Molly.
A Rogers Park story.
To my fellow outlaws, outcasts and misfits,
Welcome to all the new folks coming over from Granta in the UK.
Couple of great guest writers dropping soon. NOELLENOELLE drops a new piece “Lesbians can’t be biphobic” on 8/30 and Eric Leja drops “Making my mark” on 9/27.
Now without further ago, away we go!
“Sarge?” I asked the young man sitting on the sofa next to me over the roar of Black Sheep singing, “Engine, Engine, Number Nine, on the New York Transit line, if the train falls off the track…” then everybody in the living room of the house party shouted, “Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up!”
“No. Surge,” the young man replied, leaning in close so I could hear, offering a mixture of beer breath and body odor. He was a new face in the crowd.
We’d been throwing house parties for a couple years to pay for the rent, food and drugs, but I’d never seen this kid before. He was skinny but wore a XXXL baggy shirt and pants which flared out wildly at the bottom, the current fashion trend in the underground rave scene in Chicago. He spoke through a thick Eastern European accent. His teeth, which were few, looked like they’d been sharpened by jagged chunks of coal.
“Your name is Surge. Like a power surge?” I asked again.
“Yeah. Surge. Like surge.” He said with a mischievous smile, proudly displaying his minimalist collection of yellow and black teeth, “Do you like drugs?”
I was twenty-one. And did like drugs.
“Depends. What you got?” I asked.
“X.” He replied, slinging the Elmo backpack off his shoulder and setting it on his lap.
“What’s X?”
“Ecstasy. A pill.”
“What’s it make you feel like?”
“Like everything all at once.”
Sold.
“How much?”
“Twenty if you give me a balloon.” He replied.
We had a five-foot nitrous tank at the party. It was five bucks a balloon, two dollars a refill. My pal Ryan brought the tank over the night before. He got it from a shady dentist out in the western suburbs. When I was carrying the tank up to the third floor, the 2nd floor door flung open and Hippie Dan stood in the doorway wide eyed.
“Is that fucking nitrous man?” Hippie Dan asked.
“Yeah. For the party tomorrow night. Landlord’s not giving us our security deposit back so we gotta make some moves.”
“Fuck yeah man, let’s crack that fucker open.”
“I don’t know how. I never did this before.”
“You need a cracker, for the top, and something to fill up with the nitrous.”
“That must be why Ryan is bringing balloons over tomorrow.”
“You for real man? You got a five-foot tank of medical grade nitrous oxide, and you don’t know what to do with it?”
“Swear to God.”
“Well, I got a cracker inside. I can get the nitrous out, but I don’t got nothing to put it in. Actually…”
He sprinted inside and came back out with a contraption that opened the top of the tank. Then he wrapped a hefty garbage bag around the top, turned the nozzle of his “cracker” and the bag began to fill up the nitrous.
He glanced up at me, a maniacal look in his eye and squeaked, “Don’t let me die.”
He wrapped the garbage bag full of nitrous oxide over his head as airtight as he could and began heavily breathing in and out from inside the bag. He swayed back and forth then took a face first header into the floor. I yanked the garbage bag off his head and checked if he was dead. Right when I was about to call the ambulance, his eyes slowly opened and through a groggy smiled, he whispered, “That’s good shit.”
I quickly grabbed the bag, filled it with nitrous, wrapped it around my head and shouted, “Don’t let me die either.”
It was a fast high, like slamming into a wall at a hundred miles an hour, each half of your brain separated, like old school alarm bells, an imaginary steel ball clanging between the two halves as you hear, “Wha Wha Wha Wha Wha” then just as fast as you went up, you come slamming back down to earth.
Dan yanked the bag off my head, filled it back up then pulled it over his head and we went back and forth until either of us could take any more, then he helped me carry the tank up to my apartment. Before he left, he pulled his marijuana bowl out of his pocket and held it out for me to see.
“My bowl’s broken,” he said.
I studied it for a moment, looking for cracks, but couldn’t find any.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
“There’s no weed in it,” he said with that mischievous smile.
“I just gave you free drugs. Now you want more?”
“Can’t blame a man for trying,” he said then left.
I had never done nitrous before and here I was sitting across from a stranger offering me something called ecstasy. Who wouldn’t want ecstasy? But only the young or old and scared could believe it could come in pill form. Words can be tricky, loud and cunning, like passion, the Latin root of which is “pati” which means “to suffer” which you only learn after the passion. So, what lessons would ecstasy have to teach?
Before the lesson, there was some needed street math. Surge had drugs he was willing to sell but didn’t have enough money to buy a five-dollar balloon. Something was up.
“You working me man? Trying to pawn off an aspirin pill as drugs?”
He reached into his backpack and dug out a pill slightly smaller than a dime, white with brown speckles.
“This is a disco biscuit, best ‘X’ on the street right now. I’ll wait for it to kick in so you know I’m not hustling you.”
I took the pill then handed him twenty bucks and a balloon. He jumped off the sofa and headed into the other room to fill it up. I downed the pill with a swig of Miller Lite, rested my right arm against the side of the sofa and bobbed my head to the music as my roommate sat plopped down in a chair next to me.
Thirty minutes later, still sitting in the same spot, every ounce of dopamine and serotonin poured down over me like a bathwater avalanche. I could see, feel and hear every molecule on earth, for all of time backwards and forward. My eyes slowly closed. I tried to open them back up. They would not open. Weird. My nose itched. I tried to scratch it. My arm would not move. Also, weird. Stand up, I thought loudly. My legs would not work. I heard my breathing. It was loud, heaving, then began to slow, slow, slow. You’re drowning, I thought, but you’re not in water. My breath came in short quick chirps. I could no longer hear the party, the laughing, the music, or my roommate talking in the chair next to me.
