Jazz Musician Junkie

This is my dream from last night. I guess I dream in cliches a bit, huh?

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.

2014: Fulfill Some Dreams and Spanish-English Dictionary

I have been wanting to start a creative writing group--well, reawaken HLS even though its members have been thrown to the four corners of the world. Slowly they are coming back, but until then I thought I would just start up another creative group. So I did. There are four of us and our first meeting was last Friday. It went very well. It's forcing me to remember to write and to write regularly. I gave everyone the Ten Minute exercise assignment that I did in Melanie Jordan's poetry class. Melanie, if you're reading this, it was one of my most favorite classes of all time. From those exercises we are supposed to write something and bring it to the next meeting to be critiqued at the following meeting.

Today I read this. I liked what he had to say, but I really liked his idea of how anytime we wanted to sort of rework himself, he would start a new project. He also talked about how he did a project called Today where he took a picture and wrote a story every day starting on his 30th birthday and continued for 440 days. A story a day? Maybe I could do that. Of course, I would think that, but really. Why not at least do best to attempt it. Who cares if I miss a day here or there. I'm the only one holding myself accountable because here is what I realized after reading the article. He would start a new project when he wanted to change something about himself. I would love to become a better person, to improve myself. Not better, but truer. The only constant in my life has been the desire to write, to tell stories. So if I have always wanted to be a writer, wouldn't writing everyday lead to me being truer to myself and who I am? Obvious, I know, but sometimes I need something that obvious to bang me over the head. Focus. Thus, combining all those things, I took a picture of a Spanish dictionary and wrote my Ten Minute exercise as a story about that dictionary. It's cliche, I know, but when you are rushing through something as an exercise and writing for the first time in several months, well, it's not a masterpiece at the end. I think we all realize that.

A Spanish dictionary lies on her bed near a small suitcase. The bed is unmade. Only a rumpled sheet remains, bright in the morning light filtering through the open window. The quilt fell to the floor sometime during the night and she has been too manic to stop a moment and pick it up. She flits from one task to another as her mind races from one thought to another to an excuse why she shouldn't be making this trip. Not now. Better to stay and make up with Georgianne. Georgie who didn't sleep here last night for the first time in two years because she needs some space. They really need to take a moment. Rest for a beat. How else did she put it? What does it mean that Alina cried the tears of heartbreak without the broken heart? Her heart wasn't breaking.

She picked out her best underwear from the top drawer of their dresser and stuffed it into a corner of the suitcase that had once belonged to her grandmother and somehow had come to be in Alina's possession. She'd kept it in a top corner of her closet, the space where things are put to be forgotten about. She'd kept it there until the email from Manuel showed up in her inbox three weeks ago. She'd started fantasizing about her grandmother's suitcase and jumping on a plane, taking up Manuel's offer to come visit.

Manuel and Alina had become friends during her sophomore year in college. He was in Houston studying abroad for a year. He'd told her all about his home in Barcelona, describing the art and architecture that was everywhere you looked. The sounds of the street musicians and how they had the best hot chocolate--nothing like the watered down stuff she'd had all her life. Hot chocolate and churros. She wanted to taste it. She felt she could. Imagined what it would be like to fly away with him back to his home to experience all the wonderful things he'd described all those nights they were studying together or out drinking together. But she knew she couldn't go. Not then. She had classes to take and grades to keep up and scholarships to keep so she could graduate with her useless degree.

She'd thought about it from time to time and then email Manuel. He'd write back and they'd half-heartedly plan a visit. Then life would happen and the dream would fade like the tide going out to sea until the next nostalgic email from Manuel. "Saw this and thought of you."

Then three weeks ago. Typical email exchange except the idea took hold. It didn't fade away. She even checked flights and her bank account.

And then two days ago. Georgianne said, "we need space."

5,245 miles seemed like the perfect amount of space.

She finishes packing her grandmother's suitcase. She shoves the Spanish-English dictionary into her messenger bag and leaves.