I had relapsed after the detox that second time I came home. After the rehab not taking twice. I didn't stick around to see my parents reaction, but figured they’d’ve had me arrested, once it was clear, that I had robbed and pawned the jewelry my mother would wear while gossiping with aging aunts, and an uncle that summered in Provincetown.
My mother would go on about the earrings my father got her from Bethany’s for their anniversary. To one aunt, my mother said that the matching watches her and my father were wearing, were bought when we visited Monaco, that, they cost five-thousand—each.
These were the reindeer games played when gathered at reunions and summer barbecue’s. Christmas’ and, on the off occasion, Easters.
Under rented heat lamps, depending on the season, next to bungalows and in-ground pools, my aunts would start their conversations with: not to brag, or my uncle, the one who had a matching pair of shoes for every outfit, would say: between us girls, and I heard my father use the ubiquitous: oh, mine is docked in Manhasset Bay Marina, many times, scoffing if you said your’s was docked anywhere on the southern shores of Long Island. The Hampton’s didn't count.
It was a constant, ad nauseam, vying to be The Big Dick of the family. Bragging rights over each and only ever over each other.
My father was a banker. Investment, not teller. He bought the right stock, which I later uncovered was floated to him via insider trading. He could've retired when he was forty, but his work ethic was that of a different era. We lived in a huge house, in one of those neighborhoods where your taxes were frightening if you only made five-figures, but the town had its own glorified rent-a-cop who, with some frequency, used the words spook and wetback, in attempts to try to explain his frustrations.
- - - -
The lady at the pawn shop knew how to spot a junkie. The pawned loot came to somewhere just short of four-hundred, which, look, for an addict, is sweepstakes type money, but I had lifted a lot of shit from the house and it left me puzzled.
But, I didn't complain.
Odds were that she had a piece under the counter, aimed at my genitals.
It was fine, really it was, considering I hadn't paid anything for the jewelry.
It was certainly enough to get me to Little Odessa.
Or was it Little Russia?
I thought Odessa was Ukrainian?
It was in Brooklyn, I new that for sure. All the way at the ass end.
Bottom of the borough.
- - - -
I had met this Russian call girl during my first stint at St. Magdalena Rehabilitation Center For Wellness, just outside of Newbergh, NY.
Albany.
Svetlana lived in Brighton—yeah, Brighton Beach. She was close to my age, but life took its toll.
Svet and I both smoked the same brand of cigarettes. We mind melded when she told me she loved the SciFi movie series, Tales of Pangea. We geeked out over it. Her favorite character was the protagonist, Rallis Loque, and I countered that Saxena, the tough as nails warrior who was an ally to Rallis, was arguably just as an important and complex character as the lead of the franchise. And Svet said that while she loved all the movies within that space opera universe, she felt that Champions of the Nazaro, was by far the best in the series. Adding: It’s one of the only endings to a beloved series, that ever stuck the landing.
We routinely had sex in broom closets and on bathroom floors. If we were lucky, we’d sneak out at night, walk about a half a mile into the woods, until we reached this clearing. We would gaze up, our genitals in full use, and we’d stare at what was the most stars I had ever seen. When we’d finish, there was no intimacy or talking about feelings. No congratulations or good job’s were exchanged. It was all shop.
I never took it personal that we went straight back to being geeks after we came.
She was very chatty after the act, though.
Svet would say things to me like: I believe in ghosts because we are looking at them right now, The lack of light pollution was stellar the further away you got from The City. I didn't always know where she would go with those kind of statements. All these stars in the sky could have burnt all their hydrogen billions of years ago, and what we are looking at, when we gaze at the sparkle of them, it might be the winter of their scintillation. So if it is an actual physical thing that is happening and allowed in the laws of physics, and I am looking at the ghost of a star, then there is no reasons why we can’t see the ghosts of dead people.
She turned her head towards the woods, as though she was looking deep, past something, whispered in Russian, and then refocused her head onto the night sky.
This is why I didn’t always like to go out at night with, Svet.
Svet had completed the program. Made it through.
I was there to see her off.
She had shaved her legs, put on perfume that had been smuggled in, and lit a cigarette before she left the lobby. Svet planted a warm wet kiss on my cheek. She gave me a card that read Romanov’s Truck & Tow. On the back, in her oddly perfect penmanship, she wrote: ask for Marina, then ask for me.
Call me when you get out, okay?
Ye-Yeah- yep. yep.
I didn’t.
Not the first time I came out of the program, anyway.
- - - -
I was lightly on the lamb after I pawned the jewelry I heisted a few hours before. By chance, I found the card Svet gave me when she left rehab, in an old pair of jeans. A piece of it was salvageable, and I was able to read the name of the business, Romonov’s Truck & Tc, and the address.
I’ve always had the directional sense of a pigeon, despite the vertigo, and was confident that I could find the place.
I nodded off on the second train ride and only woke up because the conductor jabbed at my chest to let me know that this is the last stop. It left me exactly where I needed to be. I looked at the position of the sun to calibrate where east and west were, needed to sit for a moment and let the spinning subside, and once I had all that established, finding Svet was a breeze.
There was nothing substantially charming about the house. Business, or whatever the hell it had become. Run down and in a neighborhood on the precipice of gentrification. I knocked on the door and this young girl opened it, I mean, she might've been young, and I stepped in. It was dark, there was the smell of burning rubber that gave me a charge and a tiny pit in my stomach. I turned to the girl to ask if she knew Svetlana.
A glob of jaundice with knuckles landed square on the bridge of my nose, put me on my ass. Made my nose bleed. I regained my bearings, Svet was standing over me, yelled something in Russian, as the girl and the guy who socked me rummaged through my clothes, looking for anything sellable.
The girl fell back, just like me, when Svet’s tiny foot met her face. I assumed Svet was cursing in Russian. They all were. The couple faded into dark corners on opposite sides of the entrance. Svet helped me up.
Sorry, you know how these places can be.
It’s alright. They probably need that shoe more than I do.
Preemptively, I had taken the cash from my looting and put it in a tin can, buried it in a spot I knew I’d remember. This wasn't my first rodeo. Both on being robbed and doing the robbing.
Svet took me by the hand and lead me through the house. She had managed to carve a small living space by the back door. I finally got a breath to look at, Svet. She was strung out. It’d been a few years since I’d seen her. She was off white. Her skin was no longer porcelain. Blonde, she wasn’t anymore.
- - - -
We bought the gear with the two twenties I had tucked under my sack for fear of being robbed. I was coming down, Svet knocked-out and we were in her corner of the house. I was sitting up, smoking a full cigarette, which was a huge find on the floor when I got out of the subway station earlier that day.
Svet’s head was in my lap. Thats where she landed after shooting skag into her almost gossamer veins. She had one of those standard issue mattress’ they give you when you do a stint in county. I thumbed the lump in my jean pocket, realized I still had some dope, and an ease settled on me which gave way to a fraction of lucidity. It was quiet in the house, couldn't tell if the sun was on the rise, or in decline.
There was a man smoking crack or meth, sitting on the floor directly across from us. I couldn't really see the rest of his body, he was just a torso. His name was Vassily.
He was older than us.
It wasn't the gray hairs in his beard. There was an age behind the things he said.
The weight of his words.
Vassily was born durning communist rule in the Soviet Union, on the streets of the inner city of Moscow. His falling-apart tank top revealed ill lit tattoos on his chest, shoulders, and arms.
He told me the eyes on his chest, which were drawn hyper-realistically, signified he was a watcher, and could not be hoodwinked, but he didn't use that word.
The eight-pointed stars meant that he was: somebody.
He explained to me that the one on his index finger was a skull and that it meant something specific, but his English wasn't as good as Svetlana’s, so its meaning was lost on me.
He talked about how the tattoos were a result of him falling in with the wrong people. It was the cold war, and Soviet citizens were not afforded the creature comforts of middle America. Not even impoverished America.
I refrained telling him about how I grew up. Thought it prudent not to mention how I never felt hunger, regularly took hot showers, and how my parents paid for college.
The more particularly interesting part of his story was not how he came hear to America, but how America came to him.
The Wall had come down, and Gorbachev had signed whatever armistice that officially ended the Cold War. He didn't remember exactly how many years or months after that, that the very first fast food American restaurant opened its doors.
He said that the smell of grease and decadence inexplicably permeated all of Moscow. Vassily seemed to light up when he remembered the memory of that day. I could see that this was one of his better ones. Memories.
He regaled that the day was a kind of cold that only that part of the world knew. It got into your bones he said. Suggested that it was a type of freezing that you can never shake or be rid of, even in the summer or a bathhouse.
Vassily said that the lines went on for blocks. So far back that he could only kind of see the end of it. He explained that despite the brutality of the day, it was worth standing in file because it would be the first time he had the chance to see what a specific type of freedom tasted like.
Vassily averted his eyes for a few moments. I could tell that this was the first time he understood and articulated why he waited for hours to get that cheeseburger. How he’d never consciously understood why he waited on that line.
So how was the burger?
He took a beat, refocused on me, then reacquired his Russian steeliness.
—it wahz colt, he blurted.
- - - -
After hearing the best day of Vassily’s life, I cooked up and shot some of the dope I still had leftover. I conked and woke up hours later.
My jeans were unbuttoned, my crotch was slightly warm and wet. I looked around, hoping to see if Svet or Vassily were still there. They weren’t.
All her shit was, but it had been plundered and pillaged, leaving husks dumped on the floor, scattered haphazardly around her mattress, which drew my eyes to the still wet dark streaks that led out her spot and through an opened backdoor.
Svet, maybe Vassily, it was anyone’s guess, straight robbed me. The heroin was gone.
Looted.
Along with my other sneaker.
It was cold,
The act,
The reality of it all.
