âMotherfucker,â says Dos into the stale air of his cavernous live/work laboratory.
How long had it been? Three years plus, but Dos knows this is irrelevant. The Jones is an eternal flame. The Jones is terminal. The Jones rides shotgun in your lizard brain toward the infinite night, its soft tendrils tickling your prostate. Into the grave, perhaps beyond.
Dos rocks an off-off-white Puma tracksuit, flip flops. Clothes he fled his apartment in, over six months ago, when they blew up the bridge nearby. Everything is outsized, he is shrinking, drying up. The loose flesh of a once stocky man hangs off him like a shitty suit. His hair is untended, or natural, or ânappy,â shooting skyward from his scalp in a salt-and-pepper afro. He places his hand on his cheek, calculates the length of his beard to be just shy of a centimeter. A yellowed plastic breathing apparatus hangs loose around his neck, from which a thin tube dangles freely.
Dos Mac is not the name he was born with.
âMotherfucker,â the man repeats. For there is no doubt as to what he must do.
He envisions his âdayâ with growing horror and annoyance. Plans for further microscopic tweaking of the 3-D model of the reconstructed subway system (which, admittedly, he has been tweaking for weeks on end) are now fucked. He would need his oxygen tank and hand cart. He would need â¦
Problems present themselves to the man, with respect to securing some heroin. Dos Mac has no idea what day or time it could possibly be. And more to the point: he has no idea where to look in New York City, his hometown rendered alien to him after the âattacksâ of February 14, the island of Manhattan a decimated void, now in an endless state of rebuilding, seemingly leading nowhere, one massive semi-abandoned construction site. He has no clue as to who would have the good stuff on hand. Or if shaking some loose is even a remote possibility.
He shuffles sideways, turns a bit. Blinks at the wall of computer monitors, stacked willy-nilly, closed-circuit cameras showing Times Square, barren save a tractor, a couple NYPD vans, and a loose grouping of soldiers in black ninja suits. Another screen shows the corner of Hester and Broome, and forty feet east of that, yet another camera is trained on the sidewalk outside his front door, which is virtually traffic free.
The fluorescent light over the right-hand side of the rear of the gigantic room flickers. Once that goes, simply getting a bulb for the shit will be a serious, likely a very dangerous, task. And suddenly he has the fucking stones to fancy he can saunter out, pick up some smack, and be back before lunch? Dos Mac is kidding no one.
His regular NA posse would be disgusted with him. His sponsor would wobble his head at the staggering waste of it all. All that work. The breakthroughs and milestones, the weepy mea culpas and poker chips, all for naught.
But there is no more NA. Finito. No more meetings. The âroomsâ sitting silent and derelict, or buried under rubble and ash. Either way, that crutch is history.
As addicts go, Dos had been more than highly functional. In this and in all things, the Mac excelled. Some labeled him an overachiever, perhaps attempting to compensate for his bleak roots in the housing projects of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Dos found this insulting, simplistic. Everybodyâs got their scene. His scene was that he was black and poor in America, but damn, havenât we done away with the stereotypes and all that bullshit? Apparently not.
At what point do you stop being a prodigy? When you hit eighteen? At twelve? When is it no longer charming? At what juncture do you become just another annoying brain clogging the coffee shops and microbreweries near MIT?
The thing with Dos and the smack was never an issue of health or well-being. Nor did anybody aware of his habit do more than whine at him for being fucking lazy. Or for not sharing. Most of his trashy
How long had it been? Three years plus, but Dos knows this is irrelevant. The Jones is an eternal flame. The Jones is terminal. The Jones rides shotgun in your lizard brain toward the infinite night, its soft tendrils tickling your prostate. Into the grave, perhaps beyond.
Dos rocks an off-off-white Puma tracksuit, flip flops. Clothes he fled his apartment in, over six months ago, when they blew up the bridge nearby. Everything is outsized, he is shrinking, drying up. The loose flesh of a once stocky man hangs off him like a shitty suit. His hair is untended, or natural, or ânappy,â shooting skyward from his scalp in a salt-and-pepper afro. He places his hand on his cheek, calculates the length of his beard to be just shy of a centimeter. A yellowed plastic breathing apparatus hangs loose around his neck, from which a thin tube dangles freely.
Dos Mac is not the name he was born with.
âMotherfucker,â the man repeats. For there is no doubt as to what he must do.
He envisions his âdayâ with growing horror and annoyance. Plans for further microscopic tweaking of the 3-D model of the reconstructed subway system (which, admittedly, he has been tweaking for weeks on end) are now fucked. He would need his oxygen tank and hand cart. He would need â¦
Problems present themselves to the man, with respect to securing some heroin. Dos Mac has no idea what day or time it could possibly be. And more to the point: he has no idea where to look in New York City, his hometown rendered alien to him after the âattacksâ of February 14, the island of Manhattan a decimated void, now in an endless state of rebuilding, seemingly leading nowhere, one massive semi-abandoned construction site. He has no clue as to who would have the good stuff on hand. Or if shaking some loose is even a remote possibility.
He shuffles sideways, turns a bit. Blinks at the wall of computer monitors, stacked willy-nilly, closed-circuit cameras showing Times Square, barren save a tractor, a couple NYPD vans, and a loose grouping of soldiers in black ninja suits. Another screen shows the corner of Hester and Broome, and forty feet east of that, yet another camera is trained on the sidewalk outside his front door, which is virtually traffic free.
The fluorescent light over the right-hand side of the rear of the gigantic room flickers. Once that goes, simply getting a bulb for the shit will be a serious, likely a very dangerous, task. And suddenly he has the fucking stones to fancy he can saunter out, pick up some smack, and be back before lunch? Dos Mac is kidding no one.
His regular NA posse would be disgusted with him. His sponsor would wobble his head at the staggering waste of it all. All that work. The breakthroughs and milestones, the weepy mea culpas and poker chips, all for naught.
But there is no more NA. Finito. No more meetings. The âroomsâ sitting silent and derelict, or buried under rubble and ash. Either way, that crutch is history.
As addicts go, Dos had been more than highly functional. In this and in all things, the Mac excelled. Some labeled him an overachiever, perhaps attempting to compensate for his bleak roots in the housing projects of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Dos found this insulting, simplistic. Everybodyâs got their scene. His scene was that he was black and poor in America, but damn, havenât we done away with the stereotypes and all that bullshit? Apparently not.
At what point do you stop being a prodigy? When you hit eighteen? At twelve? When is it no longer charming? At what juncture do you become just another annoying brain clogging the coffee shops and microbreweries near MIT?
The thing with Dos and the smack was never an issue of health or well-being. Nor did anybody aware of his habit do more than whine at him for being fucking lazy. Or for not sharing. Most of his trashy
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