A 20-something musician, mainly jazz, heroin addict was looking to clean up his life and looking for his father who left the family when the 20-something was very young, like two years old.
Milt Jr. meets up with an old jazz musician friend of his father's who is also a junkie. More of a junkie and street performer than a jazz musician anymore. Robert tells Milt Jr. about his father, how he cleaned up his act years ago, remarried a woman who had two kids of her own. When the wife died, the step-kids were too busy with their own lives to have anything more to do with their mother's second husband. They all lived in different cities so it was easy to let the relationship fade away. He didn't even bother calling them when he was diagnosed with heart failure.
Jr. finally finds him. Tells him he had the help of his old friend Robert. Milt wants to talk to Robert to make amends. When they go back to find Robert, he's in trouble. Son offers to save him just as the police are closing in on the drug house where Robert's been staying. They go into hiding back at Milt's shitty apartment. He can't afford much since he has to pay so much for doctor's visits and trips to the emergency room.
Robert stays on the sofa going through withdrawal. Tries to fight his way out sometimes when he has the strength. It's so tempting for Jr. to want to give into his fight and run off into the night with Robert to score. But he has his father now.
Milt calls Jr. into his room and asks him to help him get some stuff from beneath the bed. When Jr. looks underneath he doesn't see anything, but Milt explains that he sort of packaged it up underneath the slats of the bed with butcher paper and tape. Jr. pokes at it, but his father leans in and shows him to rip through the paper not worrying about the mess. Jr. feels through the paper for the objects that Milt hid there. He pulls out a few scrapbooks and a small box, like a plain jewelry box. Jr. flips through the scrapbooks and sees a few picture of him as a toddler and then a little older from when he was around ten. "Your mom tried to keep in touch with me. Maybe thought I'd come back for you."
Jr. waits for him to say more, not really sure he wants to hear more. When it's apparent there's nothing more to say Jr. continues flipping through the book. More than half of the book is blank pages. Another scrapbook has images of Milt playing saxophone and posters advertising his group. Milt looks through another scrapbook of photos Jr. doesn't recognize.
Jr. picks up the box and opens it upside down. Out falls a prescription bottle of Dilaudid and a bundle of heroin. The words "what are you doing with this" can't even form on Jr's lips. His own driving desire to take the stash and run fights against the astonishment that his father, an ex-junkie, could sleep every night over a stash like this.
"In case I ever needed to go before my time. A more appropriate way to go, I don't know."
Jr. takes a calming breath, closes his eyes, lets himself imagine the preparation, the smell of the match catching flame, the bubbling, the swirls, the cotton, the needle soaking up that awful glory, the feel of his nail flicking the barrel, "don't waste a drop," the pinch of tying off, the firm vein under fingertips, a perfectly virgin vein that doesn't roll, the sharp pierce, the bloom of blood, a sign of a direct hit, the push on the plunger, and the release, and how everything is all right with the world.
Until it wears off and the hunger sinks in. More than hunger. Need. The shivering. The aches. The sickness. And ever the desperate need wailing and shrieking and clawing at the insides. Jr. focuses everything on that intense feeling of desperation. He's slowly able to compare it to the now. To the mediocre feeling of everything might not be okay but there's nothing that can't be handled.
"You okay there--?" Milt almost says "son". Almost.
Jr. nods. "Can you take this? Please?" and holds out the bottle and the bundle. His hands shake.
"Guess I didn't leave soon enough." Milt takes the drugs and pockets them.
Jr. stands. Walks over to the filmy window and looks out at the brick wall view. His hands tight in his pockets. After a moment, he answers. "No, you exited right on cue." And with that he turns and looks at his dying father sitting on the floor with his scrapbooks and a pocket full of a drugs he would have killed for a month ago. He turns to leave and doesn't look back.
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