fear and loathing in flushing

So I walk from Penn Station to Grand Central and I catch the Seven Train out to Flushing Queens. The Shea Stadium Line. Raised to love the Mets I was lucky to bear witness to the triumph of the glory of the miracle of the summer of 86 and then being a Seinfeld fan when they did a two part episode where Jerry befriends Keith Hernandez and they do this great parody of Oliver Stone’s Movie about the assassination of John F Kennedy. It is hard to explain how much I love New York City. Deep in the weird rectilinear shadows of the tall buildings looming and the smell of infinite pizza and garbage and montage image and echo of Lou Reed and Jim Carroll and KRS One and Rakim. The many voiced verbal intensity of New York at its most City is a special energy beyond everything else even all the damn dirty money (!) the sheer verbal exuberance and cultural diversity and sturm and drang and laughter and slaughter and psychopomp slang; how much I love the sheer fucking humanity of this little island where all these things I kind of hate—marketing and advertising and big banks and trading firms, supercilious irony kids, Yankees fans—seem to rule over the surface of it. But under that surface New York City’s got mad soul and is somehow as pure as the newborn Christ on day one Anno Domine dear reader light of my love and life of my light. My New York is the New York of The Velvet Underground, of Thelonious Monk, of James Baldwin, of Bob Dylan, of Taj Mahal, of Walt Clyde Frazier, of Gray’s Papaya hot dogs, of sad scattered schizophrenics sleeping on hard heartless concrete, of Sidney Lumet and Al Pacino and Dog Day Afternoon, of the Stonewall Riots, of the Jewish Delis and Vaselka pierogi, of The Puerto Rican Day Parade, the Halloween Parade, of Candy Alexander, of Henry Miller, of Willie Mays, of The Ramones, of Basquiat, of Bruce Leroy The Last Dragon and Ghost Dog and Wutang, of St Mark’s, of Mulberry Street, Canal Street, 125^th and Lexington, of beadseat cabdrivers, of people who can sincerely bullshit you endlessly about how they got no time for all the bullshit, people selling used books at NYU and Washington Square, the 4^th Ave Basketball courts, of Earl the Goat Manigault, Lloyd Sweet Pea Daniels and the Rucker League and all that great playground basketball into the heart of Time Eternal, of Phil Schapp and his love for Art Blakey and the hard bop of the Jazz Messengers, of Grandmaster Flash, DJ Red Alert and Kid Capri, of my man Badger who was a bike messenger in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens before he went on down there to North Cackalacka, the New York of Willis Reed and Patrick Ewing, of free hot dogs at Rudy’s in Hell’s Kitchen on Wednesdays, of Central Park and Prospect Park, of CBGB’s and Irving Plaza, of Andy Warhol, of granite and brownstone, of people whose ethnicity is too much to cipher, of skyscraper windtunnels in the winter of eighteen inch subway rats that steal babies and sell them to travelers from mysterious lands beyond The Dollar, or immigrant mole people who speak a language only unfuckable twins can understand, of gods and goddesses mixed up real tight and close with untouchables and unfixables on the subway, of Coney Island and Staten Island and the voice of Bugs Bunny which can still easily be heard in the Bronx, of Duane Reade everywhere you go, of Howard Stern and Mike and the Mad Dog, Halal Carts, Ratso Rizzo, the Chelsea Hotel, the Latin Kings, Chinatown, Birdland, Herbert Huncke, Martin Scorsese and Robert Dinero, the Metropolitan Opera, Spike Lee, Tom Verlaine, YES I REALIZE IM ACTUALLY LEAVING ALL THE BEST STUFF OUT BUT IM TRYING HERE OKAY WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME THE RESURRECTION? Etc that is my New York City.

I had no idea that things would go as wrong as they would but in retrospect I really should have; in retrospect it is/was obvious that I’d been in denial and rationalizing glaring things away the whole time; partly because I just had to believe that there was somewhere to go next that might be the gateway into a new a new adventure or true refuge where I could really get some rest and recenter myself emotionally and spiritually after seeking and searching and traveling for what felt like so long you know; but why I should have expected that from this next development is really bewildering in retrospect as this had not been a place of peace and refuge before but a place of bad vibes and terrible turmoil; but I wasn’t really aware of that at the time dear reader light of my life and gogo of my logos, because life isn’t like that, sometimes you just have to believe in the face of the chaos and the terror of it all right, so I’d been in denial and I’d rationalized some good justifications to myself and all that because I didn’t have much else to go on other than my own highly questionable intuition; because like I really should have known based on my past experiences that things would spiral wildly out of control and get really weird really quickly and it might get really fucked up and I might have to find another place to stay rather quickly; because you see when I had visited Hannah back before Benedict had come to Queens to marry her and live with her there that time I’d suffered some seriously bad vibes  and had had to flee when I’d really wanted to stay longer and work on the book I’d been deep into writing at the time. One night she’d painted my nails but it took like two and a half hours. She always said she was very neurodivergent, she had ADHD and was on the spectrum as they say and things like that, and she was taking a lot of Ambien after taking a lot of Adderall all day drinking a lot of kratom and kava and stuff, and she also used to talk about how she had Borderline Personality Disorder and like her memory and awareness would blink in and out and she kept telling me I probably had all the same disorders and thus and such as sometimes is the way with such people you know dear reader light of my life reaching back across all the blacks and blinks but I don’t know you know but so she’d become very repetitive and she wouldn’t let me go to bed when I tried to escape when she got to be a bit too much to bear which sucked so again why would I have thought this was all a good idea? Well I was desperate I suppose and like I guess I figured that maybe getting married to Benedict would help?

But then so like this time things really started out well and I really enjoyed myself at first. I told them I had some psychedelics and weed and that they were welcome to some mushrooms and weed and that I was going to eat some acid. This was after I’d watched them grind up what appeared to be some time release Adderall in a special grinder and snort it, and drink some Kratom and huff nitrous oxide from balloons, which I joined in on. They clearly liked their drugs, which I of course could understand, but it would become an issue. In retrospect I should not have offered Hannah mushrooms but I’d meant to be a polite guest you know, And maybe I shouldn’t have eaten that LSD.  But Benedict definitely should not have eaten all of Hannah’s Klonopin so quickly. He’d just picked up her refill from the pharmacy and arrived back with them not long after I’d arrived. That would be what really set her off. The first few hours before that had been pretty sweet. They let me take a bath and Hannah made up my face so that I looked like a gaudy drag queen and the acid had me vibrating just right. Benedict was doing stuff on his laptop and would chime in on the conversation occasionally but over the course of a few hours he'd become increasingly incoherent and eventually Hannah noticed he was out of it and when she counted her pills a bunch were already missing and she became very upset with Benedict and went to her room and put the pills in a bureau drawer which you could hear clearly through the walls and door as she did it loudly and clumsily. But she was no match for his need to eat all the pills really. That’s just how it is sometimes you know. So he kind of benzodiazalackadisically followed her in to talk to her as she sobbed loudly and asked him how he could do this to her in front of me he mumbled and crooned incoherently in a zonked attempt at consolation that only served to cause her to sob the more loudly and yell at him to get away from her and screetch and run into the bathroom and lock herself in said bathroom while he promptly started opening and closing bureau drawers in the bedroom until he found the pills and I heard the clicking and the clacking of pills and plastic and I’m pretty sure he pocketed them and put the empty bottle back in the bureau drawer because I saw him take something out of his pocket and put it in his mouth after he came back past me and went to the bathroom door where he leaned on it and kind of slid down in mumbling and crooning soft incomprehensible entreaties to her through the door the earnestness of his murmuring surpassed only by its absolute indecipherability. The vibes had really taken a turn for the worse and I was feeling pretty vibe sensitive because I was high on acid but I also felt a kind of bemused frustration at the situation because I was supposed to stay there with them and was doing this thing where I hope foolishly and try to float through on the buoy of my own completely unrealistic good spirits like hey how can you really think these happy days are yours and mine when you got raped by the fonz as a kid eyyyy but I cannot really explain myself dear reader and light of my love and life of my light stretching back through void of space and aeons of evermore over the hills and far away mine is to sing and to shine and to go mad rather than to see the world clearly and despair I’m sorry but that is just how I am sometimes road of excess palace of wisdom and all that but I mean I know it also means I make some pretty big mistakes and in retrospect the foolishness of my behavior during this situation with Hannah and Benedict is obvious to me now. In retrospect.

But so I took my stuff and moved it into the living room where I was supposed to sleep which was out of the way in the other side of the small apartment from the bathroom and bedroom. I was hoping Hannah would feel better and calm down a bit and that Benedict would pass out. But no. She came flying out of the bathroom to where I was in the living room (messaging my friend Geo on Instagram and asking her to send good vibes  because I was dealing with a lot of difficult energy) and Hannah just bawled and kept telling me that her marriage had been a disaster and that Benedict would never get a job and how unfair it all was and I nodded and agreed that this was all very unfortunate and distressing but then Benedict (who’d managed to stumble in slow motion over to where we were) showed up and started disgruntledingly grumbling and mumbling at her to talk to her therapist about the bathroom and as she tearfully berated him I tried to get up and go use the bathroom and pee because I had to go and then I tried to stay in there a bit and I was hoping against hope that things would settle down but they only escalated further and when I heard loud thumping noises I worried that he might be getting violent so I came out of the bathroom but what it was was that she’d been banging her head against the wall in the hall. When she saw me come out she rushed to me and asked me in very urgent tones to come into the bedroom with her and I went along hoping to help her calm down and she locked the door and sat down on the floor and sobbed loudly with her head in her hands and I tried to console her but I had trouble. Soon Benedict began to knock on the door and I suggested to her that she try and reconcile with him and put him to bed but she kept asking me why bad things always happen to her and why did she not get to be happy and have a good marriage like everyone else and I of course had no answer and was really feeling like I should just get the fuck out of there oh confusion’s masterpiece the inscrutable east and maybe I could still find somewhere better to sleep outside and then there was a soft thump through the door and a sliding sound and another soft thump and you could tell that Benedict had fallen into the door and slid down it into a benzo mess on the floor. Then Hannah says that she’s gonna take some klonopins, that she’s earned it, and she opened the bureau drawer and got the bottle out but there were no pills in the bottle and she started crying more loudly and distressingly than ever for a bit before becoming bitterly angry and muttering that there had better be some Adderall left and she went to her closet and got a small metal lockbox out and dialed in the combination and opened it and took out what I assumed to be the Adderall bottle and there was no click clack of happy little pills within but she opened it to check anyway and now she became even more furious and she unlocked and opened the door and he was still there in a crumpled heap on the floor and she kicked him a few times and then lost her balance and fell down on her ass with a thud and began sobbing more loudly than ever before and while at this point I felt sympathetic toward both of them and pitied them their situation I felt a kind of humorous exasperation toward myself and wondered just how exactly I was always getting myself into all these crazy situations in my life and what was I going to do because at this point I realized I might be better off spending the night riding the subway around all night or sleeping at Penn Station or something but I wanted to be in good shape for my meeting with Cyrus and his business partner at Union Square Park the next day.

But so being kicked nice and hard had woken Benedict a bit and he came to and livened up briefly and kind of hunched over her cooing in a sweet incomprehensible manner drooling a bit like a baby and I laughingly muttered to myself perhaps more loudly and laughingly than I should have in retrospect that “I need to get away from crazy drug addicts!”

Whereat Hannah suddenly turned and glowered at me, eyes blazing, and cried out: “WHAT?!?!?”

And I was kind of trapped in the bedroom with them in the doorway but I was not clumsy like her or completely wasted like him so I kind of effortlessly hopped over and past them like a large cat and headed back to the living room part of the apartment by the front door and she did not follow me yet but cried out “I’m not a drug addict! I have prescriptions! My husband has betrayed me!” Then he got a little worked up inasmuch as such was possible and told her to calm down and she pushed him out of the way and he fell down with a thump and I saw her run into the bathroom and start slashing the underside of her left arm with a razor blade which was shocking yes but I was not many months removed from doing caregiving for someone prone to outbursts of self harm precipitated by the stress of interpersonal conflict; that had been Mikey, Denice’s son, and I’d restrained him physically at such times and wondered if I should do the same with Hannah now (and of course I had my own crazy history of self harm and self destruction but that all didn’t occur to me consciously in this moment though of course it was there in my subconscious informing every meaningful moment and all that) but then her husband came stumbling to her in the bathroom and started attending to her cooing and mumbling as she held up her very bloody arm to me and glowered at me eyes mad ablaze like she’d sprung fresh out of a Grecian tragedy and she said to me bitterly:

“Look what you’ve done to me!!”

Well this was all very troubling and shocking dear reader light of my life I think it is easy to understand that and I was in a strange and new position and situation in my life that I perhaps should have expected but had not at all and right then (and I know this was wildly inappropriate but still it is what I did ) I laughed at her, I laughed loudly, partly perhaps out of nervousness and perhaps because high on the LSD and of course as a response to the ridiculousness of the assertion because I felt that it was ridiculous to blame me here though of course such things as this can and do happen all the time here among us humans on earth. But I mean I really thought I was caught up in some of the craziest shit I’d seen in quite some time and though perhaps I should have known better than to end up here like this I was not really all that responsible for the worst of it all and was a victim of circumstance as Curly Stooge used to say. But so Benedict kind of came back to life a bit at the sight of all that blood and helped her clean up and bandage her arm and they made up a bit and the dynamics of the situation and the vibes changed significantly. They bonded over his nurturing of her and even moreso they bonded over the sense of a shared common enemy, namely myself, Piscadoro King Fisher, the fool with a thousand faces.

Given what I’ve described already the irrationality of what follows should be no surprise but at the time it surprised me quite a bit and in retrospect it seems obvious that it might have been wiser of me to be more conciliatory and try to smooth things over.

Like when Benedict demanded I apologize for calling them crazy drug addicts, not to him because he’d behaved like an addict he readily admitted with his speech still quite slurred; but to Hannah I could have said something more polite and apologetic than “well I said it because that’s what you are, you’re like me aren’t you,” which I didn’t know would be so incredibly insulting at the time. And I still had my gaudy drag queen make up on which was kind of amusing to me in the moment, like we were in a carnival gone hilariously if horribly wrong, and I went on: “You know I’d like to say that this is the most awkward and painful social situation I’ve ever been in in my life but it isn’t at all. To be honest I’ve seen and lived through much worse and I’m not that fazed by self harm and I’m not that easily manipulated by crazy drug addicts.”

“How dare you!?!” Hannah cried, extremely insulted.

“Oh calm down,” I said dismissively. “You’re flipping out over a bottle of pills and your husband’s a spoiled idiot and to be honest I think I’m the one who has a right to be insulted here because you’re both in your damn thirties and can’t handle your damn drugs or sort out your marital conflict over it without dragging me into it.”

“Why is this happening to me?!?!?” Hannah cried out, hitting her head against the sink with a bonk. I had never seen her do this kind of thing and she’d never told me about it and the stuff she’d told me about herself—how much fun she’d had at college and how she’d completed law school but decided not to be a lawyer and how she’d dated so and so from Twitter and had a grudge against whoever—had all made her seem more normal, although the law school thing was pretty weird, and her feuds with her neighbors were fucked up, and she did once call me a rapist out of nowhere that one time. I guess now in retrospect it was foolish of me to get into the situation I was in.

But so Benedict now becomes very indignant and he’s all, “Piscadoro, if that even is your real name, you need to leave!”

But Hannah said, “No Ben, let him stay even if he said something extremely hurtful and untrue.”

“Oh it was true,” I said, laughing a little, boyishly as it were. Chuckling cherubic then and there for some reason.

“You gave me those mushrooms!!” she cried out. “You get out!!” Quite the 180 but I had to admit I did have it coming. But I didn’t leave.

“It’s late and you said I could stay here,” I said. “Listen I’m sorry I got exasperated and stressed out and said hurtful insulting things ok. I don’t really have anywhere else to go.”

“Get out,” Benedict said, mustering all the British seriousness he could muster. “I’m calling the police.”

“Go ahead you fucking clown,” I said, laughing in his face.

“You think you’re stressed?” Hannah cried. “How do you think I feel? Why does everything bad always happen to me?”

Benedict stood up and actually stepped to me. He was short but muscular but very unthreatening being as fucked up on benzos as he was. Swaying in place where he stood.

“Don’t step to me Ben it’s ridiculous,” I said. Then I apologized again and asked if I could just go lie down in the living room and maybe they could go sort things out in the bedroom and Hannah said okay and Benedixt took a pill out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. He was trying to be sneaky but he was sloppy wasted so it was more just brazen and she saw it.

She shrieked and ran into the bedroom and slammed the door but did not lock it and he followed her in and she was crying and I went to the living room and started messaging people on my phone. I figured I could get up and leave early before they got up. I didn’t even care if I got any sleep I just needed a little peace and quiet. But alas dear reader it was not to be. Not to be! Hannah came rushing out of the bedroom and into the living room and sat down next to me crying and asking why she’d ever gotten married and why couldn’t she just have one good thing in life—which she did have, I thought, since she had a New York City apartment that her mom owned that she didn’t pay rent on, which was a lot more than a lot of us have you know, but I didn’t bring that up—and why did everything go so wrong in her life. She said Benedict had passed out in bed but then he came stumbling over to us fully dressed saying he was going out for a bit.

“No!” Hannah said. Then to me she said: “He just wants to go out and steal, that’s what he does when he gets wasted. That’s why he was in jail before I SAVED HIM.”

“I thought he’d been forging scripts,” I said, because I’d heard he was actually pretty good at that.

“Talk to your therapist about your anger,” he slurred at her, his eyelids drooping, and then she started crying more and berating him and he went to open the door and she got up to grab him and was not forceful at all but they both fell in a sad heap on the floor. She started asking again why this was all happening to her but I had no answer and asked if I could go sleep in the bedroom because I had an important meeting the next day.

“Absolutely not,” she said, her eyes flashing.

“Well then can I have some space and quiet here so I can rest?”

Benedict stood up again, clumsily, kind of undead, and tried to grab the doorknob but missed, and Hannah got up and took him to the bedroom, guiding him carefully by the shoulders. This time, finally, they did not come back and I messaged some friends online and eventually fell asleep, waking up early in the morning and gathering my stuff together as I crept quickly and quietly out of the apartment and out of the building and out of Queens back into Manhattan.