To Neil Busis,

I unfortunately hadn't known Anne very long. I met her through my friend Sol. As long as I have known him Sol has been a user of serious drugs and my understanding was that he met Anne through drug acquaintances. They began seeing each other and using together for a few months. At that I had just begun taking steps towards sobriety, but I had used a few times with both Sol and Anne. About a month before her death I had gotten clean, but Sol, Anne and myself would still hang out frequently. We had a number of thought provoking political discussions, which even now stick with me. She was very opinionated and intelligent. She seemed pretty happy most of the time, though towards the end it seemed as if she was carrying a weight; something that was bothering her that I wasn't privy to. She started to use more quantitatively and with greater frequency. I remember it mostly because the spike in how much she was using happened very rapidly. There were a few times Sol had told her to be careful, which seems a harbinger for the events that followed in hindsight. Sol used heavily and has always used heavily as long as I knew him, so for him to tell somebody to be careful he would really have to be concerned. I wish I could provide you the insight as to why things occurred as they did, but it haunts me that I myself don't know. She was one of the nicest people I'd met in my time in San Francisco and it always seemed that she had plans to do more with her life before it was cut short. She was not without ambition, but I guess it seemed to me that she was on a mission to be high in her last days.
I was with her the night before she died, we had been hanging out at the beach during the day and then Anne, Sol and myself proceeded to her apartment where Sol stayed the night. I lived only a few blocks away at 34th and Quintara at the time. At about 7:30 or 8 in the morning I got a call from Sol. I had contemplated not picking up and going back to sleep, but I decided that he probably wouldn't call me in the morning unless something was wrong. He explained to me that Anne was still breathing, but he couldn't get her to regain consciousness. I told him to call an ambulance and I would be over as soon as I could get there. He was reluctant to call because he was afraid she would get in trouble, but we ultimately decided that it would be better that she have the opportunity to get in trouble than not wake up again. I got on my skateboard and went directly to her house as fast as I could. Sol was still on the phone with the dispatcher when I got there. They told him not to panic and they were sending an ambulance. Shortly after I arrived and while Sol was still on the phone Anne stopped breathing. Sol began to panic and frankly so did I. I had no idea what to expect, though my Father who was a doctor always taught me that remaining calm is the best thing you can do. While Sol was panicking I took the phone and the dispatcher attempted to instruct me on administering CPR. Sol gave her mouth to mouth and I compressed her chest, but we couldn't get her breathing. The ambulance arrived quickly and they took over. At one point they revived her breathing for a short moment, but by the time Sol and I had gotten to the hospital she was pronounced dead.
I felt extremely inadequate and ill prepared to deal with the loss. I still wish there was more I could have done. I had lost my best friend to a heroin overdose the year before and its a hard thing to go through. Some of my current best friends use and I always feel that I have to cherish the little time we get with them because they won't be here forever. I'd hoped to have been a little older and wiser before I had to deal with these things.
Anne's death hit Sol particularly hard. I let him stay at my house as long as I could afterward, but he began using more heavily and he started using Meth again shortly there after. He hadn't done so since it landed him in the hospital a year before. He is currently homeless and he no longer seems to have a drive to get a job or an apartment of his own.
It hit me hard as well, I began drinking again and I've had a few relapses with opiate pain pills since. I never had a lot of good friends, so loosing somebody I consider a good person is particularly painful. I miss her as I am sure you do as well. I wish I could find some words for you that could bring you some solace, though the idea of loosing a child seems overwhelming. I'm not a parent, but as an adopted child I've always been particularly conscious of the bond between a mother and her child. I am sure the bond you had as her father is no less significant.
If there is anything you would like me to be more specific about I will do my best to be as articulate as you need. You can also call me, if you want. My number is 610-657-****. I am terribly sorry for your loss




Sincerely,
Roger Nelson

2...


Brooklyn never felt like home, nowhere did really when it came down to it, but I lived there about half a year until I'd gotten tired of trying to scuffle a living through various scams, trying to get a job, or at least spange enough to get a bottle. It was starting to get cold around November and I knew I couldn't make it through another winter in that old dilapidated warehouse.
I was getting anxious about the onset of cold weather and I'm always looking for an easier way to live. My generation wasn't left the hope of the American dream, retirement was not going to be our reality, all the paint has chipped from our white picket fences and they've crumbled to the ground as they rot... The new American dream is the notion that we have to find a way to make our lives easy enough that our backs won't break under the tax burden our parents willed us. Why should I feel bad that I never get up to do anything... It will be just like last time or there will always be next time and there's a lifetime full of excuses for what comes down to laziness.

This time next year I'll be more tired, more cold and filled to the bone with the trembling sickness... It never gets better, but god's still got a plan... right? Thats what they say... Whoever they are.

I decided to move back to Allentown, in search of god's glorious plan, the last bastion of the deteriorating fences... A garrison held by apathetic warehouse workers and rednecks that reject the notion that there is a battle raging as the bombs rain down around them.

At the time I wanted a warmer place to live, something with some kind of heating. Thats my American Dream...

I hopped a bieber bus for $20 up to the Charcoal drive-in, in Wescosville, where I'd arranged for an old friend Devon to pick me up in his old beat up VW Rabbit. If New York seems grey, Allentown is much greyer. This time of year the valley is filled with the stench of something indeterminate burning, with a hint of plastic. The clouds seem to be pouring out of old smoke stacks and chimneys and they cast a plume of gloom about the entire town.


Devon was a typical Allentown druggie. He listened to black metal, always wore a Burzum shirt and had long straight black hair he was constantly brushing out of his eyes, which were always looking at the ground as he mumbled words you could halfway understand. He had grown a long beard, but behind it, he still looked much too young to have one. He had also slowly developed a little bit of a lazy eye from having abused cough syrup in high school for lack of a better way to get high. It wasn't until around our last year in high school that we'd discover the great ease with which pain pills could be acquired.

I arrived at the Bieber bus terminal in Wescosville, which was attached to the Charcoal Drive-in truck stop/diner; a place whose only claim to fame was that Bill Clinton had once eaten there. His coffee cup was displayed prominently upon a crooked shelf that look as if could come tumbling off the wall at any moment. I sat in down on a torn booth cushion and ordered a cup of coffee while I waited for Devon. After about 15 minutes or I could hear the sputtering engine of his old hatchback as he pulled in and I went out to meet him... He looked the same as ever and maintained my expectations, wearing an old burzum shirt and a long black trench-coat.

"Every time I take a fucken bus somewhere some low-life feels the need to take a rotten shit within the first 15 minutes and the smell engulfs the thing like a Nazi gas chamber for the entirety of the trip." I greeted Devon.
"It wouldn't be the same without the putrid aroma curdling the foul air..." He said in his monotoned, constantly bored voice.

"I'm of the opinion that a special circle of hell is reserved for bus shitters." I said as we got into his car and began to drive off.

We hadn't really formulated a plan, looking back, I'm not even sure he knew I intended to stay for any serious amount of time. I guess I wasn't really sure of that myself. We decided to stop at Queen City Diner on Lehigh Street so we could get to the business of scheming. Queen City is your typical old crappy east coast diner. Lots of nearly burnt out neon lights, with all genre's of low life scum mixed with your occasional family value red-necks. Mostly truck drivers, motorcycle gangs, strip club women from the club a few buildings over and Emmaus punks.

We both knew all the waitresses well so we just walked in and sat in a booth in the back. Jane, an older woman of about 400 lbs, lumbered over with a cup of coffee for Devon and a Tea she served us with her cigarette tar stained fingers.

"Yous know whatcha want?" she grumbled through her menopause moustache, in her cranky, crackling smoker's voice.

"Just tea," I said.

Devon ordered something and we sat quiet for a while, just listening to other people's conversations occasionally laughing at something that was said here and there. When Jane came back, she sat down in the booth and began eating from Devon's plate and relating news about other people to whom we were all mutually acquainted.

"Yous remember that big guy Johnny?" She asked.

we both nodded and I mumble, "yeh."

"He got arrested for hittin' that Natasha girl he's always hangin round... Thems twos always fightin' bout somethin. I don't know about that guy." She continued with a mouth full of Devon's fries.

"ehh, not surprised" I mumbled again.

"yeah, well yous two better stay outta trouble," she said, cackling as she finished. Then as quickly as she sat she got up and walked to the front podium, where an old lady and her husband were waiting to be seated.

"you know that old, abandoned house we were drinking at a few months back?" I asked Devon.

"yup," he mumbled almost inaudibly.

"You feel like staying there for a little while with me?" I asked.

"sure... why not"

"well... you got any shit?" That was the important question that needed to be asked before embarking on any plan.

"yeah."

"alright, well, lets get out of here and go pick up a bottle."

Devon and I moved into an old abandoned house we'd broken into before I moved to New York. It was an old ranch with wood planks screwed tightly over the windows sitting forgotten behind a group of apartment complexes off Fullerton Ave in Whitehall...
We went around to the back where we'd pried a board off the basement door a few months prior and it was still opened, the wood now warped and deteriorating. Then we lurched down inside and made ourselves at home.
After I'd put my bag down on a couch that was left in the living room, I walked back outside to the sidewalk, pried open the lid embedded in the sidewalk that read, "PPL gas and electric..." with a tire iron and flipped on the power main to the house, then did the same for the water main... The water main requires a little more work than switching on a breaker box. There is a large nut that must be tweaked to adjust the water flow to the house and it requires a special wrench to do properly. Luckily an adjustable wrench will work alright in a bind and I've gotten accustom to bringing one with me where ever I go.
I walked back inside, plugged in my laptop and it worked. In the kitchen, we opened the fridge... cold air... that worked. There was one thing left to do...
I went back over to my computer, popped open a terminal shell and typed:
~$ sudo su
~$ ifconfig eth1 down
~$ iwconfig eth1 mode monitor
~$ ifconfiq eth1 up
~$ Kismet
Then I sat back with a can of warm beer and scrolled through the available networks. There was an apartment complex next to us with three WEP encrypted connections. When I found one of suitable strength I ran airodump-ng and aircrack-ng for each of the networks in our range... Cracked the passwords and wrote them with a sharpie on the wall...
We would also utilize their telephone service from time to time. We lived close enough that we could hook a cordless phone circuit to a nine volt battery and connect it to a phone line in an apartment's phone box and voila phone service, plus hours of entertainment listening to other people's calls...
In all the setup took about 4 hours including cracking the passwords...

While aircrack was busy collecting wep packets, we set to knocking down spider webs and spraying corners with bug spray until we both gave up for the night... It only took a few hours until I was too tired to do anything else... So I did what any logical man would do in my position... I pulled out a fifth of Clan McGregor from my back pack and took a nice long swig...
Devon walked into the living room, where I'd sat down on the couch and plopped down next to me exhausted. He pulled out a bag of dope and without a word, cooked it down a bit, filled the dropper, tied off and began searching for a vein. He had track marks up and down his left arm and some of them had begun to abscess.
He smacked the big vein towards the bend in his elbow which had a large discolored bruise over it from missing the vein too many times. The vein started to pop out and pulsate up and down slowly. Then he picked up the needle, stabbed it down through his skin, drew up some blood and down it all went. The dope began to emanate through the room making everything smell like old rotten vinegar... He looked at me and nodded...
"Theres more there then I'm gonna do tonight... You gonna score tomorrow?" he said, slowly working the words off his drooping jaw...
"Yeah, Nick said he'll be around before 2."
"Well if thats the case why don't you push off and you can get me back tomorrow."
I pulled out my works, tied off... found a vein and booted it before I found myself dozing in and out of a good junk nod.

By the end of the month I was able to squander all the money I'd saved up selling home-made potato vodka to kids in Williamsburg on dope, beer and cigarettes... This seems to be the life we're relegated to here in Allentown, there is nothing but dope to do and somehow it always managed to find me alone and depressed...

I often wonder if there are a thousand people in a thousand small towns like this around America that are just like me... Sitting around doing nothing, like me and wondering why we always reap what we sow... wondering why we are lonely, but we're not so isolated. We still managed to bring in money and drugs. Its always amazed me that mediocrity can be so over-appreciated in a place like this. You don't ever really have to be particularly good at anything to get by... Its all been pre-packaged and shipped from some city halfway across the globe where people are actually good at doing things. Even homes here are built out of little more than cardboard, and are clearly meant to be the furthest sellable thing from permanent.
All around for miles is the stench of failure, the failure to solve our small city's long winded economic problems that even preceded the great recession, whatever they've decided to call it this time to give it a more positive spin... And in every bar there is some lousy drunk guitar playing failure that fancies himself the next Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen, pretending to be a rock star, because, if you can play at all, you might as well be...


Nothing gets better...

I digress...

I used to buy dope from a guy named Nick. He was a greasy old hick that lived in an antiquated, run down motel behind the Porn shop on Tilghman and Blue Barn. Nick didn't use, but he pushed as much as he could. His fix was the money, though he didn't live like he had any at all... Maybe I'm mistaken... Maybe his fix was the thrill of barely escaping being caught, like a sex exhibitionist of sorts, but either way, he was never short on cash... My fix was clear... That I didn't have to care about money for a few hours, or about getting a job, or about the fact that I hadn't had sex in over a year and there was not even a prospect off on the distant horizon... I could drown out my Mother's incessant voice messages asking when I'm going to settle down with some nice girlie somewhere... I didn't have to care about that... or anything for a few hours.
Nick, like most drug dealers in Pennsylvania was a paranoiac and I couldn't blame him. Somebody had to do it and better he sit around nervously tapping his foot, waiting for the police to come break down his door than I. Pennsylvania is not at all like New York or California... The police here have nothing better to do than fuck with minor drug offenders and underage drinkers. Nick knew that as well as anybody so he had a system for those that came to his hotel room. All I knew was that 5 knocks meant that we wanted to score. I'm not sure why, its just what I was told, so I went with it and it worked out.
Once you knocked, he would lurk about the room for a moment before he slowly crept up to the door... You could hear him walking up, the old floor creaking beneath his fat, hairy feet. Then he'd look through the peep-hole for a good minute and examine you, like you couldn't see that he'd approached the thing, but nobody ventured to tell him he wasn't really being that sneaky...

If you brought somebody new he would make you wait longer while he scrutinized every detail of their face and sometimes he wouldn't let you in at all for any number of reasons, most commonly, he'd decided your friend(my friend... whoever it happened to be) was a cop, so I seldom brought anybody else with me as it might diminish my chances of scoring my dope today.
Finally, he would open the door with a loaded hand-gun pointed at your skull for a good moment or two and watch you carefully as you walked inside.

Once the door closed behind me, he would relax a little bit, though I emphasize "little..."
He'd put the gun on the night table and sometimes even smoke a joint(though it was almost worse if he did, because he'd get more paranoid and/or chatty).
The little room smelled like three day old cheetos and skunked PBR. It felt equally repugnant, like a hot sauna full of old, fat, naked lounge lizards coagulating in their own juices as their sweat permeated about the room in a dense humid fog. There were however no, old smelly lizard men, just Nick festering alone in this shit hole... You could almost see the cigarette ash covering floor kicking up like a dust storm as you shuffled about the room trying to find somewhere clean to sit down.

"Why did you try to bring a cop here with you last time?" He said.
"Look, thats my buddy Joe, he's just a hipster, hardly a cop... really harmless in all regards." I replied.
"Well don't bring that cop here again or I'll kill you both." He said. He was always insistent once he'd made up his mind. So it was. Joe was no cop, but Nick had decided he was. If I'd ever wanted to score from Nick again, I'd have to leave Joe out of it, which was fine with me quite frankly. I didn't really like hanging out with him anyway.
"let me check you for a wire." He continued. He had a little sweeper device he would wave around your body wildly searching for any kind of bug you might be wearing.
"He's not a cop Nick, I'd have killed him already if he were... You really think I'd wear a wire for some fucken pig?" I said, clearly frustrated at this stupid charade.
"Thats probably what you'd say if you were wearing a wire." He started waving his contraption around even more furiously until he was satisfied that I was indeed not wearing a wire.
"See I'm not wearing a wire... can we just get on with it." I said.
"How much?"...
"10 Bags."
Nick walked into the bathroom in the back, nervously looking back at me from time to time as if he weren't quite convinced... He began to rummage around fervently for a while like he was trying to obscure where exactly the dope was hidden... I could care less, so long as he made good on it. Finally he would return with a twisted, grimacing smile, like he'd out witted the law and won at least this round. People like Nick have to work with whatever little victory life gives him... He's had no other success at anything in his life, so he would cling to these moments as a beacon of hope for the future.

When it came down to it, I really hated Nick and his stupid antics. I'd never have associated with him had he not provided me a vital service. Yet, it was almost like he began to think we were more than just drug acquaintances, but friends, so it always took twice as long as the last time... He'd tell more and more of his life story with such zeal as if it were incredibly exciting, despite how mundane it was in reality...
He once told me about how he watch somebody die after a drive by, which was about the pinnacle of his life. I wouldn't bother to remind him that thousands of people die everyday in much the same fashion... That had never crossed his mind. Seeing somebody die from the safety of the window in his hotel room was the most exciting thing that would ever happen to him...

First he would hang a bong out over his fat belly and light up, then he'd want to talk your ear off about some unprecedented road construction on 22 that held him up or whatever other minor inconvenience he was forced to suffer... Stupid shit threw him into a wild rage. You would be lucky to get out of there an hour later if you got out of there at all...
You never knew what might send him flying of the handle, which was the only thing worse than his mindless hick rambling. There might be a loud knock at the door and he'd start yelling and waving his gun around. Finally somebody had done him in... Maybe that somebody was you this time and so you might come to be staring down the barrel of his magnum revolver...
To avoid any of this recurring bullshit I always made it clear that I wasn't interested in any chit-chat of any kind... I did my best to get my shit and leave. I'd rather shoot up in the bathroom across the street than to sit around with Nick any longer than I had to...

So thats precisely what I would do. Walk up the road to Chris's Dinner, walk right past the counter and into the bathroom. Fill my dropper, push off and walk out exactly as I came.
It was a long trip from Chris's back to the house, the trek usually took about 2 hours between the bus and walking... Sometimes I'd skateboard and it wouldn't take as long, but it was still an arduous journey to make nodding out, jaw drooping down to the pavement. I'd usually do a few key bumps along the way, while keeping a vigilant eye out for cigarette butts to smoke until I could finally sit my ass down and work into a serious nod back at the house... Time would fly away and I'm still not sure where it all got to, but I'd missed it. Whatever happened in those moments thrown away the way my mother spends money? Yet I still don't feel as if I'd missed much. Life went on the way life goes on and everything in Allentown was exactly the same as I'd left it before I wandered into this thick haze. People moved in the distance, like ghosts, their form obscured into shadows, fleeting instants that might have been better spent. Then, another day I'd hoped would never come so I could finally rest without guilt.

Life has strange way of forcing you to wake up sometime...

Cold air blew in from the cracks in the window frames like a harbinger of the coming storm. You could feel it; a rush of cold air being push around by some force that moved with precision... percolating about the old farm house, kicking up the rotting vinegar smell... Now the house itself was addicted like we were... It needed us as much as we needed it, though we would destroy it completely if we lingered any longer. I got up, emptied the dregs of last nights bottle and slowly walked out into what used to be a bathroom.

The sun comes in the same way every morning, creeping around the edges of the large boards covering all the windows in the house and it shoots in streaks of light through clouds of dust... The whole place smelled like an East coast winter, dead and stagnant... and my joints creaked, too frozen to move...

Allentown is a ghost town... crumbling row-homes lined the streets like moseleums for for the soul-less. They could sense when somebody new had arrived and they would come out in droves, but they never stayed. Then they would go back to their routines for months or years until something forced them out again. I was never content to accept their fate as mine... Most people hated me for leaving. I hated myself for much different reasons.

After a few weeks we had furnished the place with tables made out of old wooden pallets and milk crates we'd re-purposed as anything we could think to sue them for. They were bookcases, dresser bureaus and night stands. All the surface area we could build was eventually covered in empty beer cans and bottles and we stuck candles in some of the bottles so we could see at night without leaking too much light to the outside world. we cooked with an old camping stove and used as little power from the city as we could hoping that would keep us from being noticed until the spring.

Some people came to live with us and left and mostly it was devon and I. We claimed two of the three bedrooms and the other was left to whatever miscreants and vagabonds so chose to crash there. The door of the middle room had been ripped of and used as a table top in conjunction with some milk crates and was replaced with a tapestry depicting a goats head inside a pentagram. This could have been a beautiful home. now pentagrams and punk band symbols covered the walls enveloped in song lyrics and squatter slogans. Ironically most of these were written by people that didn't stay long, maybe a night if at all. This somehow was a badge of honor for how bad-ass they were. There was nothing bad-ass about it. Lacking options isn't cool, it doesn't give you street cred and should not be glorified at all. It should command a great deal of fear and paranoia. You cannot live in a squat house like a rich kid at a country club, we were less free because we created fewer options for ourselves and its loathsome. Thats why I hated myself. Some of the people that came around were born with no options and thats the only thing more frightening... Devon was one among them. He'd been born a crack baby, his parents constantly fought and he was beaten mercilessly by his father. He might run away, but he was always brought back there when they found him. Society never gave him a chance. I had many chances and blown them all.

When the party ended and everybody that had a home went home, it was very quiet. You could hear a semi-truck now and again, grinding its way through the snow/sludge that blanketed the streets, but past 4am it was completely dead. We couldn't go in and out during daylight hours so we would have to sneak out early morning or stay in all day. If you left you had to stay out all day in an attempt not to alert anybody that the house was occupied. We had made tracks in the snow out the back door that went into the small old growth forest behind, finally coming to a big retaining wall on the left built to hold an old train bridge that was in the process of falling into the Lehigh river. There were rusted steel beams that held the bridge up that one could use as a ladder. There you would climb over the wall at it's lowest point and find yourself in an alleyway that led back out to Fullerton ave.

Some nights I would walk the train bridge out to the center and smoke cigarettes rolled from pipe tobacco and held together with black tar or pot resin. The bridge wasn't used anymore, but the tracks on the other side of the Lehigh were. They went up past the Appalachian Trail through the Lehigh gap and off north somewhere. At 5:30 every morning the train would rumble past the town of Catisaqua, churning metal against metal as it tore past oscillating light from the engine dotting through the treeline. There were plans in the works to tear down all those trees to build more shopping malls.

If you walked the tracks on our side of the river going north you would have reached a place we called the ruins. Then it was alive. All the degenerates of Whitehall would gather there. On cold nights Devon and I would bring out wheel barrel loads of palettes to burn. There used to be a cement processing facility here, but all that was left now were the monolithic remains of buildings, covered in dead vines and trees. It was hidden from view by a line of trees and past those trees were houses, some belonging to typical Pennsylvania rednecks flying confederate flags interlaced with the homes of drug dealers and crack heads.

This particular night I walked the tracks up to the ruins and smoked a black tar cigarette. It was delicious.
There were a few buildings speckling the woods, all of them cathartic structures of cement and steel, filled with memories from the industrial revolution, when people around here had jobs. Sometimes we would find their memories in old lockers or in the remains of huge machines, whose purpose has now been long forgotten. Tonight I walked aimlessly until the sun began to come up. I watched it through the trees for a moment. Trees that would not be here soon and I wondered which one of these glorious bastards would be the last one standing? Would anybody fight for them? Probably not. I gave up too and I went back home.

The front door slowly creaked open and I silently slipped inside.

Devon lay motionless on the couch... His legs were still firmly planted on the ground and his long black hair fell around his head in all directions. He looked too young for this old desolate world... His chubby baby cheeks had gone pale from the cold.
I sat down on the couch, thinking he might wake up...
His eyes were rolled back, his head fell towards the floor. The couch, the floor and everything around it was covered in vomit. It oozed out of his nose like hot tar even as he lay there. He wasn't breathing. 5 empty dope bags lay on the table made of pallets next to an empty bottle of 100mg Morphine pills he'd procured on his own a few days back...
All I could think to do was to clean him up... Nobody would want to wake up covered in puke, but I guess it didn't matter.
I wiped the puke from his nose, but more blackened fluid kept leaking down through his nose and out of the corner of his mouth.
His head rolled back, limp and lifeless... His blue eyes looked out at nothing, fixed with such precision... There was nothing left of the whites of his eyes, they'd filled completely with blood... It almost looked like they might burst from the the pressure...

I never understood what other people felt when somebody close to them died. I still don't. I couldn't cry. I felt like this had been a long time coming and we all knew it. Its not that I didn't care, I just couldn't even force a tear... He'd been dead for a long time, or maybe its just that it didn't really matter, he'd managed to circumvent the good 40 years of bullshit he probably had left in him, what in his life is worth mourning its passing... It did matter though and where he was is left a pit of emptiness, a missing node in a string of synaspses, all of which are necessary to function properly again.
None of us deceived ourselves, in fact it was really our goal to get out easy like he did and we all wanted to go first so we wouldn't be there to clean it all up. Maybe it didn't register right away what it meant. That all I will be able to do for the rest of my life is miss him...
Some days it will barrel over me like a truck. I'll be walking along and for a moment I think it might be cool to go see if Devon is hanging out at the old abandoned factory in Egypt and maybe I'll even start walking down there before it hits me...
Mostly I miss him before the Junk, when there were a few things he'd managed to care about despite the shit that rained down on him daily... He used to call his sister every day.

Now Angie would call me from time to time just to ask if I had any idea where he was or if he were okay. She never asked to speak with him, I guess she knew better, but she just wanted to know that he wasn't dead or something. Now what do I tell her?

I thought for a moment about the first time we'd shot dope...
We were talking about it for a few months before we'd finally gotten a few clean needles and were able to score something decent enough to boot.
We got the dope from a friend who knew somebody who had some, because we hadn't formulated our own connections yet. It was pretty good dope as it would turn out, but I didn't know... I wouldn't have known if they just put flour in a bag and told us to stick it in our ass. None of it really made sense to me at the time... It was just something new for a moment...

We planned it all precisely... Every detail of our day; that nothing would go awry, but we didn't know what we were doing when it came down to it... We were just kids and thats what we felt like doing at the given moment...
Devon and I walked down Church St. in Egypt, PA and veered right at the Ironton Rail Trail. We walked down the trail a way until we could see a large imposing structure looming ominously above the tree line. There were two large silos and a handful of smaller buildings all weathered from years of abandonment.
We kept walking the trail, keeping the Creek on our left as we got closer. Across the creek was a fence with barbed wire run across the top of it and behind that a mess of old concrete and steel climbing up towards the sky...
We kept walking until we finally came to the Dam.
When the buildings were abandoned the Dam was released and now what remained were the two big slabs of concrete that jetted out into the water, but the whole center had been removed... Its a gap no bigger than an average man laying down, but it looked more intimidating from either side before you lept over it. Sometimes after a storm the water would be rushing through like rapids, but getting over the fear is the biggest part. So we got a good running start and jumped over the gap respectively...
On the other side we walked the fence until we found a large hole, crept through and walked briskly across a large open field leading up to one of the old decrepit buildings looking over our shoulder to make sure nobody could see us go in. There were a few buildings actually, all of which were abandoned. Two of them were large cylindrical cement silos, the largest standing at least 200ft tall and to get to the top you had to climb an old elevator shaft. There were two smaller cylindrical buildings and then one big square building.
We went into an old office building... It had windows that looked out into what used to be an old workshop. The shop was big and empty and looked like a decrepit air plane hangar, rusting steel beams fallen from the tall ceiling and crashed to the ground... It looked so beautifully mangled. Threes grew up through the roof and vines covered everything inside and out.
We sat down at a desk in the office and booted up for the first time. I wasn't prepared for how it might feel, though it wasn't a life changing ordeal like acid... It was not at all dissimilar to snorting it, which I'd done before, but not altogether the same. It hit like a rush... More similar to smoking weed when your drunk, but not at all the same as that either. I felt comfortable even as it rushed... I didn't feel sick, though I probably threw up 8 or 9 times, and still, I didn't care. I felt good. I leaned back against the wall and fell in and out of sleep for a few hours... Devon fell asleep in the old executive chair with his feet up on the table.

It didn't seem that serious then... Now Devon lay dead on the couch...


I didn't call the police or an ambulance. Maybe I should have, maybe they could have brought him back, but I knew he didn't want to be back. So I let him sleep. Who could blame him. Why would anybody want to wake up again to this grotesque, shit, existence.

He looked pale, but content, like nothing could bother him now... Indeed nothing would, save the maggots.

I walked through the dark house... The only light was the sunlight coming through the edge of the boards that covered the windows, which now illuminated the cloud of dust that had been kicked up in the storm of my pacing, floating around like galaxies of bacteria and mites bouncing about the cosmos aimlessly. I kept pacing back and forth for a while biting my hand... I had no idea what to do...
I walked through the kitchen, opened the back door and sat out on the edge of the porch openly, something I hadn't dared to do before for fear that our squat house might be discovered by our neighbours. Now I didn't care if it were... I rolled a cigarette and sat smoking for a moment before I called Angie on our makeshift phone system. I guess I knew it had to be me...

Calling Angie was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. The phone rang for what felt like an eternity until finally her small voice echoed through the receiver like a gunshot far off somewhere. "hello," she sounded like she had just woken up.
"hi," I managed...
"Is something wrong?" The panic began to rise in her voice exponentially with each syllable... I almost needn't say anything at all, I'm sure she'd guessed.
"yes... something is." I couldn't finish my thought so I took a drag on my cigarette... I felt short of wind...
I heard Angie sigh as she rustled out of bed...
"Devon overdosed..." I continued.
"What!... Is he okay?!?" She demanded fervently.
"No..." I mumbled, maybe even incoherently after a long deafening silence, but she knew... "No, he is not... furthermore..."
"Furthermore what?!!" She was angry and impatient... I guess she should be...
"Furthermore... I'm not sure that he didn't mean to do it... There was an empty bottle of morphine and I'm not sure what his intention was, but it was a lot of shit."
Angie began to cry... she did so as if she hated her lungs, wheezing heavily between sobs...
"Is there a doctor there I can talk to." She whimpered through her tears...
"I haven't called anybody yet, he hadn't been breathing for a while when I found him."
"What!"
"I don't think he had been breathing for some time... Don't ask me how I know... There are things better left unsaid, but... Just know if there was something I could have done, I would have done it..."

I took my leave of Angie and called an ambulance... Recounted everything as well as I could three times over... First to an EMT, then to a doctor, then to a Police Officer(obviously with significantly less detail). Finally I was allowed to go.

Then there was the funeral... Devon Died on January 14, 2008, we put him in the ground three days later on my Birthday. There wasn't much of a service, which I was glad for. No need for the big charade I suppose... I believe he'd have felt the same way. Angie sat next to her mother consoling her, their father was nowhere to be found.
Angie looked beautiful and young, though she was now 25 and significantly older than me. She was no stranger to dope, though she'd not started booting it as young as her brother. She was skinny and fair skinned, with long black hair. She had dark circles around her eyes and looked ravaged, but somehow she was still beautiful.

Nobody seemed to notice the absence of their father... Nobody waited for him to get on... It was probably better he didn't come.

Devon's father used to beat him regularly, sometimes he'd done something to warrant it, he knew it was coming for a week and he wouldn't go home until the police would pick him up for something and take him back there. He was always received by his mother with tears in her eyes... She knew what was coming too... The next time you'd see him, he was covered in gashes and bruises.

Sometimes his Dad would just beat him for sport, these were usually less severe drunken beatings... I think Devon had grown accustom to living like that, maybe the dope helped him along...
So I guess his Father was punishing him this time by not showing up... Maybe he was just ashamed. Probably he just didn't care. There was a football game he wouldn't be made to miss or something. He was just a bastard.


Devons mother however began balling at the sight of her son in the casket and sobbed through the entirety of the service. You could barely hear the Priest babbling monotonously over her tears. I believe she felt guilty in a way... She'd expressed that to me once a few years back as we were making ready to leave... She knew about the dope and I guess she knew why he used and understood it, but she had to sit idly by and watch him deteriorate...
There weren't many people present maybe 10 in all, only Angie, Devon's Mother and I continued on to the cemetery where he was finally put in the ground. I stood a good distance back and tried not to be seen as much as possible.
I sat there listening to the Priest reading some final incantation from a prayer book and Devon's Mother sobbing between breaths. She seemed as if she would never run dry of tears.
Somehow it hadn't really registered that Devon wasn't coming back until that moment...
I kept my eyes fixed on the ground as best I could, though sometimes my eyes would wander over to Angies. She had welled up and her dark eyeshadow was now running down her pale face.

1...

Saturday Morning Deterioration...
....................
Life always falls apart quickly. I wonder if its planned this way... You always hear religious people talking about the plan. It makes sense to believe it all. I wish I were like them... I wish I could believe it. Everything is easier when you know that somehow its okay, even when its not. There is some good reason shit sucks and when you get through it you'll know that reason as if you always knew it. Wisdom is something that cannot be transferred quite as easily as knowledge. It comes only from experience...

Every morning I wake up with this feeling... Things are not okay out there and my plan is crumbling. Maybe its not quite in line with the big plan. I wish I had their faith.

I roll over, place one foot on the floor and begin to push myself up from this old creaky mattress. A light mist dissipates in the air as I exhale the cool air. Its like I've awoken from a long coma. I re-realize each morning, as if it were the first time I'd considered it... I'm lonely and perpetually discontent, and disappointed...

Sara left. She's probably a thousand miles from a thousand miles from here by now and its probably my fault like everything else. I guess I should have said something... I did say something, but I should have said more...

My life is just a long string of these counter productive decisions. Constantly awaiting the right time to say something that should have been said a long time ago. Constantly afraid to say the wrong things. Its left me alone, blowing the dust off of old memories that rest quietly, where her head used to... I can still smell the back of her neck on the wind as she walked off like she was willing to forget me forever. And she did, subsequently.


She got in her car and drove off from Young Ones record store in Kutztown, where we would usually meet if I were in town. I watched her drive away for the last time until I could no longer see her little black hatchback. I just sat there crippled for a moment, knowing she wouldn't be back. I thought about driving after her… Doing something heroic, but I’m not really anybody’s hero…

"Here let me save you from your comfortable life and bring you into my miserable world of abject poverty, because…
well… I think I’m in love with you…"

That should probably go over famously. Anyway, she seemed happy enough to be leaving.


It always turns out the same way... It doesn't really matter why, but they get tired of something or they find something better or maybe its the combination of the two occurring simultaneously that nurtures the idea... One day, when they've had enough, they leave... Why shouldn't they? Sometimes I beat them to it, most of the time they win anyway. I'm not sure what I mean by win, but you definitely know it when you lose. I'm not really sure what it feels like to win any more. Sometimes winning feels a lot like loosing.

I've gotten to a point where I understand competition. I used to be very competitive. I just realized that in order to win, you must be willing to hurt everybody. It hurts me to hurt the people I care about. My brother will never talk to me again because we damaged each other too much as kids and he cannot forgive me. We were relentlessly brutal to each other and all there is at the end of what started out a competitive game is a long winded pain that will never be extinguished. When you can see the pain caused by the damage you've done, its impossible not to be affected... I know that the only person I've dramatically impacted on this planet, I impacted negatively. Unfortunately I think most people could easily say the same.

After she moved, I seldom came back to Allentown. I moved to Brooklyn for a while. I moved there right before the hipster thing officially had a name. There were hipsters in Williamsburg, but they hadn't been coined that yet as far as I had heard. Living in Brooklyn still had a New York style toughness too it. McCarren Park was still being run by scammers and drunks. Gentrification was just beginning in that area and rich kids in wolves clothing began to encroach on the park and throw dance parties in warehouse art-spaces. I thought they were an easy target as did a lot of the scammers in the park. They were easy targets. They came with lots of daddy's money and few scruples about what best way to spend it. Many people ripped them off for drugs. I ripped them off for drugs. I found a few ways to get really creative ripping them off as did others. I used to buy pain pills and sell the cheap ones to hipsters to cover the costs of my more expensive ones. I would also pour crappy liquor into more expensive bottles and sell it to under age kids again at a price that covered my habits as well.

I moved into an semi-abandoned warehouse space further north on Bedford ave with a guy named Joe that I knew from Allentown. Joe was one of the early hipsters. His father had enough money to rent the space and Joe arbitrarily let people he knew stay there. The place was huge and we had free run of the entire thing for a good while. Nobody occupied the top two floors and we were the only tenants in the building renting a small portion of the bottom floor. Eventually the abandoned floors become home to squatters escaping the increasing rent prices in other parts of the city. I got on better with the squatters than I did with Joe most of the time and slowly migrated to the top floor of the building, which was a large open space separated mostly by blankets hung by other squatters. I ended up dragging a bed from somebody's trash in Greenpoint, back to the warehouse and hung a few dark tapestries around it so I could sleep.

There were three other people up there with me. All had met each other hopping trains from the midwest. There was a couple from somewhere in the middle of nowhere Ohio, their dog, and the other was a crust punk, with a greasy knotted up mohawk, that looked like it had been dyed every color imaginable at some point. His name was Aaron and he was from Lansing Michigan. He taught me a lot about turning the electrical main back on in abandoned buildings. His father had worked for a utilities company until he was laid off a few years back. They lived in an abandoned motel for a while and they dealt mostly with analogue meters that could be tampered with physically, quite easily. We were unfortunately dealing with newer digital meters in New York and we lived without electricity for a while, until I found a loophole in Con Edison's business logic.

I had spent a lot of time at the library on Bushwick, when I had observed somebody on the computer next to me signing up for utilities online. I decided to take a look at the process myself. First I realized that they had run the payment form through a javascript validation function. So I rewrote the form, but replaced the javascript function in the onsubmit attribute with the number 1 and I was able to supply the form unvalidated credit card information. Obviously that would be found out, so I wasn't quite satisfied with that approach. I then found a cross site request forgery vulnerability that allowed me to add new properties to the account of anybody that had an open session on the ConEd account page. I had to come up with a way I could use this to our advantage and I decided the best way would be to hook up the electricity ourselves and then send the link over craigslist to people who were looking to rent out a room. This gave us a high likelihood that they would have a session open on ConEd's web page that we could exploit. I was able to check that the address had utilities hooked up by calling their customer support line and pretending to be interested in purchasing the building. This worked for a few months at a time and we made it through an entire winter in that manner.

Aaron and I started making potato vodka and selling it to under age kids in Williamsburg... It seemed logical at the time. I hadn't envisioned any kind of future... I hadn't had a plan in a long time and I got tired of day dreaming about life goals and ideals I'd never attain. Goals are just a p repackaged list of regrets if your not independently wealthy. I gave up on all that crap. It was a comfortable, sedentary existence. I hadn't much ambition and I wasn't going anywhere, so it suited me at least temporarily.

It was time to get realistic about life, things didn't work out like they had in storybooks. The people I've cared about fucked me over... The people I didn't care about dragged me down with them... Nobody was ever precise or honest.

New York is Grey and it covers everything in this shadow of discontent.
Brooklyn Emanates this malodorous stench from stagnant sewer water evaporating and moving through the city like an angel of death... It's no wonder that New Yorkers are such a miserable lot. Born into this toxic, roach infested, swamp thats been filled in with concrete and steel, now rotting away slowly and nothing is ever maintained... Yet they walk around with their crooked scornful faces hardly noticing anything. I guess you have to shut everything off just to get by here. Nobody is really born in New York, they start as bacteria festering in the sewers until they bud off into an independent organism and slowly evolve into these fetid suit wearing bastards...

Everyday is exactly the same. The scornful faces walk past you and they look through you like you don't exist and maybe you don't. A million people in cars drive past, going where ever people in cars go and the low life's gather in the park trying to find some low hanging fruit to pick pocket. The devil stands on the corner reading passages from the bible, while his minions scurry around him. We're all somehow doing his bidding. From the empty eyed prostitutes that walked a few blocks from the park to the hipsters getting loaded at some dance party, doing lines of blow like tomorrow will never come.

And then... You wake up again and roll out of bed again...
Check the still to see if there was any vodka left in there that I could try to sell at the park today. Sell a bottle, drink a bottle, shoot up and go back to sleep. One has to have some ambition lest life become too boring. Its not really a reason so much as a ruitine...

The sun shines in through the cobweb covered, old, opaque, warehouse windows, burning the skin on my face to ash and forming dark sut encrusted circles around my eyes like the rotting tar boiling in my veins. I'm always tired... and sick... I feel old.

I can't recall how many times I vomited last night while I rested my head, leering like some old desolate ruins over this shitty, backed up toilet. The pipes probably let out somewhere on bedford ave.
The old forgotten factory sat silently, alone... like its contents... A dozen or so dejected loosers, fallen from their respective social networks into the weary sleep of a degenerate squatter, invariably comfortable in the remote seclusion of some Brooklyn warehouse, long erased from memory in a sea of rusting steel that seems as if it were thrown ashore by the old tired Atlantic the way a prune eating codger might shit out a 3 month old turkey dinner.
Everything was so silent, you could hear the old floors creaking as if they themselves had come alive and the cold Atlantic wind whistled through some small crack in the window pane. I guess I just woke up out of another meandering stupor... Its not suprising that I've awoken in this mess of a life, as I've done for years now. Its just disappointing.

Every morning is the slow, methodical process of weathering a hang-over. Most days I sit in bed far too long looking up at the tall ceiling, precariously deteriorating away, wondering how its managed to stand this long, how we've all managed to stand this long.
Then I'm forced to ask myself why I bother to hold myself up any longer. I'm not trying that hard. I'm not working. I barely do anything all day. I've become the heroin coursing through my veins. The only thing that gets me out of bed is the frantic search for something I didn't boot last night...

My stomach churned away as I rose and when I stood I could hear the bile swishing about, waiting to become projectile... I'd nothing left to vomit save that mess of stomach acid sloshing back and forth as I staggered about, trying to find my sea legs, but even that shit came up... Hair dangling down over the shit stained toilet that hasn't seen a cleaning supply in at least 10 years... brown liquid shot out in all directions... Covering the whole place in yet another layer of scum.

My morning seemed to follow a fairly strict ruitine at the time. The first item on the list was to find some dope... I tried to be pretty good about making sure I had some first thing in the morning, but there is no such thing as a fail safe plan. I begin to sweat a little bit, but its best to hold on as long as possible. After about an hour I couldn't concentrate, my body would shake... So I'd shoot up, you don't want to wait so long the shakes come on, then your liable to miss...
After that, I'd empty the still into some old liquor bottles, empty fermented potato mash into the still and start a new potato fermentation in the Container I'd just emptied into the still so that I'd have staggered batches through the week.... You couldn't do much selling anything until around six or so when I'd make my rounds to a few little williamsburg cafes and then to the park and back through. In the mean I'd try to score some more dope for the evening. If anything in the ruitine failed it would throw everything off for a couple of days.