id est
abe
“I ain’t uh idiot. We all seen what you done, tryna to take that tramp home.”
Always had to bring up that one night, which I, to this day, am not sure what really happened.
It’s not easy dating a girl with an equivalent affinity for drugs. We’d found a shitty hotel between our two towns in northern Oklahoma, which were three hours apart, and were consuming copious, orange-colored liquid methadone. I don’t know how or whom she did to get it, but it was fantastic. But she was in fighting mode while I was in get-fucked-up mode. She’d already poured me several doses more than the recommended amount, even for a drug addict, out of a proper medical measuring cup that came as a lid for the bottle of drug.
I had to avoid the fight. “How ‘bout another cup o’ that stuff?” I barely lifted my head off the pillow to ask, hoping to divert her tunnel vision of negativity. She was as fucked up as I was on that methadone, but seemed dead-set on arguing. The right side of the mattress was always my side, as the left was always hers, and I stretched out in my proper place long before this, knowing she would begin again with the same argument. She stood at the foot of the bed on her side, glaring down at my flattened-body, with the hollow eyes of opiate.
“You done drank twice as much as I…I…iiiiuuuggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” as puke gushed from her onto her side of the bed. I received a few splashes, but was too zoned to get pissed about it… or even wipe any of it off my face. I couldn’t move.
Honestly, I think I’ve seen someone truly pass out three times in my life. This one was different, more extreme. Her eyes closed and the face of an expressionless mannequin stole the space of hate; she dropped like a stick, straight up-and-down, face-down onto her side of the bed, into her own swamp of vomit, splashing me again.
I turned her on her side to be sure she didn’t swallow any of another gush, taking great care and thought to be sure she faced away from me and towards the edge of the bed.
Took what seemed like 20 minutes to get from horizontal to a slouched-vertical so I could get to the bottle and another 10 or so to get a chair placed where I could keep an eye on her, drink drug, and see the TV, all at the same time. I slugged straight from the bottle, forgetting that this fluid was a bit lethal. The measuring cup was lost during the struggle with the chair.
I remembered, about a year before, her laughing as I jumped balletic leaps to release a fart when we first started dating. Before things turned sour. Those leaps slowly became humorless and a catalyst for arguments. In her defense, those funny blasts would occur in crowded bars after I’d given up on us. Even I stopped thinking they were funny.
She rolled back into her vomit-swamp, face towards the sky above the ceiling of the room, and mumbled something completely incoherent, except for “TV”, then, without waking, shoved a bubble fart that actually caused ripples in her own barf that appeared to quiver and jiggle for hours.