning against the café wall.  He was sipping on a Miller High Life and holding a stringless guitar.  And who did he hope to charm with that?  Who did he possibly think he could woo?  The women he’d once had a shot with were long gone, and the more Chuck spoke, the more words left him.

            “I passed out on Decatur Street,” he told us, as if he was trying to explain anything.

            I went inside to be blasted by air conditioning, planning to slide a few dollars into the video poker machine, something to do now that I wasn’t drinking, hadn’t been for over three months.  Fridays were the hardest, when John Carlo would disappear on me, but this day, he didn’t seem to notice it was Friday.  It was too perfect for that.  He was over there talking to Chuck and wanting to hang out with me.

            Then I saw Wardy shoving twenties into the machine, and I turned quickly, pretending to check the ATM before John Carlo could see Wardy and the switch in his head that wanted to buy crack would flip.  As long as he didn’t see it, he wouldn’t buy it.

            John Carlo took my hand when I scurried back out to the sidewalk, hoping he hadn’t seen Wardy and that Wardy was winning so he’d stay at the machine forever maybe, or long enough for us to turn the lock on John Carlo’s door so the world couldn’t get in.

            “Something horrible happened in the neighborhood.”  There was something burning in his bright blue eyes then, this pain I’d seen a few times way below the surface.  He pulled me onto the piano bench someone had dumped outside the cafe.  I slid one leg over his, and he held me to him the way he hadn’t in a long time, not since the summer had started and I’d been sleeping at his house every night, his insurance policy against smoking crack.  His hands were in my hair so softly.  I wanted to stay in that moment forever.

            “You know Randy’s dead.” Chuck’s voice was a flat note that failed to raise into a question.

            All of my life I’d known I was lucky enough to have never known anyone who died, the angels and the martyrs distant statues carved in marble.

            “What are you talking about?” I asked.

            John Carlo told me that Randy had been staple-gunning insulation underneath his girlfriend’s house and it had hit the main wire to the street. 

            I tried to picture Randy, his brown curls when he taught us how to barbeque so we didn’t have to cook blackened food, the girl he’d fallen for whom he’d written love songs, but it was like he had a smudge in front of his face in a photograph or a doppelganger about to walk around the corner proving everyone wrong.  I don’t know what color Randy’s pain had been, but I could picture it silver then like lightning on sheet metal.  I wondered how he had forgotten to pay rent on his life, how the thread that holds the soul to the ribcage had snapped.

            He had designed the first handicapped accessible ramps for trailers that FEMA had approved, and a few weeks ago, FEMA had let him go. That’s where we were, still tracing pain down a red line that connected right back to Katrina.  Some days, it seemed like it had only been minutes since the water had drained, and this was one of them now.

            L.T. pulled up, and I put one hand in my back pocket and leaned through the window of his truck as if for a kiss, and he passed me the Loris in an empty cigarette pack.  John Carlo and I sat there like two kids posed in front of a dusty piano in a grocery store restaurant bar while the Wardy hit the poker machine and a ding ding ding droned on in the air.  “If you chew them, they hit you harder,” John Carlo told me.

            It was like the way we’d been before I’d stopped doing cocaine then, the two of us alone and sharing this pain, but back then like a snake, I’d shed it.  I hadn’t known then how deeply John Carlo’s pain ran, like a cavity that can’t be filled.  It comes from a long life of windows spray painted black, and a son he’ll never see, the slashed tires of his girlfriends, the boy who taught him how to shoplift food while some free-spirit hippie of a mother played music in the woods.  Or should I say, those are only symptoms; he was already lost long before any of that.  No one in John Carlo’s family called him for his birthday.  Mostly, except when we used to get really wired together, he says he has no regrets; he’s always skipped out on his rent just in time.

            There was nothing to do but sit outside then and listen to the air conditioners hum.  He handed me another Lori.  The outside tables were covered with ashtrays. A mangy dog, teats dragging, whimpered as she passed, and John Carlo’s puppy whined for her. The carpetbaggers had left town for the summer, but they’d return in October with more expensive trucks and venereal diseases and houses to flip. The contractors who had stuck around were getting off work with their beer and their Bacardi to splash on the ground in Randy’s honor.

            By ten o’clock, the store was closing, so John Carlo bought a six pack, and we walked our dogs to his house.  He put ten Lortabs on the coffee table that had been burned by cigarettes and joints and whatever else you can set on fire at five o’clock in the morning.  When I kissed him, our lips melted with the Loris, and I felt the way I hadn’t felt with him for a long time, like we were one another’s last chance at this life.

            “Guess who called me?” he asked.

            But I didn’t know.

            “The guy.”

            “The crack guy?”

            The Loris were making my heart float away from me.  Randy was dead, and there was nothing I could do but stay in John Carlo’s arms, but he was pulling them away, and I could tell that the switch in his head had been flipped.

            “You told me to take your phone and your money,” I begged.  He was on the couch and I climbed on top of him, the 110 pounds of me. I couldn’t reach the phone, his arm a heartbeat longer than mine. 

            “I have to.”

            “Just don’t.”  The sobs shook me, making me cry hard enough that he’d know he couldn’t do it.  If I only loved him enough, he wouldn’t call back.

            “It’s better this way.  Otherwise, I’ll go on a binge.”

            “No.  You made me promise I wouldn’t let you.”

            “Trust me.”  He wiggled away from me.

            “Please.”  I ended up on the floor sobbing because I couldn’t get the phone out of his hand.  “Please don’t leave me because I’m crying.  I can’t be alone tonight.”  The puppy was there, all gray and tail-wagging.  John Carlo had gotten him the day before.  I ate two more Loris, chewing them to powder until I choked.  Here I was crying on the floor that my crack-head boyfriend was going to leave me because I was crying that he was going to smoke crack.

            “You can have them all,” he told me and took me back in his arms then. 

            “It’s better this way,” he said again, but at least he was holding me.

            “I don’t want to be alone tonight,” I whimpered.  My own little dog was on me then, licking the tears.  The Catahoula’s tail thumped against my leg.  It would have taken an earthquake or a fire to get me to walk through that door.

            “Can I borrow your car?”  he asked, but I said no. 

            He was back in ten minutes.  In that time, I had decided to buy a gun and shoot whoever was selling it to him to death or call the cops. “Maybe I should drink a beer,” I said instead.

            “It might make you calm down.”

            He showed me the pipe and the little pieces of steel wool and then the shaking started.  The rocking back and forth.  I tried not to look for a long time.  When I handed him one of the Heinekens he’d bought, he opened it with a lighter. 

            “Just do what you would normally do,” he stuttered, as if I normally drank beer.

            He turned the Playboy channel on and groped clumsily at my thigh.

            “It will be over soon,” he promised, but he couldn’t really talk.  The Catahoula slid underneath the couch.  My Chihuahua knew better.  She stayed close to me, licking my tears when they came and watching John Carlo with one eye when they didn’t. 

            There are different things we all need to face hell, and I could have gotten on my knees and prayed for the strength to walk out of that room and leave my love shaking on that fleabag of a couch, but something inside of my head broke.  I got him to open me another beer with the lighter he couldn’t put down.  When I asked him a question, he couldn’t hear.

            His phone was ringing again, so I silenced it and put it in my pocket.  In the bathroom, I deleted the call history but wrote down the number planning to give it to the police or Crime Stoppers or call it myself one day so I could meet the guy and blow his brains out with a gun I didn’t own.  I figured if nothing else I could pay him all the money I had to stay away from John Carlo forever and my angel wings would grow brittle white feathers.

              On the television, a woman was sucking some huge cock, but John Carlo wouldn’t look at me as he tried to jerk my shirt off.  He’d been cutting from this chunk of dirty yellow with a razor, and he watched the rock closely as if it was about to scurry away to live under the couch with the cockroaches.  I unplugged the television as he took another hit. 

            “It will be over soon.”

            He stared at the television cords, the impossibility of them.

            I could have run out the door until I was home six blocks away, but all I’d want was his skinny arms around me, hugging me down there on the floor with the popcorn he’d spilled days ago.

            I hadn’t had a drink in almost four months.  The beer railroaded me as I ate two more Loris, feeling the glow of them somewhere down there, enough to keep me sane and make me sleep. 

            John Carlo.  His eyes were so blue they burned, and he was the kind of person who when he smiled, his whole face changed.  He loved me from the beginning and couldn’t sleep without me.  He clung to me through the days of cocaine cravings until the cravings seemed to be gone.  He loved me in the sand of Biloxi and at the lake and in the devastated neighborhood where I wanted to buy a house.  He loved me in the dog park watching the trains go by and by.  He loved me at a heavy metal show in a vacant lot, but nothing was ever like it was the first time when he loved me while cleaning the blood off of my face on Decatur Street from when an ex-boyfriend of mine had beaten me up. This is what happens when you walk into Popeye’s Chicken on Chef Menteur Highway and see your old crack dealer and eight months gurgles down the drain.

            Since he’d run into the dealer, I had been throwing it all away again and again, the baking soda and the steel wool and the shards of what we’d been.  At first, he’d thank me earnestly, as if my own two hands had wiped his addiction off the planet as the angel wings grew more strongly, but they were light weight wings then.  Then, he’d thank me hopefully, then only to be polite until finally, when he’d lost all confidence in himself, he’d just laugh at me.

            I should have left him the night Randy died because then I’d have been leaving the man I loved, the side of him who would miss me, but he must have sensed that coming because the punk in him came out to defend him against all that.

            Randy was dead, and the blue pain was leaking down my face.  John Carlo was rocking back and forth and looking through the C.D’s.  He shook the cigarettes out of his pack to see what was inside before his jerking hands scattered mine all over the floor. When I saw him in the top cabinet he had never opened, I told him there wasn’t anymore, but he couldn’t hear me.  The Catahoula pissed on the floor, but I knew better to let him out.

            I drank the fourth beer in the amount of time it took John Carlo to dump out the silverware drawer.

            I saw some lint on the floor and I showed it to him.  “Look, baby,” I told him.  “I found some.”  I lit it.  “Oh no, that wasn’t it.”

            “Wait, wait, wait, here’s some more.” I lit a piece of popcorn on fire.  “Wait, what about here?” I lit another.  “Oh shit, that wasn’t crack either.  Here, let me keep looking.”  I opened the cabinets and burned up the corner of a paper plate.  “Fuck baby, I really thought I found it.  Here, try this.”  His reached for the pipe then and again when I handed him Styrofoam and some white pebbles and the hard edge of a piece of cheese.

            We played ‘Here, here try this,’ for a while.

            “Will you just stop?” he asked in a voice too low to be his.  His eyes were dark pools.

            “I can’t stop,” I cried.  “You want me to stop? Well, I can’t.  How does that feel?  I just can’t stop.  Ask me again.” 

            “Stop.” His voice was deadpan and low as if he was speaking from his guts, something deep down in there that had nothing to do with his brain or heart.

            I lit some more popcorn on fire.  He kept falling for it. I stuck my hand under that couch where the roaches were crawling and handed him a piece at a time, watching it turn brown in the pipe before he’d drop it.

            I was on my hands and knees.  From outside, I could hear first birds of dawn whistling ‘loser.’  Finally, the dogs were asleep in the corner.  I hadn’t been drunk in a long time, and my head pounded; I wanted to put my fist through the window.  Instead, I found him more pieces of yellow and white.  He was rocking back and forth.  “I think I finally found it,” I whispered, but I had lost my resolve.

            “I can’t keep doing this, baby,” I told him.

            “Please don’t stop.”  He was lost in the smoke somewhere, wandering around on a hippie commune without a mother. “You’re helping me.”

            It took hours for him to come down. “I have to leave you now,” I said over a stomach of tears, the spaces between his ribs collecting them.

            “It’ll be too sad,” he said.

            I should have left him that night because then I’d have been breaking up with the John Carlo I loved, but instead I waited a month until I was desperate because I couldn’t save him.  He didn’t even come after me to tell me I was worth something.

            He was thinner each time I saw him to collect the money.  We never talked about having it, but I remember the night it must’ve been, the perfect world.  “We have to be more careful,” I’d told him.  “Because I’d want to have it.” 

            “I would too,” he’d said that night.

            It wasn’t that I was afraid to do it all alone. It was more like I knew what it would turn me into if I had to explain for the rest of my life to some little person why John Carlo was always unavailable in one way or another.  It would turn me into something skittery and feral; I’d never be able to get up off of the floor with the popcorn, what with all that little person’s hope and my angel wings crushing me down.

            The whole thing had been taken care of when he called me up.  I was passionately in love with him when I answered the phone.

            “Do you want to have casual sex?” he asked.

            “What would be casual about it?”

            “It could just be, I don’t know, a release.”

            That was the thing with him.  He never tried to bluff.  He’d lay his shittiest hand on the table and offer it up to you without even bothering to draw.  But he was honest about it.  I spent a long time trying to decide if it was out of stupidity or character that he was like that.