Akronites Autonomous
This is how it goes. Lucia is young and capable. She is regimented. Emulating Kerouac with his Benzedrine, or Shelley with his morphine, it doesn’t seem unordinary that Lucia schedules both her studies and her leisure around requisite drugs.
Spring semester of her sophomore year at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, finds Lucia standing outside her Lincoln Park dorm while she smokes a cigarette because her roommate’s been back around again. The roommate sobbed into her cell phone all last night: “I don’t even know if we’re still together anymore,” and it kept Lucia awake. It’s a Saturday around noon in April, and so far the roommate has been in bed all morning, eating Pringles, and watching Sex in the City DVDs on her laptop. The weather has cracked, and dewy hints of spring are blowing in off the lake.
Lucia’s cell phone pings with a text from Ethan. Hanging out today at the beach. You coming?
Lucia texts back, Obviously, and I’m on my way right now.
Inside Lucia’s dorm room, inside the top right drawer of Lucia’s desk, shoved to the back past the highlighters and index cards, hidden behind a divider, is a pencil case. Inside the pencil case, among its innocuous paper clips, postage stamps, rubber bands and safety pins, is a miscellany of pharmaceuticals (ranging from Kolonopin to Percocet to Adderall), a rainbow variety of ecstasy (from red cherries to blue dolphins), a couple nuggets of weed, some shroom caps and stems, and cocaine sealed up in a cigarette cellophane. A few condoms too.
Before meeting Ethan, she dashes to her dorm room and opens the desk drawer. The roommate in bed blows her nose and wipes Pringle crumbs from her chest. Lucia plucks out a roll of ecstasy. It’s a yellow one, stamped with a pitchfork or an arrow or something like that.
She swallows it down dry because she thinks it’s a fun thing that’ll add even more fun to a Saturday afternoon at the beach with her friend Ethan.
The ecstasy hits with an agitation when Lucia feels boxed in and itchy riding the Red Line south. Standing in the el car with her right hand gripped on the metal post, she only notices how violently her teeth grind after she notices her left leg pumping like a piston.
A flap of sky peels down to join the great lake, and the beach, a crescent of sand, creates a drooping seam below the horizon. Ethan is easy to spot. Lucia doesn’t walk to him, but the earth slides under her until he is prostrate below her, propped on his elbows, an open bottle of something stuck in the sand.
Ethan shields his eyes, as if preparing to salute and looks up to Lucia. “Your pupils are the size of manhole covers.”
“I can hear your blood flowing, Ethan, and it sounds like traffic.”
“Oh, good grief. You’re high, aren’t you?”
“Goodness gracious. You and I are electrons circling a nucleus we’ll never understand, aren’t we?”
“If you don’t quit that with your jaw, you’ll chip your front teeth.”
Lucia sits in the sand with her legs bent and forearms resting on her knees. “Can I have a pull from that bottle?”
“It’s meant to be shared.” What makes Ethan so extraordinary is how ordinary he appears. Inoffensively lanky, he has the haircut and coy gestures of a boy next door who none of the neighborhood girls take seriously but all of the neighborhood girls tell their secrets to.
A pageantry of clouds splashes into Lake Michigan. Emerald spray recedes over the oblong frame of a far-off barge. The setting sun churns the sky a cream sickle orange.
Lucia gets the shivers. “I like getting to the bottom of things,” she says. “Like cans and bottles. Of beer and whiskey.”
Ethan replies, “They say god is at the bottom of the bottle.”
Lucia stands. Her teeth are sore.
Ethan stands. “I guess I wasn’t much good at day drinking,” he says.
He tilts toward her. She lapses into him. They meet in an apex of support. She wraps her arm around his waist. He wraps his arm around her shoulders.
Not sure if she’s bluffing, Lucia asks, “Which way?” And then decides she’s bluffing only if he calls her on the bluff.
He chaperones her through the city streets back to his side of town.
Ethan lives in a strange pocket of a burgeoning Hispanic neighborhood encroaching on an area of long abandoned factories. Ethan and Lucia stop in a White Hen Pantry convenience store, its bright fluorescence haunting on the otherwise desolate block. Ethan buys a 12 pack of Tecate. Lucia buys Gatorade, gum and cigarettes.
Ethan’s apartment is a second-floor walk-up in a converted warehouse against the el tracks. Books are stacked knee high against the walls in his bedroom. The lights stay off. Lucia is not shy. She crosses to the futon mattress on the bare floor in the corner and sits. He sits beside her. They each light a cigarette and crack a beer and talk about how much fun they had with each other. They finish smoking their cigarettes. Then they start kissing.
The window looks south over flat factory roofs and a single smokestack. Lucia slides her tongue tip into Ethan’s mouth, and tilts her head to look over his ear and out the window. Two red lights burn on top of the smokestack. Lucia pulls her shirt off. The red lights brighten and fade in a slow throb. Ethan whispers, “Lay down on your back,” and she does. He pulls off his shirt and kisses down her neck, collar bone, and nipples. She arches her haunches and pries off her pants.
Ethan spends a lot of time going to work on her belly button with his mouth. This is odd, since there’s another crevice on Lucia, nice and greased up and more deserving of attention, just a little further south. She closes her eyes and contemplates the oddness of belly buttons.
“Ethan,” she whispers.
He rises on his knees between her spread legs.
“Do you want to?” She looks at his belly button, cupped by pubis.
A new text message pings Lucia’s cell phone in the pocket of her pants heaped on the floor.
Ethan’s body contorts his shoulders and arms in canted angles over her. The smokestack lights cast a slow strobe of red on the ceiling. Lucia imagines Ethan tethered by an umbilical cord. Ethan gives up. She imagines him as cellular soup clinging to a uterine wall. He quits trying to do what they were trying to do, and lays beside her while mumbling apologies. An el train rumbles by, piercing a zoetrope of white through the apartment. Lucia curls over Ethan’s side and rests the side of her head on top of his armpit. She almost dozes off, but is brought awake by an itch to pee.
Her bare feet rasp over the floor on her way to the bathroom. She squats by the pile of clothes to retrieve the cell phone from her pants pocket and reads the new text while nude and hunched on the toilet. I’ve got stuff so white it’s almost yellow. Wanna be my focus group? The text is from a guy Lucia sometimes buys cocaine from.
“Ethan.” Her hard voice and demeanor leave no hints of their clumsy intimacy moments earlier. He sits up. She grabs her clothes from the floor.
She says something about how she has to go, and it’s better this way, and she really means that, and Ethan is her friend, and she’ll she him again soon. He covers his nakedness with a blanket and cracks open a Tecate. He says she doesn’t have to go, and he says he didn’t mean to make it weird, he’s sorry if he made things weird, she can stay, and he wants her to stay and it won’t be weird.
Lucia more shimmies into her clothes than puts them on. On her way out the door, Ethan says she doesn’t have to be so nice about it, and Lucia isn’t sure if the comment is meant to be sarcastic.
While she walks north toward the skyline, her flash-fried mind is crusted black and cracking under the straining speed of the present. It takes another couple blocks until she’s near any sign of life and is able to hail a cab.
After the Coke guy buzzes her up, she stands by the coat rack on the other side of his threshold, leaving just enough room for the door to close behind her.
He asks with his back to her, “Would you like a drink?”
She follows him. “I’d love one.”
He sits on a black leather couch and gets right down to business, chopping up lines of cocaine on the hardback cover of an Intro to Economics textbook on his lap.
When describing the effects of cocaine, it can sometimes sound like the punch line to a bad joke.
Lucia sits cross-legged on the floor with her elbows on the coffee table. “Nice place,” she says, lying to him. There’s a plasma screen television mounted on the wall. A decorative samurai sword rests in its stand on the window ledge.
He passes her the flat text book, handed off like a tray, and a rolled-up dollar bill. Lucia snorts. It hits like a lightning bolt. The euphoric omnipresence only lasts maybe forty minutes until the feeling sharpens to a gnawing combination of starvation and insomnia.
The punch line to the bad joke, the best way to describe the effects of cocaine: It makes you want to do more cocaine.
A thin trickle of watery snot drips from her left nostril, but she can’t feel it on her upper lip. How does she know this guy again? She can’t feel the snot because snorting has scraped her sinuses dry as pumice stone. He has her number in his phone and thinks they’re good enough friends to invite her over on a Saturday night. When she turns to cough after an inhale, her throat splinters a syrupy stiffness of a popsicle stick. The drink he offered earlier finally shows up as a bottle of bottom shelf gin he pulls from behind a leather couch cushion.
Lucia wonders if maybe she should offer this guy some money, but before she can open her mouth to ask, he’s already passed over the textbook with freshly chopped lines on top. This is how it goes. He has problematic urges of his own, and Lucia’s companionship makes the budding addiction seem less insidious. Razor daylight punctures the apartment. What’s his name again? Did Lucia drink that whole bottle of gin? Where did the last two or three or five hours go?
Lucia’s cell phone pings with a text from Ruby. Meet me for breakfast?
Sand is still embedded in Lucia’s sneaker treads. A paste of Ethan’s mucus and spit has dried over her navel and in the crannies under her boobs. Her hair is coated with the grimy stink of cigarette smoke, el trains and taxis. Most apparent is her depleted gaze and sunken eyes in the yellowed sockets of her hamburger gristle face.
All the tables in the diner are full, a mixed crowd of college kids, young parents with their infants, and some neighborhood elderly. Ruby is already seated and sipping a Bloody Mary, which lets Lucia off the hook when she sits and orders a screwdriver.
Not one to judge, and maybe even a little hurt she wasn’t invited along, Ruby asks, “Rough night?”
Lucia has swallowed the screwdriver and is looking to flag down the waitress for another. “I’m glad you called. This is just what I needed this morning.”
“It’s past noon. I’ve been waiting over an hour.”
Seated at a table behind Ruby, is a frazzled, but disgustingly joyful, couple who pass the time waiting for their order by being enamored with their infant.
“Yeah, I know, I’m sorry,” Lucia says. “All last week was research. I went out last night. The final essay has me all wound up. I had to blow off some steam.”
Lucia watches the mother and father and baby. An empty stroller is parked in the aisle, angled under the table. The mother sets the infant on her knee while the father lunges towards the baby with smiles and Eskimo kisses. The waitress refills the coffee and brings another screwdriver and takes their order.
Lucia is crashing.
“Something has you all wound up,” Ruby says.
Lucia starts talking, but she doesn’t talk about Ethan or the beach or the coke guy. She talks about her final essay. The essay is on the suffrage movement. Although the exact statement has yet to be written, the thesis covers ideological compromises that led to votes for women, but held back the overall women’s rights movement.
The infant turns away from her father’s Eskimo kisses and molds her pudgy face into a stern expression of frightening maturity. “The band Bikini Kill was a mouthpiece for women’s issues. Rape. Abortion. Objectification in the media. I guess in a nutshell, Bikini Kill’s music was a reaction to systemic slavery of women by men in a historically patriarchal power system. While lead singer Kathleen Hannah may have proudly considered Bikini Kill a feminist band, and the press may have villainized Bikini Kill as a feminist band, identifying the group too closely with its message or activism may unintentionally overshadow gender equality with women’s rights. Rape, abortion, and objectification in the media are certainly issues that affect women, but to say Bikini Kill is a feminist band that sings about aforementioned issues, as opposed to saying Bikini Kill is a band that sings about society’s ills, discourages dialogue, and creates a further divide,” the infant says and then continues. “This is especially hazardous when considering the press, which may not have understood the messiness and accessible simplicity rooted in punk music - thus missing the whole point of Bikini Kill’s scrappy substance – discredited the message with claims the band couldn’t play their instruments, and any attention Bikini Kill received was undeserved, a biproduct of cheap controversy. An example of this sad misunderstanding is how Kathleen Hannah is remembered by chroniclers of pop culture as the girl who got sucker punched by Courtney Love at an MTV red carpet event. The patriarchal power structure gets the last laugh. Bikini Kill’s legacy is quashed by a reductive televised scene of a rock n’ roll slut catfight,” the infant says.
When the food comes, Lucia’s omelet tastes like sand, and she can’t chew, let alone swallow more than two bites.
The infant giggles and coos. Drool dribbles from the infant’s pink lips.
.My original plan was to park at the restaurant next door to Barnes and Noble and cut across behind the gas station to the back parking lot of the Barnes and Noble. That plan was out of the question because I’d been followed and there were likely others waiting for me. Before I even knew what I was doing, I continued to drive down 18. I pulled into a Speedway gas station on the corner of 18 and Cleveland-Massillon. A few men with plow attachments on the front of their trucks stood pumping gas. I pulled out of the gas station. My dad’s pickup sputtered and fishtailed as I turned left back onto Cleveland-Massillon. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore.
What made the rendezvous behind Barnes and Noble at two in the morning during a snowstorm so dire? Who was I even supposed to meet?
I drove back home going straight down Cleveland-Massillon. The snow had stopped, but the roads were still bad. In less than a month, my entire identity and hometown had been completely defamiliarized. All the music and places and things I loved had been turned inside out. I had no idea, from one moment to the next, who I was or what I was supposed to do.
Once I got home, I turned the radio on. A song by Jason Isbell played as I stripped off my clothes. “This is how you make yourself vanish into nothing / And this is how you make yourself worthy / of the loving / She gave to you, back when you / Didn’t own a beautiful thing. / This is how you make yourself call your mother. / And this is how you make yourself closer / to your brother: / Remember him back when he was small enough to / Help you sing / You thought god was an architect, now you know. / He’s something like a pipe-bomb ready to blow. / When everything you’ve built that’s all for / show goes up in flames. / In twenty-four frames.”
I kept the radio on as I laid in bed. Right before daybreak, my radio spoke to me. “LOVE ME!” it said. Before the station break and weather announcement at 6:00 a.m., my radio spoke to me again. “I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL!”
The sun came up, pink and gray filtered through the branches into my window. I paced the particle board floors as I gulped coffee and chain smoked. I listened to a song by Andrew Bird on repeat. The song was called “Not a Robot, But a Ghost:” “I run the numbers through the floor / Here’s how it goes: I crack the codes / I crack the codes that end the war / I crack the codes that end the war / I pushed a note under your door / Here’s how it goes: Things come to blows / But we don’t want this anymore / We don’t want this anymore / We don’t want this anymore / I crack the codes you end the war.”
I went to work. I tried my best to get through the shift, but everywhere I turned were signs of impending punishment. I couldn’t stand to listen to the music anymore, yet I couldn’t block it out or try to not pay attention to it. A man shoveling the walk tossed the salt carelessly and large chunks hit like buckshot against the automatic doors.
The hitch trailer was gone. The truck with the capped bed was gone. The old ambulance parked behind the Galaxy Restaurant was gone, replaced by a row of police cruisers. Their windows were rolled down and the engines left to idle.
“They’re after me,” I said.
Tina was working at the front desk. “What?” she asked.
“You think I’m a good person, don’t you, Tina?”
“Are you okay?”
I asked Shane if it was okay if I left early. He said yes it was.
*
I went to the cops. The Copley Police department.
I stood in a cramped antechamber. A small desk with a telephone stood in front of a door that lead further back to the offices. A dispatcher stood behind the desk, talking over her shoulder to someone in the back offices. They were both laughing when I entered.
She turned to me. Her expression went from jovial to grave at the sight of me. I must have looked like the shell of a ghost stumbling in out of the snow.
“Yes, young man, how can I help you?”
This was it. I was about to turn myself over to the authorities that may have played a part in my tormenting.
The woman frowned. The phone rang. She listened to my story about at car accident near the ramp of 77 and 18. She went to the back office to get a police officer.
He emerged through the narrow doorway, all regaled in the blue and silver. I quaked. I was pale with deep purple bags under my eyes. If this officer didn’t take me in for my shenanigans, I was afraid my legs would give out and he’d have to carry me out to my car. That’s how deeply I believed I’d stumbled into a conspiracy. In fact, I had such conviction that I’d been battling against tremendous forces that I truly believed I might have been beyond help from the officer. I was in over both his and my head. There was no help he could offer. In a way, I was correct.
I explained my situation. The officer maintained eye contact. He listened intently, leaning in over the desk.
“Okay,” he said. “Because of all the snow last night, we had a lot of accidents. What time did you say this happened?”
“Between two and three in the morning.”
His eyes bugged out. “No, young man. I don’t think anyone reported any accidents then.”
I turned to leave. When I got outside, the afternoon sun was blinding white against all the snow.
Back at the estate, my sister’s BMW was parked down at my parents’ house. From my place, I saw its roof gleaming in the sun. After I’d parked in the garage of my coach house, I walked down to my parents’ house. She was in the kitchen, opening three weeks’ worth of mail that I had collected and dumped on the center island.
From here on out, things got hazy. I remember my sister opening the mail as she talked to my mom on the cell phone. I remember the sun came in through the skylight like a buttery illumination of a Fresnel lamp. There was sick twisted smirk on my face that I couldn’t wipe off. I explained to my sister, as best I could, my misadventures.
Still, I censored myself. My actions the previous night could have potentially caused the death of a spy. I couldn’t tell her anymore for fear she would be thought of as complicit, an accessory. I didn’t want any retribution that was about to come down on me to come down on her.
“Have you slept?” she asked me. “So, what went on last night?”
She pleaded with me to go with her to her house that she shared with her husband, my brother-in-law, on the cul-de-sac down the road. I could sleep on the couch in their finished basement. Or I could sleep in the guest room, but I preferred the couch in their finished basement.
I brushed her off and told her, “Nah, nah, that’s okay.”
I left her standing there opening the mail.
I walked back up the driveway to my place. Back inside, all the daylight bouncing off the snow lit the room like a surgical operating theatre. For the first time since I could remember, I didn’t turn the radio on. I collapsed in my clothes onto the couch. I fell dead asleep.
That night, my sister and brother-in-law hauled my scrawny quaking ass into the hospital.
Akron’s half-hearted skyline came into view as my brother-in-law merged his car onto the inner belt. I asked my brother-in-law to switch the radio station.
I started singing a song by a band called the Flaming Lips, but I forgot what the song was called. I started singing a different song by the same band, but I forgot what song it was again.
We pulled up to the building. I didn’t think the building was a hospital.
But the building was. The building was Akron General Hospital.
“I want a cigarette,” I said.
“No,” my sister told me. “We’re going to go in.”
The admitting nurse had strawberry blonde hair. Even in her baggy scrubs, I could tell her breasts and buttocks were firm and good. “You’re fit,” I told her.
She smiled at me.
I was laid on an examination table in an alcove and the curtain was drawn and the lights turned off. Another nurse, young and pleasant and chubby, sat in the hall. After the curtain was drawn and the lights in my alcove turned off, I didn’t see my sister or brother-in-law again that night. I fooled myself into thinking they’d rightfully washed their hands of me for the sake of their own safety.
Subdued fury transpired.
Questions.
Blood tests.
I left my alcove.
“We need you to stay in your room please,” a nurse from somewhere said.
Urine sample.
“I want a soda.”
“Okay, we can get you a soda.”
They brought me a Coke in a Styrofoam cup.
“I want a Sprite.”
More questions.
“I’m in the program.”
I complied and was polite. They brought me a blanket. I didn’t cover up with it. They brought me another blanket. I didn’t cover up with that one either. I was asked to put on a hospital gown. I complied.
I didn’t think I was in the hospital. Throughout the intake process, I wasn’t in the hospital in my mind. I was in a training facility. The ultimate purpose, to break me down and build me back up again.
Papers were signed.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” I told a woman.
Two plastic bands were put around my wrists. I examined them.
One had my personal information: name, weight, eye color, hair color, birthday.
The other was a barcode. Under the barcode were printed the words, “GEMS INC.”
The band Coldplay.
Their song “Adventure of a Lifetime.”
Gems. Diamonds.
We are diamonds, taking shape.
Otherwise, the ER was quiet.
In a way, fooling myself that my sister and brother-in-law had washed their hands of me for the sake of their own safety was preferable to the truth. The truth was, not only was she my sister, but she was my younger sister and my only sibling still alive, at that. She had been anointed her brother’s keeper. The truth was, I had burdened her with the thankless responsibility of trying to help me when I wasn’t willing to accept there was anything wrong with me. In a way, fooling myself was preferable to the truth because my sister unquestioningly took on the burden. She didn’t help me because she had to. She helped me because she wanted to. I guess?
As for my brother-in-law? Who knows? In his defense, he’d been married to my sister barely over a year before my little fiasco landed on their doorstep. And my sister was his second wife. I’ve always been of the opinion that if you marry someone, you marry all the baggage that comes along with them. So, in a way, that was why fooling myself was preferable to the truth. Because, in truth, if I was forced to face the facts, that’s all I’d be to my sister and brother-in-law, forever: baggage.
I was walked to the end of the hall. All the walls were yellowed and dingy in the way of unpleasant emergency rooms on cold February nights, lit by the flickering fluorescent bulbs overhead. I was walked into an elevator and we rode it up to what I assumed would be my room for the night. I wasn’t wearing shoes. I was walking in socks. The woman who had asked me the questions and I rode the elevator to the sixth floor. She was middle-aged and seemed somehow disappointed.
The door dinged and slid open. We stepped out. The elevator closed behind us. When it closed, it closed uneventfully. We stepped into a large room. A very bright white wall faced me. The lights above were very bright. A clean and sharp contrast to the hall I’d left six floors below. To my left, a door. To my right, another door. We hung a left into the #600 Unit. The woman who’d chaperoned me up in the elevator, turned and left. The door closed and latched behind me. When it closed and latched, it did so uneventfully.
The walls were painted yellow with strange designs of intricately adorned circles and triangles. The only light in the common room came from a window-paneled counter with an office behind it. A man with a beard and his head shaved sat down with me in front of a large window. In a ratty recliner chair in front of the television (which was off, thank god) sat a woman slumped and snoring.
More questions.
“Who’s that?” I asked about the slumped and snoring woman.
“We don’t give out information about other patients,” he said. He asked me if I felt safe.
I told him I felt the safest I had been in weeks. I was shown to my room. I was given Trazadone. I fell asleep.
In the dark of the following predawn morning, a stately black man, who was very tall, came to take my vitals. He rolled a four-wheeled cart of medical equipment into the room to check my blood pressure, heart rate, temperature. My muscles gave no resistance as my loose limbs and torso were raised and lowered in his grasp. I was putty. He left, wheeling out the cart of medical equipment along with him. I rolled on my side and fell back asleep.
I awoke again when the same stately black man knocked on my door. I had a phone call. The phone was an old touchtone mounted into the wall in the common room. The call was from my mom’s cousin.
“Hey man,” he said over the crackly line. “What’s going on? You’re in the hospital? It took me forever to track you down.”
“I don’t know what the hell is going on,” I snapped back. A quick irritation formed in my throat and pulled me out of my fog. “I don’t even know where I am. I’m in the hospital.”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard, man. Is everything okay?”
“Look, I can’t talk right now.” The call was certainly being monitored. There was nothing I could tell him.
Beyond a large window with its double-paneled panes, crisscrossed by chicken wire, was a brick smokestack and corrugated steel building from an old B.F. Goodrich facility. The sky was a light, shameless azure blue with only suggestions of wisps of clouds. Screaming came from a room down the hall in the #600 Unit. Everything smelled vaguely of a dusty attic with wafting hints of feces and sweat. None of it registered in me. All I heard was a muffled drone of the heat vents kicking on and the only aromas I detected were my own dead skin flakes falling off me, and industrial strength laundry detergent.
My sister came to visit me that very morning. She brought with her my notebook and Mont Blanc pen. My sister informed me our Mom had purchased a one-way ticket for the earliest flight available out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida to the Akron-Canton Airport. I didn’t have much to say to my sister at the time. In fact, the little I can remember saying to her was: “All anybody ever talks about in here is shit and vomit.”
Then I jolted up from where we sat at the table in the common room, so I could dash to stand in front of the television screen and catch any potentially instructive subliminal codes coming from a commercial’s jingle. Looking back on it, I don’t even remember what the commercial was for. At the time, though, I was certain that whatever the jingle was, its music and lyrics contained a message of paramount importance that was meant just for me.
As for my mom’s flight home, I wasn’t sure if it was direct or if it was a connecting flight with a layover. If there was a connecting flight, I was pretty certain the layover would be in Atlanta. Come to think of it, my Mom might not have flown out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport. She might have flown out of West Palm Beach instead.
When the elevator door had slid closed behind me on the sixth floor, and the door to the #600 Unit closed and latched behind me, it was not as